Talking Biotech 042 -- National Academies GE Crop (GMO) Report

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Now here's your host, Yeah, hi everybody, it's nice to be back after a 3-week hiatus. It is the Talking Biotech podcast where we talk about the major breakthroughs in genetic engineering and also plant domestication, animal domestication, what we know about the way that technology can be used to better steer the human condition and mesh well with other plant genetic improvement techniques. Today I'm here for the first time in 3 weeks. It was good to have a little time off and have a Saturday morning back. Mechanistically, I do produce this podcast on my own. I spend my Saturday mornings doing this. It usually takes 3 or 4 hours every Saturday, and it was nice to have an opportunity to smell the roses a little bit. Plus, I was out of town at conferences and other places, so all very good. And in that hiatus, had a lot of time to think about what we would do next. And there's some great interviews coming up. We'll talk about Indian suicides, we'll talk about dogs, we'll talk all about a number of different topics. So this last week, I was at the Conference of Plant Biology 2016, which is a conference I go to every year except for— well, not 2016, it sometimes it's another number at the end— but Plant Biology. And it's from the American Society of Plant Biologists. And to me, it's the marquee plant science meeting. Just amazing work, cutting-edge, all about really more development, physiology, biochemistry associated with growing plants. Not as much applied, but certainly getting more that way, you know, meaning we're not talking about irrigation and farming techniques, we're talking about the nuts and bolts of plants and what makes them tick. One of the highlights of this year's meeting was a meeting of 3 of the panel members from the National Academies recent report, the one on the current state of genetic engineering in crops. Now you'll recall I spoke about this briefly a few weeks ago, and I got a lot of emails saying, well, no, you didn't talk about the downsides enough, you didn't talk about the yields, you didn't talk about this, you didn't talk— and really I wanted to have the experts address these particular comments. And it was really great because I had an opportunity to do that at this meeting. So the podcast is broken down into three different parts. The first one, Owen, and if and if I sound horrible, it's because I'm really sick. I caught the crud in Austin. I don't know what happened. I guess there's several ways that could be interpreted, but my voice is automatically very low and rather gravelly. I anyway, so go but going back to this, I apologize for the bad. bad pipes, but it demonstrates my commitment to you, the listener. So there's, uh, broken down into 3 parts today. The first part is Dr. Neal Stewart, and Dr. Neal Stewart is a professor at the University of Tennessee Plant Sciences Department. And Dr. Stewart has long been recognized for his contributions to synthetic biology and biofuels and other areas of plant biology. And I have a discussion with him about his role in the panel, and we really discussed more of the process. Why did it go the way it did? How was the panel put together? What interviews were done and why? The second part is actually from the ASPB meeting where I recorded live the discussion, and you'll hear 3 voices. You'll hear Rick Dixon from University of North Texas. You'll hear Neal Stewart, who describes the synthesis of the panel's findings. And you'll hear a little bit of Dr. Robin Buell from Michigan State University. She's in there too. But I presented the entire discussion almost all in its entirety. I did have to do some edits. So if you were there, you may be thinking, oh, there's some stuff missing. Well, I had to cut some of the visual gags and some of the visual material that doesn't make for good audio. And I was sitting up front when I came in, and there was nobody sitting around me. But as the room filled, people began to come in during the discussion, and there was a lot of rattling around and chair noise and people noise and coughing and other sounds that I removed. And so if, you know, so there's a few little bumps here and there during that discussion or during that section, and that's what's there. The third part of today's podcast is Dr. Neil Stewart. And Dr. Neil Stewart— man, my voice is shot. Dr. Neil, it's the first time I spoke today. I said, I'll get up on Saturday and do the podcast. And I won't—

I'm sorry.

Uh, say anything in the morning. I'll save my voice. So I've been pointing at my dog all morning, and she don't get it. Um, the other thing I neglected to mention was that the National Academies group that listened to testimony, they interviewed the— or interviewed the likes of Jeffrey Smith, Gilles Cerolini, other of the detractors of the scientific consensus. And so they really did make this a well-rounded, or at least attempted to hear all sides of this discussion, even those with very little scientific merit. So it's hard to point a finger and say that this wasn't a fair hearing. So back to the third part of today's podcast is Dr. Neal Stewart. And Dr. Neal Stewart is also a guitar player and songwriter, and he decided to share with us a song he wrote about genetic engineering in crop plants. So first, my interview with Dr. Neal Stewart. On this part of Talking Biotech podcast, we're fortunate to be in Austin, Texas at the Plant Biology 2016 meeting and have an opportunity to sit down with one of the authors of the NRC Plant Genetic Engineering Report. And I'm sitting here with Dr. Neal Stewart from the University of Tennessee. And maybe you could start out by telling us a little bit about your research Right.

So I'm on faculty in plant sciences, and I do mainly plant biotech and more probably synthetic biology, getting more into what's known as synthetic biology. But we do everything from gene discovery and then moving plants out to the field for for field evaluation. And I actually started out in ecology, so I still kind of think about ecological questions and environmental questions at the heart of, you know, at the heart of what I do.

And that's really important in the context of discussing biotechnology and these issues. And this whole panel that was convened, how were you and the other members selected for this really important task?

