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How safe does transgenic food need to be?

Nature Biotechnology volume 31, pages 794–802 (2013)Cite this article

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An Erratum to this article was published on 01 December 2013

This article has been updated

Disputes over how to assess a foodstuff's safety continue to play into public fears about transgenic crops.

Why, after transgenic products have been in the human food chain for more than a decade without overt ill effects, do these doubts persist? And will it ever be possible to gather sufficient evidence to ameliorate the concerns of skeptics and the public at large that these products are as safe as any other foodstuff?

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Figure 1

Change history

  • 26 September 2013

    In the version of this article initially published, on page 795, reference was made to a paper that argues that 90-day feeding studies should only be done when deemed necessary, with the implication that EFSA had authored the paper. While EFSA does take that position, the paper was authored by scientists at the RIKILT Wageningen UR (H.A. Kuiper and E.J. Kok) and The James Hutton Institute (H.V. Davies). In addition, the EU project described by Esther Kok on page 796 was incorrectly identified as the GMSAFOOD Initiative. It should have read SafeFoods. The errors have been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of this article.

  • 01 December 2013

    Nat. Biotechnol. 31, 794–802 (2013); doi:10.1038/nbt.2686; published online 10 September 2013; corrected after print 26 September 2013 In the version of this article initially published, on page 795, reference was made to a paper that argues that 90-day feeding studies should only be done when deemed necessary, with the implication that EFSA had authored the paper.

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The FDA's position on foods from new plant varieties (PDF 78 kb)

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DeFrancesco, L. How safe does transgenic food need to be?. Nat Biotechnol 31, 794–802 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2686

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