by Kenneth Eade
9
Confucius said “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
Four years ago, Seth was content. He had a great job. The pay was very good, he set his own hours, had no supervisor, and got to travel all over the world. The move from San Francisco to St. Louis took a little getting used to, but the boss had a cool setup in St. Tropez and every summer Seth stayed at the compound in his own little villa, right on the beach. With the parties at night on the boss’s yacht or in town, the good life was an easy one to get used to. It was a job that was too good to be true.
The Germinat bunch worked, played and lived pretty much together. As you moved up the ranks of this new world order, it wasn’t most important how smart you were. Sure, it had its place, but the most important thing was how loyal you were. Seth was a loyal employee. A team player. The hours were long, but the pay and the perks were great, and he had a lot of down time, as well as the opportunity to work on his own projects. Seth’s friends were from the company, his girlfriends were from the company, and the guys who were married were married to girls from the company, of course. The principal rule was “don’t ever bite the hand that feeds you, and you will never be hungry.” Seth should have listened to this one because the hand he bit would later bite back, and that bite had the full faith and credit of the United States government behind it.
Seth started out in this business as one of the “good guys.” He was going to solve world hunger and malnutrition. But his company was primarily interested in preserving their monopoly on the world’s best sold pesticide – Cleanup – before its patent expired in 2000, so the first crops they engineered were crops merged with a soil bacteria that could resist glyphosate, the herbicide in “Cleanup.” The new patent for these “Cleanup Ready” crops would neither feed the world nor solve nutritional deficiencies in third world countries. But it would extend the protection of its patent, ensuring the sale of a lot of herbicide. “Cleanup Ready” crops were the backbone of the Company’s GMO products.
Seth was, however, working on a project he really believed in. It was called “Miracle Rice.” Miracle Rice was created by inserting a gene that produced beta carotene into a rice plant’s DNA, which was hoped to solve one essential problem of malnutrition in young people in underdeveloped countries – vitamin A deficiency which caused blindness. The main problem was engineering enough beta carotene in the plant. As it stood, you would have to eat 20 pounds of Miracle Rice every day to get the minimum required amount of vitamin A, something that was better imparted by supplements or even carrots. But Seth vowed not to give up.
Bill Penner, Seth’s boss, was a VP and you couldn’t get much higher than that. Bill had an office that was as imposing as his ego and drove a very cool Ferrari in his off time. He was a tyrant, so everyone at the company aspired to be on his good side. That was the key to a great promotion and, hence, a great life.
One afternoon, Seth was returning from a lunch date with a very hot co-worker, and his secretary said, “Mr. Rogan, Mr. Penner would like to see you in his office right away.”
This was his chance. Seth practically ran out of the room. The elevator couldn’t move fast enough, as he fidgeted around nervously while it slowly stopped at every floor on its way to the penthouse. Bill was more of an administrator than a scientist, but he also had impressive scientific credentials. He was somewhat of a social climbing, stuffed shirt, but Seth respected him and considered himself fortunate to be part of his team. He finally reached the penthouse floor, and took a deep breath when the elevator doors opened, then walked out at a quick pace.
The penthouse floor was all executive offices. It had an impressive conference room, and even a private restaurant for the big wigs. Seth could get used to spending more time here. Bill’s secretary showed him in. Bill was talking on the phone and seemed to ignore Seth at first, but when he saw him, he flapped his free hand in the direction of one of the two chairs in front of his massive fine walnut desk for Seth to sit down. Seth sank down into one of the plush chairs.
“I know, Walter, but we’ve been faced with this before. You just need to follow the protocol and everything will work out fine,” Bill said into the phone. “Look, I’ve gotta go. Let’s get together for lunch tomorrow and make a game plan, ok? Right-o, Walter, bye.”
Bill hung up the phone and extended his hand to Seth. “Seth, how are you man?” Seth stood up and completed the shake.
“I’m good Bill, you?”
“Couldn’t be better. How’s life treating you?”
“To tell you the truth Bill, I love this job, thank you. Of course, your St. Tropez hideout is an unexpected perk that I look forward to every year.”
“That’s why I picked you for a very special assignment, Seth. Because you’re a company man.”
“Yes I am. I’m very happy to be here.”
“Seth, your credentials are very impressive. You’re one of our only top level biologists who are published.”
“I guess I’m just a workaholic. Don’t know what to do with all the extra time,” said Seth.
“Yeah, well, we’re gonna keep you pretty busy for the next couple months.”
“How so?”
“Seth, we’ve chosen you to head a team to do a peer reviewed independent study on GMOs.”
“Which GMOs Bill?”
“Which? Well, we have a new corn that’s coming out called Bt corn. We already know that it’s safe for human consumption, but we need, you know, the test tube stuff.”
For Bill, besides being more of an administrator than a scientist (his graduate training was a JD) he was even more of a politician. For him, the “test tube stuff” was a necessary evil.