Oh, you know, I have no idea. I think they were looking to fill certain niches, and I don't know, maybe I— at least the way I think about it is they went down the line of people and everybody was too busy, then they got to me. But basically Rick Dixon and I were picked as the kind of crop biotechnology expertise in in the committee, and they also knew that there was going to be genome engineering and synthetic biology kind of coming. And this was in 2014 when the committee started, right? And of course, it's all just escalated as far as the amount of research and basically the pipeline of products coming from genome engineering and synthetic biology into So the panel based all of its synthesis on a variety of different inputs and an exhaustive review of literature, but also a lot of testimonial of individuals.

And what was the philosophy behind the range of different inputs into the committee's synthesis?

So the— from the start, The committee wanted to hear from all sides of the story, all sides of genetic engineering of crops. And so they really went out of their way to get that range of opinions and points of view. And I think that's a good thing. I was actually kind of skeptical at the extraordinary wide range, you know, as it was happening kind of in real time. In retrospect though, it was— it basically gave everybody a chance to weigh in, and I think in the end, I think that was really effective.

I agree. I remember looking at some of the webinar or some of the online versions of this that were available and thinking, oh no. But in the end, it does give at least a sense of fairness and a sense of at least being open to the nontraditional viewpoints, which are non-mainstream viewpoints, which I think is something we should do as scientists. And at the same time, we run the risk of, you know, some folks will say you legitimize it But I think at the same time we're— but it was good that that was done that way, and I'm glad we asked that question. What were some of the major outcomes in terms of the positive aspects of what we saw from the synthesis of the report?

Well, so thinking more about the science part, because this also spans socioeconomics and, you know, but the— I think the public should be reassured in that we really looked at all of the science that has been done. And, you know, the consensus of the committee is that today's genetically engineered crops, the things that have been on the market and have been used as, you know, food and feed products and that sort of thing, they're all safe. Not only are they safe, they're environmentally friendly. They have made farming more efficient. And really have helped farmers and the food supplies, kind of stabilizing the food supply. So I think those are the major positive outcomes.

And what about some of the limitations? What are some of the maybe caveats or things that came out in the report that said here's some things that maybe we should be careful about or look at carefully going forward?

Well, I think that one thing that was a bit unexpected going in, you know, now that in 2016, going in, is that we essentially made the recommendation that we should look at all sorts of breeding technologies, the conventional breeding, mutagenesis breeding, genetic engineering, genome modification, and, you know, essentially weigh those kind of all the same because time after time the academies have have performed these studies and time after time since the '80s said there's nothing inherently dangerous about genetic engineering technologies. It should all be product-focused.

And so, I mean, I think that was a very hopeful outcome that basically weighed genetic engineering with other And I know the report, once it came out, was quick to be deciphered in multiple ways by third parties. And some of the major issues that they said was, oh, you never increased yields. You know, that was one of the big criticisms that came out saying that this was a legitimate synthesis of the report. Could you comment on that a little bit about maybe a little of the nuance of the questions of genetic engineering and yield? Well, I think that's a very good question.

So to say that genetic engineering has not increased yield, I don't think that's what the committee said. What the report said was that the increase in yield, essentially the vector, the slope of the line, was not— didn't appear to be changed by genetic engineering. What genetic engineering— but I think what the consensus is, is genetic engineering does decrease the variability of bad things that can happen to crops during a growing season. And the other thing is it's really, it really has changed. It's been a game changer with regards to chemical inputs and tillage and that sort of thing, which once again goes back to the environmental benefits.

And so when you, when this report came out, And I was— I kind of stood by waiting for this. Organizations like Food and Water Watch, you know, they immediately jumped on this and said, oh, it's just more industry propaganda. And so how do you respond to that?

So yeah, so the day that the report was rolled out and Fred Gould and members of the committee were in Washington to roll it out and to give a presentation, yeah, I was kind of surprised that the Food and Water Watch representative you know, basically said that Monsanto gives so much money to the academies, and so, you know, who's surprised? And I was, I was kind of surprised that, you know, that people kind of could make those sorts of statements. And, and I really have never seen any, any substantiation of those sorts of statements. But the study was funded by a wide variety of entities including the USDA and then some foundations. And I think maybe some foundations that are not actually known to be pro-GMO. So I don't know. I mean, the committee I don't think was influenced either by big ag or—

Monsanto.

big organic or big anything. It was, you know, we— I think we actually did take a really objective look at it.

And I'd maybe throw in, too, that the reviewers that are selected to go through the document are usually pretty— come from a rather good range of interests and ideas. And so this always seems to be a pretty well-vetted document when it comes out. And one, maybe something I can splice in earlier, go back and, you know, what is the NRC and the National Academies of Science, and how do they serve us to, as a kind of centralized way to help synthesize important scientific data for the public?

So the National Academies have essentially 3 wings: medicine, engineering, and science. And so the NRC— so when actually when we started the report process in 2014, the National Research Council was the auspices of the report. Now I think that's changed. I think all the reports are going to come out under the auspices of the National Academies, and this might have been the first one. But the National Academies is really the organization— it's not a governmental organization, it's a private organization in which scientists, engineers, medical, biomedical researchers, doctors are elected by their peers, and it's really the probably most I don't know, expertise-loaded organization in science, medicine, engineering in the U.S., maybe the world.

