Jeffrey Smith is a leading global thought leader on the health dangers of genetically modified organisms. He has written two best selling books, directed five documentaries, delivered thousands of lectures, and delivered over 2,000 lectures all over the world. In recent years, Jeffrey has been sounding the alarm about new genetic engineering techniques, including gene editing, including CRISPR technology, which, he warns, can cause health and environmental disasters. In this episode, Jeffrey talks about the dangers of GMO 2.0, and how the use of gene editing technology to create them could be even more dangerous than they are already causing. Jeffrey Smith is the author of the best-selling book, "Genetically Modified Organisms: The Real Story" and the director of five documentaries. He is a frequent lecturer, speaker, and advocate for organic and non-GMO diets, and he has counseled world leaders on six continents. His meticulous research presented at medical conferences has inspired thousands to prescribe non- GMO and organic diets. The success of the GMO education movement he pioneered is measured in part by the fact that 48% of the world s consumers now acknowledge that GMOs are unhealthy. This episode features an interview with Jeffrey Smith, who has spent many years in the trenches fighting against Monsanto and the GMO industry, and who has been a key figure in the fight against genetically modified foods and their use in the anti-pesticide campaigns. In this interview, we discuss the history of GMOs, the dangers they pose to our environment, and the dangers posed to our health, and what we can do to our food supply, and our environment. Thanks to Jeffrey Smith for coming on the show to talk about this important topic, and why we should all be worried about the risks of genetically engineered organisms in the first place. We hope you'll listen to this episode and share it with your friends and family. If you like it, share it on social media! and tell a friend about it on your social media about it! We're listening to this podcast! if you're a friend of the show! and/or share it in the comments section, we'll be listening to it on Insta- or tell us what you think of this episode on your feed, and we'll hear about it in your feed! or share it to your friends about it :) Thanks for listening! Timestamps: 3:00 - What do you think about it?
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today we're going to talk about a really fascinating, important subject of genetically modified organisms, and particularly the new use of CRISPR technologies to create them.
00:00:13.000Probably the leading global thought leader on this issue, on the health dangers of Genetically modified organisms, GMOs, over the past 27 years is Jeffrey Smith, who has authored two bestsellers, directed five documentaries, delivered 2,000 lectures and interviews in 45 countries, trained 1,500 speakers, and organized More than 10,000 grassroots advocates.
00:00:40.000He has counseled world leaders on six continents, and his meticulous research presented at medical conferences has inspired thousands to prescribe non-GMO and organic diets.
00:00:52.000The success of GMO education movement he pioneered is measured in part by the fact that 48% of the world's consumers now acknowledge that GMOs are unhealthy.
00:01:03.000In recent years, Jeffrey has been sounding the alarm about new genetic engineering techniques including gene editing.
00:01:12.000Unregulated GMO 2.0 can cause health and environmental disasters.
00:01:17.000The most urgent danger comes from genetically engineered microbes, including the use of CRISPR technology.
00:01:23.000So thank you, Jeffrey, so much for joining us.
00:01:26.000And you and I have spent many, many years in the trenches fighting against Monsanto.
00:01:32.000But tell us, generally speaking, before we get into GMO 2.0, let's talk about sort of the history of GMOs, because they were promised originally.
00:01:41.000We were going to get a green revolution, and that if we had GMOs, we could increase plant productivity and reduce the amount of chemicals that we use in agriculture.
00:01:52.000But actually, the GMOs have increased, vastly increased, the amount of chemicals that we use in agriculture.
00:01:59.000And can you explain kind of how that works?
00:02:32.000It kills a lot of bacteria, but this bacteria survived and they figured, okay, let's put it in the food supply.
00:02:38.000So they took the gene out of the bacteria and put it into the crops that allowed the crops to also survive what would otherwise be deadly doses of Roundup.
00:02:49.000So it allowed farmers to use Roundup by spraying over the tops of already maturing soybean fields and corn fields, and it wouldn't kill those crops.
00:03:05.000To spin it, as you said, Monsanto and their PR firm and the other biotech companies Claimed it would increase yields, which it hasn't.
00:03:14.000It would feed the world, which it actually works against.
00:03:17.000They said it would reduce the use of agricultural chemicals and it skyrocketed in these herbicide-tolerant crops.
00:03:24.000And most importantly, they said it was safe.
00:03:27.000And the FDA said it was safe, but it turns out it wasn't the FDA scientists.
