I invite you to check our website for a listing of events. You may register for these programs online or by calling the 24 hour reservation line. Stevens books, altered genes, trista twisted truth will be for sale in the lobby and hillary will be there to sign books. If you have any friends who wanted to hear this program and were not able to, the podcast should be online in about a day. He is speaking again thursday in palo alto at the community center. If you want to find out more about that online you go to Silicon Valley health institute. In terms of questions today, when you feel the question. So pass them to the aisle. That way i wont have to block the tvs while the recording this. Now i will start the program officially. Greetings and welcome to todays meeting. I am bill grant, cochair of the forum and chair of this program. It is my pleasure to introduce our distinguished speakers. Steven is a Public Interest attorney who initiated a lawsuit that revealed the agency had covered up warnings about genetically engineered food and misrepresented the facts. He received his law degree at uc berkeley where he was elected to the California Law review and the legal honor society. His articles on genetically engineered food have appeared in several publications including the researcher and the financial times. His book altered genes, twisted truth was released in march 2015 is one of the most important books of the last 50 years. In 2017, he received a luxembourg peace prize for outstanding promotion of environmental peace. [applause] thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with such a great organization. I would like to begin by asking you to tell me what would you think if, at the snap of my fingers everybody in the world suddenly became aware of all the facts about genetically engineered food and everybodys opinions became aligned with our very best scientific knowledge. If we adhere to the routine rhetoric, we would have to predict that such a worldwide way of enlightenment because all oppositions to vanish because all of the opposition has been based in ignorance and all the concerns about risks are just due to an improper understanding of science, but in reality, in this world, we actually inhabit the phenomenon that weve quickly vanished is not the opposition to the foods, but the foods themselves. Thats right. If the actual facts became widely known, the entire genetically food venture would quickly collapse. That is why despite the pretensions about educating the public, the proponents have routinely suppressed or distorted critical facts. They document case after case in which scientific institutions enabled the venture to advance. Asic facts of biology have been twisted. Creating genetically modified foods has been described to make it appear far less disruptive and far more resized than it actually is, and false statements have consistently been issued about the test on these foods to cover up troubling results. Further the evidence that shows the distortion of the evidence is solid and its been tested by many experts. A Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics from the university of missouri stated that the evidence in my book is comprehensive and irrefutable. A professor at the institute for biological studies said the book is scientifically solid and truly outstanding. He also stated it dispels the cloud of misinformation that has misled people into believing that foods have been adequately tested and dont entail normal risk. Moreover, the irrefutable fact that they have been routinely misrepresented is concrete evidence. It shows how strongly the evidence weighs against the soundness of the ge food venture. If the evidence were truly supportive of the venture safety, there would have been no need to distort it. I think that is a nobrainer. If the facts are on your side, youre not afraid of that. Your joy and privilege to truly present them. During the next 25 minutes i will point out some of the key distortions in falsehood and clear up the confusion theyve created. In the process, it will become evident that there are strong science based reasons for a reaching for basic conclusions. Producing new foods through todays technology which is a term for genetic engineering is a risky process to every genetically engineered food, the safety of those on the market has never been adequately established and some of them have already been shown to be harmful. I will also explain how the ge food venture is not only abnormally risky from the standpoint of biological science but outright reckless when viewed from the perspective of Computer Science and how biotech machinations have disregarded the hard lessons that Computer Science has gained about the inherent risk of altering Information Systems. Lets first examine one of the biggest falsehoods that has been perpetrated in defense of ge foods. The routine assertion that there is an overwhelming consensus that they are safe and this consensus is based on extensive scientific evidence. Indeed the conference was is on par with Expert Consensus about the reality of human induced Climate Change. However, there truly is a genuine Expert Consensus in the case of Climate Change. There has never been one in regard to ge foods, and wears every group of experts that is examine the data related to Climate Change has reached a common conclusion, many experts have raised cautions about ge foods and several scientific institutions have done so as well. For instance, in 2001, the Royal Society issued a major report concluding the default prediction for each ge food should be the genetic alteration has unintended and potentially harmful side effects and it is scientifically unjustifiable to regard any ge food as safe unless it safety has been established through a course of testing far more rigorous than any leaders have required. That report has never been revised or refuted. Its as relevant today as when