These days, Cui Yongyuan’s affairs are quite hot. The cause of this incident is related to genetic modification. We all know that Cui Yongyuan is a famous anti-genetic person, referred to as a reverse person. Those who love natural food support Cui Yongyuan, and many love science. Many people think that Cui Yongyuan does not understand science and is a typical liberal arts student, so he does not understand the significance of genetic modification.
Genetic modification involves the diet of each of us, so, almost when chatting with friends, we will always be asked this question: Is genetic modification harmful? Today, I am here, answer it together.
My answer is: who knows if genetic modification is harmful!
Everyone may say: Your answer is not rigorous, you can't be so emotional!
I want to tell everyone that this is true. In fact, it is useless for liberal arts students who do not understand genetic modification to say whether genetic modification is harmful, because they do not know how the technology is.
And those experts who specialize in the study of genetic modification, they answered this question with their eyes closed, because this thing has not been produced for many years, how do you know what its impact will be like fifty years later? What about a hundred years from now?
All the claims that this thing has been scientifically tested and "harmless to humans" are based on the current testing equipment. However, the problem is: tomorrow, the inspection equipment will be updated and the inspection items will increase, and there may be problems that you did not see before.
In order to illustrate this problem, let me talk about two cases in the history of medicine in the world. These two cases should be understood in medical schools, and we have learned them in class.
The first case is called a reaction stop event.
Respond incident
We know that women will vomit when they are pregnant. This thing is very annoying. Sometimes they vomit endlessly and feel uncomfortable. Therefore, pharmaceutical companies began to think, which drug can reduce the body's reaction? There should be a big market for this thing!
So, they took a fancy to a drug called thalidomide (also called thalidomide), which is a sedative, and its main ingredient is a chemical substance called α-phthalimide. , This stuff is good, it calms down after eating, and prevents you from vomiting, so it’s named “Actazone”.
So, is this thing harmful to the human body?
They did a test, and according to the test methods at the time, they proved that the drug was harmless to the human body and had "no obvious side effects" on pregnant women. Therefore, the competent department approved (how dare you approve it if it is harmful). The specific process is: it was first synthesized by a pharmaceutical company in West Germany in 1953, entered clinical practice in 1956 and was tested in the market, obtained a West German patent in 1957, and was successively approved for sale in 51 countries. As a result, it sold super well, and the whole world bought it. Only the United States at that time was cautious in reviewing, so it was not approved.
So what are the consequences of this matter?
In December 1959, West German pediatrician Weidenbach first reported a rare deformity in a baby girl. In October 1961, at the former West German Gynecology Conference, three doctors reported that many babies had similar deformities. These deformed babies have no arms and legs, and the hands and feet are directly connected to the body, which resembles the limbs of a seal, so they are called "seal limb deformities" and "seal fetuses". So these doctors felt very strange, why did such a child suddenly appear recently? What happened in these years? Therefore, they combined the recent events and found that the time when the drug was released on the market coincided with the time when the seals appeared. Then they investigated and made statistics, and found that the two were highly correlated.
This is the usefulness of clinical statistics. When we were studying in medical school, the teacher repeatedly talked about such cases in class.
As a result, this matter has attracted great attention from doctors all over the world, because everyone has also discovered so many seals. Therefore, in-depth research has been carried out, and the research has found that: Thyretin can selectively act on the embryo, the toxicity to the embryo is obviously greater than that of the mother, and its teratogenic effect on the fetus can be as high as 50% to 80%. - Taking it for 8 weeks, the incidence of deformity in the offspring can be as high as 100%.
The genes of the human body are very precise. Under normal circumstances, the life code on the genes, the length of the hands and feet, and the five fingers should be formed regularly according to the instructions. However, antireactive drugs can hinder this command in a certain part, resulting in deformed children.
Therefore, after adding research methods, the problem that the original detection did not expose gradually appeared.
The consequences of this matter were extremely serious. It became the largest drug-induced birth defect catastrophe in the 20th century, and legal disputes are still involved today.
From 1956 to 1962 when the drug was withdrawn from the market, more than 10,000 cases of seal fetuses were reported in more than 30 countries and regions (including Taiwan Province of my country). There were 5,500 such teratogenic births, about 1,000 in Japan, and at least 69 teratogenic births in Taiwan. Reactin was the first drug to be identified as a teratogen in humans.
These more than 10,000 disabled people have become the price of medical progress, but for each of them, this is the whole life.