00:03:32.000It was the political appointee, Monsanto's former attorney, Michael Taylor, who was in charge of GMO policy at the FDA. And he diverged from what the scientists said.
00:03:44.000Claiming falsely that they didn't know of any difference between GMOs and non-GMOs and therefore they can go on the market without any testing or labeling.
00:03:52.000And then nine years later, from lawsuit discovery, we realized it was a fraud and that the overwhelming consensus among the scientists working at the FDA was exactly the opposite.
00:04:03.000The GMOs were different and dangerous.
00:04:06.000Yeah, and this same thing happened in our lawsuit against Monsanto when we discovered that the head of the pesticide division at EPA, Jess Rowland, for a decade, was actually secretly working for Monsanto.
00:04:21.000So they had both agencies that they had nailed down.
00:04:29.000And then they had Jess Rowland at EPA, and in that way they were able to Subvert democracy, subvert the political system, subvert science, and give protection to their industry.
00:04:42.000As you pointed out, they started using Monsanto, I think, originally in 1973, when their other principal product was DDT. And, of course, they were making Agent Orange at that time, too, and spraying it all over Vietnam, but they made DDT. EDT got banned in 1973, and they needed a new agricultural product to replace it, a flagship product.
00:05:07.000Then they found glyphosate, which was a tank descaler.
00:05:12.000It was used to get corrosion and calcification out of the inside of underground tanks.
00:05:19.000And they found out that it would kill...
00:05:22.000Somebody threw some of it out in the yard one day, and everything green died.
00:05:26.000They figured that's a great herbicide.
00:05:29.000And originally, for the first 30 years, it was applied by men.
00:05:35.000You know, they would hire a lot of farm workers with backpack applicators and a little spray gun, and they would walk the corn rows early part of the season.
00:05:44.000So they weren't spraying it on finished crops.
00:05:46.000They were spraying it on the weeds that were competing with the corn as the corn first got out of the ground.
00:05:51.000Once the corn got it foot or two high, the weeds could no longer catch up with it.
00:05:55.000But those men with backpack sprayers would spray the individual weeds and would kill them, other than having to go with the spade and pull them out of the ground.
00:06:03.000And then when they discovered Roundup Ready corn, and they put that little gene in it in the corn seed so that the corn was now immune to glyphosate, they could now fire all of those workers and hire one guy in an airplane with tanks on it and spray the entire landscapes with glyphosate. they could now fire all of those workers and hire And anything green in those landscapes would die.
00:06:27.000And let's talk about that Roundup Ready corn because it's interesting that the most long-term comprehensive study on any genetically engineered food that we eat for rats was done on Roundup Ready corn.
00:06:39.000And they found that when they took corn that had been sprayed with Roundup and fed it for two years to rats, they developed multiple massive tumors, early death, and organ damage.
00:06:50.000But this study was designed even in a more advanced way to determine whether it was Roundup that was causing the problem or the genetically engineered corn.
00:07:00.000So another group of rats were fed the Roundup-ready corn that had never been sprayed with Roundup.
00:07:06.000And they developed multiple massive tumors, early death, and organ damage, which means maybe it was the GMO. But the third group was fed Roundup in the drinking water and just ate regular corn, and they too had multiple massive tumors, early death, and organ damage, and the controls suffered none of these.
00:07:27.000Ceralini, and as you probably know, he was just lambasted and threatened and discredited by the echo chamber of Monsanto's front groups and pseudoscientists that were paid directly or under the table.
00:07:41.000And that has been the history of GMOs.
00:07:43.000In my book, Seeds of Deception, I open with the book with the story of Arpad Pustai.
00:07:49.000Who discovered that the process of genetic engineering generically, no matter what particular gene you put in, can cause potentially precancerous cell growth in the digestive tract, smaller brains, livers, and testicles, partial atrophy of the liver, and damaged immune system in his rats.
00:08:06.000And when he went public with his concerns, he was a hero at his prestigious institute for about two days, and then a phone call Allegedly from Monsanto to Bill Clinton and then to the UK Prime Minister's office and then to his director resulted in him being fired from his job after 35 years and silenced with threats of a lawsuit.
00:08:28.000So he became a poster child for what happens if you dare to discover problems with GMOs or even question their safety.
00:08:38.000Yeah, and so they have Monsanto and the big chemical producers have control over the political system, and they maintain that control through a variety of mechanisms, including direct contributions to political candidates, but also they have control over other institutions in our society as well, including the media.
