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Aqua
Bounty questions thoroughness of NRC study
January 20,
2004
WALTHAM, MA
– Advanced hybrid salmon can reduce existing environmental
risks in aquaculture and increase consumer benefits, says the
developer of a high-tech salmon now under review by the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration, but only the risks are reviewed in a
new National Research Council report, Biological Confinement
of Genetically Engineered Organisms.
“AquAdvantage
salmon hold considerable promise as a platform technology for
sustainable aquaculture,” said Elliot Entis, the president
of Aqua Bounty Technologies, Inc. “They make it possible
to produce more food in less space, which conserves scarce coastal
resources. They gain more weight using less fish feed and generating
less waste, which conserves the fish feed resource and lowers
nutrient loads in the water. They speed up the fallowing cycle
on the farms which radically improves water quality. They make
it possible to use more expensive sterile fish, which prevents
escapees from becoming invasive. And they will help reduce the
cost to U.S. consumers of heart-healthy seafood, which increases
consumption among people who can’t afford to buy salmon today.”
“In America,
we balance these public and environmental benefits against the
very speculative risks reviewed in the NRC report,” Entis
said. “Apparently the NRC authors prefer the European “Precautionary
Principle” of scientifically-impossible zero risk.”
Noting that
the NRC study committee included only one fisheries scientist,
who works with inland species like pike and walleye, Entis noted
that the salmon section of the study makes several very basic
biological and economic errors. “Because the NRC authors
do not understand the existing salmon industry, they discount
the gains available from improving current aquaculture practices
and overstate the potential for future impacts.”
The study
suggests, for example, that sterile transgenic female salmon could
mate with wild males, foreclosing on the next generation because
the embryos would all die. But sterile female salmon do not even
produce eggs, Entis said, so males could not be enticed to mate
and waste their contribution to the next generation.
“This
is exactly why we have proposed using sterile females,” Entis
explained. “We know that sterile males can create an opportunity
cost in the environment, but the females have absolutely no impact.”
Although the NRC authors were unable to find “appropriate
research on the courtship and migratory behavior of triploid,
all-female salmon,” Entis cited three scientific studies
completed in Ireland just since 2000. The Irish studies found
that sterile mixed sex salmon returned to their spawning rivers
at a “fourfold lower rate” than fertile salmon and that
only two-tenths of one percent of sterile females returned to
the rivers at all. None of the females were fertile.
In addition
to making errors of basic biology and conducting an insufficient
literature review, Entis said the NRC authors apparently misunderstood
ABT’s proposal to test each batch of sterilized salmon eggs
to ensure the treatment is successful. “The NRC study suggests
we plan to test a few eggs and cull any that are fertile,”
Entis said. “In fact, we’re proposing to conduct a statistically
credible sampling program that will test eggs from every mating
and, if even a single fertile egg is found, the whole batch will
be thrown away. This is the process already used for fish health
testing.”
Entis questioned
the study’s claim that “the cost of individual screening
is a fraction of the current market price of salmon smolts…”
“In fact,” he explained, “individual screening
would virtually double the cost of smolts and push consumer prices
so high that virtually all the economic benefits of this technology
to the consumer would be lost.”
Entis said
the company “welcomes all relevant research” into the
performance of advanced salmon hybrids and re-iterated his commitment
to release all environmental and food safety research conducted
for the FDA review as soon as it is completed and found scientifically
acceptable to the agency.
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