WHY MONSANTO LOVES CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES

Monsanto also loves, besides two very important universities, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and one huge Frankenfish corporation named AquaBounty.   The FrankenFish (genetically modified salmon) was in fact, born in Newfoundland, at Memorial University in 1996. Two Memorial based  researchers, Garth Fletcher and Choy Hew, worked to create this fish that does not exist in nature, along with Peter Davies of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. (St. John’s Telegram: Jan. 24, 2011.)

 This work on genetically modified salmon was protected by Memorial University and Queen’s with the final patent coming in 1996.  At this point what had been a publicly funded venture became a totally private firm under the name AquaBounty Technologies, complete with a birth certificate in the form of their own private patent . But I would like to know how many people connected with these two universities now have stock, or stock options, in AquaBounty?

So we have two prestigious universities (Memorial and Queens) that took Canadian tax payers’ money to boost along and become part of an exercise that was secret, entirely corporate driven, without proof that genetically modified salmon (or other modified fish) did not pose a threat to the public health of Canadians or would not escape to breed with wild fish.   But this is only half the story.

The part that is really creepy concerns the patents for these genetically modified salmon. Enter Monsanto. And the US Food and Drug Administration.  That’s where the battle to certify Frankenfish is being fought.  And Canada?  Where the US goes is most certainly where Canada will go. And guess who will be sitting in advisory positions to the US government upon application for approval?

For one, Michael Taylor, the US Food Safety Czar.  He was previously an attorney for Monsanto. He was influential in getting other genetically modified foods approved. Another adviser to the US on Frankenfish is Alison Van Eenennaam.  She used to work for Monsanto. And also advising will be Kevin Wells, who works for a company named Revivicor, that is genetically engineering pigs (this from Jeffery Smith ,Natural Grocers.)  And the answer from the FDA will be coming soon enough to our markets.

 Canadian companies don’t have to label genetically modified food.  Wheat, corn, soy beans, we don’t really know what we’re eating.   And if the AquaBounty application is approved the flood gates will open wide like gaping jaws.  We won’t know when we could be eating FrankenFish, or FrankenPork, for that matter. But we should be acutely aware of one thing…the most evil of all corporations to ever to come into being may very well wind up with most or all of the patents on all genetically modified salmon, and when escaped GM fish (by accident or design) mate with wild fish, Monsanto can claim they own all, or most of, the salmon in the seas and rivers.  And make the claim stick.  Harper’s new conservative judges (four new ones, a majority before he leaves office) will make sure it sticks in Canadian jurisdiction.

But AquaBounty isn’t the only worry.  For twenty years, FDO researchers in BC have been experimenting with, and using sex hormones to satisfy fish farm demands for all female salmon in their pens.  And not stopping there, our DFO fish scientists, along with BC governmental approval, have stocked a large number of our lakes with these sex changed and sterilized fish.  Continued…

Action is the Mother of Hope  

Betty Krawczyk
Schiver Rhodes Publishing
www.schiverrhodespublishing.com

Dr. KRISTI MILLER AND FRANKENFISH

At issue in the Cohen Commission, currently taking place in Vancouver is whether fish farms have diseases that can spread to wild salmon, which in turn may have caused the salmon crash of 2009.  Speculation is swirling around the testimony of Dr. Kristi Miller, a federal fish biologist working out of the Pacific Biological Station on Vancouver Island, and what she knows about fish diseases.

 

But the Harper government has silenced Dr. Miller.  Which is odd, as it was the Harper government who ordered the Cohen Commission in the first place after the crash of the salmon population in 2009.  Surely somebody around Harper must have advised him that fish farms were likely to come under discussion beforehand.  Then there was the enormous run of Sockeye in 2010 (the largest run in one hundred years) that would seem to counterbalance somewhat the claim of real or threatened destruction of the Sockeye by disease. 

I can’t see Harper panicking enough over the discussion of fish farms and fish diseases to risk criticism of being called a dictator (which of course he is) by silencing Dr. Miller.  There has to be other reasons.  But Harper can certainly silence Dr. Miller as the responsibility for fish farms was transferred from provincial jurisdiction to complete federal control by way of a recent law suit pressed by Alexandria Morton.  Dr. Miller, in any event, is a federal employee. This leaves us in a bit of a fishy soup.

