Allergies à la carte: is there a problem with genetically modified foods?

Is There a Problem with Genetically Modified Foods? What’s in a name? Ask genetically modified (GM) foods. They go by many names, ranging from the sinister (“Frankenfoods”) to the adoring (“super crops”), depending on who’s doing the naming. Although there are clear benefits to the use of this techn o l o g y — f o r example, genetic modification could reduce the amount of allergenic substances in foods such as peanuts, the most common food al lergen— there is also growing concern among the general public about whether foods modified by recombining DNA from widely different organisms are safe. A conference titled “Assessment of the Allergenic Potential of Genetically Modified Foods,” organized and sponsored by the National Toxicology Program, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the NIH, was held 10–12 December 2001 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to address this question. Clinicians, bench scientists, government regulators, industry personnel, and policy analysts summarized the current state of the knowledge, examined the issues, and made recommendations for setting research priorities to improve risk assessment. GM foods are products of plants engineered by biotechnology (no GM animal products are currently approved for the U.S. market). GM crops contain either genes from other plant, animal, or bacterial species, or modified genes constructed in the laboratory and not found in nature. These “borrowed” genes confer some advantage such as pest resistance, herbicide tolerance, longer shelf life in the supermarket, or increased nutritional value. One unanswered human health question concerns allergenicity. GM foods often contain proteins that humans may not have ingested before or that they may have encountered in a different context (for example, as a glycosylated protein in the original plant but as a nonglycosylated protein in a