LINDA WAS ECSTATIC LAST summer when she learned that she was pregnant again. But the 39-year-old mother of two was also worried, since the chances of giving birth to a baby ith Down's syndrome increase dramatically with age. So at 12 weeks, Linda who lives in London, decided to have the full battery of tests that determine the risk of Down's syndrome. An ultrasound scan measured the fluid within the neck of the foetus, the more fluid, the higher the risk, while a blood test tracked hormone levels crucial to foetal development. All the results came back normal except one. As a result, Linda was told the chance that her baby may have the syndrome was one in 130, a high enough risk to warrant more tests. If she wanted to know for sure, her gynecologist suggested amniocentesis, a procedure that involves drawing fluid from the amniotic sac around the foetus. But about one in 100 times, amnio triggers a spontaneous abortion. Should Linda take that risk in order to settle the Down's question? It was her call: the doctor would only present the alternatives, not give advice. "I wanted these tests because I thought they would be reassuring, said Linda, "but the choices they confronted me with, only increased my uncertainty".
Linda eventually decided to skip the amnio and she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. But her dilemma is becoming increasingly common as modern science pinpoints ever finer gradations of risk, but is unable to tell us whether those risks are real and if so, whether they're worth taking. We can measure just about everything: the number of defective genes on a chromosome, the levels of radiation coming from our mobile phones, the annount of microbes in our drinking water. And when something is out, we demand a fix. But all too often there is no fix. Science can't eliminate the risks it's so skilled at identifying.
Over the past months and years we've endured the SARS crisis, the BSE scandal and the foot-and-mouth epidemic. We've been warned of deep-vein thrombosis from air travel, brain cancer from mobilephone radiation, and mutations from genetically modified organisms.
We've been told that climate change threatens our coastlines, antibiotic-resistant viruses threaten our children, and wayward asteroids threaten our planet. Sometimes just getting out of bed in the morning seems too risky, especially when we consider that it could take decades before we know if these potential dangers are real.
How worried should we be? That depends on how much uncertainty we are prepared to live with. These days we are prepared to live with less and less uncertainty. As science, medicine and technology make life safer, healthier and more comfortable, our intolerance of risk is growing. Plenty of dangers have been eliminate: childhood mortality is way down, diseases that were once common have been eradicated, food is more plentiful and nutritious than ever. But these advances have made us ever more sensitive to the risks that remain. "Before the umbrella, if it started to rain you got wet" says Raffaelle De Giorgi, director of the Center for the Study of Risk at Italy's University of Lecce. "With the invention of the umbrella, the risk of getting wet was born."
Most Europeans, for example, are alarmed by the prospect of eating GM foods, but many will happily sit in a bar eating potato crisps, smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol, all of which together amount to a much more certain degree of risk to health than sipping a bowl of GM tomato soup. Europeans are suspicious of GM foods despite the absence of any proof that they are actually unsafe. In contrast, everybody knows smoking can kill you, but 94 million people in the E.U. do it anyway. "There are discussions about health risks that are a luxury," says Irene Lukassowitz, Spokeswoman for Berlin's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. "By and large, we are very well-fed and we have the time to worry about even the smallest risk. Consumers want to be protected, but prefer it if there is someone else to blame."
Helene Guldberg, developmental psythologist at Britain's Open University, believes that our risk aversion poses dangers of its own. Society's reluctance to accept the inevitable risks that accompany progress, she argues, could slow the pace of discovery and innovation. "There can never be a guarantee that anything is harmless" she says.
LOOKING OUT OVER A FIELD OF genetically modified oilseed rape on his 810 hectare farm in Oxfordshire, 85 km northwest of London, Christopher Lewis recalls the warm, sunny day last summer when an Oxford University scientist came to visit his farm. Lewis, a thoughtful man who's been a farmer for 44 of his 69 years, has been growing GM crops for the past 36 months as part of a U.K. government study to track the impact of genetically modified organisms on the environment. He took the researcher down to one of the maize test fields. Conventional maize was growing on one side; on the other, the plants were genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate, a herbicide found in every garden store, which kills plants while leaving the soil undamaged.
On the GM side, treated with relatively mild concentration of glyphosate, there were occasional clumps of small, stunted weeds as well as midges, bees, beetles and a pair of partridges feeding their young. Lewis rememebers that on the non GM side which was treated with simazine, a stronger conventional herbicide that clears weeds but can render the soil sterile there was nothing; no weeds, no insects, no birds. "How can these anti-GM protesters continue down this route?" Lewis wonders. What more assurance do they want?
