dr lauren paying is an anomaly he's a public official and most people that are in these positions they do with their bosses they just keep in the box and go along not doctor paying twelve years ago he was here in the pi a community center any first met he didn't know anything about the issue before that day he connected with them he thought oh my god this is really important he then went with them to the state convention and in that time they've done for court cases and they've won all of them he's also gone to new mexico about four years ago he's going to arizona he's gone to thailand nine years ago he was in brazil the last six months and he spoke four times there so we are very knew my grandmother maybe my grandmother's mother is from here in pa they came in the sugar planter workers and eventually my grandfather became a banker i guess they saw the promise and him on my left him with a stepfather who was you know typical stepfather syndrome so i inherited nothing from my stepfather although he was a very very smart guy he wasn't in my lineage and basically a duck farmer and a banker i've given this talk almost on a yearly basis for the last six years and co are with a college and usually from g m o free hawaii there were three advisors and then there's a member there's one advisor for legal protests and he's very prominent and then i will represent the health issues so we have health environmental an egg and legal but as we go out to try to move the bill forward you can imagine a room this size where maybe half the people  know the issues the other quarter really hates you and a third one it doesn't add up ten percent are going to tell you you're affecting my job then you have to kind of look in yourself have the gumption to say what you believe is true and hopefully i'll convince you some things that are true i would tell you this is basically the same presentation i've given for the last long ten years but i keep adding things that the industry monsanto syngenta pioneer they keep bringing up and so you have to be able to think about them and respond but let's get really basic here the issue came about initially when we tried to move first man if you take care of your brother he will take care of you and to modify or patents or mess around with how ions cal or tarot is absolute no no but we went and tried to we were we did we block the genetic modification of carlo the thing that they would not hear of this so he went county to county so big and then they blocked it and it was unanimous the mare overrode the veto then they overrode the marriage veto and at the very last minute the coffee farmers said yeah we want g m o free coffee too so they kind of got on that the next in within nine months we were here blocking g m o kahlo in the field in the market and in the lab in maui a by the way the field lab market it was blocked in the big island because when we saw g m o rice escape now i have to bring this up now because it's kind of a warning we were in the middle of giving testimony before our county council about the uncertainty and risk of g m kahlo i always speak about g m food but the h where they're talking about color find we we travel the same path sometimes in the middle of that testimony in the middle of my testimony i told our county council this might be the last time we talk about this because we are about to be preempted that is the state pushed forth by the feds passed the rule that no county can be more conservative for g m crops now that's a very strange preemption normally the preemption as a county can be more conservative but not more liberal this one it was twisted a county can be more liberal but not more conservative that county members were furious they do not want to be preempted and so a lot of interrupted the meeting told the law read it as started talking because they filmed the county and we kind of won that one not on the issue but because they were so upset about being preempted we are always there's always attempt to preempt the genetic modification control there always is an attempt so people are watching this and all that we do lo and behold one day they might say it's illegal you preempted the other issue they might bring up one day we're always afraid is stop talking about this this is a national security issue no no no no no no no no it was after nine eleven we had these talks for homeland security and these guys came in from texas and they talked about food security and this guy from texas he kind of like dick cheney's that kind of treated him like dick cheney mano crap to g m o's are the most dangerous thing of all that thought hey that's useful if i quote him so after the conference i went up kind of innocently and said can i quote you he goes yeah sure mano propping jim most are very dangerous when you get wiped out you get wiped out now i thought that was understood but to hear him say that so i said well so you'll speak against them here on the islands he said you  understand isn't what don't understand we want the enemy to have it iran and china so you never have to invade them you just say i'll turn off your seed or your seed my time bomb in three years you want  like no idea and that's when i decided forget the politics just do the science as i was raised i went to high school here i went to princeton university after four years of mathematics physics and chemistry i graduated with honors in chemistry i did my medical school in tulane in new orleans i have a masters in tropical medicine after that i spent twenty four years overseas with walter reed institute of research and the world health organization my job was to test drugs vaccines and diagnostics against tropical diseases in the year two thousand after twenty four years overseas we decided to come back because my parents are old and i came back and i saw this problem here so let's just get going here ok the title of this talk and it's the same title in arizona g m o is genetically modified organisms are we gambling with our future and it's a trick question because the answer definitely is no and people say wait stop who side are young i can guarantee you as you define gambling we are not gambling with our future ok here we go and this is how i define gambling you know you play roulette when you play roulette you know how many black squares you know how many red squares and there's two greens so you know the chance of losing you know the chance of winning and the chance of losing is always a little bit greater because there's the equal number of blocks and two greens ok but you know the odds of winning and losing ok so that's how i define gambling let's talk basically what is genetic modification now genetic engineering it's almost