Posted on: March 26, 2015 Posted by: Michele Lee Comments: 0

GMO concept

The companies that produce and market genetically modified organisms (GMOs) insist that their products aren’t harmful. They say GMOs could never cause health difficulties or lead to environmental damage. But independent researchers have shown that the truth is a far cry from these claims.

The problem starts with our basic knowledge of genetics and the genes that corporations are altering in their laboratories. Until recently, scientists thought they had a good grip on the basic genetic code that organisms use to make proteins and carry on metabolic processes.

Using that knowledge, the corporations that produce GMOs say, they can build safeguards into the organisms like corn and soy or pharmaceutical-producing bacteria that they market. They claim to be able to insert genetic code that keeps these plants and microbes from spreading into the environment, interbreeding with wild organisms and reproducing.

However, a study by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) raises serious questions about our fundamental knowledge of genetic code.

“All along, we presumed that the code or vocabulary used by organisms was universal, applying to all branches of the tree of life, with vanishingly few exceptions,” says researcher Eddy Rubin, who directs the Joint Genome Institute at the DOE. “We have now confirmed that this just isn’t so. There is a significant portion of life that uses different vocabularies where the same word means different things in different organisms.”

What this means is that the function of various genetic codes that had been thought to be common among microbes, for instance, actually can differ in what they cause individual types of microbes to do. So when a corporation builds in a code that is supposed keep altered microbes from spreading their genes to wild microbes, the code may not function as planned.

That could lead to genetic catastrophe, if the unplanned spread of GMO genes in bacteria or other organisms leads to resistant disease.

Will these new concerns slow the corporate development of GMOs? Don’t count on it.

5 Resources to protect you from GMOs

But there’s a lot you can do to protect yourself these days. Here are a few resources to guide you in finding foods less likely to be contaminated with GMOs.

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