Hot Potato
From the
Crumb Trail comes a story that I
blogged about last November.
Back40 looks at this from another angle though - one looking at the basic toxicity of all potatoes, not just GE ones.
bq. A few years ago an obscure researcher named Arpad Pusztai got his 15 minutes of fame by publishing the results of some experiments he performed on rats and touting them in the popular press. His experiments were designed to show that genetically engineered potatoes were toxic to rats and by implication humans too since humans are quite a lot like rats. But his study was debunked and he lost his job. His work was sloppy and his data was suspect, but the most interesting part was that the rats fed only GE potato extracts had such a poor diet that they would have been deathly ill even if the potatoes were not GE.
bq. So much so standard and boring in the junk science GE wars. But potatoes are worrisome for other reasons. All potatoes contain "toxic glycoalkaloids (GAs) that cause sporadic outbreaks of poisoning in humans, as well as many livestock deaths". They are a member of the nightshade family of plants, some of which are very toxic, but so are other common foods such as tomato, eggplant and bell peppers. A recent study discusses the effects, ways to detect GAs and ways to breed low GA cultivars.
Interesting reading...
Posted by DaveH at February 27, 2004 10:10 AM