For starters Dr. Kristi Miller is not just a fish biologist.  She heads a department at the Biological Station.  Her title: Dr. Kristi Miller, Head, Molecular Genetics.  And the title of her division is: Ecological Genomics.  What is Genomics?  According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

“a branch of biotechnology concerned with applying the techniques of genetic and molecular biology to the genetic mapping and DNA sequencing of sets of genes or the complete genomes of selected organism, with organizing the results in databases, and with applications of the data (as in medicine or biology)

A little thick, you say? I agree.  But let’s look at the operable words here.  They are, GENETIC MAPPING, DNA SEQUENCING OF GENES, WITH ORGANIZING DATABASES, and WITH APPLICATIONS OF THE DATA.  From what I know of scientific jargon, I believe this means that Dr. Miller and her staff are looking at fish genes with the object of changing or modifying them in some way. In fact, I think BC is hosting some of the prime architects of genetically modified fish that is causing such great consternation in other parts of the world. Now why would I think such a terrible thing was happening right here in BC?

Because the salmon that are called FrankenFish by the U.S. media have had their genetic structures altered by the DNA Sequencing of Genes, Dr. Kristi Miller’s specialty. These fish are drastically altered by the process of inserting added genes into the salmon eggs.  The fish then grow huge.  And they carry added material in their flesh…hormones and pathogens.  They are being designed for fish farms. I believe these genetically modified fish are already being farmed here in BC on at least two different farms. 

Added to the horror of the creation of these FrankenFish, other fish that have simply been sex changed and sterilized are now populating our BC lakes and coastal waters.  I believe this is really the information causing Harper to panic.   Dr. Miller might accidentally, or under questioning, start talking about how her main work,  I’m beginning to suspect, is that of creating, or helping to create, FrankenFish.  And a rising fear that, (as intimated by Dr. Edward Donaldson) the public might turn ugly upon receipt of this knowledge.

HELP! I'M FALLING...

Help, I’m falling…
Into a slough of despair. The deeper I get into reading the scientific papers on how to create sterilized, sex changed, fish farm fish slurry out of what would have been beautiful, healthy wild salmon is turning my stomach. And I have a cast iron stomach (I’ve raised eight kids.) I’m also relatively shock proof. But, in reading another of Dr. Edward Donaldson’s papers, I find I am not shock proof at all. The salmon Dr. Donaldson (DFO, West Vancouver laboratories) and colleagues are designing to stock fish farms with, are not only also being stocked in BC lakes, but already have been released into BC’s coastal waters.

We are told in a paper entitled The Reproductive Containment of Genetically Altered Salmonids that salmon, triploided and directly treated with estradoil (the most potent of estrogens ) “have been released from both Capilano Salmon Hatchery and Big Qualicum Salmon Hatchery into British Columbia Coastal Waters.” Page 114
And in the same paper we read that these fish were caught and are being caught, by both commercial and recreational fisher people and consumed by humans. However, there are many problems associated with sterilization of salmon, as Dr. Donaldson goes on to inform us, because male hormones are also being used to sterilize fish. Why? Just for fun? To see what will happen? Just to see what will happen to wild fish when some of the treated fish are not completely sterilized as has happened before? There isn’t even a reason to use male androgens as fish farms want all females. Dr. Donaldson tell us on page 118, bottom of the page no.3

No. 3 “Androgens are potent steroids (testosterone, etc.) which are biologically active in humans. Operators must therefore utilize appropriate protective equipment and avoid self exposure.”

No. 5 “Androgen solutions must be disposed of after use in an environmentally sound manner.”

No.6 “While androgen residues are completely eliminated in a matter of two to three weeks after the termination of treatment and the sterilized fish at the time of marketing contain no indictable levels of natural androgen, the potential exists for consumer resistance to fish that have received androgen treatment during early development.”

The potential exists? Just the potential? That the public would be appalled at buying and eating sterilized, sex changed, super fat fish? With no real assurance that hormonal residues are not lurking in the mushy fish flesh? I think perhaps Dr. Edward Donaldson and his colleges have been driven more than a little mad by the secrecy they must labour under; by a grossly magnified sense of their own privilege to destroy and rearrange natural systems almost at whim, and by both provincial and federal governments who recognize only one mantra, that of profit.

This is the same sense of an almost god-like privilege that the logging corporations feel when they freely admit they are after every last old growth tree in this province so that natural forests can be replaced by tree farms. Is it such a stretch for the BC government and the government of Canada to feel that it might also be a profitable thing to change the very fish of the seas into manufactured versions of fish that can be patented? Not likely? Oh, very likely. I’ll tell you about Monsanto’s interest in these fish later. Also about the interest that an extremely prominent businessman in British Columbia has in FrankenFish.