Dr Jonathan Latham is a former genetic engineer and medical researcher. He now questions the safety and efficacy of new Genetic Manipulation (GM) techniques known as CRISPR and the GM plants, animals, microbes and human therapies they may produce.
From being a contributor to the science of genetic engineering Dr Latham is now one of its best credentialed and respected critics.
Dr Latham is in Canberra today, to question our government’s plan to deregulate many CRISPR methods and their products. Yet the EU and NZ recently decided to regulate them all as they have no history of safe use, may chop instead of cutting DNA, and have other off-target impacts.
“Genetic engineering is less a method for improving crops than it is a mechanism to acquire the intellectual property that confers control over plant breeding and the seed industry,” Dr Latham says:
“Patented GM crops facilitated a massive consolidation of ownership, as seed and chemical industries merged. Now Bayer/Monsanto, Corteva (Dow/Dupont), ChemChina/Syngenta, and BASF own 60% of the world’s commercial seed supply (including all GM varieties). (see attached)
Dr Latham just presented a peer-reviewed scientific paper on the safety of the insect toxins (Bt) made in GM plants, at a Gold Coast conference.
“Your regulators – OGTR, FSANZ and APVMA – assume these toxins are “natural” and harmless but they are not. As insect resistance has emerged, Monsanto now calls them ‘super toxins’ in patents, contradicting its statements to those regulators.”
Jonathan has a Masters in Crop Genetics, a PhD in Virology, and published many scientific articles. He is co-founder and executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project – non-profit publisher of Independent Science News https://bioscienceresource.org/about-us/our-staff/ and is curator of a trove of chemical industry documents on its toxic hidden history, published as the Poison Papers Project. https://www.poisonpapers.org/
Dr Jonathan Latham