00:08:59.000Will you talk about that a little bit?
00:09:01.000Yes, in terms of the media, we can see originally when bovine growth hormone from Monsanto was being pushed, they hired a PR firm to rate all the coverage and they created friendlies and a list of enemies and the friendlies were rewarded and the enemies were threatened and leaked documents show that they bragged about how they got certain reporters kicked off the case at the New York Times or elsewhere.
00:09:26.000They had a four-part news series in a Fox TV affiliate in Florida stopped from a threatening letter from Monsanto's attorney to Fox promising dire consequences to Rupert Murdoch and his business.
00:09:52.000There was a pair, two Florida reporters, Yeah, Steve and Jane.
00:09:58.000Basically what happened was they had a contract and they weren't allowed to be kicked out at that point because they had a contract.
00:10:06.000So the lawyer for the Fox station, not the local one, the main one, started to bring them through a series of rewrites.
00:10:17.000And it was not on the basis of what was true.
00:10:20.000It was on the basis of what they can get away with legally.
00:10:23.000And over a series of months, they did 81 rewrites.
00:10:27.000And the moment that the contract gave them the opportunity to fire one of them, they fired him and they ultimately redid the entire series favorable to bovine growth hormone I've interviewed her and followed her a bit.
00:10:51.000So the concept of leaving reporters and scientists in their wake is something that happens not only in the United States, but all over the world.
00:11:01.000Sometimes I interview The people who are in part of the approval committee for GMOs for their country, and there's usually a majority and a minority.
00:11:12.000The majority was put there from the influence by industry and often pro-GMO governments.
00:11:19.000The minority may be representative of civil society or independent scientists.
00:11:23.000And the ones that talk to me from that side say it's so frustrating because those that approve it do not even look at the data.
00:11:31.000They just rubber stamp all the approvals.
00:11:34.000I talked to one of the leading scientists in the world, P.M. Bhargava, who was put on the approval committee by the Supreme Court of India and said, please evaluate whether this is true or a facade, as is claimed in a citizen's petition.
00:11:48.000He came back a year later and said, it's totally facade.
00:11:51.000No GMO in the world has been properly tested.
00:11:53.000There's about 30 areas that they need to be studied.
00:11:56.000Only about 10% have been studied, but they've been done by industry themselves.
00:12:00.000In such a poor way, they're meaningless.
00:12:02.000No GMO should be on the market right now.
00:12:05.000What's interesting, Robert, is that when you look at the amount of GMOs in corn and soy in the United States on a graph, and it moves up in a particular slope, And the amount of glyphosate-based herbicides sprayed on those.
00:12:46.000However, when we look at the animal feeding studies, the animals suffer from precursors to these same diseases.
00:12:54.000When we look at the modes of action, we could predict these same diseases.
00:12:58.000When we talk to Scientists, when we talk to veterinarians and talk about the pets or the livestock, they talk about these diseases as becoming prevalent in the animals soon after GMOs and Roundup were introduced, and especially the doctors.
00:13:16.000I've spoken at about two dozen medical conferences, and now I'm hearing from doctors and have for more than a decade who've taken a large number of their patients and put them on non-GMO and organic foods, which don't allow either GMOs or Roundup, and there's an astonishing improvement.
00:13:33.000In fact, we surveyed 3,256 people who got better from 28 different conditions when they switched to non-GMO and largely organic diets.
00:13:43.000And what did GMOs do to productivity in terms of agricultural productivity, agricultural yields?
00:13:50.000There's actually a yield drag for soybeans because the process of genetic engineering generally causes massive collateral damage and takes energy away from the growing process.
00:14:01.000They haven't figured out how to increase yield with genetics because it involves lots of different genes, and they've gotten lucky with single genes being put in for single traits, which is very rare.
00:14:11.000Usually genes work in networks or families.
00:14:14.000So they haven't been successful at improving the yield in general.
00:14:18.000If you look at just the corn, there's been about a 2% increase per year because of the impact of the corn on the corn borer.
00:14:31.000In soil, there's a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, which produces a toxin which kills caterpillars.
00:14:38.000It breaks little holes in their guts and kills them.
00:14:40.000So they take the gene out of the Bacillus thuringiensis, put it into the corn.
00:14:46.000Now the corn is a registered pesticide.
00:14:49.000It's an insecticide and it kills insects and we eat the corn.
00:14:54.000Now the spray is something that washes off and biodegrades in the sun.