“Take whomever you need. I want only the best on this team. We want to prove once and for all that our products are safe. This comes from the high-ups.”
“I thought you were one of them,” said Seth. Bill laughed.
“But you did say independent study, right?” asked Seth.
“Yeah.”
“How can it be independent if it’s intercompany?”
“That’s why we picked you Seth. You’re published. You have the legitimacy that we need to counter crack pots like that old Scottish guy and his ridiculous claims.”
“You mean Arpad Pusztai?”
“That’s the guy.”
“He’s actually Hungarian.”
Arpad Pusztai was a Hungarian biochemist out of the Rowett Research Institute in Scotland. He was one of the only scientists to come out against GMOs and was promptly discredited by peer reviewers. Seth had never read his reports but he knew about them.
“Whatever. The President called up Blair and told him to shut that mother fucker up. He was spouting all kinds of lies about our products.”
“The President? Of the United States?”
“Yeah. Look, what we want you to do is do some independent testing on our Bt products and give us a full report so we can submit it to the EPA.”
“Not the FDA?”
“No, Seth, even though it’s a food, the EPA is the one who approves it because it’s technically a pesticide and that’s their bailiwick. You just have to evaluate that the Bt toxin in our corn is at an acceptable level for human consumption.”
“I’d be honored to.”
The EPA’s jurisdiction over the corn seemed strange to Seth. How could a food be a pesticide? People eat food, not pesticides. The FDA’s criteria for safety was a “reasonable certainty of no harm” from a proposed food. If a genetically engineered food was generally recognized as safe, if it had the same nutritional value as its non-GM counterpart, it was deemed safe for human consumption. With the exception of substances which were already known allergens to which humans were susceptible, testing was voluntary and the FDA simply relied on the reports that the industry chose to give it. As a consequence, either GM corn, soy, and/or cotton oil or a combination of all those elements were in almost every packaged food in the United States and e
veryone had already been eating them since 1994. In contrast, the EPA could allow foods with pesticides in them, as long as they were at “acceptable levels.” Seth, as Bill said, was a “company man,” so he accepted the job. How hard could it be? he thought. It’s already been found to be safe. All Seth had to do was make some checks and balances. Child’s play for an experienced genetic biologist like him.
“Great, now like I said you pick whomever you want. Your lab has a blank check.”
Bill’s phone rang and he immediately turned to it, brushing Seth off. “I gotta take this, Seth, please keep me advised of your progress.”
“Okay.” Seth got up and turned toward the door.
“Oh, Seth,” Bill called, putting one hand over the speaker of his phone.
“Yes?”
“We know the shit is safe. We just need more ammo, you know what I mean? Just get us what we need, okay, nothing more.”
“Okay.”
10
Seth picked Robin Bender as his “right hand man” for the project. Robin was a respected botanist, and he would need a leader in the field for what he was being asked to do. Their first work was a test of Bt corn. Robin would be reverse engineering the corn and Seth would test its effects on lab animals. Seth had never thought of Robin as a girl, although she was pretty attractive. Even in her lab coat, she walked with the sexy sway of a woman who was always ready to at least negotiate.
To engineer Bt corn, the gene known to produce the Bt toxin is forcibly inserted in to the DNA of corn randomly. Both the location of the transferred gene sequence in the corn DNA and the consequences of the insertion differ with each insertion. The plant cells that have taken up the inserted gene are then grown in a lab using tissue culture and/or a nutrient medium that allows them to develop into plants that are used to grow GM food crops.
Bt corn was a form of corn that was genetically modified to produce its own toxin that would kill insects, primarily targeted at the European corn borer, an enemy of corn farmers. The same technology was used for cotton. The corn was engineered using a gene found in the soil bacteria, Bacillus thuringienis (thus the name “Bt.”)
When the gene was fused with the DNA of the corn, the corn actually made its “own insecticide.” When insects ate any part of the corn plant, the toxic proteins produced by the Bt gene would penetrate the linings of their stomachs and they would quickly die.
Seth and Robin had two control groups of rats. One was fed the Bt toxin itself, in large doses. The other was fed the corn that produced its own Bt toxin.
Seth enjoyed working with Robin. Because of the pressure on them as a team, they both had assistants to do all the grunt work. Robin had brought her assistant, Shirley, from her department, and Seth had gone elsewhere in the company for his assistant, George. But when 5 pm rolled around, Shirley and George ran out like they had heard the school bell ring. That left Robin and Seth, natural workaholics, spending quite a bit of time together.
The lab was not a romantic setting by any means. It was cold and stark, and resembled a science classroom in a university. But Seth and Robin often found themselves taking their work home with them, and, as a consequence, spent many a dinner break together. Back at the lab, it was all work and no play.
“Robin, come here and look at this,” Seth said, bent over his microscope. Robin was busy working on their next control group of GMO foods.
“Seth, I’m not the biologist.”