it was first issued. This fact came to life when there was a lawsuit to compel the fda to hand over 44000 pages of its internal files on ge foods. Within that trove of documents were members from the own scientists expressing concerns about the unusual risk of the genetic engineering process and the need for all the foods it produces to undergo safety testing. The evasiveness studied and declared the processes of genetic engineering and traditional breeding are different, and according to the technical experts in the agency, they lead to different risks. Moreover, the fdas own biotechnology coordinator acknowledged there was not a consensus about safety in the Scientific Community outside the agency either. However, the fda has an admitted agenda to foster biotechnology. When it issues its policy in may of 1992, after having received all that input, it claimed it was not aware of the informatio information. It also asserted there is overwhelming consensus that ge foods are so safe they dont need to be tested at all, even though it knew no such consensus existed. They allowed ge foods to enter the market without requiring a smidge of safety testing. If they had told the truth and the concern of its own experts, the subsequent history of the ge venture would have been very different and might well have been very short. At the least, it wouldve been suggested to much more rigorous testing. What about the claim that no one successful product of genetic engineering has ever been linked to a human health problem. Thats also baloney. It starkly at odds with reality. In fact, the technology is very first indigestible product cal caused a major epidemic. It killed Many Americans and second four and five thousands. Thousands of those people are still invalids to this day. That product was the food supplement of essential amino acid ltryptophan which has been derived from genetically altered bacteria. Although it met the standards for from a logical. D, it contained minute amounts of an. Hes. Unlike the conventionally produced supplements, one or more of its accidental additions with highly toxic even at extremely low levels. Because none of the tryptophan substances had the link to disease and disruptions within the organisms, there were legitimate reasons to suspect that the engineering process had induced the formation of the extraordinary toxic substance that cause the calamity. Consequently it was blameless. Most people know of this tragedy are under the illusion that the technology has been completely exonerated. Worse, ge proponents routinely claim that none of the products have been linked. That includes most professionals and Public Health with whom ive spoken, completely oblivious to the fact that the first indigestible product caused a major epidemic right here in the United States. Its important to note that the toxic incident has serious implications for all foods produced through genetic engineering. They were merely endowed with extra copies of some of their own genes. They were not engineered to produce anything other than a beneficial substance the ordinarily make. The forced overproduction of this normally benign substance put abnormal stress on those organisms that led to the creation of an unintended and highly toxic byproducts. Almost every genetically engineered food yielding organism is being compelled to overproduce one or another chemical. For that reason alone poses unusual risk. Now the standard claim that the safety of ge foods has been thoroughly established by reliable testing cannot survive scrutiny either, especially considering that many well conducted studies published in peerreviewed journals have detected harm to the animals who consume ge food. In 2009, a systematic review of the studies on ge foods that was itself published in a peerreviewed journal concluded that the results of most of them indicate that the products may cause pancreatic, renal and reproductive effects that may alter biochemical and immunological parameters, the significance of which remains unknown. Another review that encompassed the additional studies that have been published up until august 2010 also provided cause for caution. It concluded there was an equilibrium between the Research Groups suggesting that ge crops are as safe as their non ge counterparts and those raising serious concerns. Now obviously, the fact that more than 15 years after ge foods headfirst into the market, half the published studies on them raised serious concerns in the eyes of objective scientific reviewers undermines the claim that their safety has been decisively established. This conclusion is fortified when we examine some of the specific results that occurred before and after that date. For instance, a team of European University scientists published a paper in 2011 in which they reviewed the data from 19 studies on ge soy and corn varieties that have already gone through the regulatory process, were on the market, and comprised 83 of the ge foods for people have been regularly eating. What they found was disturbing. 