Whole Earth Discipline

by Brand, Stewart

  —Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962

  I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool. In defense of a bizarre idea of what is “natural,” we reject the very thing Rachel Carson encouraged us to pursue—the new science of biotic controls. We make ourselves look as conspicuously irrational as those who espouse “intelligent design” or ban stem-cell research, and we teach that irrationality to the public and to decision makers.

  We also repel the scientists whose help we most need to develop a deeply sustainable agriculture: the agronomists, ecologists, microbiologists, and geneticists who are fulfilling Rachel Carson’s dream.

  • When genetic engineering first came along in the 1970s as recombinant DNA research, I was surprised by the hysteria it inspired. From my biology background, I knew that genes have always been intensely fungible, especially in microbes. We weren’t creating a new technology so much as joining an old one, using the very techniques that microbes have employed for 3.5 billion years. Asking around over the years, I’ve found that professional biologists are universally unalarmed about genetic engineering. Most are adopting it in their own work because it is transforming every one of the biological disciplines.

  Activists who oppose genetic engineering in crops give detailed biological arguments about the damage they’re sure it will cause, but it’s oddly context-free biology. Superweeds! Allergies! Gene flow! Transgenic novelty! Surprises! While the public is saying “Oh my God!” biologists are saying, “So?” All that stuff is normal, in the wild and in agriculture. In the wild, you study it; in agriculture and restoration, you tweak it. Genetic engineering offers some nifty new precision, speed, and reach, but that’s all that is new. As with nuclear, those who know the most are the least frightened.

  What I’ll attempt to do here is fill in some of the biological context that makes genetic engineering unthreatening good news, especially for environmentalists.

  A note on usage. Except in quotations, I’ll employ the emerging abbreviation GE instead of the still common GM. GM usually stands for “genetic modification” or sometimes “genetic manipulation,” but the term is too general. All of evolution, all of agriculture, and all of selective breeding of any kind is genetic modification and always has been. GE specifies genetic engineering, a finer-grained practice. Instead of selecting for traits, which breeders do, GE identifies the genes behind the traits and works selectively and directly with those genes. Breeding is usually stuck with the traits and genes within the existing genome of an organism and of species that will hybridize with it. GE can reach out for desired traits and genes in more distant organisms. A synonym for genetically engineered is transgenic.

  There lies the horror, apparently. “A fish gene in a strawberry? That can’t be right.” Old fears well up—of Chimeras, of monsters, of newborns with the wrong number of toes or an open spine, of the bad seed subtly undermining all that is normal and right. Once it is loose, you can’t call it back. It is against nature. It is hubris. It will inevitably be punished.

  (The fishy strawberry story happens to be wrong, but that doesn’t affect its legendary impact. As usual with good stories, it’s partly a conflation—in the early 1990s there was a tomato called Flavr-Savr with a bacterial gene to slow ripening, and it was popular, but it was too hard to ship after all and didn’t taste great, so it disappeared; and there was an attempt in 1991 to duplicate a flounder gene in a tomato to make it frost tolerant, but it failed to work. There never was a strawberry with a fish gene in it.)

  • The whole GE controversy was foreshadowed—and should have been settled—in the mid-1970s when recombinant DNA hit the fan. The technique, then called “gene splicing,” emerged from a series of discoveries and inventions that culminated by 1974 in the ability to blend genes from various sources, including humans, into bacteria. One of the first applications was meant to be a cheaper, safer way to generate large quantities of insulin for treating diabetes. Everyone realized this was going to be an immensely powerful technology. Some of the scientists worried that potentially harmful strains of bacteria could be created, and they called for a moratorium on recombinant-DNA research until the hazards could be sorted out.

  As soon as the issue got into the press, parts of the public began freaking out. Religious groups and environmentalists were up in arms. Scientists playing God, they declared, were committing abomination. Monstrous organisms would be created, environmentalists said, that could threaten everything living. There would be insulin-shock epidemics and tumor plagues. The Cambridge and Berkeley city councils—both cities the home of major universities—outlawed recombinant-DNA research. The U.S. Congress began introducing restrictive legislation.

  That was the atmosphere that led to the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules in California in February 1975. Coming from all over the world, some 146 genetic scientists and related professionals convened for four days to regulate their research. They instituted an array of laboratory containment practices and mandated the use of organisms that could not live outside the lab. Some experiments were banned entirely, such as tinkering with the genes of pathogenic organisms. The guidelines were soon adopted and enforced in the United States by the National Institutes of Health.

  Was Asilomar a good idea? The question was controversial then and remains controversial now. As it happened, I had an early window on the issue from an inside perspective.

  One of my jobs as an assistant to California governor Jerry Brown was to arrange visits to his office by leading intellectuals. Brown’s view was that “government may not always be the first to know about important new ideas, but it should not be the last.” Thus every few weeks I got to spend a day hosting the likes of organizational guru Peter Drucker, futurist Herman Kahn, farmer-poet Wendell Berry, and media celebrator Marshall McLuhan. In 1977, two years after Asilomar, the California legislature was threatening to regulate recombinant DNA research in the state, so James Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA and director of the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, came to visit. Watson had been an early supporter of the moratorium on recombinant DNA research and had helped to organize Asilomar.

