Deadly Genes Released into the Wild

Last week, the Swiss agritech company Syngenta revealed it had mistakenly sold farmers an unapproved strain of transgenic corn. No big deal, they claimed, the strain was practically identical to an approved strain. The US Environmental Protection Agency helped Syngenta to control 'spin' on the story.

This week, Nature reports that this was a baldfaced lie. Unlike the approved crop, the accidentally released corn strain contains a gene confering resistance to an important penicillin family antibiotic, ampicillin. The ampicillin resistance gene is a workhorse for genetic engineers, so its not surprising that it ended up in the corn strain. The appalling thing is that (1) Syngenta allowed it to be released into the wild and (2) That having done so they (and the EPA) lied about it.

We are already facing an emerging public health crisis with the rise of multi-drug resistant pathogens. It's idiotic to flood ecosystems with the very genes that confer antibiotic resistance upon deadly bacteria.

Its exactly this sort of accident that makes food engineering dangerous and undesirable. We consumers do not profit from food engineering - anybody want to claim that vegetable prices in the US are substantially cheaper (say, than Europe) thanks to widespread sale of genetically modified crops? No - the beneficiaries are reckless multinational agicultural corporations. The rest of us face unpredictable consequences.