To the Editor:

Re “Europe Turns Against Science” (Sunday Review, Oct. 25):

Having been a crop genetic engineer myself (I helped bring the world’s first genetically engineered whole food, the Flavr Savr tomato, to market), I take issue with Mark Lynas’s reference to a “worldwide scientific consensus on the safety of genetic engineering.”

Genetic engineering is a technology. Each product of any technology will (or at least can) be different; the various products of crop genetic engineering certainly are. And because each product is different — not only in the ways genetic engineers design and expect them to be, but also by potentially containing unique unintended and unexpected changes — the safety of each one must be assessed individually.

The World Health Organization agrees: “Different G.M. organisms include different genes inserted in different ways. This means that individual G.M. foods and their safety should be assessed on a case-by-case basis and that it is not possible to make general statements on the safety of all G.M. foods.”