|
|
|
Foreign Policy
Winter 1998–99
Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare? The Brave New World of Science and Business
By Mae-Wan Ho
Reviewed by Charles C. Mann *
Most people, I suspect, regard genetic engineering as something that will happen tomorrow. They are wrong. Biotechnology is here today. Indeed, it may be about to start a trade war. In the United States, biotech—especially agricultural biotech, by far the most economically important branch—is relatively uncontroversial. More than 4,600 genetic modifications of organisms have been field tested, including 9 modifications of carrots, 11 of apples, and scores of genetically modified tomatoes. Five years ago, no bioengineered crops were grown commercially in the United States. This year, American farmers harvested 45 million acres of genetically modified corn, soybeans, cotton, potatoes, and other crops.
Europeans, by contrast, are saying “no” to this technology. Fearful that the new varieties might hybridize with wild species to create uncontrollable races of what critics call “Frankenplants,” Austria and Luxembourg have refused to permit genetically modified maize to grow on their soil, despite its approval by the European Union. This summer, France announced a two-year moratorium on all bioengineered crops other than corn. And Britain’s burgeoning antibiotech movement has acquired the backing of Prince Charles, who issued the edict that genetic engineering “takes mankind into realms that belong to God and to God alone.”
Since restrictions on genetic engineering could push U.S. agribusiness out of Europe, the possibility of a trade war is real. Inevitably, these disparate attitudes prompt the questions: Who is right? Is genetic engineering safe? Mae-Wan Ho doesn’t think so. Her recent book, Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare?, declares that genetic engineering is so hazardous that “the future of the planet and all its inhabitants is at stake.”
Ho is a biologist at Open University in Milton Keynes, England. The Ecologist magazine has dubbed her “the most important writer today in the controversial field of biotechnology.” Ho’s book, which has captured the attention of environmentalists, is an ambitious effort to prove that genetic engineering is the inevitable outcome of a reductionist, ecologically catastrophic mindset that belongs in the dustbin of history. But her attempt to link biotech to larger sociopolitical issues compels Ho to wander into the swamps of economics and political science, where she gets completely lost. Not until I read Genetic Engineering did I learn, for instance, that the development of the birth control pill “is why we live in a society that still stigmatizes single mothers.” More startling still is her belief that Darwin’s theories prompted the slave trade, even though Britain abolished slavery 52 years before The Origin of Species was published.
The howlers are a pity because fluttering beneath the claptrap are two serious arguments against genetic engineering: one economic, one biological. The economic argument (which Ho fails to make coherently) plays off the original justification for biotech—its potential to feed the world. Although global population growth is slowing, affluence is driving up the demand for food, as the new middle class in Asia and Latin America eats a larger and more varied diet. To satisfy this demand, grain harvests must increase approximately 40 percent by 2020—no easy task. The central argument for agricultural biotechnology is that by increasing resistance to pests and poor environmental conditions, it can substantially raise effective yields, translating into lower food prices and less hunger.
Unfortunately, genetic research and development is expensive. If biotech firms are to have any hope of recouping their costs, they must stop farmers from saving part of their harvest for the next year’s seed—a traditional practice, especially in developing countries. (In fact, biotechnology can help achieve this goal. In a development that Ho does not discuss, the U.S.–based Monsanto Company has acquired the patent to the “Terminator,” a group of genes that induces plants to produce sterile seeds.) Consequently, the spread of genetic engineering will yoke farmers in rich and poor countries alike to biotech corporations, turning them into modern sharecroppers who must get their seeds every year from distant masters. The key question is whether the potential for corporate exploitation of farmers is offset by the possible benefits to consumers, most notably lower food prices.
Nobody knows the answer. But Robert E. Evenson, an agricultural economist at Yale University, has argued that abandoning biotechnology altogether would lead to a small increase in food prices. In developed countries the increase could be absorbed easily, but in impoverished nations even a slight rise in the cost of living could translate into a large increase in the misery index.
Ho would doubtless respond that such analyses are flawed since they implicitly assume that agricultural biotechnology works—that is, it can deliver safe, reliable increases in productivity. Her second stronger argument is that the extraordinary complexity of living creatures makes genetic engineering inherently unreliable and unsafe. Many genetic modifications consist of inserted genes that help plants resist some pest or poison. Monsanto, for instance, sells bioengineered soybeans that are immune to the company’s herbicides. But this simple picture of genes as predictable biochemical factories, Ho rightly says, masks a far more complex reality.
Genes function differently at different times and within different environments. One cannot be sure whether a gene that codes for a particular protein in one species will do the same in another—or even whether the gene will stay in the same place. Worse, the process of inserting foreign genes into chromosomes is poorly understood and may be risky. Foreign genes must be smuggled into cells by biochemical “vectors” derived from viruses. Evidence suggests that these vectors can combine with DNA in plants and animals to create new viruses, which in turn can attack other species and even permanently transfer genes into their chromosomes. As an example, Ho says, a fruit fly gene has ended up in human DNA, where it has caused a neurological wasting disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome. In nature, such transfers seem to be rare; genetic engineering could increase their frequency with unknown consequences.
For Ho, such uncertainties suggest the need for a moratorium on commercial genetic engineering. But if we truly do not know the consequences of genetic engineering, how can we be sure that the long-term effects might not be beneficial? The proper response to the imponderables of genetic engineering is to subject bioengineered products to thorough testing.
Alas, the regulatory system in the United States—the supposed gold standard—leaves much to be desired. As the New York Times Magazine recently reported, potatoes modified to produce a bug-killing toxin were not tested or labeled by the Food and Drug Administration (because it does not regulate pesticides) or the Environmental Protection Agency (because it does not regulate foods). Neither has any regulatory body examined the potential effects of these potatoes on the ecosystem nor whether the pesticide gene they now carry could possibly slip into other species.
A serious book on genetic engineering would have examined whether biotech products could be tested properly or for that matter contained. Instead, this book ends with a long denunciation of the “reductionist science” that has, in Ho’s view, polluted the Earth, starved the Third World, and turned microorganisms into “thoroughly promiscuous, sex-mad fiends.” Scientists, she says, must stop adhering to mechanistic explanations (which embody the exploitative world-view of capitalism) and embrace holistic, organic theories. At this point, experienced readers hold their breath, waiting for the writer to drag in quantum mechanics as “proof” that science has somehow entered the Age of Aquarius; on page 204, I stopped holding my breath.
Ho charges that mainstream biologists, who supposedly cling to reductionism, are blocking “a deep and sustained change in direction in all spheres of life.” Curiously, though, she acknowledges that the evidence against reductionism comes from the work of “hundreds, even thousands of molecular geneticists in academic institutions all over Europe and the United States”—that is, the same mainstream biologists whom she denounces. And it is these same poor, benighted folks, not New Age critics such as herself, to whom we will have to turn if we are ever to find out whether the promises of genetic engineering are truly outweighed by its pitfalls.
Endnotes
*: Charles C. Mann, contributing correspondent at Science magazine, is coauthor of Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1996). Back.