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Expert calls for "safety first" with GMOs

A US expert argues that the biotechnology industry has lessons to learn from the aviation industry in terms of putting safety first.

Dr Anne Kapuscinski, director the Institute for Social, Economic and Ecological Sustainability at the University of Minnesota is a key player in the Safety First Initiative which hopes to address community concerns with GMOs.

According to Dr Kapuscinski the plan is to develop a set of "scientifically reliable and socially credible" industry-wide safety standards, which includes requirements for public participation.

She said that unlike previous attempts to regulate safety, the new process will ensure that scientific risk experts, consumers, and environmental organisations as well as groups developing the technology will all have an equal say in shaping, reviewing, and overseeing the standards.

Dr Kapuscinski first became interested in biosafety during her work in the mid 1980s as a fish population geneticist working on a project to develop transgenic fish.

"Then I began to ask some really hard questions about what would happen if these fish accidentally got out into the environment," she told ABC Science Online.

In the search for ways to prevent or manage risks, or identify where risks might be unmanageable, she studied the safety history of a number of industries including aviation, and found some telling common themes.

"Most of them ignored the safety issue until there was pressure from consumers and workers speaking up and saying this is not safe enough. That's sort of where we are right now in the biotechnology world," she said.

"Companies don't tend to start taking safety assessment seriously until they're pretty far along in the development."

While GMOs are living organisms, not machines, the experience with aircraft safety provides three "compelling" lessons, which Dr Kapuscinski believes could be useful starting points for biotechnology safety.

One idea would be an independent profession of safety advocates who would have the power of veto over whether a company releases a GMO, she said.

She also said it was important to build in safety upfront. This would involve developing greater control over GMOs prior to their release.

"Right now genetic engineers have little or no control over how many copies of a transgene get inserted, where in the genome they get inserted, and, most importantly, over where the gene gets expressed," she said.

"If you could have much better control it would make risk assessment much more predictable and much easier to anticipate the things you need to focus on."

Another built-in safety feature would be a method to prevent unintended gene flow. However Dr Kapuscinski does not believe solutions such as "Terminator" technology, primarily designed to protect biotechnology companies' intellectual property, are a good example of built-in safety.

The final lesson from aircraft safety, she says, is the importance of monitoring.

"No matter how good a job you do, there can still be surprises so it's important to have some way of following up," she said.

Big picture questions

Dr Mark Lonsdale who is leading a CSIRO study on the ecological implications of GMOs applauded Safety First Initiative's emphasis on precaution and monitoring but emphasised the importance of giving more consideration to the end user of the technology.

"We're currently at the stage where because the technology allows us to do things we keep doing them. It would be nice to get the point where we consider the end user and ask what people want from it," he said.

"The other question is to ask why are we modifying a crop? Often it's to benefit a company, not the community at large."

According to Dr Kapuscinski the Safety First Initiative was "about dealing with the grey zone between the total yes and total no to the technology".

"Certain applications in certain socio-economic and environmental contexts will be beneficial and others will not," she said. "The devil is in the detail, and we have to sort out what makes sense to go forward with and what doesn't."

She said questions about whether a GMO is an appropriate solution will be "built into the negotiation of what is safe enough".

"One person will say: 'Well, I don't think this is safe enough, especially because I see an alternative to this technology'. Another person in the working group is going to say 'I'm not convinced that alternative's really viable so I'm willing to tolerate a lower level of assurance of safety'."

The first meeting of Safety First Initiative's executive advisory board and stakeholder steering committee was held last week. Members included representatives as diverse as Charles S. Johnson, the former Executive Vice President of DuPont and Margaret G. Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists.