Brent is one of the major proponents in the United States of open-source biotech, along with Rob Carlson, Drew Endy, George Church, and Craig Venter. All of them are acutely aware of the dangers of bioterror and have worked directly with the government agencies responsible for biosecurity. They promote transparency and widely available biotech skills as the safest as well as the most pragmatic way to deal with potential dangers, much as the spreading of computer programming skills has helped keep the Internet healthy despite countless attacks with computer viruses, worms, and other malevolence. Craig Venter argues that the time biotech was most dangerous was when it was confined to secret government bio-weapon labs in the Soviet Union and the United States.
Decades of lab work and industrial-scale bioreactors have shown that it’s easy to cripple organisms so they can’t survive outside the work environment, and they’re feeble even when you don’t try to weaken them. As for creating wild-worthy microbes on purpose, computer scientist Rudy Rucker speculates:I have a mental image of germ-size MIT nerds putting on gangsta clothes and venturing into alleys to try some rough stuff. And then they meet up with the homies who’ve been keeping it real for a billion years or so.
One benefit of the anticipated importance of synthetic biology is a growing profusion of eclectic organizations and meetings designed to include all potential stakeholders and players right from the start—bioethicists, environmental activists, biosecurity professionals, social scientists, politicians, reporters, funders, and investors, along with the bioscientists and bioengineers.
Great names the organizations have, too—SYNBIOSAFE (in Europe), SynBERC (Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center), International Consortium for Polynucleotide Synthesis, and the Industry Association of Synthetic Biology. The extensive public discussion called for by the ETC group is in fact happening. In 2008, for example, Drew Endy invited ETC’s Jim Thomas to publicly debate with him about synthetic biology, and I got to stage the event in San Francisco. “I want to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer,” said Endy. “Powerful technology in an unjust world is likely to exacerbate the injustice,” said Thomas.
At about the same time, a New York Times reporter visiting the Synthetic Biology Working Group at MIT noticed on their to-do list: “Grow a house.”
Now is the time to ask: What are the most environmentally useful things that synthetic biology could do for human food production? Do we make ever finer adjustments to existing agriculture, create new crop plants, start over with algal vats, reinvent aquaculture and mariculture around microbes instead of fish, or what? And that’s just Greener food. What about Greener fuel and materials?
I have a history with organic farming—more than I realized. Reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007), Michael Pollan’s natural history of American agriculture, I was surprised by this passage:Organic Gardening and Farming struggled along in obscurity until 1969, when an ecstatic review in the Whole Earth Catalog brought it to the attention of hippies trying to figure out how to grow vegetables without patronizing the military-industrial complex. Within two years Organic Gardening and Farming’s circulation climbed from 400,000 to 700,000.
At Whole Earth we did indeed promote the intensely organic publications from Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, and I got to be friends with Bob Rodale. Pollan mentions also the influence of an essay we carried by farmer-poet Wendell Berry in praise of Sir Albert Howard, whose 1940 book, An Agricultural Testament, laid the foundation for the organic movement. That book begins, “The maintenance of the fertility of the soil is the first condition of any permanent system of agriculture.”
Sir Albert’s tome, along with earlier books such as Franklin Hiram King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries (1911) and George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864), convinced me that the quality of a civilization, and its likely longevity, can be judged by the quality of its soil. Thus I’m cheered by the current proliferation of new genres of soil-centered agroecology—organic, permaculture, polyculture, conservation agriculture, biological farming, and integrated farm management. We can add to the list transgenic crops, if they’re designed right and used right.
This is the place to introduce formally two people I’ve already quoted a lot—Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak. Raoul teaches organic farming at the University of California-Davis; prior to that, he was a partner in a commercial organic farm called Full Belly; he used to be president of the Board of California Certified Organic Farmers. Pam is a plant geneticist. Besides being married (with kids), they are coauthors of a charming, densely informative book published in 2008, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. Drawing on the daily details of their professional lives, the authors make a case for treating GE crops and organic farming as convergent techniques for feeding the most people with the least harm to the land. “To meet the appetites of the world’s population without drastically hurting the environment,” they write, “requires a visionary new approach: combining genetic engineering and organic farming. . . . Genetic engineering can be used to develop seeds with enhanced resistance to pests and pathogens; organic farming can manage the overall spectrum of pests more effectively.”
To keep his organic certification, Raoul is not allowed to use any GE seeds. In Tomorrow’s Table, he writes:As an organic farmer, I want to see more farmland transitioned to organic practices and at the same time I want to use the most powerful technologies available to create an environmentally friendly, sustainable, and high-yielding farm. . . . In the same way that the introduction of genes from wild species through breeding revolutionized farmers’ management of pests, so can the introduction of genes through GE revolutionize control of diseases, insects, and nematodes for which there is presently no organic solution. GE can also greatly increase our understanding of what is going on in plants at a molecular level. Pam has been working for twenty years trying to understand how plants and microbes communicate.
