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Using Genetic Engineering to Stop Corporate Pollution

April 26, 2012 by admin in Science with 1 Comment

Genetically engineered zebrafish, estrogen absorbing organs lit up (Photos by Exeter University)

by Heidi Stevenson

There’s a bit of humor in seeing science used to defeat an unfair claim based on a scientific tenet. Corporations, along with their government agency puppets, routinely hide behind the claim that it isn’t enough to show an association between their product and health damage. They insist that we must also prove a direct cause-and-effect link between their product and the harm.

When it comes to the massive damage being wrought by corporation-produced toxins on the health of humanity and the earth, the mere fact of association should be more than adequate to remove these products from the market. There is no motivation on the part of their makers to prove their products are safe as long as this situation is allowed to continue. The onus of proof of safety is being pressed on the wrong shoulders. However, we’ll leave that aside for now.

Corporations have been able to get away with creating these chemicals and spewing them into the environment by claiming that they were only “associated” with a range of severe harms to organisms. They have demanded—and government agencies have gone along with them—definitive cause-and-effect proof. In other words, corporations are saying that, until their particular products can be proven beyond any reasonable doubt to cause specific harm, then they can continue to profit from them.

It matters not to them how many lives they destroy. They couldn’t care less about destroying the environment on which we all depend.

Now, though, things could change—at least for estrogen-mimicking chemicals. These include disasters like bisphenol A (BPA), dioxins, nonfermented soy, sodium laurel sulphate (SLS), sodium laureth sulphate (SLES), and polyethylene and related PEG compounds. Scientists have found a way to genetically engineer zebrafish so that body parts glow in the dark when they’re exposed to toxic estrogen mimickers.

The Study

Scientists from the University of Exeter and the University College London have utlized zebrafish that are already transgenic (TG) and sold in pet stores as novelty fish for aquariums. They created a variant of zebrafish in which absorption of estrogen compounds by body parts would cause them to glow. The photos above are from the study, and clearly demonstrate the wide range of organs that are affected.

The study, Biosensor Zebrafish Provide New Insights into Potential Health Effects of Environmental Estrogens, was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Here’s how the researchers describe what they discovered:

Exposure of the TG fish to estrogenic endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) induced specific GFP expressions in a wide variety of tissues including the liver, heart, skeletal muscle, otic vesicle, forebrain, lateral line and ganglions, most of which have not been established previously as targets for estrogens in fish. Furthermore, we found that different EDCs [endocrine disrupting chemicals] induced GFP [green fluorescent protein] expression with different tissue response patterns and time
trajectories, suggesting different potential health effects.

That is, they found that these body parts were directly affected by estrogen disrupters. They later stated that this was in more locations than had previously been known. They concluded:

We have thus developed a powerful model system for screening and testing environmental estrogens, and for intelligent targeting of tissue-specific studies to identify molecular mechanisms underlying estrogen signaling pathways and understanding their physiological and pathological impacts.

In other words, these scientists have created a method by which corporations that produce estrogen disrupters and spew them into the environment can now be forced to stop. This new method can provide the definitive information that proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, precisely what sort of environmental harm and health damage is being done.

The only question is whether government agencies have the will to utilize this method. If not, then it would the final proof that the agencies tasked with protecting the environment and people aren’t even trying. Perhaps we, the people, should put a fire under them and our congressional representatives to start the testing now, not tomorrow, but now. The means for doing so exists, and it can be done rapidly.