know i'm a nerd is professor at the university of washington i've been involved in issues around genetic engineering since the early one nine hundred eighty s and i thought  i might just do a little bit of sort of background about what's this all about it's been almost forty years since scientists first discovered have to transfer genes from one organism to another and make them function ok and that has genes you know araa components of chromosomes of which organisms have different numbers we have twenty three pairs and all together the stuff i think probably there's been enough of that stuff around that you have a general notion of it now from the very beginning groups of us particularly on university campuses and particularly who are biologists i'm not a biologist i'm a public policy person and lawyer began raising questions a bat out the risks the potential hazards a risk is a potential hazard ok it's probab sometimes we know the probability sometimes we don't sometimes we know the extent of the hazard sometimes we don't so you can have lots of unknown's there or not sometimes some risks are very very precise we know them we've been calculating them we were used to them but these risks were totally novel so the best we could do was to start to raise those kinds of questions how would the d n a function in  to model a mental model and you've seen this innumerable times on television and in print of of the cellular structure is like with what i would call a tinker toy because i'm an old guy but what some younger people would see as a lego set ok and what they're basically saying is we're just taking out a yellow piece of putting in a red piece or something like that ok the fact of the matter is that every biologist knows this even the ones who don't confront the discontinuity and the contradiction in their own heads that the genome is not static like a lego toy construction or a tinker toy it's fluid it's dynamic so for example you could have the same elements that are in different positions and they might function very differently and that's because think of it this way the d n a and the cells of your eyeball are identical is identical i guess would be better to say the d is identical to the d n a thank you to the d n a in your pancreas how come your eyeballs don't produce insulin ok the point i'm trying to get as a non biologist is that the constituents of the d n a do not determine what happens but the model that they promote is that it does determine what happens ok if that were the case we would be producing insulin in our eyeballs the fact of the matter is that we have i think it's twenty five thousand genes and our bodies have something like three million proteins that are produced by the genes some of these proteins do nothing else but turn on and off a in certain cells ok it's extraordinarily complex extraordinarily fluid nonetheless you will hear all the time of all we know about this organis and we know about this organism so if we put the two together we know what's going to happen and pat pat pat on the head don't you worry about a thing ok so that's the fundamental flaw and there's a great article it's on line by barry atlantic about fifteen years ago he's writing for a non scientific audience and he of course is a great biologist who's been very concerned about this and so he lays at this stuff out if you want to get more more on this so over the course of time though enormous industries have coalesced around genetic engineering and whole social systems like the u s agricultural state system which is the land grant colleges which is the county extension agents which are the ag committees in the legislatures which are ag commissioners and  extra farm feed people and all of them and they all sort of read the same kinds of literature and they go to the same kind of schools and rah rah rah and there's a line there's a line and the line is that g is safe even though the u s government does no assessments whatsoever the line is that g e increases productivity even though all studies show after two or three years any increase in productivity goes down because of the past so whatever that they have engineered to combat gain resistance you know evolution is true i hope there's no one here who doesn't believe that because we need darwinian evolution all the time in every farm field that's why with pesticides it's just a whole history of getting something new getting something new because the pest becomes become resistant so given the fact that this stuff is becoming more ubiquitous and given the fact that there is no reputable health data published to assure people whether it's safe or not a major movement has grown up around the world to say at the very least the stock should be labeled because that would give people the ability to choose if people want to run unknown risks hey go for it in my classes i used to ask if anyone ever did skydiving anyone here ever do skydiving perfect you'll excuse me it's always a guy it's always a younger person ok now the risks that this guy skydiving is no greater or no less than the risks to any one of the rest of us right and we don't do it ok some people will willing to run risks and others are not so willing to run risks right so one of the good things about labeling is it says hey if you don't give a shit and you want to you know eat what you want to eat and do whatever go for it man but i don't think that i want to run those risks i'm a more cautious person or i'm responsible for buying food for young kids whose bodies are rapidly developing and things like that some fifty countries  require labeling of g e foods or have laws governing labeling there's quite a variation in it but the u s does not and bills have been introduced in the s congress particularly sponsored by congressman dennis kucinich and senator barbara boxer and they have not gone anywhere so within the activist movement  people have started to say we should try to get statewide laws and regulations dealing with this and that's exactly where we are in washington state right now it's many of the same companies and dow and monsanto and syngenta and so forth and some of the companies specialize more in medical applications which we're not here to talk about which by the way are quite problematic also and others in ag environment food kinds of kinds of issues and there was a tremendous ideological set of propaganda about ten years ago which called genes the blueprint you heard this stuff about health and about yourselves and it's all nonsense the cancer researchers became dealing with cancer genes instead of course in agendas and stuff like that so i which i think potentiality that might not exist otherwise but whether or not they come to fruition really depends on exactly why the same reason that your eyeball doesn't make insulin right i mean there are lots of other things that have to go on ok let's take something like b r c a one the so called breast cancer gene ok university of washington is very big on that one thousand out of every twenty women who get breast cancer do not have that gene so how can it be the breast cancer gene there's this deterministic element that's what's wrong a blueprint says this