Could you give me an idea of, well, first of all, how many people were serving on this committee and what your day-to-day action was like? What was this like to serve on the committee? And give me a sense of the intensity and the duration and the amount of effort that went into this report. Because I think when Food and Water Watch throws this away as, ah, just another industry piece, how much real human effort and human time really went into this?

I don't know. You know, I mean, the— I mean, there were 20 people on the committee, and they ranged from, you know, folks who are in really the biotech area to science communication, economics, we had lawyers, we had— because we really looked at governance and agronomy, weed science. Basically, it was a, it was a very broad committee. We met several times in person and had several meetings on webinars, and there was just a lot of back and forth communication amongst the committee members about the various papers, various talks, various opinions. And, you know, in the end it was a consensus report. And I don't know how many of my hours went, went into it over 2 years. I don't know, a few hundred maybe. But it was, um, it, it was, it was, it was very good for me to actually see all of, all of the opinions in the wide range and not just the small niche of science that, that I'm familiar with and comfortable with.

Thank you. On behalf of all of us in plant biology, thank you for your service on this. It really did construct a durable document that I think each one of these really serves as a landmark that we'll look back on and see where we were and how it meshed with public opinion. And it's really writing a very interesting history in plant biology.

The Academy's GE crops report like all of the reports, are consensus documents. So all of the points that were— that made it to recommendations and findings and that sort of thing, it was all a consensus of 20 people. And so anybody that ever reads the report should always keep that in mind. And that to me is— I don't know, it's, it's, uh, the, the 20 people from such diverse backgrounds can come up with a 400-page consensus document is Is something. I'm not sure what it is, but it was certainly— I actually think it was a big accomplishment for the group, and I think we were all happy with the outcome.

And that was Dr. Neil Stewart, one of the members of the National Academy group. And now we'll go to the meeting that was held at Plant Biology 2016. The first person you'll hear is Dr. Rick Dixon, Followed by Dr. Neil Stewart, and then Dr. Rick Dixon again, and followed up at the end— stick around for the song. We'll see you in a few minutes.

And when this panel was first called together, it was somewhat controversial, particularly in the plant science community. I mean, this whole area is massively controversial, however you like to look at it. But there was certainly some concern that there have already been a number of National Academies reports that have dealt with genetic engineering in crops. And all those reports have essentially come out and said what really matters is the product, not the process, and genetically engineered crops are essentially safe. So the question came up, why do we need another report? What was the reaction of the public? There was also some concern that this was taking a much broader look than other ones had done, and that the composition of the panel did not necessarily seem to reflect a bunch of people who were all going to be gung-ho about genetically engineered crops. Maybe that was the polite way of putting it. So there was certainly a little bit of pushback early on to try to maybe change the composition of the panel due to concerns that, you know, maybe this report was going to not go in the way that people wanted.

Yeah.

