Today (5/12/09), the French government was launching le Haut Conseil des Biotechnologies (High Counsel on Biotechnologies), an initiative aimed at assessing GMO’s impact on human health and the environment, in other words an attempt at solving the many controversies around these lines. The ultimate goal – or secret ambition – is to propose the EU with a guidelines and directives covering science, ethic, economic impact and legal to draft the next EU legislation with regards to GMOs. This new institution will try to provide answers with regards to production (dedicated field, control, …), food processing (should a plant process one type of organism such as organic or should it be allowed to process everything?) and commercialization (labeling a product GMO free for instance).

The HCB is comprised of 63 members, each of them representing one or more stakeholders: policy makers, scientists, environmental advocates, human health experts, physicians, industry representatives and consumers associations. One of them, Marc Lavielle, the only mathematician of the HCB, has a beef with the data currently available to support decision making. In an interview with French newspaper Le Monde, he believes we should forget everything we think we know, whether it is about the suspicion of toxicity or the notion of innocuousness. “Today studies are performed on groups of about ten rats, only for a few weeks.” The methodologies (when divulgated in their entirety) could help compare outcomes. But pharmaceutical – life science – labs would have to release these studies. And they have been very reluctant to do so, and for the ones they have made public, they have been accused of manipulating the data. If one would want to analyze the variation of the weight of a rat’s liver in the 10% range, with 99% confidence, one would need a sample of 50 guinea pigs. With 20, the probability to detect this outcome will fall down to 88%, and with 10, down to 60%. Questioning the validity of what is to be factored in every decision of this nature is fine by me and I am sure it is by you. Agreeing to it implies to delay any decision for an extra 2 years to conduct new experiments.

But should we forget EVERYTHING? Because, to me, and to many others who have taken the time to read reports – I should say who have been digging them up in the first place – there is overwhelming evidence in the open of species cross-contamination as well as human contamination, and of these seeds failing to adapt to harsh environment and to produce higher yields.

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