00:15:00.000When it's genetically engineered, the amount of that BT toxin is thousands of times greater than the spray.
00:15:07.000But even the spray has shown immune system responses and allergic reactions in humans.
00:15:12.000When it was sprayed over the Pacific Northwest for gypsy moth infestation, 500 people reported sickness and disease, and some had to go to the hospital.
00:15:21.000Now, farm workers handling the BT cotton, the cotton genetically engineered to produce the BT toxin in India, are reporting the same symptoms as those that were sprayed with BT. But it gets worse.
00:15:33.000We eat that BT toxin in the corn that we eat.
00:15:38.000In high concentrations in petri dishes and laboratories, it drills holes in human cells that look exactly like the holes that it kills insects with.
00:15:47.000In Canada, they found 93% of the pregnant women tested had BT toxin in their blood.
00:15:57.000Possibly through the holes that it drilled.
00:15:59.000Now, it should wash out of the blood very quickly, so why was 93% of the Canadian women tested containing BT in their blood?
00:16:09.000Well, the people who did the study suggest that maybe it was the milk and meat of the animals that they were eating, because those animals ate a lot of BT corn and BT cotton as part of their diet.
00:16:23.000But there's another plausible explanation.
00:16:27.000In the only human feeding study ever conducted on the commercialized GMOs, this was on soy, they found that part of the gene inserted into the soy, that bacterial gene that allows it to resist death from Roundup, had transferred into the DNA of bacteria living inside the people's digestive tract.
00:16:48.000Now, they don't know if it was continuing to function.
00:16:50.000As soon as this was reported, the pro-GMO UK government stopped the funding so they couldn't find the answer.
00:16:57.000But imagine for a moment that you're eating a corn chip, and the corn chip has genes that produce the BT toxin.
00:17:04.000Now, imagine if that gene transferred to our gut bacteria and continued to function.
00:17:11.000It means that our intestinal flora could theoretically become living pesticide factories.
00:17:16.000And that may be why 93% of the pregnant women in Canada had the BT toxin in their blood because it was being produced inside their own digestive tract.
00:17:29.000We can't verify that it's happening, but there are certainly indications that the digestion Is deeply affected by those that eat GMOs.
00:17:39.000In fact, 85.2% of the more than 3,000 people that we surveyed reported getting better from digestive disorders when they made the change in their diet.
00:17:49.000Yeah, I mean, these are the kinds of studies NIH should be doing, and we should have the answers to all these studies.
00:17:55.000You know, if I manage to get into the White House, it's the first thing that I'm going to do is to, you know, go over to NIH and say, let's get definitive answers on all of this right away.
00:18:06.000And, you know, so that we can shield Americans from these toxins and shield our children.
00:18:11.000What about the, you know, if BT toxins are putting holes in the stomach of caterpillars, and that may account for the disappearance of all our butterfly species.
00:18:22.000And I don't know if anybody's made that connection, but how about bees and other pollinators?
00:18:31.000First of all, in terms of the BT toxin, one of the BT varieties was tested years ago and showed that it could kill off the larva of the butterfly, and that was quietly removed from the market.
00:18:45.000However, one of the big problems with monarch butterflies is that they grow on plants that are killed by the Roundup in the Midwest.
00:19:01.000And so the fact that you have the BT toxin, which might be causing damage to the insects, and the lack of habitat so the larva can feed has turned out to be a disaster.
00:19:13.000Now with bees, we know that Roundup or glyphosate is an antibiotic.
00:19:18.000And it's an interesting antibiotic in that it kills the beneficial bacteria, but not the nasty stuff.
00:19:23.000So lactobacillus, bifidobacteria, things that we need, things that we want in our yogurt, etc.
00:19:29.000Bees need these beneficial bacteria to digest.
00:19:32.000So when you look at colony collapse disorder with the death of all of these bees, if you think of the neonicotinoid insecticides, which some people blame for it, it wouldn't explain all of the symptoms.
00:19:44.000One of the symptoms are they seem to starve to death even though there's plenty of food because they perhaps can't digest it.
00:19:51.000One research study showed that the bees lose the ability to navigate back to the hive.
00:19:57.000One study showed that in environmentally relevant levels of glyphosate in the study, there was about a 30% death rate in the hive.
00:20:06.000And there was a study by a company called Biologics that was looking at the impact between Roundup and these bees, but it was purchased by Monsanto and they stopped doing those studies.