This case tells us that the so-called "non-toxic and side effects" is only relative under the current testing conditions. Once the detection methods are increased and the detection equipment is upgraded, it may become toxic and have side effects. So, caution is a must.
Another example from the United States.
weight loss pills
There are a lot of obese people in the United States, so diet pills are very popular, so pharmaceutical companies are staring at this big cake. The American Home Products Company, one of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the world at that time, created the most popular Fen-Phen weight loss therapy in the United States in the 1990s. This therapy uses fenfluramine (fenfluramine) produced by the company. ) and phentermine (phentermine) two weight loss drugs are used in combination. According to the equipment testing at that time, it was believed that the drug "has no toxic and side effects" on patients, so the procedures were complete, and the drug was approved by the US FDA for marketing. Throughout the 1990s, about 6 million people used this therapy to lose weight.
But, in the end, it turned out to be a disaster. Fenfluramine is a weight loss drug that acts on the central nervous system to suppress appetite by increasing satiety. The drug was approved in the United States in 1995 for the treatment of obesity. As a result, clinicians later discovered that a large number of patients with damaged heart valves appeared recently. Why? So began to increase research methods, after a number of studies confirmed that the use of fenfluramine can lead to serious side effects such as heart valve damage, central nervous system injury, pulmonary hypertension and finger necrosis, 30% of people who take fenfluramine lose weight abnormalities in the electrocardiogram. Because of the large number of people taking it, the drug caused damage to the heart valves of about 100,000 people in the United States every year, and the consequences were extremely serious. The FDA had to withdraw the drug from the market in September 1997, two years after the drug went on the market, and reminded all patients who had taken fenfluramine for a long time to go to the hospital immediately for an echocardiogram for heart valve damage.
In the United States, compensation for the drug is still pending.
Twelve years after the drug was banned in the United States, in 2009, the Chinese drug regulatory department also urgently stopped the production, sales and use of the drug. Remember, everyone, the gap is twelve years.
This means that if you follow the experimental results of the United States, it is very likely that you will find yourself falling into the ditch after a few years.
Similar events, and the famous sibutramine. The drug can act on the human central nervous system, suppress appetite, and achieve the effect of weight loss. According to the test results at that time, it "has no toxic and side effects" on people. Therefore, it was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1997. Approved for listing.
However, later, researchers found that it would cause serious cardiovascular and cerebrovascular adverse events in some users. Beginning in 2002, European drug regulatory authorities conducted a large-scale clinical study on sibutramine. It was found that the risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events in users was 16% higher than that in the placebo group. As a result, countries began to blacklist the drug one after another.
The famous weight-loss drug "Qumei" in my country back then contained this sibutramine.
In the field of western medicine, there are many such examples. I am not an anti-Western medicine person, I just want to use this example to talk about genetic modification. My point is:
For all genetically modified tests, even if the result is "no toxic side effects", it is based on the results of current equipment level testing. In the future, with the improvement of inspection equipment, it is likely that many problems will be detected, and the impact of genetic modification is likely to be much delayed than that of drugs, so we must be cautious about this.
There must be some effects of genetic modification on the human body, but we still don't know it yet. Because this is something man-made, just like plastic is not a natural thing, it is difficult to be decomposed by nature. The impact of genetically modified foods on the human body is profound.
According to the current momentum, it is estimated that genetically modified will definitely exist in China. However, I hope that it can be marked on the product, so that we have the right to choose "eat" or "not to eat".
I will strongly oppose genetically modified research on traditional Chinese medicine. Originally, the ingredients of traditional Chinese medicine are relatively complicated, and there is no thorough research so far. The medicinal properties of Chinese medicine and the pharmacology of Western medicine have not been connected. In this case, in order to increase the yield, transgenic research on traditional Chinese medicine will destroy traditional Chinese medicine.
One more thing, the day before yesterday I chatted with a classmate who worked in a US pharmaceutical company on WeChat. He said that there is a study in the US showing that patients with depression were divided into groups and ate non-GMO foods and GMO foods. The incidence of eating GMOs is high. They believe that this is the lack of certain nutrients that humans need in genetically modified foods. There are many studies of this kind in foreign countries. He said that the United States is also in chaos now, and there are indeed many genetically modified. But when their family buys their own vegetables, they definitely go to the kind of food stores that are all non-GMO.
Last night, when I was eating in a restaurant outside, I saw a piece of boiled corn, but I dared not eat it, because I didn't know whether it was genetically modified or not.
Therefore, it is necessary to manage indiscriminate species and identify them.
