Even if it didn’t deal with a topic of such surpassing importance, I would encourage everyone to read this book just on the basis of power of the logic and the clarity of the writing on display. Reading it, I felt privileged to be in the company of a man of such a rare combination of intellect and principle. Author Steven M. Druker, a public interest lawyer, builds his case in support of the book’s extended title systematically, chapter by chapter, until he has constructed an edifice of persuasion as solid as an Egyptian pyramid.
The nub of his argument is that genetically engineered (GE) food products, as brand new substances produced by a means that is radically different from traditional plant breeding, are on the market illegally because American law requires that such new products be extensively tested before they can be sold. To do the required testing over the extended time period required, however, would make the whole GE venture uneconomic, so the law has been skirted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The skirting has been done by treating GE foods (now generally called genetically modified organisms or GMOs, originally meant to be a euphemism because it sounded better than “engineered”) in the same way as we treat foods that have stood the test of time and are simply generally recognized as safe (GRAS).
Not only is it manifestly untrue that GMOs are GRAS, but through the discovery process in a lawsuit that he and a number of very knowledgeable scientists initiated, Druker learned that FDA administrators overruled their own scientific experts in declaring them GRAS. That is to say, GMOs have been treated as though they were no different from new plant varieties created by traditional methods when it is not true and the decision-makers at the FDA have known all along that it is not true. They are not recognized as safe even within the FDA, itself.
The big problem, according to Druker, is that in its early development stage in the 1980s, bioengineering was seen by the Reagan administration as the next big technological wave that the United States could catch, similar to the digital electronics revolution, that would help keep the country in the world economic forefront. With this business booster mindset, political leaders, in league with the avaricious owners of companies like Monsanto, have allowed politics and greed to trump science, and, indeed, to trump existing U.S. food safety law, in furtherance of the dangerous GE food agenda. Furthermore, blinkered members of the science community, who have apparently put their wetted fingers to the wind and have gone along enthusiastically with what can only be characterized as massive scientific fraud, have abetted them.
One can hear a good summary of Druker’s book in the excellent interview of the author by George Noory on the latter’s Coast to Coast AM program on YouTube. Many of the highlights are there, except that Druker doesn’t have time to go into the section of the book entitled “Another Continuing Trend: Research that Produces Disturbing Results Produces Nasty Attacks.” The danger of GMO foods is not just theoretical. It seems that almost every time GMO food products have been subjected to any sort of serious scientific test—of the type that would be required of them but for their illegal GRAS-pass, and of the type that the general public has been led to believe they routinely receive but don’t—these “disturbing results” tend to show up:
• Male rats fed a variety of Bt maize developed by Monsanto for the Egyptian market differed from those fed the non-GE control maize in organ and body weights and in blood chemistry, despite the fact the control plants were the parental variety and were grown next to their engineered relatives. The differences were detected after 45 days and after 91 days, several toxic effects were measured, including abnormalities in liver cells, excessive growth of intestinal membranes, congested blood vessels in the kidneys, and damage to cells that are essential to sperm production.
• Feeding another type of Bt maize to both young and old mice was associated with a marked disturbance of the immune system and of biochemical activity.
• When mice were fed for five consecutive generations on GE triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye) their lymph nodes enlarged and the number of some important immune system cells significantly decreased.
• Rabbits that consumed GE soybeans had adverse changes in enzyme function in their hearts and kidneys.
• Mice that ate GE soybeans for two years displayed indications of acute liver aging in comparison to those fed on non-GE soy.
More information on the subject can be found at http://earthopensource.org/earth-open-source-reports/gmo-myths-and-truths-2nd-edition/.
Druker has many examples of the nasty attacks that been made upon scientists who have come up with such disturbing findings. One such example can be found online in the case of world-renowned expert on food safety, Dr. Arpad Pusztai. In Britain, where Dr. Pusztai lives and works, the authorities are as much under the thrall of the biotech promoters as they are in the U.S. The British version of GRAS is the principle of substantial equivalence, which is invoked for GMO foods there and gives them a pass from long-term testing before they are allowed on the market. Dr. Pusztai was suspended from his position at the prestigious Rowett Institute for objecting to that policy on national television because of what he had found with his own tests.
The Central Role of the News Media
From the JFK assassination to 9/11 and many other important matters that we have looked into, it all comes down to the corruption of the opinion-molding profession, primarily the news media. Druker’s Chapter Eight, entitled “Malfunction of the American Media” (subtitled “Pliant Accomplices in Cover-up and Deception”) explains in great detail how what a large percentage of the educated American public--including scientists--believe about GMOs is so completely at odds with the truth. They have been duped by the news media's massive propaganda campaign. Actually, the subtitle of the chapter is much better than the title. By their lights, the media are not malfunctioning at all. You name the outrage, and there they are, pliant accomplices to the cover-up and the deception. However mistitled, that chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
When I wrote a poem entitled “Boomerang” back in the 1970s, with vague foreboding about the course of technology, I had in mind some cataclysm related to nuclear physics—and the Fukushima disaster keeps reminding us that I might be right—but after having read Altered Genes, Twisted Truth, I now fear that the disaster might just as easily have its origin in the field of molecular biology.
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