  In a short talk to a group including Brown, the governor’s staff, and some legislators and press, Watson said:My position is that I don’t regard recombinant DNA as a major or plausible public health hazard, and so I don’t think that legislation is necessary. My experience is partly as a scientist who has worked with DNA for thirty years, and as a director of a laboratory where I have moral and legal responsibility for our work with viruses, and I think about it. . . .

  The general rule that seems to govern most of the people working with medical microbiology is that once you’ve domesticated a bacteria or a virus and got it to grow under conditions of a laboratory culture, it loses its virulence. Biochemists generally live pretty long. (That’s not true of organic chemists—they normally have a life span about five years shorter than other people, because those fumes that smell bad are bad.) . . .

  We’ve been told there’s a danger of E. coli getting a gene for cellulase via recombinant DNA. If there were a real selective advantage for E. coli to have cellulase, which would do away with our species [through starvation], it would have it already—by viral transfer or other means. Evolution is constantly trying to seek out the best set of genes for a given organism to occupy a niche. I do not worry about “monsters.” . . .

  Some people have said the [Asilomar] guidelines are capricious. I think they’re totally capricious and totally unnecessary. We must have wasted $25 million on those precautions by now and it’s on its way to $100 million. I think it’s the biggest waste of federal money since we built all those fallout shelters. . . . It’s silly to control where there’s no evidence of danger. I am totally agreed that the public should
participate in any process where they can be given facts to think about. But the tradition is, you don’t call fire until you see it.

  Watson was right, it turned out. The authoritative book on the history of molecular biology is Horace Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation (1996). A year after the Asilomar conference, Judson reports, “scientists’ fears were receding fast. All the biologists who had signed the original appeal for the moratorium and the conference now agreed that the dangers had been exaggerated and the practical effects pernicious. Over two decades, the guidelines have been progressively relaxed.” Recombinant-DNA techniques—genetic engineering—went on to revolutionize human medicine, transform every branch of biology, and become a major tool of disciplines ranging from chemistry to crime detection, from anthropology to agriculture. All without a single instance of harm.

  So, was Asilomar a good idea? I would say yes, but for political reasons rather than scientific. The guidelines set by the scientists were far more specific and appropriate than politicians would have set, and those guidelines could be adjusted annually in response to real experience in the world, whereas political regulations not only resist fine-tuning, they defy any change at all. The recent simplistic legislation banning most human stem-cell research in the United States was a classic case. The Asilomar scientists forestalled that kind of folly by taking public responsibility themselves, early and adaptively.

  • One particularly ingenious early adopter of the new genetic technology was Bruce Ames, a biochemist at the University of California-Berkeley. The problem he wanted to solve concerned the tens of thousands of novel chemicals that industry routinely creates and releases into the environment without much testing for their toxicity. An animal test for carcinogenicity using rats or mice would take two years and cost up to $750,000 per chemical, and a thousand new chemicals were being introduced every year.

  Proposing that any chemical that would cause cancer would also cause genetic mutations, Ames engineered a strain of bacteria so that it would provide a quick test for mutagenicity as a stand-in for the carcinogenicity test. He took Salmonella bacteria and elegantly tailored them so they would starve in a petri dish filled with a particular nutrient unless they mutated the ability to eat it. He would drop a sample of the chemical to be tested in the dish. If, two days later, colonies of Salmonella were prospering in the dish, it showed that the chemical caused mutations and probably caused cancer. Though it took Ames ten years to develop the test, he gave away his Salmonella strain and his technique free of charge or patent to any who wanted it. Instead of the two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars required for an animal test, the Ames test took two days and cost $250 to $1,000. It became the world standard test for carcinogenicity and continues in use today.

  The success of the Ames test was part of what inspired a major conflict inside Friends of the Earth, the environmental organization founded by Dave Brower in 1969. In the 1970s, while it was growing rapidly in size, impact, and international reach, Friends of the Earth launched a fight against genetic engineering. Two prominent members of the FOE advisory council argued against the campaign and then resigned in protest when their advice was ignored. They were Lewis Thomas, the celebrated author of The Lives of a Cell and head of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Paul Ehrlich, then the most influential of Green-activist scientists. I happened to get a copy of Ehrlich’s protest letter and printed it in CoEvolution Quarterly.

  What Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1977 still applies:Dear Friends:

  As a professional biologist, I have become increasingly concerned about the opposition to recombinant DNA research expressed by FOE and some other environmental groups. . . . As an evolutionist, I have been rather depressed by various features of the ensuing controversy. It has been stated that the research should be discontinued because it involves “meddling with evolution.” Homo sapiens has been meddling with evolution in many ways and for a long time. We started in a big way when we domesticated plants and animals. We continue every time we alter the environment. In general, recombinant DNA research does not seem to represent a significant increase in the risks associated with such meddling—although it may significantly increase the rate at which we meddle. . . .

