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pod touch from the choose our. geology life on the go. video on demand cheesemonger bold colors and already just feeds now in the palm of your. question. the purpose of this experiment is to determine if genetically engineered fish will outcompete and mate with wild fish and if they do that whether their genes will spread in a wild population or whether they will disappear over a number of generations and we're interested in that because that's one of the main questions about ecological risk if genetically engineered fish are being produced in a fish farm and if they were to escape from the farm and if they were able to mate if they were fertile the question is they skate and if it is based taken to waters

where there are wild relatives what will happen if they interbreed with the wild relatives and our experiment is designed to test that question. so this and. the university developed a computer model in which they created a population of sixty thousand wild creatures into which sixty transgenic individuals penetrate a council load of questions was compiled for instance other than survival strategies or mating advantages and all the mixed offspring the stronger or weaker . these phenomena are observed and the results. then the computer calculates the possible future results.

what we're doing in these types of tests to look for mating advantages of transgenic males relative to wild type males. males are larger than wild type males and they could have increased mating success because of that and they could have increased access because either the female prefers to mate with larger males or better by being larger they can drive away the smaller wild type competitors that are around and as a result of that combined. advantage with other males as well as the female preference we found at the transgenic males get more than seventy five percent of all the meetings so for example one thing we've also been assured

is that the young don't survive as well and the mating advantage of the tragedy of males would drive that trans gene into the population more and more transgenic but the survivorship of the young is less and less through time. resulting in a smaller population size. quite likely the population could go extinct. genetic engineering to some extent is about a four hundred year old mistake it was a mistake that began with the cartesian revolution and this idea that life is a machine. you know that basically animals are better machines that animals are basically machines and yet they continue to try and treat life as a machine and engineer is if you are a machine and the cruelties of the early going to sections are now being repeated

by the genetic engineers who are literally changing the makeup of the entire living kingdom based on this pathological mistake of thinking that life is a machine that's why they believe in genetic engineering they're engineering life as if they were engineering machines and that's the fundamental mistake of genetic engineering. as a lawyer and author andrew kimbrell old battles his way through all the issues raised by the new genetic technology he heads an environmental agency in washington which vigorously campaigns for food safety literally legally as an attorney i find is very important for the very first time in history in the last twenty years we've defined plants animals even humans now as machines and manufacturers under section one one of our patent law that's what you can patent machines and manufacturers so

we've decided as a government as a as a polity and as this pumpkin a beagle that a human and a primate these are machines and manufacture is no different than refrigerator toasters are new tennis racket they can be patented and commodified is a shocking commodification of life and shocking philosophical development as well as legal. this was the greenhouse that was used for a story and so one year ago. this facility had a lot of things that had been stored over the years which we had to clear out and then construct this entire facility to hold the tubs and for the channel we have about one hundred fifty tons of water in here right now. oh some buildings converted greenhouses improvise they should and inventiveness this is

welcome risk assessment research looks like conducted by a handful of idealists around the world one would think that it is the only industry and government controlling agencies to conduct these tests thoughts markets and profits are at stake not the mills and food most certainly not our environment that is not in the south of the effects it may even be in grave jeopardy. the research that we're doing here and looking at the transgenic mating advantage so forth is very unique because there we know of no other lab in the world that is looking at the success of transgenic individual in the wild like and that and actually one of the reasons why we began this research in the first place is to set a methodology where industry where regulators could have organisms and see whether they would be safe or safe if they were the environment. ways that

transgenic organisms like fish can get into the environment the first place. would most likely be an accidental occurring where they would be either in an. or fence. area in the ocean that the fish wouldn't stay for a day and go into the natural. really every year thousands and thousands of fish paid for these types of situations so it's a very common type of event there is a storm off the coast of maine a couple years ago that destroyed some of the enclosures that famine were being formed in and that one storm one hundred thousand feet. they cannot see from the situation and they create a great number of there are certainly environmental hazards associated with transgenic animals in particular with fish because they can escape and they're free

ranging after that it's real hard to find one after they get out as the as the salmon farming industry has discovered on its own the in order to protect against the fish either colonizing new habitat or interbreeding with with wild fish what we're doing is developing a fish that is more or more production line fish that will be sold will be sterile so that it can reproduce and they will be all female and the reason why they're all female is because. sterile female salmon tends not to come back from the ocean they have no reason to come back to the rivers to spawn because they're never mature so they stay out to sea they feed they live their lives there and they die there and one of the things that i find so curious about the argument of the biotechnology companies that often call themselves life sciences. is that when you talk to them about the environmental threats about all the other threats they say don't worry