00:20:26.000I'll tell you, everywhere in the world, because as you read, I've spoken in 45 countries, and the activists usually greet me and give me an orientation and tell me which divisions of the government are now being controlled by Monsanto.
00:20:40.000And sometimes part of the government brings me in to try and stop the takeover of another part of the government by Monsanto.
00:20:48.000So they're now bare, but they're still doing the same thing.
00:20:53.000Let's talk about, oh, what about in terms of productivity of the yields?
00:20:59.000I think, what is it now, 85%, 95% of the corn produced in the world is now Roundup Ready corn, right?
00:22:06.000It was a tool for corporate agriculture.
00:22:09.000It didn't allow farmers to save their seeds.
00:22:13.000It damaged the soil bacteria, eliminating regenerative agricultural processes.
00:22:18.000And so it was a disaster and that wasn't even looking at the health issues.
00:22:23.000However, they have been pushing this concept that it was needed to feed the world and that it was going to increase yields.
00:22:31.000And that takes money away from the more appropriate technologies.
00:22:35.000And this report determined that agroecology was appropriate because that can double staple crops in developing countries.
00:22:43.000In one of my books, I described A study with about 12 million farms using agroecology, and it was a 73% increase in yield.
00:22:52.000And when you think about GMOs as not increasing yield, but being pushed as the solution, it's tremendous hypocrisy and it's very dangerous to work against the real solutions.
00:23:04.000But American farmers seem addicted to it.
00:23:08.000Why is that and how do you break that addiction?
00:23:10.000Well, you mentioned earlier that there's a lot of control over the government and the media.
00:23:15.000Farmers are also another area where Monsanto and the biotech industry exert unprecedented control.
00:23:21.000When you think of what information a farmer gets, there's the land-grant universities that provide extension agents that give advice to the farmer.
00:23:29.000The land-grant universities receive money from the biotech industry, which then determines a research agenda.
00:23:35.000So the extension agents basically say which seeds and which sprays.
00:23:40.000The farm journals and the farm radio get supported from advertising from Big Ag, and they're not allowed to run anti or even true stories about GMOs.
00:23:53.000I was told by one reporter, I write for a farm magazine and I'd love to figure out where I can publish an article about your work.
00:24:01.000I said, can you put it in the farm journal?
00:24:06.000There's also a kind of a messaging where GMOs and Roundup are the future and anyone who's against it is anti-science.
00:24:17.000There's also a reduction in the availability of the best producing seeds in the non-GMO varieties.
00:24:24.000There's also a kind of a pride in having the rows between your soybeans completely clean, which only happens when you have the Roundup ready version.
00:24:34.000There was also an effort to sue farmers who dared to not plant Monsanto seeds.
00:24:41.000Then they would sometimes get visited by Monsanto's crop cops who would find contamination, sometimes even in a farm that wasn't even theirs, and then they would get a note saying, you must pay us $70,000 for using our seeds illegally or we can sue you.
00:24:59.000And now there's something called dicamba, And dicamba-resistant crops Where dicamba can be mixed with the glyphosate, but it can volatilize, rise into the air and travel, and then land on nearby crops causing damage.
00:25:17.000Or millions of dollars of damage have occurred.
00:25:21.000It's been up at the EPA. And some farmers realize they have to use the genetically engineered dicamba-resistant varieties or their neighbors who are using it and spraying with dicamba could destroy or damage their crops.
00:25:34.000So there's a whole nexus from cultural, scientific, economic, etc.
00:25:40.000Do you have any idea of an exit ramp off of that?
00:25:44.000You know, if you had a president of the United States or somebody at USDA who wanted to really change that system and change towards regenerative agriculture and help farmers wean off of those chemicals, how would you do it?
00:25:59.000Well, I've heard stories, for example, about one GMO corn farmer who worked with a friend of mine, a professor, to implement a regenerative agriculture program.
00:26:10.000And after the first year, he was making more money and needed less Roundup.
00:26:16.000And so he said, you know, I can get away with maybe 20% of the Roundup, maybe not at all.
00:26:23.000It turns out these agricultural inputs Require a level of disability in these crops in order to be on the treadmill for chemicals.
00:26:35.000If you have healthy soil, it can sequester carbon, it can fix nitrogen, it can produce all sorts of components that are needed for a healthy crop, which can then stave off the plant diseases and improve the yields.
00:26:51.000But when you have sick plants on denuded soil, you need the fertilizer, you need the pesticides to kill off what would otherwise be naturally killed off.
