Page 6, Section 4: Food standards

Site No.4 - http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/foodmatters/gmfoods/

This website is a site where they inform the public on the standards of their food, whether it is organic, au naturale or genetically modified.

The scientific content of this site is pretty low, it doesn’t really tell a person how genetically modified foods came about, it really only tells people how food is genetically modified and that explanation is far from detailed.

The website seems to dip its quill into an inkpot of detail at certain stages. It is a site that mainly concerns itself with the healthy and safety levels of foods, so it would be necessary to go into detail in areas regarding the regulation of GM foods. The website seems to pull the minimum requirement when going into detail about GM foods.

This website is pretty accessible. It’s an Australian-government sanctioned website. Surfing around the internet site is pretty easy as well; the navigation bar on the left takes you pretty much anywhere you need to go around the site. This makes the site easy to surf around, like I previously said, and easy to read; although, the designers tended to clump a bunch of text on one page and then ditch the page altogether after formatting it with paragraphs, which makes it both much harder and yet much easier to read.

The credibility of the site is pretty unquestionable – it’s a government-sanctioned site that seems to rate Genetically modified foods in Australia and New Zealand. This means that the site would be a leader in the world of genetically modified foods, in terms of nutrition and the genes that could be added to certain foods.

The site also seems to be pretty biased. It seems to want to have more Australian genetically modified foods available. The websites organization is pretty qualified and tests to see if genetically modified foods are safe and healthy to eat.

Scientific Content: 4/10
Detail of content: 7/10
Accesibility: 8/10
Bias: 6/10 (Higher is better.)
Total: 6/10 (Averaged, rounded down.)

Page 5, Section 3: Genetically Modified Foods

Site No.3 - http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Genetically_modified_foods?open

This website (a Victorian site sanctioned by the Government), is where a nice portion of my information was obtained about genetically modified foods.

The scientific content of this site is pretty average. It does not go into too much detail about genetically modified foods by a scientific view, but goes into enough detail so you will be able to understand basically what genetically modified foods are. It explains what foods have been modified, how they’ve been modified, the benefits and the risks of genetically modified foods. It also tells us how available genetically modified food is in Australia.

The site goes into detail in certain areas. However, that also means that it goes into little detail in other areas of the webpage. It goes into details in terms of the benefits and risks of genetically modified crops, but goes into little detail about what genetically modified foods actually are. This is because it tells you what they are in a very brief, concise way, cutting down the amount you need to read while still retaining all the facts.

The site is very accessible – it is the Better Health Channel for Victoria, a site that provides information on several dozen topics regarding your health. It is written in a way that you do not have to be a complete genius in the fields of Biology to understand it, and it seems to primarily be targeted for use towards High School students and parents.

This webpage seems to be highly credible. As it is a governmentally-sanctioned webpage, that means that someone from the genetic engineering field of expertise has gone through and checked that the information being displayed on this website is accurate and precise concerning not only the topic mentioned (genetically modified foods) but also information concerning genetically modified foods in Victoria, which is what it accomplishes.

The website is biased towards the governments opinion, which is that genetically modified foods should be less-available to the Australian public than any other country – Australia has less than 20 GM approved foods, additives, flavorings and enzymes. Europe has around 20 of these and the USA has more than 40 approved foods. This shows that Australia is behind the genetically modified foods bandwagon and wants to stay that way.

Scientific Content: 6.5/10

Detail of Content: 7/10

Accessibility: 9/10

Bias: 5/10 (Higher is better.)

Total: 7/10 (average, rounded up.)

Page 4, Section 2: Transgenic Plants and Crops

SITE No.2 - http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/T/TransgenicPlants.html

This site, while having little-to-no design, is actually incredibly factual.

The scientific content on transgenic plants – a still up-and-coming field of genetics – is rated pretty highly in my eyes. The page uses many scientific words, but most of them have links to a page which explains the meaning to you. Before, I had no idea what recombinant DNA was, but now I do. It goes into many areas of transgenic plants, such as what the common genes implanted are, and explains transgenic engineering well.

The detail this site delves into is pretty handy. It uses a lot of scientific words, such as somatic and germline cells, plasmids, vectors and recombinant DNA, but it is easy to read if you take your time through it and click on the links explaining the words which are scientific that you do not quite understand. The website discusses transgenic plants in high detail, like I explain, but it also has a nice level of accessibility to it. You can click on links to explain words you don’t know, you can look up a certain section of what you want to know about transgenic plants (for example, if you wanted to know about the increased nutritional value), or you can – quite easily – just read the whole article on transgenic plants without too much trouble.

The credibility of the site is supposedly incredibly high. Most of the information has been adapted from “Biology published in 1994 by Wm. C. Brown,” but has been slightly adapted to opportunities provided by an online text. This book was/is apparently used at a university level, which must mean the text is accurate, precise and highly informative.

This website is seemingly quite unbiased. It merely provides the pure, hard facts so you are able to read them. The information is accurate, doesn’t seem to sway one way or another in terms of the implications of transgenic plants and is a nice, easy, afternoon read available online.