we're making genetically engineered fish sterile we make sure they're sterile by the way who checks on this millions of fish being sterile is ridiculous and for us maybe don't worry biological plants we're going to put a trauma neither technology in these plants will commit suicide after one growing season. and i find it very strange that a company because of life sciences is telling us that their technology only will work if you make all life on earth sterile. what a terrifying concept you know if i was an engineer and an engineer came to me said i have invented a technology about like the only problem is we have to sterilize all living things so go back to the drawing board you have a failed technology that's what i'd say. because that's going to tell us about going to a sterile. in

norway not only of the effects of foodstuffs on humans and animals being examined terri or traffic has brought together a group of scientists for numerous different fields to work out a holistic perspective they include well a killer biologists geneticists immunologists ecologist most recently a philosopher. and those christians are both concerned vade the whole ecosystem disturbances in ecosystems by introducing new foreign possibly different

d.n.a. and also directly related to changes that may take place in animal organisms and implant organisms. we are concerned of both the call genetic pollution and we are concerned of both making everybody understand that genetic pollution is something hope that different from the chemical pollutions we have been stupid enough to initiate over the past fifty years or so because chemicals never replicate themselves and even even a huge chemical pollution but over time get smaller. value for d.n.a. it may be the order of area wrong because d.n.a. is self replicating in principle so it's more pollution may replicate itself to become a huge pollution in theory and all these different types of risk

aspects that we are concerned about contributing to getting answers to so far is a lot of questions no answers. are odd was. was. the. i. just like their american colleagues the norwegian scene wonders about what effect these new forms of life will have outside the laboratory experience gathered with genetically modified farming has shown that there are and will be grave repercussions to the environment. just as pollen fly in the modified

plants drift unwelcome fields fish that escape will undo the predictions made by industry and the longer be subject to control. manny's anyone link in the food chain. ecosystem is effective. thomas but this is a member of terry a tropics team and sees the matter from an ecological viewpoint as i have been to cuba and we have some cooperation with a group. of scientists from cuba and i think very interesting example of transgenic fish it has some of the traits that it was not expected when they modified the genes of the fish they have found that the fish is growing about twice as fast as the normal. but that's a side effect of

a totally different effect it also tolerate salt water and that may be very important in for example the further spread of that species. so it also shows that the new transgenic plant or organism may suddenly have some all the traits that was not expected and maybe no one thought just come with a side effect of the case the difference is that. we don't put that first generation of of crops or animals out onto the market we observe them as i said in our case we have thought of generations that had been under cultivation where we had been observing these fish and we've been calling anything that has an unexpected result something that grows continues growing fast or grows too quickly or gets sick or whatever it is we will we call those fish and we only select the ones that don't have those unintended side effects for for actual production by the

time these fish are ready to go on the market they will have been through six generations that's over fifteen years of observation. and we're quite confident that there's nothing. occurring there was an expected. back to the united states for the past eighty years genetically modified grain has been cultivated as if this were completely normal canola cotton and soya dominate the market the plants have been manipulated so that they produce their own insecticide to kill pests. apart from humans who of course this is well how does it affect nature do you professor of entomology at the university of minnesota is attempting to examine just this point is that the bt corn bt cotton and even v.t.

potatoes were commercialized before many of the potential effects of these crops on the environment were investigated so. how much gene flow what kind of non-target affects. whether or not resistance in the target will occur and how to deal with these things were not figured out before that before the plants were commercialized and it was as they were commercialized people were raising these issues and and frankly what it is is it takes a while it takes a number of years to figure these things out and the. people who made these plants knew that they wanted to get them commercialized as fast as possible so you run into a problem where the people who are trying to sell these things want to sell them the soon as possible because the sooner they sell them faster they can make their investments back at the same time we need to take the time to evaluate the

environmental effects and so in the united states the route that's been taken this to allow them to be commercialized and then sort of play a. game of trying to chase after it and find out whether or not we have any affects and characterize what they might be. celebratory visit to call g. we are interested in various factors affecting sex in the environment. so many things we do we actually work on endangered species problems there's an endangered species butterfly nearby that we work with. i think the importance of monarchs to the ecosystem is a pretty interesting thing to think about so probably if monarchs went extinct tomorrow there probably wouldn't be a big he can logical impact there are a few parasites and some predators but not nothing that's really