00:27:01.000So if research dollars were put into that, demonstration farms, and lots of them in different areas so that the farmers could see other farms in their geography, in their crops, And they can see an improvement per acre in their bottom line.
00:27:20.000And there was a financial support system to help farmers transition into that, both with the training, the loans, etc.
00:27:28.000And especially if they want to go to organic for the three years during the transition, then it should be pretty easy.
00:27:33.000They've done some transitions in Germany and other places that were effective, but nothing as big as you and I would probably want.
00:27:45.000One of the factors of genetic engineering that's important to understand is that the process of inserting a foreign gene or just changing the order or knocking out a particular gene causes massive collateral damage.
00:28:00.000We know this from the traditional GMOs.
00:28:02.000There could be hundreds of changes in proteins and metabolites.
00:28:07.000There's a new allergen in one of the Bt corn The Roundup Ready corn has higher levels of putrescine and cadaverine related to not only the foul odor of rotting dead bodies but can also link to cancer and allergies.
00:28:23.000So the collateral damage is dangerous for consumption and it's unknown what its impacts are in the environment.
00:28:30.000With gene editing, it also has massive collateral damage.
00:28:35.000And I'll explain what it is in a minute.
00:28:37.000But it's important to understand just how dangerous and damaging it is.
00:28:43.000The journal Nature described it as chromosomal mayhem.
00:28:48.000So here's what CRISPR is, which is the most popular gene editing technique.
00:28:54.000Imagine a molecular scissors designed to cut the DNA and a guide telling the scissors where to cut.
00:29:07.000Sometimes the cut happens in a dozen other places that are not supposed to be cut.
00:29:13.000Sometimes additional DNA is added to the cut DNA when the cell repairs it, so now you have mouse DNA or goat DNA or bacterial DNA added in there.
00:29:25.000Sometimes there's accidental deletions, additions, even something called chromothripsis, a shattering of the chromosome, which rejoins in a haphazard manner.
00:29:35.000The biotech industry has been pummeled by those of us pointing out the drawbacks and dangers of GMOs.
00:29:43.000As you said at the beginning, about half the world's population believe correctly that GMOs are not safe to eat.
00:29:50.000So they've come with a global campaign to convince governments that gene editing is not something that produces GMOs.
00:29:58.000It's basically a precision breeding method.
00:30:01.000And they pretend that it is safe and predictable and should not be regulated at all.
00:30:08.000And they've convinced the US government, the Canadian government, the UK government, Japan, Australia, India, many in South America.
00:30:17.000And right now in many of these countries, you can gene edit an organism and put it into the food supply or the environment and tell no one.
00:30:28.000Well, CRISPR. CRISPR Labs cost less than $2,000 on the low end.
00:30:34.000That means that you can create a GMO in your basement, especially microbes.
00:30:38.000But it also means that all of the high schools that are going to get CRISPR Labs are going to end up producing these new GMOs.
00:30:46.000There is a gene rush going on where everyone is looking to find their patent and their solution with this gene editing technology.
00:30:54.000Now, on the biggest scale, There's going to be an incremental contamination and corruption of nature's gene pool.
00:31:02.000Ultimately, if we don't curtail it, it's a replacement of nature, the end of biological evolution as we know it.
00:31:09.000So future generations will not inherit, as we did, the products of the billions of years of evolution, but instead they'll inherit a hybrid natural products and laboratory products from a technology prone to side effects.
00:31:24.000As a non-profit institute, our Institute for Responsible Technology, and that's responsibletechnology.org, we're trying to figure out where we go first.
00:31:34.000And so we ask the question, what's the most dangerous of organisms to genetically engineer?
00:31:43.000As you know, the microbiome inside our bodies is critical to health.
00:31:49.00080% of human diseases are linked to disorders in the microbiome.
00:31:54.000We outsource about 90% of our chemical and metabolic functions to the microbiome.
00:31:59.000We can get away with 23,000 genes in our cell less than earthworms because we use the genetic information of the 3.5 million genes in the microbes living inside us.
00:32:10.000There's an elaborate way that infants get delivered a microbiome from the mother and it gets fed from the milk.
00:32:17.000Part of the milk is inedible by the child.
00:32:21.000If the child gets sick, their salivary microbes change, feeding back through the breast, change the milk and it helps heal the child and it reverts back to the other milk when the child is healthy.