  One must always remember that any laboratory creations would have to compete in nature with the highly specialized products of billions of years of evolution—and one would expect the products of evolution to have a considerable advantage. In addition, there is evidence that bacterial species have been swapping DNA among themselves for a very long time and perhaps even exchanging with eucaryotic (higher) organisms.

  In my view, the brightest promise of recombinant DNA is as a general research tool for molecular geneticists—a tool to use in the pursuit of the highest goal of science, understanding of the universe and of ourselves. . . . If recombinant DNA research is ended because it could be used for evil instead of good, then all of science will stand similarly indicted, and basic research may have to cease. If it makes that decision, humanity will have to be prepared to forego the benefits of science, a cost that would be high indeed in an overpopulated world utterly dependent on sophisticated technology for any real hope of transitioning to a “sustainable society.” . . .

  Of special interest to environmentalists and the FOE board is the work of Bruce Ames at Berkeley in developing tester strains of Salmonella, which are used in screening the products of the prolific synthetic organic chemical industry for carcinogens. Those of you who are familiar with it undoubtedly recognize that the “Ames screen” is the single most powerful technical tool that has been handed to environmentalists in decades. And yet Ames’ research is being hindered by a complete—and pointless—ban on all recombinant DNA research with Salmonella. FOE is thus in the position of helping to block work on the most promising techniques for detecting environmental carcinogens.

  That was the moment when environmentalists turned away from reason in regard to genetic engineering. Thirty years after Paul Ehrlich resigned in protest, Friends of the Earth and all the other environmental organizations I know of still oppose genetic engineering. Most of all they oppose transgenic food crops; thus the great coinage “Frankenfood.” Since pickiness about diet and loathing of the “wrong” food is such an ancient cultural practice, maybe that’s the heart of the matter. I suspect that if environmentalists felt OK about eating genetically engineered food, their other complaints would fade away, so let’s start there.

  The most massive dietary experiment in history has taken place since 1996. One enormous set of people—everyone in North America—bravely ate vast quantities of genetically engineered food crops. (Some 70 percent of processed foods in the United States now have GE ingredients, mostly from corn, canola, and soybeans; nearly half of the field corn that goes into our corn muffins, corn chips, and tortillas is GE; and half of our sugar comes from GE sugar beets.) Meanwhile, the control group—everyone in Europe—made the considerable economic sacrifice of doing without GE agriculture and went to the further trouble of banning all GE food imports. It was great civilization-scale science, and the result is now in, a conclusive existence proof. No difference can be detected between the test and the control group.

  Peter Raven sums up the outcome: “There is no science to back up the reasons for concern about foods from GM plants at all. Hundreds of millions of people have eaten GM foods, and no one has ever gotten sick. Virtually all beers and cheeses are made with the assistance of GM microorganisms, and nobody gives a damn.”

  (Who’s Peter Raven? The head of the Missouri Botanical Garden for the last four decades, he is usually described as “one of the world’s leading botanists and advocates of conservation and biodiversity.” He has won nearly every environmental prize there is, as well as the National Medal of Science; Time declared him a “Hero for the Planet.” )

  Raven is hardly alone in his conclusions. In 2004 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported:The question of the safety of genetically modified foods has bee
n reviewed by the International Council of Science (ICSU), which based its opinion on 50 authoritative independent scientific assessments from around the world. Currently available genetically modified crops—and foods derived from them—have been judged safe to eat, and the methods used to test them have been deemed appropriate.

  Millions of people worldwide have consumed foods derived from genetically modified plants (mainly maize, soybean, and oilseed rape) and to date no adverse effects have been observed. . . .

  Allergens and toxins occur in some traditional foods and can adversely affect some people leading to concerns that genetically modified plant-derived foods may contain elevated levels of allergens and toxins. Extensive testing of genetically modified food currently on the market has not confirmed these concerns.

  Conclusion: “To date, no verifiable untoward toxic or nutritionally deleterious effects resulting from the consumption of foods derived from genetically modified foods have been discovered anywhere in the world.”

  Here’s one more overview, from a 2007 article titled “The Real GM Food Scandal,” in Britain’s Prospect magazine:The fact is that there is not a shred of any evidence of risk to human health from GM crops. Every academy of science, representing the views of the world’s leading experts—the Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Brazilian, French and American academies as well as the Royal Society, which has published four separate reports on the issue—has confirmed this. Independent inquiries have found that the risk from GM crops is no greater than that from conventionally grown crops that do not have to undergo such testing. In 2001, the research directorate of the EU commission released a summary of 81 scientific studies financed by the EU itself—not by private industry—conducted over a 15-year period, to determine whether GM products were unsafe or insufficiently tested: none found evidence of harm to humans or to the environment.