“If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out,” said Oscar Wilde.
That’s the situation Syngenta found itself in last week, when the news media reported on a mistake involving biotech crops. It turns out that an infinitesimally small amount of corn that does not have regulatory approval--but which is nevertheless totally safe to consume--probably entered the food chain in recent years.
This made headlines around the country, which is no surprise. But lost in all the hullabaloo was an important fact: The reason why we know Syngenta erred in the first place is because Syngenta reported the error on its own to the federal government.
In other words, Syngenta told the truth and was found out.
The notification took place at the end of last year. Regulators at the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration were still discussing how to respond to the oversight when word of what happened was leaked to the press.
The most important thing to know is that nobody’s health was ever at risk. The corn in question goes by the technical name of Bt10. The proteins it produces are identical to another biotech enhanced corn called Bt11, which received regulatory approval here in the United States in 1996 and in Europe in 1998. Here’s how the scientific journal Nature described the situation: “U.S. government scientists have assessed the Bt10 corn--which differs from Bt11 by only a handful of nucleotides on a section of the gene that does not code for the protein toxin--and have concluded that it is safe to eat and poses no environmental threat.”
What’s more, these Bt10 plantings involved a microscopic fraction of the U.S. corn supply. About one-one-hundredth of one percent of the country’s corn acreage was potentially affected. Most of the harvested Bt10 corn actually wound up as animal feed.
Syngenta and the government were preparing to release a statement about what happened, but they were also taking great care not to create a ruckus over a fairly minor incident. With the exception of anti-biotech zealots, nobody wants to raise public alarms over nothing. “Had there been a human health concern, we would have alerted the public immediately,” said an EPA spokeswoman.
That’s the point - there was no human health concern. Officials were taking their time as they thoroughly collected information and tried to craft an appropriate response. What we have here is an example of America’s food industry and its regulators working exactly as expected. A mistake was made, it was self-reported, and the government began contemplating an appropriate response. Syngenta now faces a substantial fine.
Winston Churchill once spoke of “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The case of Bt10 is a mistake wrapped inside responsibility inside trustworthiness. It’s a regulatory success story.
The enemies of biotechnology like to use scare-tactics, and they’ll no doubt attempt to stir up controversy over the Bt10 mix-up. They’ll want Americans to think that biotech crops are somehow unnatural, even though they merely represent the latest development in the science of genetic improvement and agricultural crossbreeding that has been going on for thousands of years.
Before these activists start lecturing us on what’s natural and what isn’t, however, they should read a separate story that first appeared in Nature last week. Plant geneticists at Purdue University seem to have discovered what the New York Times described as “an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century.”
The details are a bit complicated, as they involve poorly understood non-DNA backup copies of a genome. Suffice it to say that the natural world is stranger than we first thought--and that scientists may in fact know more about developing new crops through biotechnology than they do about how organisms in the wild pass on their traits from one generation to the next.
Something tells me that the plants studied by the Purdue scientists didn’t bother to inform regulators about their plans. Occasionally nobody tells the truth, but it gets found out anyway.
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“If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out,” said Oscar Wilde.