And, you know, there were some adjustments made to people on the panel. An extra plant scientist was brought in, but also an extra social scientist was brought in at the same time. And with hindsight, I would say that the composition of the panel worked out extremely, extremely well. This is the panel. I think this may have been taken pretty much when we'd finished which is why everybody is smiling. But it was an extremely, extremely diverse panel, as you can see from the whole thing. So our job was to take this very, very broad look at genetically engineered crops, past and future. Now, we're taking a very, very broad look at genetically engineered crops, but if you actually look at what is actually out there, there now that all the kerfuffle is about, it's very, actually very limited. So since the 1980s, genetic engineering has been used to express many traits in plants. So you're looking at, you know, 30 years, 35 years of work in the area, and the first commercial production was introduced in the mid-'90s. But for a number of reasons, only very few GE traits are actually in widespread use. And these are mainly herbicide resistance and insect resistance, and they are mainly in major crops: maize, soybean, cotton, canola, some sugar beet. And there are obvious reasons for this, particularly when you look at the cost of deregulation. Only a crop that essentially has a large dollar value associated with it can companies get a return on their investment for for doing the research and putting these things through the regulatory. So I think a lot of people get quite confused when they talk about GE crops. They really are talking about not very much if you're actually looking at past experience. So the motivation for the study was that there are claims and research that extol either the benefits of or the risks posed by current genetic genetically engineered crops, and that these claims have created a confusing landscape for the public and for policymakers. And I think that's obviously very, very clear, that there are very strong proponents on each side, and unless you have a really good science background, you may be pretty lost in this. And of course, many policymakers do not have that science background. So it was felt that a clear study was needed to carefully examine the evidence behind the claims and the rigor of the research. So what we're saying in a way is that one of the major motivations for this study was the fact that although we've had a number of previous studies, we still have this problem that there's this massive public perception. So this was the idea for bringing together as balanced a committee as we possibly could. The other thing, of course, is another obvious one to people in this room, that because the technologies are changing so rapidly, there's a need to study and examine the cutting edge and where that may actually take us in the future. The systems that we currently have now for regulation are presumably, well, we know they are, are outmoded. So this just puts this into perspective. Genetically engineered crops are planted on about 12% of the world's cropland. This shows the countries where there are genetically engineered crops. Probably what you'd expect, obviously, the US, South America, very few in Europe, just one or two countries, one or two countries in Africa, for instance Burkina Faso has got a lot of GE cotton, and then China, India, Australia, not New Zealand. And these are the crops along the bottom that are grown. So our experience obviously has to be with these particular countries. The process of the academies is important to understand, I think, how these committees work. And in 1996, another report from the academies, actually on understanding risk, made the comment that if you take a purely technical assessment of risk, that could result in an analysis that accurately answers us the wrong questions and will be of little use to decision-makers. And part of that, I think, is based around the fact that there's a lot of social and political context to these things. And if all you look at is the technicality, the final report may not really sort of hit it off with the audience you're aiming at. The process that the Academy uses is to solicit input from individuals who have been directly involved in or who have special knowledge of the problem under consideration. So there's your next problem. So we're all involved in doing biotechnology, we've been funded by biotechnology companies, the day before the report is even published Food and Water Watch says the whole lot of us are in the pocket of Monsanto and the report is worthless. That's par for the course, of course. And then the academic— the academy study process And this is really important. It says that these reports should show that the committee has considered all credible views on the topics it addresses. All credible views. And in order to do that, the committee examined the relevant literature. So we didn't just go back to report previous reports on this and say, you know, that that was the deal. We went back to the literature and over 1,000+ research and other publications. Were looked at. We held a lot of information gathering meetings. Over 80 presentations were given to the committee. We spent most of the last 2 years— it seems like we spent most of the last 2 years in Washington, D.C. and on webinars and conference calls. And we read more than 700 comments submitted by members of the public, both for and probably somewhat more against GE crops. But all those comments were read, were catalogued, were grouped, and were addressed where possible. And I think what made this different from a number of other academy reports where basically a bunch of folks get closeted away for 6 months or so and then a report comes out is that we kept this report transparent throughout the whole process. So everything was available on the website. When all the comments that were made were posted on the website, the bios of all of us were out there on the website. Any member of the public could log in through WebEx and see the webinars and see the information that was being presented to the committee. So the process was as transparent as possible. And there was a lot of communication out from the committee at the same time on Twitter, et cetera. And this was unusual for a National Academy report, I think.

Yes.

So I guess the final sort of— I'll give the key message right now of where we— where the committee came out. There's no longer a clear distinction between crop improvement approaches, and you're going to see that the final recommendations of the committee really are, you know, that a GE crop is no different from any other crop, and it's the trait that matters, and that's what you concentrate on. But the other thing is that all technologies for improving plant genetics have the potential to change foods in ways that raise safety issues, and that's another really critical point. So classical breeding or mutation breeding, for instance, have just the same issues. The committee's analysis was based on experience to date, and as we've said, that's mainly to do with herbicide resistance, insect-resistant varieties of maize, cotton, and soybean. We looked at data in Africa and developing countries And we looked at data from industrial scale all the way down to low-resource farms. And the analyses were conducted to look at agronomic and environmental effects, human health effects, social and economic effects, and then we moved on to look at new technologies in plant modification and then thought far ahead into the future for the sort of traits that might be delivered by this type of technology 30, 40, 50 years from now. and what that may mean. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Neil, who's going to go through kind of the majority, I guess, of the conclusions of the report.

Yeah, it was interesting that we were basically charged to scan into the future, but it seemed like that a lot of our effort was kind of retrospective. Okay, what have we learned From the past 20 years of growing things like Roundup Ready soybean and Bt corn. And, you know, these crops are essentially produced to make farming easier, not to change the composition of food. In fact, it's kind of anti-changing composition of food. It's keeping— It's keeping the crop. The food composition is substantially equivalent, right? So what have we learned over the past 20 years? For these crops that have been grown since the mid-'90s, there have been definitely reductions of yield losses. If we're focusing here first on insect resistance traits that are engineered, Bt traits, I mean, that's a major— That's a big deal. Finding. And so most of the slides that the Academy's produced do focus on the findings and recommendations, and these are all consensus. These were, these were all by consensus of the 20 people. And you think about, I mean, I don't know, I have a hard time, uh, getting consensus with, with my wife at times. Just 2 people.

2 people.

