Some recent writings

A few pieces I've put out in the last week or two:

1) In Defense of Frankenfoods.  Milken Institute Review.  An excerpt:

“While it is possible to be pro-biotechnology without being pro-Monsanto, such a nuanced position is difficult to maintain in the current atmosphere. It seems that many suffer from what might be called Monsanto Derangement Syndrome, buying into all sorts of conspiracy theories. Yet genetically engineered foods are no more synonymous with Monsanto than hamburgers are with McDonald’s. When anti-Monsanto became de facto anti-biotechnology, many left-leaning commentators chose to swim with the tide. Thus emerged a (justifiable) belief that many on the left were anti-science on the issue of biotechnology. In the words of journalist Keith Kloor (writing for Slate), opponents of genetically engineered food “are the climate skeptics of the left.” Although there is some truth to this observation, the political reality is more complex.”

2) Consumer Acceptance of Controversial New Food Technologies: Causes and Roots of Controversies with Jutta Roosen and Andrea Bieberstein in Annual Review of Resource Economics. An excerpt: 

“The dread/control framework may partly explain aversion to new food technologies, particularly in our modern society. In most developed countries, only a very small fraction of the population makes a living by farming. That many consumers today have little connection to and knowledge of modern production agriculture means that new practices adopted by farmers are likely to seem foreign, unknown, and—from the consumer’s perspective—uncontrollable (Campbell & Fitzgerald 2001, Gupta et al. 2011). It has been argued that many consumers have a “romantic” notion of farming (Thompson 1993) and that agricultural literacy is “too low” in the population (Pope 1990). Empirical research suggests that agricultural literacy is loweramong urban children than among rural children (Frick et al. 1995). Thus, when consumers become aware of a new technology—e.g., lean, fine-textured beef or Roundup Ready soybeans—it may be interpreted as a signal of dread and of unknown risk, which Slovic (1987) argues is most aversive and prone to
elicit public panic.”

3) New Tool (FooDS) Identifies Consumers' Views on Food Safety with Susan Murray in Choices.  An excerpt:

“Figure 4 plots the FooDS price expectations index for beef, pork, and chicken against the same-month price data from the BLS on ground chuck, all pork chops, and boneless chicken breasts. For the first two meats, the correlations—a statistical measure of association, with 1.00 being a perfect correlation—between price expectations and actual prices are 0.72 and 0.83, showing a high correspondence between consumer expectations and actual prices. The correlation for chicken, however, was only -0.26. This latter result likely arises because actual prices for beef and chicken have trended up over this time period while chicken prices have not. However, consumers do not differentiate much between meat categories in their price expectations; the correlations among price expectations for beef, pork, and chicken are all above 0.89.”

Jimmy Kimmel on GMOs

I've seen this posted several places today, but it is worth sharing again

Might consumers interpret GMO labels as a warning label?

Opponents of mandatory labeling of GMO foods often argue that requiring mandatory labels could mislead consumers - making them think there is a safety risk when the best science suggests the opposite.  This is no minor issue, as citizens in Oregon and Colorado will vote on mandatory labeling initiatives this November (previous voter initiatives in California and Washington narrowly failed; legislation in Vermont has already passed).  

Here, for example, is an unlikely critic of mandatory GMO labeling, Cass Sunstein (Obama's former "regulatory czar") writing for Bloomberg.com:

“... GM labels may well mislead and alarm consumers, especially (though not only) if the government requires them. Any such requirement would inevitably lead many consumers to suspect that public officials, including scientists, believe that something is wrong with GM foods — and perhaps that they pose a health risk.”

I have made related arguments in the past, and have even published some prior academic work giving some empirical evidence backing the concern.  However, the evidence is far from conclusive.

Marco Constanigro at Colorado State University and I decided to investigate the issue more directly in a couple studies we conducted last year, which are now published in the journal Food Policy.  

Our research strategy sought to determine whether consumers who were exposed to foods that had GMO labels subsequently indicated higher levels of concern than people who hadn't been shown such labels.  

In the first study, we used apples as the context.  Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three groups.  One group (the control) made choices between apples that did not mention GMOs at all - that had a decoy attribute: ripening with ethylene.   Another group made choices with mandatory ("contains") GMO labels, and another group with voluntary ("does not contain") labels.  The following shows examples of choices we presented to people in the control and treatment groups.

After making several choices between apples like this with different labels, then we asked each set of consumers a bunch of questions about how safe they thought it was to eat GMOs, how concerned the were about GMOs relative to other issues, etc.

Here's the first key result: There was no consistent statistically significant difference in the average level of concern for GMOS expressed by people shown different labels.  That is, the mere presence of the GMO label did not lead to a greater level of concern about GMOs.

However, we can also study the actual apple choices that people made, and use those choices to infer aversion to GMOs.  And here, another set of interesting results emerges:  Consumers' willingness-to-pay to avoid GMOs is more than twice as high in the presence of mandatory "contains" GMO labels as compared to voluntary "does not contain" GMO labels.  Also, willingness-to-pay to avoid ethylene ripening (a common, and heretofore uncontroversial, industry practice) is as high as that to avoid GMOs.