“I know, but look at this.”
Still hunched over the microscope, and without looking up, he motioned for Robin to take a look. Robin came over to look and Seth moved aside.
“Wow, is this the control group fed the Bt?” asked Robin, not looking up.
“No, they’re fine. This is the one we fed the corn.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. And look at this.”
Seth spread a set of reports over the lab table.
“Look at the white blood cell counts. Look at this damage to the spleen.”
“Seth, you’d better double and triple check this. I don’t like the looks of this.”
“I don’t either.”
The rats fed the pure Bt toxin were fine, even at high levels. The ones who ate the corn had smaller brains, smaller livers and smaller testicles. They had irritation and structural changes in the cells of the stomach and intestines. And this was after only two weeks.
“This is looking very Jurassic Park,” said Seth.
“I think it may be the process,” said Robin, pointing to her reports. “Look at these findings. The nutritional value of the corn should be the same. But it’s 30% less.”
“Something must be happening to the corn in the process of genetic engineering that was not expected,” thought Seth.
It was always thought that bacterial genes were the best form of genes for genetic engineering. Bacterial genes were not as complicated as genes from most plants and animals, because they did not have introns, which could create hundreds or even thousands of different proteins from a single gene, meaning that the gene could not only produce the desired trait, but thousands of others, so there was no chance that the bacterial gene could produce proteins other than the ones it was intended to create.
However, when the Bt gene was first introduced into plants, it produced very little Bt protein. So, to pump up production, they added introns because those increased Bt protein production. Instead of testing for whether the introns would also cause the production of other unintended proteins, scientists went with their original assumption that the gene would produce only the Bt protein and nothing else. They may have been mistaken.
“I’d better talk to Bill.”
11
“You’re gonna have to do better than shrunken rat’s balls, Seth,” said Bill, irritatingly.
“Bill, the rats have this after ten days. Imagine the cancers they could develop in six months.”
“Rats get cancer from anything,” said Bill. “They all get organ damage. I thought I told you how important this project was, and I told you that it has already been tested and found safe.”
“You did. That’s why I’m giving you my preliminary results.”
“I want final results, Seth. Just get me a full report Seth, and don’t fuck this up.”
“I won’t.”
“I thought I was clear about this from the beginning. We just need independent data for our records.”
“Right. But what about the government?”
“What about the government?”
“Don’t they weigh in on safety?”
“Seth, you’re a loyal employee to Germinat, right?”
“Right.”
“And you get a paycheck every two weeks, right?”
“Right.”
“Well so does the government, you get my drift? They work for us, not the other way around. We are the USDA, the FDA and the EPA. ”
“Okay. Got it.”
“I hope you do.”
“I do. I do.”
“Great.”
And with a big toothy phony smile, Bill brushed Seth off. To Seth, politicians were a lot like toilets. They were all full of crap and when they got too full, they had to be flushed.
This was all settling uneasily for Seth, who was the team leader, because he didn’t like what he was seeing. Being a relatively new technology, compared to the billions of years of evolution that had produced the plant, whatever was altered could have serious effects on the future of the plant life itself and anything in its ecosystem.
Everything in each ecosystem is interrelated. The process of evolution has created an intricate balance between the plant and animal life in the system. The plant, being immobile, depends on insects to pollinate it, so they develop beautifully colored flowers and sweet nectar to attract the insects. The plant also needs to be able to distribute its seed, so, through evolution, it developed a specialized seed distribution system.
Surrounding the seeds with succulent fruit
s attracted animals, who would ingest the fruit and express the seed by spitting it out, or the seeds would come out through their waste. This process has developed over millions of years and now we come along and play God with it.
God didn’t need to create man to improve nature and all that man had managed to do in the 200,000 years he has been here is to drive a mass extinction of species. Extinction of one to five species occurs naturally. Human activities were currently pushing extinctions at 1,000 to 10,000 times the normal rate.
These ecosystems aren’t just pretty little forests that are fun to look at and play in. They provide essential services that we could not possibly perform for ourselves; like absorbing carbon emissions from human activity, thus having a cooling effect on the world’s climate, decomposing tons of waste, returning it to the soil, providing oxygen for the atmosphere, filtering water, flood control, and producing food and fuel. Whatever Seth and the company did now could affect the environment for the next seven centuries, or even longer. Seven centuries was the short time that it took to rebuild a full rainforest.
But it wasn’t Seth’s job to figure out the effects of GMOs on the ecosystem; only that they were safe for human consumption. Do the job, collect the check and benefits and don’t worry about anything else. Let someone else moralize about it. He could do that.
12
Genetic engineering was messy. To force a sequence of foreign DNA into a plant, you couldn’t just snip the desired gene from the bacteria and sew it on to the plant’s DNA sequence like an old woman working on a quilt. The foreign intruder was loaded onto tiny shards of gold and shot with a “gene gun” into a dish of plant cells.