But 20 people, uh, and some of them were lawyers. So think about that. But the application of synthetic insecticides to Bt crops have been decreased, and that is certainly an environmental benefit, and that is a major outcome. And there's often— some of these things I didn't really— and I've worked in kind of this field to some degree, a lot of these fields to some degree, some degree. And I didn't really realize, like this one, that there was often higher insect biodiversity in plantings of similar varieties. So the transgenic and non-transgenic, with more reliance on synthetic insecticides. And then of course recently, if you think about regulation, one of the benefits of regulation of Bt crops has been mandating refuges. And when these refuges are not used in places like India, you know, we've now seen recently resistance that's evolved. And so, you know, there are pluses and minuses here. But I really, you know, think that some of the unexpected benefits are worth talking about. One of the unexpected benefits of BT crops is that this halo effect, the ability of farmers now who are not growing BT crops to actually benefit from the halo of BT farming, right? And so this has been shown, I think, multiple times. And this is This is a slide from the— or a couple figures from the PLOS ONE paper on the Bt cotton halo effect in China. So before Bt cotton was grown in China, you know, you see more or less a steady state of the number of non-Bt cotton plant insects. So the insects and the eggs Per non-Bt cotton plants. Of course, here they were all non-Bt, you know, both on the left side of the slide. But then you see a reduction of pink bollworm here, and then also a reduction in the number of sprays that the farmers who were not growing Bt crops have to spray to control the insects. So, you know, this halo effect is a very important, I think, farming benefit and also ecological benefit. So when we look at the effects for herbicide resistance, we see that they can contribute to higher yields, but mainly it makes, once again, farming easier by Making— giving the farmer additional tools to control weeds. On the downside, weeds have evolved resistance to glyphosate. And of course this has been going on even in non-herbicide-resistant fields and places that the transgenic crops are not grown. But probably G-crops have contributed to the evolution of glyphosate herbicide resistance. Especially glyphosate resistance. And so one recommendation was that integrated weed management approaches should be used to delay resistance. And I don't know, I mean, it's kind of actually a little bit late to do this, but it's probably a better late than never thing for integrated weed management because really this is probably one of the biggest problems in agriculture. Evolution of weedy plant resistance. So when we look at herbicide use in cotton, corn, and soybean, you know, kind of before herbicide-resistant GE crops and then after, you see that the trends are not dramatic, right? I mean, it's kind of flat, but the types of herbicides and the toxicology of the herbicide use, you know, is— has changed. But if we look at this, this is from Ian Heap's website, if we look at the number of unique resistant biotypes that have been discovered to be resistant to herbicides, you see an tremendous, tremendous upswing. And this is, you know, from the use of herbicides and selecting, the selection pressure of essentially the communities of weeds that have the genetic ability to become resistant, you know, either standing resistance or gene families that are— I mean, it's a tremendously interesting biological problem, but tremendously damaging agricultural problem. In glyphosate-resistant weeds, these are just species, not the biotypes, but glyphosate resistance is a very small component of total herbicide resistance. Certainly not the major, major number of cases, but as a stewardship issue, maintaining glyphosate as a as a reasonable herbicide is very, very important.

It's—

most people would say we're nearing a crisis stage if we're not already there. So when we look at the GE crops, so what the GE herbicide-resistant crops, what's the role there? And we can see that prior to commercialization there were places like the Central Valley Where glyphosate was used. Of course, no GE crops are here, or very minimal number of GE crops are here in 2011. But if you look at the corn and soybean and cotton belts, there is a lot of herbicide use, and this does seem to have increased. And when we look at crops like corn and soybean and cotton, we'll see that they also increased.

So you're saying that glyphosate is But not the only reason for once the increase in herbicide use?

again, it's not— yeah, there seems to be an uptick at commercialization of Roundup Ready crops. But also, the glyphosate patent expired in 2000, so that also made it cheaper to spray glyphosate. So it's a problem that goes beyond GE crops. When we look at the agronomic and environmental effects, the general findings are People have been focused on gene flow for years, including my group has been really studying gene flow for 20 years. And so while gene flow, transgene flow has occurred, there's really no examples of damaging effects from gene flow. Compare that with herbicide resistance just evolving naturally, and gene flow is a big nothing. So you're saying that the herbicide resistance is The second general finding is that there's no conclusive evidence of cause-and-effect relationships between G-crops and environmental problems. In fact, there are— it's mainly environmentally beneficial, beneficial or benign. And so one of the more, I don't know if it's controversial or surprising, people have paid attention to this last one, there's no evidence that genetic engineering has increased the rate at which US crop yields are increasing. So, and these are the data. So if you look at the soybean, cotton, corn yields, there's no real change in that, in the slope of that line. And there's a lot of Yeah. Year-to-year bouncing around of yields. I think most people have concluded, and I think there is consensus, that it decreases the variation of potential pest-induced crop yield losses. So that variation is decreased, but Farmers are essentially, and breeders and geneticists, everybody, we're doing a better job of growing more biomass, more crop on the same amount of land. So how much has GE contributed to this? Well, we don't know. But when you look at the types of traits, I mean, we're not doing things to increase photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis.