Scientific Content: 8/10

Detail of Content: 9/10

Accessibility: 7/10

Bias: 9/10 (Higher is better.)

Total: 8/10 (average, rounded down.)

Page 3 : Transgenic Plants and Crops.

Transgenic plants posses one or more genes that have been transferred from a different species. Although this can happen via natural processes, the use of the term “transgenic plants” refers to florae that have been created in a laboratory using genetic engineering instead of this occurring via pollination. “Transgenic recombinant plants” are created in a laboratory by adding at least one gene to the plants genome. The technique used to do this is often known as “Transformation”.

There are several ways to do this –
• You can infect the plant cells with small molecules of DNA acting as carriers of the modified gene.
• Shoot the gene directly into the cell and hope it succeeds.
Usually the same benefits apply as genetic modification; combinations of improved nutritional values, increased resistances to pesticides, salts, herbicides and diseases

However, there are (again) several difficulties in transgenic plants. These include genes for herbicide resistance (like in corn) somehow transferring into a weed species, making the weeds much harder to manage, or toxic genes transferring into the pollen of a plant may endanger pollinators, like honey bees. Even though there are problems, farmers are embracing transgenic crops, as there were 100,000,000hA of transgenic crops planted in ‘06

Page 2, Section 1: Trade and Research of Genetically modified foods.

Site used: Many, all found via googling "Trade/Research of Genetically Modified Foods"

The US and EU disagree on the EU’s regulation of GM food. The USA claims these violate free-trade agreements, the EU counters this argument with the statement that free trade isn’t actually free without informed consent. This seemingly only applies to the florae, however, as the trading of biotechnology doesn’t seem to occur between nations – most research is operated by a few private organizations.

-In 1989, “Showa Denko”, a leading Japanese chemical company engineered a diet supplement to produce tryptophan at high levels which inadvertently produced at toxic by-product, killing 37 unlucky people and disabling 1500 more. Several hundred more since then have supposedly died.

-In 1998, a scientist who worked on plant lectins, discovered that rats which were fed potatoes genetically modified to contain lectin developed immune system damage and other serious health problems. The lectin itself caused no adverse effects, but the GM had process had somehow made his potatoes less nutritious.

-A 2004/5 study concluded that there was no difference among animals eating GM plants and normal plants. However, a 2009 review found that studies suggested GM foods may be incredibly toxic.

-Research also shows that in the year 2005, Americans’ knowledge of GM foods other genetically modified products continue to remain low. Their opinions seem to also reflect that they are particularly un-fond and uncomfortable about cloning in all aspects.

-Interestingly about 600 Amish in Pennsylvania, U.S.A have adopted the use of GM crops because they require less-intensive farming (fewer pesticides, etc.), are much more productive and do not conflict with their lifestyle.

-People who oppose genetically modified foods often refer to them as “Frakenfood”, obviously named after Frankenstein. The term was coined by an English Professor at Boston College who used it in response to the decision of the US Food and Drug Administration to allow companies to market genetically modified foods.

Genetically modified foods are still a research-in-progress; it is an art that is still being developed, no matter how far along we progress.

Page 1. Genetically Modified Foods?

Genetic modification is possible nowadays thanks to biotechnological advancements. The genetic material may be altered with methods that aren’t natural – this is what is known as genetic engineering. Traditional breeding can generally produce the same results, but it takes much longer. However, transferring a gene to a non-related species is impossible without genetic modification. The practice is not new – it has been around for centuries through careful, selected breeding. In theory, genetic engineering allows genetic material to be transferred between organism, like flora and fauna. A common misconception is that organic foods are the same as GM food – this is not the case. The hardest thing about genetically modifying foods is locating the genes for important traits – increased levels of insect resistance or the desired nutrient boost is incredibly difficult to look for and identify.

Several foods have been modified to make them more resistant to insects and viruses that endure herbicides. This includes:
• Maize
• Soybean
• Oilseed rape (canola)
• Chicory
• Squash
• Potato

Genetically modified foods are currently unavailable in Australia. Genetically modified ingredients, however, are present in some Aussie food such as soy flour in bread that may have come from imported GM soybeans.

Genetic engineering can be used to increase nutrients (vitamins, minerals) in food crops. Known as ‘nutritional enhancement’, it is at a relatively advanced stage compared to other genetic engineering branches. Things such as iron and Vitamin A deficiency will be a thing of a past, and the theoretical removal of proteins in nuts will supposedly lower allergy rates.

There are several benefits to GM foods – lower overall costs per nutritional value, better quality food, higher nutritional values and yields, longer shelf life, it would be possible to implement vaccines into certain foods and they would require less chemical attention, ergo they are better for the environment.

Akin to the benefits of GM food and crops, there are definite downsides to it. There are authorities that ‘mark’ GM foods on a criterion that includes but is not limited to, the foods toxicity, and their tendency to provoke an allergic reaction, the stability of the inserted gene, any levels of nutritional deficiencies and any other unintended effects due to gene insertion. This is all compared to the original product, and the GM food will only go on sale if it proves to be safe. This is the principal of “substantial equivalence”.