In the second study, respondents were divided into one of two groups.  The first control group was shown an unaltered box of cheerios and was simply asked to click on the areas of the box they found most and then least appealing.  A second treatment group did the same but for a box of cheerios that had, in small print on the bottom left-hand-side of the package the label "partially produced with genetic engineering."   After looking at these packages, we then asked each set of respondents a series of questions about how safe they thought it was to eat GMOs, how concerned the were about GMOs relative to other issues, etc.  The idea is that if GMO labels signal safety then those people who say the mandatory label should subsequently indicate a higher level of concern than those who did not see such a label.

Here are "heat maps" associated with the initial the results where we simply asked people to click on the areas they found most/least desirable.  The top pictures show the clicks for most desirable and the bottom pictures the clicks for the least desirable (clearly people in the GMO treatment noticed the GMO label and found it unappealing):

Here's the key result: There was no statistically significant difference in the level of concern for GMOS expressed among people shown the box with the GMO label vs. the group shown the box without the GMO label.  

Thus, neither study supported our hypothesis that the mere presence of GMO labels would lead people to believe GMOs are more or less safe.  

Here's how we concluded the paper:

“We interpret the evidence as suggesting (at least in the context of our studies) that any signaling effects, should they exist, are likely small and below the ability to consistently detect given our sample sizes of approximately 200 participants per treatment. Nevertheless, we do not believe the results completely rule out the possibility of a signaling effect.

A true labeling mandate imposed by law may well send a different signal about the nature of scientific and public concern than labels shown by researchers on a survey. It is likely impossible for a researcher to impersonate governmental authorities (and the media and culture surrounding a “real world” label implementation) required to fully reproduce the potential signaling effect of a labeling requirement. Our approach – exposing consumers to GM labels via a choice experiment or modified packaging – only simulates exposure to GM labels in a market-like setting, and it must be acknowledged that “real world” effects are possibly more pronounced.

There are at least two other reasons to believe that some forms of signaling are alive and well. First, study 1 reveals that mandatory “contains” labels generated significantly higher implied willingness-to-pay to avoid GE food than voluntary “does not contain” labels. The differences in responses to mandatory vs. voluntary labels may result from the asymmetric negativity effect, which may in turn result from differences in what these two labels signal about the relative desirability of the unlabeled product. The differences in the “contains” vs. “does not contain” may also send different signals and change beliefs about the likelihood that the unlabeled product is GE or non-GE. Second, in study 1 we found aversion to our “decoy” attribute – ethylene ripening – in the control that is on par with aversion to GE food. During fruit storage, atmospheric ethylene is often controlled to slow or accelerate the ripening process (see Sinha et al., 2012), but we are not aware of any significant controversy over its use. Ethylene is a natural plant hormone, and many consumers use the same mechanism when they put a banana in a fruit bowl to induce ripening. Should produce ripened with ethylene also be required to be labeled? Did the mere presence of the attribute on our survey signal consumers that it is an attribute that should be avoided?”

Synthetic biology

Fantastic video explaining how to put the engineering back into genetic engineering - aka synthetic biology (HT Marc Brazeau at Genetic Literacy Project)

From selective breeding to genetic modification, our understanding of biology is now merging with the principles of engineering to bring us synthetic biology. Written, animated and directed by James Hutson, Bridge8. Transcript can be found here: http://technyou.edu.au/fun-stuff/videos/video-transcripts/

How novel are the genes introduced during genetic engineering?

It is often asserted that genetic engineering (or GMOs) are different and should be regulated differently because they introduce "new" genes that couldn't have been introduced "naturally."

A piece at the genetic literacy project by Curtis Hannah, a plant geneticist, however, questions that wisdom: 

“The remarkable advances in the way DNA is sequenced have made the sequencing of all the genes in a particular organism (termed the genome) extremely cheap. Thousands of genomes from different organisms have been decrypted and comparative genomics is a thriving field of scientific endeavor. Investigators have also sequenced different members of a particular family and unexpectedly found that the two different members of the family did NOT contain the same genes. Some genes were found in some members of the family but not in others. This phenomenon of plus/minus genes is particularly rampant in plants.

An exceptionally striking case of this was published recently in the journal Plant Cell. Of 8681 corn genes studied at the DNA level by this group, only a small fraction, 16.4 percent, were found in all 503 lines examined. The vast majority of these genes (83.6 percent) were found in some BUT NOT ALL lines. Corn is not an exception since similar cases of plus/minus genes have been found with other important food crops. Hence, new non-GMO or conventional varieties of food crops appearing on the market this year likely contain genes that were not in those same crops the year before. Also, the new ones likely lack genes that were present the year before.

Where do these genes come from? There are several sources. First, most food plants underwent a duplication of most if not all their genomes during their course of evolution. This duplication then allowed some relaxation from Darwinian selection such that the one gene copy was free to diverge in sequence and take on a new function.”

He concludes:

“To summarize, the new methods to rapidly, accurately and cheaply decipher genomes have uncovered hitherto unimaginable variation in the genetic material of all organisms, including the ones we eat. Hence, labelling plants and their derived foods GMO and non-GMO is clearly a distinction without a difference.”