We're not doing things with gene to fundamentally change the plant property, at least not today. Nothing's commercialized today. If and when this happens, then we expect to see it. So to wrap up on this part, there are environmental benefits of growing gene crops. Herbicide-tolerant crops, Certainly they have enabled no-till agriculture. They've made weed control easier. Sometimes it's so easy that farmers overuse glyphosate, and so it's now selecting resistant weeds. But no-till agriculture means there's less soil going down the Mississippi River, and that's a, that's a big deal. And then unsprayed synthetic pesticide, insecticides, that's a big deal. What about the water? And if you ask your typical— show someone this picture and say, would you rather eat a genetically engineered crop that has a single gene that does not affect human health? Thousands of papers, yes. Versus this deal, you know, would you rather be there or eat a genetically engineered crop? Most people say, eh, maybe not there. I'm going to skip So we looked at human health effects, and this is probably the most controversial aspect. I guess I should have included the slide that shows the correlation of GE crops and autism, which is like this. There's a pretty good correlation. The same correlation holds for organic— GMOs and autism. Crops and autism is the same thing. So, but, so we looked at a lot of the animal feeding studies that are used to infer human health effects. And so one thing that we noticed is because of resources and other things, a lot of the animal studies are not optimally designed. Long-term data, and there are a lot of long-term data on health and feed conversion efficiency of livestock. We looked at those studies. We looked at studies on comparative data on nutrient chemical composition. And then, and this was also kind of a nice surprise, at least for me. Maybe other people knew all about this, but essentially epidemiological data of specific health problems like autism. Or in any sort of digestive disorder, gluten disorder. We looked at studies that essentially looked at populations in the U.S. that have consumed a lot of GE corn, etc., etc., or products from GE crops versus other countries where they've consumed less. And the conclusion was that there's actually no persuasive evidence of adverse health effects directly attributable to eating any food crops or even animals eating any feed coming from GE crops. Okay, so the committee time and time again applied all the stuff that was said about GE crops Conventional breeding. So with any new food, whether GE or non-GE, there's always some subtle favorable or adverse health effects that are— that could be there, and they may not be detected immediately. But for the crops grown the last 20 years, there's really no evidence of that, even though people say there's evidence of that.

Like?

Eric Gill Cerolini. He— this is probably the most famous, infamous study about long-term effects of feeding rats Roundup Ready corn or non-Roundup Ready corn, and then also glyphosate. So when he came out with these pictures, this is One where the rat is fed Roundup Ready corn. This is one where the rat is found fed Roundup Ready glyphosate, the herbicide. And this is one poor guy, he got both the Roundup Ready corn and the glyphosate. And wow, they have tumors, that's terrible. But of course he didn't show pictures of the other rats that were not like this. but still had tumors. So his conclusion though was that there's a higher— that GM actually, GM corn and Roundup is toxic, they cause these tumors. And so Gilles Sérapolini's study was roundly criticized on scientific basis. The European Food Safety Authority concluded that that it was of insufficient scientific quality for safety assessments. And I'll show you a couple slides here in a minute, uh, that, that— I don't know, I don't know if this is the entertaining part or the scary part of the talk, but, um, but it raised questions also of scientific misconduct since they would not release their data. And their paper was retracted and was later republished by the kind of journals that like to republish retracted papers. So, but I was kind of surprised when they invited Dr. Sterolini to give a presentation. He gave a presentation during one of the live sessions in Washington in one of the National Academies buildings, and he was in France. He dialed in and he showed his slides. And so here was, I think, one of his slides, and there he is on the phone, and here's I don't know. I don't know, but so anyway, but he's— but he's—

his—

he does risk assessment of GMOs. This is what he's done. He's done it for a long time. He's published several papers on GMOs. So he started— he gave his talk. He started giving his talk, and about, I don't know, is that 15 minutes, 16 minutes into the talk— and these are the kind of slides that he was giving. And I realized that as he was going through the science, it was like, yeah, okay, so maybe the science is not that impressive, but actually what he was saying is actually kind of scary. And I realized that scaring people is a lot easier than actually teaching them biology and giving them the data that make a difference. But he says that, like, there were a lot of studies that were done in The statistical power of these— of all these other bad studies were so low, but EFSA and FDA still accepts them. But EFSA didn't accept his study. So, well, and it's still an unexplained event, but you'll see at the top there, he just disappears. I don't know where he went, but we never heard the conclusion. We finally got to the point where— and this was actually— this made me feel very good— where Rick and I and Robin could understand it. And we could understand all the words that they used. And that was a big deal. And so the conclusion was that there basically had been really favorable economic outcomes for producers. And even we saw from the halo effect, there are economic impacts, favorable economic impacts for even people that are not growing GE crops near GE crops. But there's a lot of heterogeneity. And certainly this is very dynamic. And one of the things that the committee brought up was that gene stacking, A lot of farmers actually don't need all the stuff that's being stacked in there. And we did hear from farmers who feel like they're— they can't get certain non-GD varieties. Okay, and so that's an issue. But as we're looking to the future in countries beyond the U.S., I mean, it's going to be very important to get this— to get the social— and the economic stuff right, especially the social stuff. And I think especially when we get into genome editing in that era. So the conclusion is that there are certainly benefits to intended stakeholders, and most of these have been farmers, I think. Most of them probably had the largest benefit. But, you know, it is diffused. Certainly regulations, and if we look at the backdrop of this, regulations and patents and technology is not sufficient to— these are all important things to consider, right? Regulations need to balance biosafety. Safety and consumer confidence with enabling innovation, right? Patents, patents, the patent landscape is still very dynamic, especially with enabling technologies. And everybody knows, and everybody in this room knows, that GE crops are not the silver bullet. They're not going to solve all the problems of agriculture. So when we do look to the future, Genome editing is a big deal, and it's not exactly new, but meganucleases and ZFNs have been around for 15, 20 years, right? And now TALENs hit it big a few years ago, but CRISPR in 2013 has kind of taken biology by storm. Because of the ease of implementing it, and certainly there are plenty of case studies. And I will say for the chapter that Robin and I spent a lot of our time, it was kind of hard to keep up with all of the developments that occurred from 2014 to. 2016. But certainly, I mean, this is one of the— this is one of the success stories. You knock out 3 loci and bada-bing, you have high reability resistance. Okay, one of the earlier studies. And there are a lot, a lot more studies. And now, like, as the— as we were wrapping up the report, Yeah. CBIS had basically released the first genome-edited herbicide-resistant non-regulated crop. And so here, I guess I'm going to give it back to Rick or Robin to talk about omics and how omics can be used, should be used, How the committee foresaw these being used in the future and in the wrap-up. And I just noticed going through the slide stack, I'm wearing the same shirt during the pictures and now. I do have more than one shirt.

Yeah, so this got, um, this is part mainly from the chapter actually that Robin and Neil worked on. So we started looking at what impact omics technologies could have, maybe in the area of regulation. And one of the things early on in this process that was really interesting was that we brought in a bunch of folks from the major biotechnology companies, from Monsanto, etc., etc., and we sat them down and said, tell us how much it actually costs to deregulate the transgenic trade, and we didn't get an answer. I think, is that probably true?

I mean, they kind of danced around it.

They danced around it, but the actual point is that it is a lot of money, and it does depend, but certainly in the case that I've worked on with Forage Genetics for low-lignin alfalfa, you know, we're talking somewhere in the region of $50 to $100 million to deregulate a trade. So you've got to remember that. That's kind of what it can be costing now. And I think the big companies don't mind that because they have that money. And it also means that, you know, if Neil wants to set up a startup company and go into competition, he's got some real problems. He doesn't have that deep pocket. So we were looking at, you know, what's required for regulation and then looking at, you know, is it possible with the development and increasing accuracy and cheapness of omics technologies that we may just be able to, not now but in the future, sort of fully define the composition of a genetically modified crop in such a way that we can say it's safe? Now that's, I think that's a little fictional because with many of these things you see changes in transcript and metabolomics, and you don't— they don't inform you necessarily. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't start to be moving in this direction. We're thinking now, you know, many years ahead. So obviously we have transcriptomics, we have genomics, we have proteomics, we have metabolomics. And, you know, if you're talking about $50 to $100 million to deregulate a crop, who's going to worry if the USDA asks you to sequence the thing now with the price of sequencing, if that were informative, you know. So asking for a genome sequence or a transcriptome sequence is not unreasonable and could be done for many things. Now there are problems here with things like orphan crops, you know, these are the crops that don't have big markets and there's much less research done on them. So if I wanted to, I don't know, develop a punty of Ficus indica as a a fruit crop, a cactus, you know, I guess that has been sequenced now, but, you know, if it hasn't been, it makes it much more difficult to do a lot of this stuff. But we thought hard about that and came to the conclusion that, so the omics technologies can certainly provide a fingerprint of composition, and they could be used to examine new GE and non-GE crops for intended and unintended effects, with the proviso that you don't always know that a change means that something is harmful or not. But the more we know, the closer we may be getting to a position where we could make those calls better. So we recommended very strongly that further development of omics is needed. Genomics and transcriptomics, they're there already. Metabolomics, certainly not. Metabolomics databases for all the major crops covering the natural variation within the species We really believe that the private sector should be— sorry, the public sector should be receiving funding for doing these kinds of things. And the chapter that I worked on mainly here is summarized basically in one slide. What we looked at were the traits that we felt could be delivered over the next 20, 30, 40 years or so, and we think we're going to increase the precision, complexity, and diversity in GE crop development for sure. There's going to be a lot more examples of disease resistance traits. There's also going to be a lot more output traits. If you think of the input traits being the herbicide tolerance, etc., and the output traits being the plant quality, there's going to be a lot more of these. So we were looking at various examples insect pests and diseases. And then there's the interesting example of the American chestnut that's virtually been wiped out, and now there's a very simple strategy for making those plants resistant. And, you know, you can see numbers of how you could repopulate American forests with chestnuts if this gets regulatory approval. Improved nutritional content is obvious. So we looked at golden rice a little bit. You all know the story about that. You know about the Nobel laureate's note to Greenpeace about what's been going on with golden rice. And ASTB has been following up on this as well with a letter we hope is going to come out this next week in support of the idea that these things should not be blocked. Forage quality, biomass for processing, this is all to do with bioenergy now maybe, and bio-based products, we can see huge advantages there. We also looked at further out at traits such as increasing the efficiency of photosynthesis, or putting nitrogen fixation, so nitrogen, nitrogen, I guess that's dinitrogen, right?

Sorry.