I should mention what Pam has been up to with GE, because she’s modest about her accomplishments. At the University of California-Davis, one of the world’s great centers of agricultural research, she runs a large lab devoted to improving rice for the developing world. Working with scientists in Asia and at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, she helped isolate from an ancient rice strain in eastern India a gene that confers submergence tolerance—a way to survive floods. In India and Bangladesh, 4 million tons of rice a year are lost to flooding, enough to feed 30 million people. As Raoul remarked in an interview, “For about 50 years, people have been trying to develop flood-resistant rice using conventional breeding. They’ve failed. Today about 75 million farmers live on less than a dollar a day in major flood zones in places like Myanmar, Bangladesh, and India.”
Using GE techniques, Pam demonstrated that a single gene called Sub1A was sufficient to confer submergence tolerance. With the genetic information her lab generated, breeders in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and India used a precision breeding technique (a kind of a hybrid between genetic engineering and conventional breeding) to introduce the submergence gene into locally adapted high-yielding rice varieties, where it makes the plants able to “hold their breath” for two whole weeks underwater. The submersible rice has now been tested in farmers’ fields (the last stage before release for public use) in Bangladesh, India, and Laos.
In Tomorrow’s Table, she gently offers a challenge to the organic industry: “Because our team has also created California rice varieties carrying the submergence tolerance trait, we may be able to help our local organic rice growers and other farmers fight weeds without herbicides.” (Organic rice growers use deep water to drown the weeds. Submergence-tolerant rice would make the technique even more effective.) Which of America’s fifty-six organic certification programs, I wonder, will be the first to accept Pam’s submersible rice? Yes, it’s engineered, but the gene in question came from another rice plant, after all, and it does kill weeds in a natural and old-fashioned way. (Now ask yourself w
hat if the flood-resistant gene had come from a cattail? Or a catfish? Or a cat? Or a corporation? Where does wickedness cut in? To the rice plant, to the rice farmer, to the rice eater, it doesn’t matter.)
I asked Pam about the patent status of her flood-loving rice. She wrote:The Sub1 gene is in the public domain (we felt it too valuable to third world farmers to delay getting it out there or tie up the patent rights in some complicated way). The Sub1 rice variety has been trialed in farmers’ fields for 3 years now and has been yielding 2-5-fold more than conventional varieties under flooded conditions. Farmers are now bulking up the seed on their farms for planting next year and for sharing with their neighbors. The Bangladeshi national breeding stations are also bulking up for free distribution. Over the next 3 years they hope to have enough to plant 2 million acres.
• Organic is prospering these days. In the United States, organic cropland quadrupled between 1992 and 2005, to 4 million acres (that’s still less than 3 percent of U.S. agriculture overall). Worldwide, the total reached 76 million acres, with Australia—Australia!—and parts of Europe nearly one-third organic. Growers and vendors can charge premium prices, sometimes triple what they can get for conventionally grown crops. To the extent that the organic boom is just a marketing phenomenon, it is fragile.
I pay extra for organic food for only one reason. I don’t believe it’s safer or more nutritious or higher yield or necessarily tastier than conventional agriculture. I do believe it reduces the impact of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides on American “soils, waters, and wildlife,” so my extra payment is a public service, not a private one. Others may not be so generous when the next generation of GE agriculture introduces produce that is far more nutritious, delicious, and inexpensive than the best of current organic fare. Those crops could be and should be grown organically.
What is the essence of “organic”? The standard definition is that it includes care for the soil and the ecosystems surrounding organic farms, and that it relies on biological and mechanical controls to deal with pests and on organic materials for fertilizer. Only some keepers of organic theology go further. One authoritative document from the Netherlands reads:On the basis of respect for the value of naturalness, genetic engineering will be rejected as being “unnatural” because it disturbs the harmony or balance of the whole, but also because the recombinant DNA constructs used are not “natural substances” but synthetic constructs (relating to the no-chemicals approach). . . . Genetic engineering does not respect the characteristic way of being (“nature”) of living organisms. Genetic engineering is based on a mechanistic and not a holistic way of thinking about life. So the objections against engineering of organic agriculture go well beyond the risks of the gene technology. They also relate to the technology itself, and the human attitude towards nature it reflects.
In my opinion, that statement proves that if you torture logic clear to death, you wind up saying quite a lot less than nothing. The title of the paper is “Organic Agriculture Requires Process Rather Than Product Evaluation of Novel Breeding Techniques.” Does that mean that Europeans use no organic seeds produced by radiation or chemical mutagenesis? In the marketing world, “natural” now means anything the seller wants to charge extra for or distract your attention with. “Natural American Spirit” is the name of a cigarette brand with the tag line “100% additive-free natural tobacco.” It evokes American Indian identity, distributes eco-informative fact cards, uses organically grown tobacco, and commands a premium price. In 2002 Natural American Spirit was bought by the megacorporation Reynolds American. One quarter of all male deaths in the developed world (and one tenth of all female deaths) are caused by smoking tobacco, according to the World Health Organization.
