LeCanadian

Top Menu

  • Login
  • Archives
  • Les Actualités
  • Advertising
  • Sexy Pages
  • Contact Us

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Foodie
  • Headline
  • Health
  • Editorials
  • Lifestyle
  • Sports
  • UFO · Exopolitics
  • City
  • Sexuality
  • Dating
Sign in / Join

Login

Welcome! Login in to your account
Lost your password?

Lost Password

Back to login
  • Login
  • Archives
  • Les Actualités
  • Advertising
  • Sexy Pages
  • Contact Us

logo

Header Banner

LeCanadian

  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Foodie
  • Headline
  • Health
  • Editorials
  • Lifestyle
  • Sports
  • UFO · Exopolitics
  • City
  • Sexuality
  • Dating
  • 7 reasons why online casinos are so popular in Ontario

  • La Commission indépendante soutient le recours de la Cour suprême contre le déni des droits des non-francophones par le Québec

  • Independent Commission endorses Supreme Court of Canada challenge against Quebec’s denial of rights to non-francophones

  • Ottawa International Crafts & Book Expo 2023: An assembly of literary brilliance

  • Diane Descôteaux – Une haïkiste passionnée: Le Salon d’Ottawa

Health
Home›Health›CRISPR Gene Editing Lies Exposed by Genomics Expert: The ‘Official’ Narrative is Just Another GMO

CRISPR Gene Editing Lies Exposed by Genomics Expert: The ‘Official’ Narrative is Just Another GMO

By admin
May 3, 2016
1898
0
Share:
The biotechnology industry is carrying out a concerted public-relations campaign to promote the idea that new, so-called “gene editing” technologies are the more accurate, safer successor to now-defunct traditional genetic engineering (GE). But this campaign is founded upon several straight-up myths about the new technology, which is nothing more than the same reckless GE paradigm under another name, says geneticist and virologist Jonathan Latham, Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project and editor of Independent Science News.

Echoing industry talking points, mainstream news sources have been publishing article with headlines such as, “Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up.”

“The hubris is alarming; but the more subtle element of the propaganda campaign is the biggest and most dangerous improbability of them all: that CRISPR and related technologies are ‘genome editing,'” Latham writes on Independent Science News. “That is, they are capable of creating precise, accurate, and specific alterations to DNA.”

Propaganda war

Latham notes that this “public relations blitz” is directed from the top-down, citing a senior representative of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation (BIO) who told the UN meeting on biotechnology in February about the “exquisite specificity” and “precision” of the new gene editing technologies. These talking points are now even being parroted by serious scientific publications, with a recent article in Nature titled, “Super-muscly pigs created by small genetic tweak.”

Latham notes that the words “small” and “tweak” both constitute value judgments, neither of which is in line with the information presented in the article.

The technology in question is known as Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR associated protein 9: CRISPR/cas9, or simply CRISPR for short. It consists of using a guide RNA to direct a DNA-splicing protein to a specific site on the genome. But is it really the miracle innovation it’s billed as?

No such thing as precision

Latham deconstructs three myths of the biotech industry. The first is that CRISPR is so precise that it is not prone to errors. In fact, the opposite is true: CRISPR experiments regularly produce mutations far off on the genome.

“So far, it is technically not possible to make a single (and only a single) genetic change to a genome using CRISPR and be sure one has done so,” Latham writes. In fact, there is no evidence that such a degree of precision is even biologically possible.

The second myth is that precision is the same thing as control; that is, the ability to splice an exact gene confers equally precise control over the biological outcome.

“Suppose, as a non-Chinese speaker, I were to precisely remove from a Chinese text one character, one line, or one page,” Latham writes. “I would have one hundred percent precision, but zero control over the change in meaning. Precision, therefore, is only as useful as the understanding that underlies it, and surely no DNA biologist would propose we understand DNA–or else why are we studying it?”

The third myth is that “DNA functions are modular and changes are predictable,” that is, each gene produces only a single trait, and does so all the time. But although this was the model first used to describe genetics, there is no evidence that any gene actually operates in this fashion. And it is also untrue that genes always have the same effects, Latham notes: “Most gene function is mediated murkily through highly complex biochemical and other networks that depend on many conditional factors,” such as the age of the organism, environmental conditions, interactions with other genes and even random chance.