Putting nitrogen fixation into non-legumes, so the idea is nitrogen-fixing corn and things like that. And I guess we came to the conclusion there that we don't know how successful those things are going to be. They're really long-term projects. And we don't know what the environmental impacts of something like that might be. I mean, you would— if you had a— you know, these plants could maybe become invasive. Who knows? But I mean, that's something you would look at. And we agreed that we need a really good balanced public investment in diverse GE and non-GE approaches to address food security. But we felt that it's really critical that it is not just the big companies who do all this stuff, and that we invest in technology in the public sector to help develop these databases. We also made some recommendations— they're not on here, I think— relating to the availability of public funding to address situations where studies suggest there may be issues and we need follow-up. So I think this is going to be the beginning of a discussion, probably through BANR, the Board on Agricultural and Natural Resources. They're trying to do some work to follow up on this, to bring together scientific societies like ASTB and some of the regulatory agencies to look at how we can start to orchestrate all this going forward. I guess one of the most important conclusions finally then, and it's this conclusion that was sort of already there, was that it's the product, not the process, and that's the way we should always look at this. And that regulation should be based on novelty. And in determining whether a new variety should be subject to safety testing, the regulator should focus on the novel characteristics and any uncertainties there may be about them.

Risk.

And this could be whether these plants were done by classical breeding, you know, mutation breeding, tilling, you know, that's a method where you use molecular biology but it's not actually in the final product, whether it's using CRISPR-Cas in which the constructs are all out and you basically just have an altered allele and you can't tell, whatever. We should be looking at novel And that omics approaches could be helpful in enabling these, but they're going to require a lot of further investment and development. And this was a scheme— I think Rick Amasino proposed this first of all— that I think may be misinterpreted by some people. So I want to tell you what this doesn't mean. It's a tiered way of looking at the of this. So you have current varieties and you have new varieties. We're making the assumption now that we do have much better early-stage bases than we have now. I think that's critical. And the first thing is you do an omics analysis of your new variety. Well, first of all, you say, what's the trait? Okay, so right now, if I develop low lignin alfalfa by downregulating one gene, which we've done, it's deregulated and then we come up with another product where we downregulate a different gene, that has to go through the same caboodle of regulation and cost the company another $100 million to get it out. That would be nonsense. We would say these are both low-lignan alpha-alpha, however the new one isn't regulated at all. That's what we're saying. It's the trait that matters. So a lot of things have disappeared when we're at this stage. But you do an omics analysis, and if there are no differences, you don't— you You basically go through to approve if the trait seems reasonable. If the differences are understood and there's no unexpected health or environmental effects, the same is true. Now, if you see a whole bunch of differences that could be problematic, like you see a whole pile of genes are upregulated and you know these genes are associated with biosynthesis of, let's say, trichloroene sulfonates or alkaloids or something like that, that suggests you might want to take a look. This is number 3. Or if you have a lot of differences that you really can't interpret at all, but there's a lot of stuff going on, you might want to take a look. But all you're doing is what you did before. We're not adding extra layers of regulation here. We're just saying that these things need to be looked at. And this may mean that you might want to do, you know, some of the animal feeding tests or some of the trials we did before. So I think it's easy to look at this and say, ah, they're saying you have to now start doing all this extra stuff But I don't think we are really saying that in the report. So that was the summary. These are just the acknowledgments to point out that a lot of people took a lot of time to provide comments here. And I think generally speaking, I would say the response has been reasonably favorable to this report. We were a little concerned because you're never going to please everybody. The strength of the report in a way is that it is somewhat nuanced in places. So, you know, we really were forced by our chair, who's very experienced in these things, that if you could not really make an absolutely conclusive statement that you had the proof for something, you had to nuance your comment. Everything had to be backed up, and the social scientists kept us pretty— Kept you honest. Pretty strong on that, but I think that actually gives the report a lot of credence because basically what the report says is that GM crops are completely safe and have had a lot of advantages to agriculture, and that obviously should continue to be very strongly developed in the future, and we're going to need them. Now, we did have a question: Will they feed the world? Will they you know will they provide food security? for the planet? And obviously when you ask a question like that, you have to be careful too, and the answer is, well, by themselves, no. If we didn't have GE crops, is it complete disaster? Probably, probably no. But we certainly came away feeling that, you know, there's absolutely no basis for people to be criticizing genetically engineered crops as a problem.

Thank you very much. GMOs, GMOs, who scared everybody about GMOs? Was it Greenpeace and Frankenstein or Monsanto? Both, maybe both. Yeah, GMOs, GMOs. What's so scary about GMOs? They're lovely from their flower heads right down to their cute little toes. Their internet toes. I'm talking about GMOs. They've got their detractors, but unlike pesticides and tractors, they ain't never Killed nobody. Here, they're safe to feed your children 'cause they're substantially equivalent to other food that's on the market. Oh, well. What do we know about GMOs? Our committee looked for answers high and low. For experts to tell us What they know, all they know about Chermos. Like Jill Serralini, who made off like Houdini. He disappeared right before our eyes. His presentation was obstructed. Some say he was abducted. I hypothesize, yeah, I hypothesize that it was GMOs, GMOs. His rats got a hold of bad GMOs. And I think I heard Sarah Lena squealing. Oh, no, no. Yeah, I really hate those vermin and GMOs. C'est la vie, c'est relou. GMOs. Greet peace out, Frank and Tony. Eat your GMOs. Monsanto. Muy macho. GMOs. GMOs. They're just plants.

Whoa.

That's all I do.