is what the building is going to look like your genetic configuration does not tell us what you're going to your life is going to be like and the point of holding this meeting in part was because these bills are introduced and we are going to have hearings and we want people to become sufficiently knowledgeable about it so that you who want to organize help organize each other so that we can make an impact on the a rational society any one of these studies will be cause to do more research ok and to adopt a precautionary approach which we used to do for drugs and booze but we no longer do which  payer health care we don't get i don't believe the tipping point that it's a question of the power of the different interests that are overworked in my mind and you can have no interest and still not have power europe are dept on provinces and italy have some counties in california have tried what you find arrayed against you in addition to the biotech industry is a whole lot of traditional ag  interests i'm going to i'm making this quick and so the great thing about labeling that this situation in washington illustrates perfectly is that you can get ag interests in favor of labeling like these twelve hundred wheat farmers ok labeling in fact if not theoretically is the way we're going the way we're going in the limpia this session ok now there are problems with plate away and in order to do successful lobbying and even to discuss it with your family and neighbors the best thing would be a national labeling senator barbara boxer have tried to introduce this and it hasn't gone anywhere ok so there are efforts goldie did not mention that there is advocate now i'm being realistic there's a real question whether in our federal systems states should be allowed to pass labeling legislation why is that why is that two main factors one you could argue it affects interstate or foreign commerce and that's a federal responsibility and not a state responsibility secondly there is federal legislation about labels called the national labeling education and it is very prescriptive and in fact there have been a few a handful of court cases dealing with these questions what we are facing and what we three of us and a couple of other people have been working on on legislation on this legislation is have can with attorneys elsewhere the center for food safety most notably is h overcome these two objections these are the two main arguments that will be made against this bill and if we don't understand those arguments and if we're not prepared to counter those arguments these bills have no chance  clause can be characterized as saying if a state show that it has another interest in a particular matter the state can regulate it even though it may have some ancillary effect on interstate and foreign commerce ok so the first portion of the bill is an attempt to show why this is important to washington state not what the maimie not about x y z anything that we might think is interesting and real why is it valid for washington state to regulate labeling and by the way labeling doesn't bill of lading says this is not a week ok that's the whole the whole shebang so here are some of the kinds of examples of things that are recited in the first part of the bill we do have of course consumer rights you know but that is not particular washington state and that is insufficient to base this whole thing on so we start with health effects we were furred of the health effects protection of health is a state and local matter predominantly of course the feds are involved in it but it's a situation in which there is mutual right in new york city they require the calorie content of foods to be on the menus and that so appears to be constitutional and even though you can argue that it has tremendous impact on interstate and foreign commerce there's a lot of those foods new york city does not produce its own food for sure mayor bloomberg does not produce you know the food that serves in the restaurants there so the health concerns secondly for for health to track back ok the rise in autism the rises in obesity none of these things it's even possible to find out if there's any relationship whatsoever to geve food because you can't track it back traceability ok there is no federal law for meth one of the first things i say obviously the feds have not occupied the field polls consistently show that ninety percent of consumers want this label so there's an issue of basic democracy and that the state and its representative should be responsive to the needs of it is a citizens the example of other countries show that this is a valid exercise of what is loosely called by lawyers the police power that has the power to regulate  without disclosure people may unknowingly violate their own dietary religious or cultural norms so that's you know kosher pastrami is chemically identical to non kosher  cover but there are lots of you read some of these things about the death of beneficial insects and all this other kind of stuff ok so certainly the state has an interest in protecting its environment we have all kinds of state environmental laws these are california eccentric cetera and this begins to lead into economics which is going to be the main i think argument to grab the attention of these people in the limpia ok but that you want to protect the sale of week to japan which is x millions of dollars a year it's got to be labeled you want to protect just the way you want to keep your organic industry which is growing at x percent energy year you've got to preservation reasons you've got to impose traceability systems which are which in both labeling etc those are about ten major reasons each of which could be expand which are each one of which are valid grounds to argue against the intrastate commerce argument ok the second point is new to labeling because there is a  labeling in the us and there are statutes that govern that and the f d a is empowered to do certain labeling and the most important of those for our purposes is something called the nutritional labeling education act and that's the one that  is among other things set up the the familiar panel that we have on products that you know all that kind of stuff ok protein calorie all that kind of stuff that we're all familiar with there are provisions  exclaim to what is called in legal term occupy the field in other words as and here as the say like that's where no state or political subdivision of the state may directly or indirectly establish under any authority or continue in effect as to any food in interstate commerce any requirement respecting any claim of the types described and there's a reference to a section below unless identical to the requirements below and they list and one of the things is inbreeding so the argument is and in fact there's court already that indicates that this is  that this is a valid argument that a bill which says you've got to label this contains g m o ingredients a state can't do that because the preempted that under this law if you call and so forth you talk about foods containing products manufactured by genetic engineering prophecies you talk about the processes of manufacture not