00:32:33.000It is an elaborate, incredible We're in awe that this micro-Jedi army works on our behalf, and it works even in a more complicated way in the soils, sequestering carbon, creating a support system for the entire ecosystem, and we've only been able to characterize maybe 1% of the trillion microbes out there.
00:32:53.000And yet, we do know that when you release a microbe that's genetically engineered, If it survives in the wild, it can travel and mutate.
00:33:03.000Microbes also can swap genes with other microbes.
00:33:06.000So now the thing that you created in high school class as an experiment or in some other business or university is now occupying inside the DNA of 10,000 different types of microbes in 100,000 different ecosystems.
00:33:23.000We don't know what the impact will be, and yet there's virtually no mechanism to prevent that release.
00:33:31.000No regulatory agencies are in charge of what happens in a high school.
00:33:36.000Very little research is required for release on the commercial level.
00:33:42.000And we're of the belief that this is an existential threat that must be handled.
00:33:48.000And we point to two genetically engineered microbes that were almost released years ago, which could have had potentially catastrophic outcomes.
00:33:57.000There was a microbe that's popular on the roots of all terrestrial plants called Klebsiella planticula, and it was genetically engineered to turn plant matter into alcohol.
00:34:10.000It was a well-meaning idea to send it out to the farmers who normally burn their crops after harvest.
00:34:17.000Instead, rake it up, put it in big barrels with the genetically engineered microbes, and turn it to alcohol.
00:34:24.000After two weeks, you can open the spigot, put it in your tractor, sell it off-farm, and then use the nutrient-rich sludge on the bottom to spread on the field as fertilizer.
00:34:35.000It was a sound idea except a graduate student got permission to study this genetically engineered microbe and one day walked into his lab on a Saturday morning and all of these wheat seeds that he had planted on the soil that had been mixed with the genetically engineered bacteria were dead.
00:35:02.000This day was two weeks before the company was going to release this outdoors to see how far it would travel.
00:35:10.000This graduate student's advisor, Professor Elaine Ingham, spoke about this near tragedy at the UN. She was approached by EPA whistleblowers.
00:35:22.000Who told her just how far that genetically engineered microbe might have traveled because the EPA did a study, according to the whistleblowers that had not been publicly acknowledged, where they released genetically engineered microbes in the field in Louisiana and checked to see how far it spread.
00:35:37.00011 miles the first year, another 11 miles.
00:35:40.000They stopped funding it, but certain employees at the EPA continued to monitor and eventually they found it everywhere they looked all over the planet.
00:35:51.000Elaine Ingham in a film that's available at responsibletechnology.org slash takeaction, what would happen if it spread, if it survived, maybe if it displaced its natural Klebsiella planticula counterpart?
00:36:06.000And she said quite soberingly, it could theoretically end terrestrial plant life.
00:36:14.000We don't know if it actually would have been a cataclysm.
00:36:18.000There's another genetically engineered microbe that was going to reduce the amount of frost on potatoes and strawberries and it was about to be released and then stopped by court and it could have theoretically changed weather patterns.
00:36:32.000Because the natural version creates raindrops and snow and sleet.
00:36:38.000And this genetically engineered version didn't do that.
00:36:50.000I read a brief article today that Bill Gates now has a factory in Columbia that's producing 11 million mosquitoes a week that are being released, but there's, I don't know, hundreds of millions of them in this factory.
00:37:23.000I remember talking to one of the senior scientists of Oxitec, a company that was trying to get their genetically engineered mosquitoes released in Florida.
00:37:32.000We were both testifying in 2014 at the Mosquito Control Board.
00:37:36.000And in the lobby, I said to him, You know, you're going to change the gene pool in ways that you have no idea.
00:37:45.000He goes, oh no, no, no, it won't survive.
00:37:46.000It's designed to basically self-eliminate.
00:37:50.000As soon as they start releasing them, it'll just disappear.
00:37:53.000Well, they went to Brazil and they found that in 60% Of the samples three years after they were releasing it, there were genes from their genetically engineered version that had mixed with the natural.
00:38:05.000But I also said to this man, Derek Nemo, I said, have you ever tested the saliva of those mosquitoes in case they bite someone?
00:38:13.000And he said, we're just now testing to see if the saliva contains that new gene produced inside the mosquitoes.
00:38:39.000They put a single gene into the DNA and up to 5% of the functioning genes changed their levels of expression, which means you can have new toxins or new allergens or new carcinogens.
00:38:51.000Shouldn't you test the entire composition of the saliva in the mosquitoes that you're releasing?