that they use the terms interchangeably g e genetic engineering or g m o genetically modified organism so they try to engineer this is the ideal situation this is what they want to do their intention so basically they take the host let's say tomato the tomato has a genome the genome is the sum of all the genes linked together for example humans have thirty three thousand genes and it's for ever increasing because some of those pieces were called junk d n a and we said well those are genes and people said yes there are genes but very interesting every day we learn that those junk d n a genes are not are sometimes more important than the gene but all the genes strung together are your genome and that's your d n a so all you really want to do is take the gene from a foreign organism like the fish and you stick it in the gene of a tomato you've got to stick the thing in here it is it's stuck in and the gene is read by the i know that's hard to read but it's read it makes a protein the protein is what makes you you the d n a is the blueprint but the protein expresses the gene and so for example put the gene in you've got to turn it on ninety eight percent of our thirty three thousand genes are quiet at any one time so some are on when you're three years old only when you're three some are on when you're seventy five only when you're seventy five and god help you if you get the signal switch so sometimes we see little kids they prematurely age because they turned our gene on at the wrong time some genes oncle genes on cause cancer there you have the gene to make leukemia cancerous and not just one of them they're probably ten leukemia genes if you turn those on you get leukemia so they're silent and there's orchestrated turning on the right time but if you're going to put the red gene from the fish into the tomato for all that trouble you want to turn it on that's the green thing it's called the promoter the promoter it's like on switch then there's a blue piece called the marker when you put this thing in you want to know if it got there well what's the problem because the way you put it in how do you actually put this thing in you get a petri dish of all this d n a material from the tomato then you get your little construct the and the gene you coat metal you put it in a twenty two shotgun thing and you blast it into this plate this receptive plate of cells with the d n a and if it goes in then the whole thing is turned on and it starts to make the protein marker that i didn't drop the protein marker is how you screen it to say we got it we've got success if it doesn't get in you don't make  so that's how you blast away with the marker and that's how it's supposed to work that's the ideal situation but how does it work when you take the contract and you blasted away it is true sometimes there's a virus that can carry a it's either virus or shotgun kind of same effect look at this you blast that away and look what happened to your contract hey there's a free promoter hey there's a three oz marker  that things in the wrong place all that thing is sitting on a gene or broke the gene what's going on look at this here's the other one next to it could you blast that in a plate full of dishes a plate full of cells let's see those promoters by convention if they turn on their on switches turning on the things downstream or to the right i made it turn on this little blue thing that blue protein is supposed to be silent maybe that's your uncle  cancer maybe that was a turn on when you were seventy five or three whatever you turned it on do you know what you turned on well look here's a successful piece right there isn't that good enough yeah that was good but what about all this other weird stuff like that there's a free gene here bridging the gap with no promoter i guess that silent it's a mass furthermore i was wrong to draw the genome like a lion it really is a three dimensional twisted turn an idea like a mumbo jumbo but it is quite organized it's called live in flip outs rise torsion zz and why is that important because what it holds on itself and you try to read really the frame sometimes you recrossed bridge it's called the shifting frame and so if there's one thing we learned in the last ten years it's how little we learn we know about genetics and genome now the scientists with it i'm a scientist but you should know how little you know and that has been shown in the last ten years when i went through school the idea was one  that down the line well it reads across was the frames and shipped it can read this part and continue on now that's stupendous we went from one gene one protein to one gene three proteins furthermore there's tons of material in between that we have no idea what we're doing and we call the junk turns out to be the orchestrators it's called the r n a series never mind if you can't read it that's one thing one gene doesn't make one protein the next thing we learn is a lot of our genes are shared amongst the plant and animal kingdom whoa you mean you mean my area to malaria the malaria parasite shares a gene that makes a pump that pumps out exchanges through the virus the viruses go into an animal it hijacks and it incorporates itself in the genome takes it over then moves out and infect another species and it will history of mankind i guarantee you viruses brought us some pretty weird useless stuff well that lineage of people died out we have paid the price remember that you are who you are kind of adapted to this environment because your ancestors paid the price now one more interesting thing we always learned so some genes are silent and they shouldn't be turned on we share a lot of genes and then there's this one gene making three proteins those silent areas that used to call junk d n a we are learning that there are orchestrators and i want you to remember this is very good sometimes analogy is kind of infant child but you can remember it best this way you have a gene from the fish you put it in the tomato that's like taking the tuba i was in the band you know the high school band that's like taking the tuba player i don't play the tuba i play the trombone that's i taking the tuba player and throwing him in the football team in the middle of the game first of all the tuba player when he lands in the football team i guess he knocked out the quarterback ok fine i can help the next the tuba player on switch promoter is always on so he's playing and you tell me shut up we're trying to play the game but he's always on and there's no orchestration and the final thing is right here right here these genes that don't belong there they're from other species the call promiscuous they either move out because the tuba player