Few Europeans share Lewis' conviction. A Eurobarometer survey carried out in 2001 found that 94% of respondents wanted the right to choose whether to consume GM foods and 70% don't want to eat the stuff at all. And Lewis has paid a high price for his willingness to experiment. Anti-GM activists ripped up his crops seven times, intimidating him and his family; and some of his neighbors have shunned him for "meddling with nature.
Opponents of such meddling fear that the genes inserted into crops could confer new and undesirable traits on wild species, damaging biodiversity and creating "superweeds." They also worry that GM foods could affect human health in unpredictable manner.
"We need to be extremely cautious, because once the GM genie gets out of the bottle, it's going to be very difficult to put it back in," says Mike Grenville, 53, a mobile-phone industry consultant who, last month, led a protest against GM crops in Forest Row in East Sussex.
Opponents of gene modification also allege that GM crops are being foisted on the public by agro-chemical conglomerates interested in nothing but profit. It's true that multinationals stand to gain. These firms often control the rights to genetically modified seeds as well as to the pesticides to which the crops are made resistant. Monsanto sells glyphosate under the name Roundup and a variety of seeds resistant to the weedkiller as Roundup Ready. But GM crops could benefit others too, especially farmers in the developing world. In many countries, supplies of arable land and water are diminishing as the demand for food increases. The U.K.'s Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an independent think tank, recently suggested that gene technology could improve the livelihoods of poor people in developing countries by enabling them to increase crop yields, grow drought resistant plants and cultivate salinated soil.
The economic impact in the U.K., however, is likely to be minimal in the short term, according to a new report by the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit. Only a few GM crops so far are suited to the British climate, and public mistrust of GM will probably ensure that the market for it is small. The government's review of GM science, published this week, concluded that the health risks from current products were "very low" but some uncertainties remained, and that crop approval should be granted on a case-by-case basis.
So are GM foods safe? The results of a recent Danish trial, published by Denmark's National Environmental Research Institute (NERI), suggest they are. For three years, researchers at the NERI monitored fields of conventional and GM sugar beet, the latter genetically altered to be resistant to glyphosate. They found that the GM plots supported more plant species and insects than the conventional plots, thus providing more food for birds and other types of wildlife. And in May, Britains Royal Society produced a GM science review that "found nothing to indicate that GM foods are inherently unsafe.'
That's not good enough for Pete Riley, senior food campaigner for Friends of the Earth. His organization's study of the chemical constituents of genetically modified maize indicates GM foods show increases in amino acids, the building blocks of proteins that control bodily processes. "That could be significant in the long term," Riley says, arguing that years of exposure to GM foods could affect the growth of muscles and organs. There has been little research into how GM foods behave inside the human body. But one study, commissioned from Newcastle University by Britain's Food Standards Agency, found evidence that low levels of antibiotic-resistant genes inserted into GM soya can pass into the bacteria that live inside the gut. That's worrying, says Emily Diamand, senior food research officer for Friends of the Earth, because if you insert an antibiotic-resistant gene into a crop, and then the food is broken down in your stomach, other bacteria can pick up the gene and use it in unpredictable ways. Those concerns were backed up last month when the U.N.'s FAO and the WHO warned that a failure to rigorously study the health effects of GM foods could prevent us from identifying GM induced toxic reactions, allergies and resistance to antibiotics.I am astonished and appalled that there have been no systematic clinical tests of the long-terna health impact of people eating GM foods," says Michael Meacher, the former British Environment Minister who launched the trials in which Christopher Lewis is taking part. I am not against GM," he says, "but I don't think anything like the right amount of testing has been done."
The bottom line is, there is no bottom line: no definitive proof that GM foods damage your health, no definitive proof that they're safe. And this is a handy point to keep in mind when trying to interpret research results: absolute certainty is a myth. "Science can never say there is no chance of something happening," says Colin Blakemore, a professor of physiology at Oxford University. "All you can do is gradually accumulate evidence that reduces the probability." Most scientists agree that the balance of probability is that GM foods are safe.
But most will also admit they can't be sure. What we can be sure about, though, is that Europeans want to decide for themselves whether to eat the stuff. So in the absence of scientific certainty, the E.U. is providing the next best thing: freedom of choice. By the end of this year, any product with more than 0.9% of GM content must be identified as such. Hundreds of foodstuffs ranging from mayonnaise to cooking oil and peanut butter and coming mostly from the U. S. and Canada will now require new labels.
Neither side of the GM divide is likely to accept the other's results, so the arguments both for and against are sure to continue. There is one thing, however, on which they can agree: the customer is always right. But for consumers who have to make their decisions without the benefit of conclusive science, the question is simple: will we be lucky?
put on line on 30/09/2006 by Pierre Ratcliffe Contact: (pratclif@free.fr)