00:39:00.000So these are the brain cells behind the people who are willing to alter our gene pool irreversibly.
00:39:11.000And for years, we didn't have any examples in genetic engineering, but we did have the rabbits in Australia.
00:39:17.00024 rabbits released in 1859 so that settlers would feel more at home.
00:39:23.000By the 1920s, there was over 10 billion because rabbits multiply like rabbits.
00:39:28.000Now, imagine taking an ecosystem and with the gene rush going on, replacing many, many organisms in that ecosystem in ways that you cannot predict.
00:39:39.000And then if they're microbes, they travel around the world, they mutate, they swap genes, and now your little release is changing the nature of nature for all future generations.
00:39:53.000All right, well, tell me what the good news is.
00:39:56.000Okay, so our Institute for Responsible Technology is starting a movement to pass laws to prevent the release of genetically engineered microbes.
00:40:08.000I've been building movements for decades.
00:40:10.000We built the consumer education movement and there's a lot of support and I'd like to invite people to go to responsibletechnology.org slash take action and be part of our support team.
00:40:23.000Right now we have a letter to Secretary Vilsack.
00:40:25.000Last month we had a comment, period comment.
00:40:28.000We're going to have a declaration coming.
00:40:30.000So it'll be an opportunity to check in with that page over time to lend your support and also to make a donation to our nonprofit.
00:40:39.000But the idea is that there's many groups out there that already depend on a healthy microbiome for their success.
00:40:46.000The medical doctors now realize how important the microbiome is.
00:40:51.000And so that community and their patients are one natural ally.
00:40:55.000Regenerative agriculture is a natural ally because the microbes in the soil do the heavy lifting.
00:41:00.000The climate change movement is a natural ally that they want to sequester the carbon in the soil.
00:41:07.000They need the microbes healthy to do that.
00:41:10.000If you release genetically engineered microbes and it alters that.
00:41:13.000In fact, people living on Earth are a natural ally because algae produces 70% of the Earth's oxygen, and you want to protect that.
00:41:21.000We have the environmentalists, the oceans people.
00:41:23.000We have the indigenous and spiritual people that believe that GMO really means God move over.
00:41:32.000that already know that their success depends on the success of the microbiome and in a bigger picture on nature.
00:41:40.000So we are going to and are in the process of producing materials that can be disseminated through these different movements so we can all work together and it's interesting Robert that when you think about just how terrifying this is It's really as an existential threat and opportunity.
00:42:00.000I like to think of patients that are given a really bad prognosis where that prognosis or diagnosis ends up being a blessing for them because it changes their perspective.
00:42:15.000Here, unlike the bigger issues of existential threats like global warming and nuclear power, a single individual can impact all living beings for all future generations.
00:42:27.000There's a level of potential damage to nature that individuals have that they've never had before.
00:42:33.000So it demands a restructuring of our relationship with nature.
00:42:39.000So that instead of simply moving along and manipulating it for our benefit, we are forced to protect it.
00:42:45.000And as a safeguarder of nature for this purpose, we become a safeguarder of nature for many areas.
00:42:51.000Now, I believe personally that consciousness as an individual is not so linear and local.
00:42:57.000We've seen in history how civilizations all of a sudden adopt something new quickly, often in many different parts of the world at the same time.
00:43:06.000So I'm hoping that the attention and shift that's necessary to protect us and change our relationship with nature will actually deliver the silver lining on this threat.
00:43:19.000Where we actually realize that we must, in order to survive, Honor, protect, and uphold the nature of nature.
00:43:28.000And so that ultimately is the goal of the Institute for Responsible Technology.
00:43:33.000And we need to pass the local and national laws, create international treaties, raise the money in the war chest to make it happen.
00:43:41.000And again, I want to invite people to responsibletechnology.org because we're at a critical time right now to see if we can actually make this happen globally.
00:43:51.000Jeffrey Smith, how can people get in touch with you?
00:43:54.000Responsibletechnology.org is the mothership of our program.
00:44:11.000And I would like to invite people To share this interview with others because one of the issues is if people haven't thought about this, they're not alone.
00:44:23.000I was talking to one of the leading experts at functional medicine and progressive healthcare and I spoke to him for about an hour about what was happening.
00:45:23.000And let's actually do something because now we've arrived at that inevitable time in human civilization We can redirect the streams of evolution for all time for the price of dinner if you have a CRISPR kit.