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Europe has intense, even nutty, opinions about genetic modification. Distrust of the technology has spread everywhere, like butter on a warm baguette---especially when it comes to genetically modified foods.
Scientific research is usually immune from that skepticism. But yesterday, European attitudes toward GMOs in the food supply crossed over into their beliefs about GMOs in the lab. That's because---effectively---a lab animal ended up on someone's plate.
A lamb born to a genetically altered sheep was deliberately sold for meat at a Parisian meat market, according to a report in the French newspaper Le Parisien. The GM sheep---engineered to glow with a fluorescent protein encoded by a jellyfish gene---allowed scientists at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research visually monitor stem cell transplants intended to restore heart function.
A lamb born to the ewe "Emeraude" carried her mother's gene, but didn't express it. So unlike her mom, "Rubis" didn't make green fluorescent protein and wouldn't glow under UV light. Still, according to lab policies, she had to be kept apart from non-altered lambs at the research center, some of which can be sold after their time is up at the center. Rubis---a class 1 GMO, containing a gene of "no or negligible risk" to humans---wasn't supposed to make it out.
But escape she did. According to a statement released yesterday by the INRA, an unhappy employee intentionally transferred the lamb for sale in August 2014. A few months later the carcass was sold to a private, unidentified individual.
In December, after finding out about the shady dealings, the INRA launched an internal investigation. It halted all sales of livestock, stopped all experiments conducted by the research unit, and destroyed all genetically modified materials (read: animals). If convicted by French authorities, the perpetrators could face a year's prison sentence and a €75,000 fine, according to an INRA official quoted in Le Parisien.
Despite the lab's statement that the lamb presented no risk to humans or the environment, the incident is sparking alarm among European officials and environmental groups. People concerned about genetic modification often say the food could be dangerous, citing foggy arguments about the "unnaturalness" of mixing DNA from different species. Some worry that they cause tumors, though no credible research supports this. (Activist and disgraced scientist Gilles-Eric Séralini used cancer-prone mice to try to prove that a diet of GM corn causes cancer in a 2012 study, which was subsequently retracted.)
To a degree, the alarm over a GM lamb making into the food stream is fair. No country has yet approved GM animals for consumption, and in France regulations for all GMOs are much stricter than the US. And if Rubis made it into the food chain this time, how can research institutions guarantee that a dangerous animal couldn't make it into stews and onto plates in the future?
But let's take a step back: Is there any real threat posed by making a dinner of Rubis?
Ask Jim Murray and he'll laugh. "My reaction to hearing this story was to think, 'I'm glad to see some transgenic animal finally made it into food chain,'" says Murray, geneticists and professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis.
While the legal issue is real, he says, the safety one is not. DNA is safe to eat. Every meal you've ever had has probably held a mixture of DNA from many species. "Eat an apple and you're getting apple DNA, fungal DNA, bacterial DNA, and viral DNA," says Murray.
You digest all that DNA and break it into small pieces---its component nucleotides, A, C, T, and G---and reassemble them into your own DNA. There's no way (not that scientists have discovered, anyway) for that DNA to incorporate itself into your genetic code or to trigger an allergic reaction.
If it had been Rubis' mother who had been eaten, the story might be different. Emeraude was engineered to actually make green fluorescent protein. It's likely, though, that even GFP is not harmful. GFP hasn't been evaluated for food safety, but it's a protein found in jellyfish---a common foodstuff in some parts of the world. GFP is also the workhorse protein in many molecular biology labs, and toxicology studies, though limited, indicate that it doesn't harm most cell lines, though in a few it triggers inflammation.
So why the worry? Europe's intense hatred over genetically modified foods is a byproduct of low scientific literacy among the public, says Jon Miller, political scientist at the University of Michigan.
Two decades ago Miller and his colleagues measured attitudes about science around the world and found severe distrust in most of Europe. (Relative to most of the world, he says, the United States populace ranks quite high.)
"What's happened in Europe, largely because of [groups like] Greenpeace I think, is that science has become politicized," Miller says. "We all agree that whales need to be saved---but it doesn't follow that all science is bad, or that all corporations are bad."
While the US is gaining ground in science literacy, Miller says, it's stagnant in Europe. "That won't change until they alter the structure of the educational system," he says. Unlike the US, there is no general science education requirement in European universities. If you study the humanities, a science course need never cross your schedule.
"It's hard to have the discussion about scientific issues when a lot of the public and political leadership are not able to follow the conversation," he says. Instead Europeans have a tendency to react stereotypically and resist anything they perceive as tampering with nature.
"Sometimes I'm critical of science too, but I think on balance it’s produced a lot more good than harm," says Miller. "What I want is for people to be more discerning about what they think is good and bad, and to do it on the basis of understanding---rather than some ideological label."
The current distrust of genetic modification has, so far, made that impossible.
