and benefits, beginning with media coverage, and what one is exposed too, and what one
chooses to acknowledge. In 2007, the use of blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and
other Internet-based social networking activities allows not only for the democratization
of information but also for the proliferation and regurgitation of unsubstantiated pap.
Several stories have been repeatedly cited and have shaped the current view of genetically
engineered foods. A few are dissected below:
Toward the end of 1996 the Natural Law Party mounted a cross-Canada book tour fea-
turing Dr. John Fagan, which received extensive coverage; among the exaggerated or erro-
neous claims promulgated by Fagan and others, and one that deserves specific attention, is
the statement that “40 people were killed and thousands were crippled by exposure to gene-
tinkered food” (Graham 1996).
In 1989 there was an outbreak in the United States of a newly recognized fatal blood
disease calledeosinophilia–myalgia syndrome(EMS). The outbreak killed at least 27
people and sickened another 1500, and the cause was finally traced to certain batches of
the amino acidL-tryptophan, manufactured in Japan by Showa Denko and widely available
in the United States as a nutritional supplement. It has been estimated that, prior to this out-
break,2% of the US population tookL-tryptophan in the belief that it helped manage
insomnia, premenstrual syndrome, stress, and depression—this in the absence of any
medical data supporting the effectiveness of the supplement.
L-Tryptophan is manufactured in a fermentation process using a bacterium,Bacillus
amyloliquefaciens, in the same way that yeast ferments the sugars in barley into ethanol
in beer. Subsequent investigations by US health authorities revealed that Showa Denko
made two changes to its L-tryptophan manufacturing process in 1989, changes that
allowed the contamination ofL-tryptophan: (1) the company began using a strain of
B. amyloliquefaciensthat had been genetically engineered to produce larger amounts of
L-tryptophan, and (2) they reduced the amount of carbon used to filter out impurities
from the final product. Studies have shown that the disease-causing molecule appears
only during purification and that cases of EMS have been linked toL-tryptophan produced
by Showa Denko as early as 1983, long before the company used a genetically engineered
bacterium. The risk information vacuum for GE food allowed such alarmist and erroneous
versions of events to take root and flourish.
Powell and Leiss (1997) describe how a risk information vacuum arises when, over a
long period of time, those who are conducting the evolving scientific research and assess-
ments for high-profile risks such as genetically engineered foods, make no special effort to
communicate the results obtained from these studies regularly and effectively to the public.
Instead, partial scientific information dribbles out here and there and is interpreted in appar-
ently conflicting ways, all of which is mixed with people’s fears.
15.4 Feeding Fear: Case Studies
Society as well as nature abhors a vacuum, and so it is filled from other sources. For
example, events reported in the media (some of which are alarming) become the substantial
basis of the public framing of these risks; or an interest group takes up the challenge and
fills the vacuum with its own information and perspectives; or the intuitively based fears
and concerns of individuals simply grow and spread until they become a substantial con-
sensus in the arena of public opinion.
348 WHYTRANSGENICPLANTS ARE SO CONTROVERSIAL