9 of the measured parameters, including blood and urine bile chemistry and organ waste were significantly disrupted in the animals had ge feed. The greatest disturbances were to the kidneys of the mail and the liver of the female. The scientists emphasized that because livers and kidneys are the major reactive organs in cases of chronic food toxicity, these results should be reviewe viewed as danger signs. Furthermore, other dissolv results are so disturbing they cannot be ignored. Research is routinely misrepresented. A prominent role in this Misinformation Campaign has been poured by the uk Royal Society. For example, the society recently declared that no research has indicated that the genetic process itself has caused any harm in that all problems have been attributed either to the specific gene introduced or to particular agricultural practices. This assertion is for false. One major study did specifically link the ge process with harm. It was published in the journal and revealed that ge potatoes producing a form protein safer mammals to eat caused a problematic effect in the rats that consumed them compared to rats that ate the non ge counterparts. Even though the non ge potatoes have been spiked the same level of form protein that was produced within the modified potatoes. Accordingly, the research concluded that some aspect of the ge process itself was significantly responsible for the results because they had ruled out the other possible factors. It is only through the systematic misrepresentation of facts by respected institutions and individuals and their willingness to disregard the ominous implications of the evidence that the ge food venture has been able to continue. This disgraceful activity is being carried out in the name of science when it is actually subverting the basic principles of science. The extent to which the ge food venture has failed to be evidencebased and instead has rested on the denial and disregard has been vividly summarized by michael antonio, molecular geneticists at the school of medicine. The kind of detrimental effects seen in animals fed ge food were observed in a clinical setting, the products used would be halted and further Research Institute to determine cause and solution. However, what repeatedly happens in the case of ge food is that despite increasing evidence, serious Adverse Health results, government and industry continue unabated with the development, endorsement and marketing of these foods as if nothing has happened, to the point they even seem to ignore the results of their own research. So even this short summary has revealed that from the standpoint of biological science can the ge food venture is significantly unsound and when its analyzed from the standpoint of Computer Science, it becomes even more troubling. Such an analysis is irrelevant because both inadequate engineering and Computer Science are engaged in altering complex systems and Computer Science has learned a lot about the risks of making such alterations. Moreover, it has learned that these risks are inescapable. Software engineers have learned that when the Information Systems they themselves have created become large and complex, there is no way to alter them with complete precision. Even when the alteration is a small refinement designed to improve the systems performanc performance, the mere process of revising it is such an ostensibly minuscule manner is very likely to disrupt one or more of its parts. This is an amazing phenomenon. Software systems are designed to be linear which means they are structured so a specific operation only produces a specific result. Operation x should only produce why. However, despite the programmers best efforts, their systems transcend the intended limits, and to a significant degree behave in a nonlinear manner. Theres a very high likelihood that some of the parts will interact in ways that were not planned and cannot be predicted which means the operation x will not only yield why, it might also generate q and z. Consequently, to reduce the potential for unintended interactions, Software Designer separate components that shouldnt interact and try to insulate them from such interaction. What they try to avoid is creating code that resembles a plate of spaghetti. They want to avoid writing what they call spaghetti code, a program in which the components are complexly interacted and you cant work on one without jostling around some of the other ones. Now what they instead aim to create his ravioli code. They call it ravioli code. They tried to Design Systems in which the components that arent supposed interact are is independent from one another as the package of cheese and vegetable and separate packages of pasta. Yet even though programmers have succeeded in designing systems that are far more analogous to a mountain of spaghetti and reduces unintended reactions, they have not been able to eliminate it. Such unwanted results continue to happen. Before examining how these risks are dealt with, lets compare the characteristics of human designed Information Systems with those of vital Information Systems. Lets compare manmade software with major software. As i noted, systems are designed to be the linear, and although they unavoidably become linear to some degree, for the most part they function as linear systems but the situation is very different in the case of bio Information Systems. They are inherently nonlinear. The various parts are interconnected and every action can create a wide range of effects, many of which cannot be predicted. In their endeavor to maximize manageability, Software Engineers avoid creating spaghetti code, but bio Information Systems are the most extreme instances moreover, despite the knowledge we have gained, the extent to which our understanding remains sufficient should be profoundly humbling. The rules governing how the parts interact are clearly expressed in written form, but only a small fraction of the rules are known and most of those pertain to the mechanics of gene expression yet, as numerous experts have emphasized, many of the most important rules dont operate at the level of the genes. For instance, richard stroman, who was a distinguished professor of cell biology at the university of berkeley asserted the most important rules operate at a level higher than the gene genes, the level at which genes are organized into what he called functional arrays. He noted that this level of gene management is not confined within the dna but is coextensive with the cell itself. Moreover, he emphasized the dynamics operating at this level are different than the ones operating at the lower level and that the interactions are far more complex to the extent that they are ultimately trans calculation all which he noted is a mathematical term for mindboggling. Several other