they are what we call a keystone species that affects huge numbers of other species. and monarchs because they migrate depend on habitats in many different parts of north america so an individual monarch butterfly that emerges in minnesota or somewhere else in the northern part of its trading range will migrate through the central part of the united states through texas and into sites in central mexico where they spend about four or five months and then fly back into the southern part of the united states where they start another generation of monarchs. so what we're doing is we're trying to figure out the relative impacts of the genetically modified crops and all of the other things that might be killing one person there in. the moment because a fly lays its eggs on

a wheat the so-called new quiett that grew on fields after the industry had developed a supposedly ingenious method of killing all plants except for the desired. useful plant but a calculated use of a certain herbicide it took away the butterflies habitat. and unintentional side effect of gene technology in fact the culture. we now know who are experienced with corn in the united states the biological pollution of these you know cancer crosses uncontrollable there's no buffer zone you can't control the way insects fly or that rainwater will carry any vector can take this these new genes and spread them to other crops and to weedy relatives it's happening all of the united states can't control it but the companies are not taking responsibility for that and they're not being held liable for this

biological pollution in the future that a company like monsanto is going to go out of business there they're teetering economically months and as intimate as economic problems think of the billions of dollars already out there and biological pollution costs are not going to pay so they're going to be long gone i mean when we look at our major crops if we're not careful corn soy cotton wheat rice and oddly be polluted perhaps indefinitely in a future because of these companies actions which they can never pay for that's gross corporate irresponsibility. not to consider. a field in minnesota and you ask how many species of insects are there and it took a call me field through a growing season. what we can say is that the studies have shown this is approximately seven hundred species of insects that visit maize every year and so if you think about how many plus there are there's maybe about. five to ten species

of pests so all the rest of those species the other six hundred ninety five or so species would be considered the non-target species so they're far more non-target species and they're our target species and so when you try to control the target it's very likely that you're going to affect some of those other species as well the industry attempts to destroy five in six species could cause loss is worth millions that is understandable what is more difficult to comprehend is that industry does not seem to care that almost seven hundred other animal species are also affected. scientists of norway and america just at the beginning of their research quite frightening for the grain is already on the market and industry is impatiently awaiting approval of transgenic fish. i'm trying very hard to get. the government regulators the other scientists and the consumers to all understand that risk assessment has to be done and it has to be done in

a scientifically sound way and it's complicated we're looking at each kind of thinking here fish figuring out a good methodology to do the risk assessment and then on a case by case basis figure out what is the most reasonable answer we're always going to have uncertainty and the scientists can't get all the answers that's why the democratic process is so important because it's society that has to decide what uncertainty are we willing to accept a trade off with what possible benefit so much possible risks. as i mentioned earlier you know we don't suggest that our salmon are going to feed the world we do suggest that our two lappie and carp which requires the salmon to demonstrate a proof of concept and to build up a business but the two laughing in car in fact are going to be significant contributors to food security they won't feed the world but they contribute to food security and every piece every contribution that brings us closer to the point

where you don't have to face. famine where you don't have to face starvation in particular where you don't have to have eight hundred thousand people i'm sorry eight hundred million people a year going to bed hungry. i think that's important the truth is the only value to do net the modified animals or plants is where the companies own those patents it doesn't make for better tasting food it doesn't taste good better production is good it's really not good for the planet but it really is good. but the people on those patents were trying to uphold our food and the more that people know about this the more resistant they will become so lobbyist work as hard as we're hitting label a is worth anything else because it's in their interest to keep the consumer ignorant every time you walk into a fast food place you know every time that you know that you buy conventional vegetables europe and i am responsible for the pesticides being used the incredible

cruelty to these animals the destruction of our force and wildlife and seventy percent of our endangered species are created through farming and ranching united states were complicit in those moral crimes whether we know it or not and so it's not just an environmental crisis it's a moral crisis and we're never going to solve that by being mere consumers we have to say no we are creating either the solution or the problem as one of the few mollica boldest who are also skeptics of course i travel quite a lot and given talks many places all the world. the proponents of genetic engineering all this. and say that a lot of the scientific arguments i use are exaggerated but i have one particular argument that they never start discussing and that is when i say that von all the main risk issues alter net in an area is that ninety five percent

of all competent scientists in these fields are verkin for their produce aside and only five percent are really genuinely independent they never discuss that and that makes me suggest that maybe just situation is even worse. because i have no data for this it's my own invention. the reason i mention it is so cold that day the percentages are one hundred working for the industrious and ciro percent that are really independent can be both a very serious scientific problem in society but you also have a very very serious democratic problem as you may imagine i mean it's.

a charmer been here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.

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