As a counter-example to these myths, Latham returns to the example of the muscly pigs: In addition to more muscles, the pigs developed other traits such as thicker skin, thicker bones, difficulty giving birth and a greater appetite.

“Thus a supposedly simple genetic tweak can have wide effects on the organism throughout its lifecycle,” he writes. “Nature also revealed that thirty of the thirty two pigs died prematurely and only one animal was still considered healthy at the time the study authors were interviewed. So much for precision.”

Sources for this article include:

GMWatch.org

Science.NaturalNews.com

Read More..

Post Views: 2,001
Previous Article

Rise in Carbon Dioxide Unleashing Global Greening, ...

Next Article

Flint Water Poisoning Was Covered Up Using ...

0
Shares
  • 0
  • +
  • 0
  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Related articles More from author

  • Health

    Supplements that may alleviate certain symptoms of Parkinson’s

    April 26, 2019
    By admin
  • Health

    Mussels, oysters have highest levels of microplastic contamination among seafood

    January 29, 2021
    By admin
  • Health

    Three Amazing, Heroic Doctors Who Should be Heralded as the Future of Safe, Effective Medicine in America

    May 3, 2016
    By admin
  • Health

    Serious Vaccine Side Effects Are Rare. Compensation for Those Injuries Shouldn’t Be.

    September 23, 2021
    By admin
  • Health

    The vaccine is the pandemic: Biden to dump 60 million blood clotting Covid-19 vaccines from AstraZeneca on India

    May 6, 2021
    By admin
  • Health

    Pharmacy caught dispensing “special” flu vaccine just for black people

    January 11, 2021
    By admin

Featured Petition

  • Bell Baker’s John Summers – Stop a Crime Against Humanity – What would his Mother think?
  • John E Summers: Ottawa Lawyer Attacks Motherhood and Civil Rights – Support His Disbarment
  • Stop Ottawa Lawyer John Summers’, Marcella Carby-Samuels’ & David Tenenbaum’s Ab
  • Week
  • Month

Week

Sorry. No data so far.

Month

  • 7 reasons why online casi... In the ever-evolving landscape of entertainment and lei...

Popular on The Le Canadian

  1. The Independent Canadian Commission on Civil and Human Rights
  2. AgoraCosmopolitan
  3. Ottawa Market
  4. Agora Publishing Consortium
  5. Le Journal Canadien
  6. Dominion: Food News
  7. LeCanadian.com
  8. The Ottawa Star
  9. Capitalistocracy.com
  10. Agora Books Author House
  11. First Nations Press
  12. The Etiquette Show
  13. Ontario People's Front





Mark's



Recent Posts

  • 7 reasons why online casinos are so popular in Ontario
  • La Commission indépendante soutient le recours de la Cour suprême contre le déni des droits des non-francophones par le Québec
  • Independent Commission endorses Supreme Court of Canada challenge against Quebec’s denial of rights to non-francophones
  • Ottawa International Crafts & Book Expo 2023: An assembly of literary brilliance
  • Diane Descôteaux – Une haïkiste passionnée: Le Salon d’Ottawa
  • Diane Descôteaux – Une haïkiste passionnée: Le Salon d’Ottawa
  • How Canadians can access online casinos through mobile phones
  • Comment gérer un retard de vol ?
  • 5 ways sudoku boosts brain health
  • 10 tips to successfully market your law firm

Most Viewed Posts

  • Automated China –Mass-Producing the Future (61,381)
  • Health: Shampoo Helps Hair Loss Sufferers (57,655)
  • Citizens of Italy unleash mass protests against mandatory vaccination law (39,210)
  • Why Investors are Putting Their Money on High-End Real Estate (37,245)
  • Montréal : le cœur battant de la génération Y (37,086)
  • Une Autre Facette de Richard Lipman : Le Soutien d’un Psychologue à la Fondation Fauna (32,512)
  • Introduction To How And Where You Can Trade CFDs (30,165)
  • Canada’s Property Values Rise, In Spite of Signs of Market Slowdown (21,158)
  • “Not Gonna Write Poems” A Poetry Book by Dr. Michael Lee: Could He Be The Next Shel Silverstein? (17,363)
  • Smoking is Still a Problem in Society – But it’s a Problem That’s Being Addressed (16,158)

Visitors

  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Foodie
  • Headline
  • Health
  • Editorials
  • Lifestyle
  • Sports
  • UFO · Exopolitics
  • City
  • Sexuality
  • Dating