• What might a GE-inclusive organic agriculture look like? Organic farmer José Baer writes, “It would be great if there were a GE service that had a plethora of genes, and a plethora of crops, and you could pick and choose the gene that you wanted to splice into a specific crop. They would create the plant for you, propagate the seed, and provide you with your custom-ordered GE plant.” One can imagine organic crops biotically engineered as Rachel Carson might do it. They would be designed in detail to protect and improve the soil they grow in, to foil the specific pests and weeds that threaten them, to blend well with other organic crops and with beneficial insects, to increase carbon fixation in the soil and reduce the release of methane and nitrous oxide, to be as nutritious and delicious as science can make them, and to invite further refinement by the growers.
Along with genetic BioBricks, let there be AgriBricks to finesse crop genomes for local ecological and economic fitness. (If Monsanto throws a fit, tell them that if they’re polite, you might license back to them the locally attuned tweaks you’ve made to their patented gene array. Pretty soon they—or some company that replaces them—will be providing you with lab equipment.)
A great boon for local economic fitness is the revival of farmers’ markets like those I grew up with in Illinois in the 1940s, only even better this time around. There were 340 farmers’ markets in the United States in 1970, then 1,800 in 1994, and 5,000 by 2008. Speaking from his experience selling organic walnuts and tomatoes in farmers’ markets, José Baer speculates what selling GE organic food there might be like:I sell in four southern California farmers markets, and there I find that the people will listen to what you tell them about your operation, decide whether they agree with it, and then buy accordingly. Organic, non-organic, whatever, it’s whether they like what they hear you say about your operation. History matters, relationship with employees matters, relationship with the landscape matters, and food safety matters. Price—not so much.
The thing that excites me now is that there is a consumer trend to caring what our food tastes like. This could open up some really interesting avenues in GE. I think that the farmers markets would be the best market for GE crops because you would have the chance/ability to explain yourself. I would bring pictures of the orchard so that they could understand that there was nothing freakish about them, and I would explain the reasons that I am doing it (financial, food safety, and environmental). I think that the public would buy into it if it was presented straight to them.
Thanks to the new interest in taste and freshness that Baer mentions, along with concern about fuel costs, and the kind of bioregionalism that my friends and I have been pushing for forty years, we’re seeing the growth of the slow-food and locavore movements, more roadside produce stands, food co-ops, and community gardens, and the creation of subscription farms—a practice adopted from Germany, Switzerland, and Japan in which people buy shares in the costs (and risks) of a farm and in return get weekly delivery or pickup of great food. By eliminating middlemen, the subscription approach, also known as community-supported agriculture, means more money and better cash flow for the farmer and better prices for the consumer.
• To anticipate how biotech plus organic might play out in the world, especially the developing world, the precedent to examine is what went right and wrong with the green revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1969, just when Paul Ehrlich was making his predictions in The Population Bomb about the death of millions in 1970s and 1980s from famine, the yields from new strains of wheat, rice, and maize were taking off in India and Pakistan, and the Philippines had already flipped from rice importer to rice exporter. That happened because in the 1940s the Rockefeller Foundation had set out to cure world hunger with better crops and cutting-edge agricultural practices. One of their first hires was an Iowa farm lad with a doctorate, Norman Borlaug.
Famines in Asia were not conjectural in the mid-twentieth century. In 1943, a famine in India killed 4 million. Chinese famines between 1959 and 1961 killed 30 million.
Starting in Mexico, Borlaug and scores of farmers and other scientists began breeding high-yield varieties of wheat and corn that could grow anywhere in the developing world. The new strains would have to be non-hybrid so the farmers could grow new crops from saved
seeds, and they would have to be photoperiod insensitive—meaning they would grow any time of year. A major problem of previous high-yield varieties was that they toppled over from the weight of grain; Borlaug developed sturdy semidwarf varieties that put more of their growth into grain instead of stalk and could stand up through harvest. The plants didn’t have to grow tall to tower over weeds because herbicides would keep the weeds down. As the new wheat and maize were introduced to Asia, similar breakthroughs were occurring with rice in the Philippines.
Crop scientist Jonathan Gressel recalls:The task in wheat was especially onerous, as the chromosome carrying the dwarfing gene had yield-reducing genes closely linked to it. Crossing these away was not easy, as it requires rare chromosomal recombination (crossing over), meaning screening millions of plants in the field. The task was done and the varieties rapidly adopted by farmers in India and China. The tripled yield of Green Revolution crops led to food security in countries on the brink of war, which justified the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Borlaug and colleagues. The success of the Green Revolution ran counter to the predictions of economists, sociologists, political scientists, agronomists, and the gurus from the pesticide and fertilizer industries. They were sure the populace would not be flexible enough to adopt, would not have the infrastructure, the desire or ability to pay, and on and on. It is surprising how the self-appointed experts on agriculture do not know farmers, an issue reappearing with the rapid adoption of transgenics by farmers, especially by small, resource-poor farmers, against predictions by a later generation of pseudo-experts.
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