doesn't belong in the football team and they push him to the girls volleyball team and he's happily playing the tuba being disruptive these are called promiscuous genes genes that don't belong there move out or they amplify in other words one copy oh there's one the next time it replicate is two four eight sixteen so amplification amplification that was my area of research there was one poor worm we get sympathy for in genes and after seven generations i think fixed six fifty six percent of his genes what that gene what do you think he's doing making tons of useless protein this has to do with g m o crops doesn't it you put in a construct that forever is producing that red thing you're not supposed to turn it on all the time you're supposed to turn it on when you need it that's got at the generics so you made it so it's always on that's wasteful and when you do wasteful stuff you are attacked by the other microbes synonymous with sterilizing the fields so that they cannot be attacked by the other microbes now we learned this and they learned this too because it wasn't supposed to be like that but that's why the suit is in co i the amount of pesticides they're used you think sugar cane you think pineapples bad you should see what they're doing in the gene fields we sued those disclosure and some of these pesticides i have no idea what they are but there's a whole bunch of them ok so remember that it's it because of the nature of the setup that's how it's going to go these are the references that tell you about these moving to other species that's called horizontal gene transfer ok so that's basically what happens and that was the intention now let everything i told you with plants you know plants so they take a plant they take this modification there's a mutation they want to see if it stable you put it in but all kinds of weird stuff might happen so you bring it out to the conditions and you put it out here under rain sun fertilizer just to see if it's good if it's stable consistent ok then all the weird stuff dies and you out of i the good stuff and you select the consistent product and then you make seed and ship it out for other people to grow and you say this is probably consistent so all the plants are  plants plants or plants and so the industry they always say that the plant you're a human health guy don't talk about plants plants or plants and humans are humans ok tomato to human or fish to him it was like a human to human hey i'm matching the species what more do you want and so don't try to read us this is just a quote because guys who get a power point can read this and selves there were two boys in philadelphia they had severe combined immunodeficiency skid boys in the bubble they couldn't come out they would be attacked they didn't have immunity and they got real tired of living that way and so one day the medical people said would you like try to take the gene that's in everybody else and put it in you so you can live like normal people and they said yes ok now when you put the gene in the boy they gave them immunity you stuck on a promoter like i said why put it in it was going to be quiet and they might have put on a marker i can't remember so they injected the voice and the genes went into the bodies of the immune cells and what happened did they get immune well we don't know they died of cancer you turned on the leukemia genes by mistake this is published in new england journal of medicine this is our leading medical journal furthermore they did a study that says whoa how unlucky you turned on the wrong gene the look in your genes there was more than luck they actually calculated there was a four fold above luck in other words those leukemia genes called the promoters they can't wait to turn on and so the medical people we have a moratorium on gene therapy gene therapy has one of the been the biggest disappointment ever in the in the last forty years  medicine it was so much promise that when we realize the genes are so complicated that we have a moratorium until you can put exactly where you want it not turn on the leukemia gene you can turn on exactly what you want so even if you put in the wrong thing don't turn it on if it's a mistake you can pull it out or you can turn it off before conditions we can't do one of them and so the medical guys were very alarmed and we don't do it ok of plant guys are plant guys except for one problem here let me get this here the problem here is a problem when you grow these plants and eat these plants these doctors an animal like a mouse when said g m food the construct the marker the promoter and the most of the genes will go into the stomach cells of the rat and turn on within two hours of first feeding that is one heck of a transfer but i warn you that these are promiscuous genes and they go out and turn and you've contracted the gene so it can cross species but what did you expect it to do when you go into the mouse and it not in the mouse stomach in the mouse stomach cells and was on then in six hours you know the stomach the blood goes up into the left now it's in the lymph nodes and on so that was the mouse or the rat maybe the wrap but they also traffic did cultures human tissue cultures kidney intestine not a human but he put his genetic things on the plant on and they incorporate in the cell tissue the stuff is crossing and it's active even monsanto will admit the active ok so the stuff does cross into my million and human cell lines dr omer and mark over she was russian and she did very interesting study she fed the mice g m food and the my she was looking at birth defects and diminished litter size which means birth defect in utero so he never delivered she saw a bunch of the industry tried to repeat it and couldn't repeat what she saw she tried to repeat it and couldn't repeat what she saw she tried to repeat it again and saw it again the stuff sometimes you see it sometimes you don't sometimes you see it sometimes you don't in my field of science drugs and vaccines you will not don't bother testing because the testing will be all over the board which seems to be what we see but that was perfect for the industry because when ermac over showed it and they didn't and then she didn't and then they did they would use the negative data looks safe to me to negate  positive data that's not how science works you don't use negative data to refute positive data you want to do that i can take all of us decided we should smoke some of us get cancer some of us don't the guys who don't does that mean these guys don't get cancer you don't use negative data to refute positive data number one number two you don't even try to interpret a study until the product is made consistently ok