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1092nd General Monthly Meeting

Genetically Modified Foods - Dinner with the General Manager (GM)

Professor Stephen Leeder BSc(Med), MBBS, PhD, FRACP, FFPHM, FAFPHM

Date: Wednesday 4 October, 2000
Time: 6:00 for 6:30 pm
Venue: City Tattersals, 198 Pitt Street, Sydney

ABSTRACT

Advocates for genetically modified foods often assert that the processes of laboratory genetic engineering are really no different from those that occur naturally with plant and animal husbandry. This argument does not have the convincing impact that they expect. Those who express concern about GM fodd safety claim that genetic engineering allows humans to do what nature will not and they worry when scientists cut and paste genes. Now we have the skill to transfer genes between species. This raises new safety questions making the production and marketing of GM foods a matter for consideration by public health authorities. We simply do not know what the long-term effects of genetic mofification of crops and consumption of genetically modified foods will be, either on human health or on the ecological environment.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Professor Leeder is Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Professor og Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Senate (the governing body of the University). He was Foundation Professor of Community Medicine at the University of Newcastle from 1976 to 1985 and Director of the Division of Public Health and Community Medicine at Westmead Hospital in the Western Sydney Area Health Service until the end of 1997. He remains a member of the Western Sydney Area Health Board and chairs its Human Research Ethics Committee and Clinical Policy, Quality and Outcomes Committee.

In 1987 and 1988, professor Leeder chaired a State-Commonwealth committee of the Australian Health Ministers' Advisory Council which was commissioned to propose health targets and ways to achieve them, as part of the Board of Censors of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine 1990-1994 and has served two terms as National President of the Public Health Association of Australia. He was a member of the National Health and Medical Research Council and chaired one of its principal committees, the Health Advisory Committee, during the 1997-1999 triennium.

Professor Leeder has an interest in medical education and ethics, health policy communication and strategic approaches to research development and application. His special clinical and research interest is asthma.

Professor Leeder's book, "Healthy Medicine: Challenges Facing Australia's Health Service", was published on 1st September 1999.