Windfall

by McKenzie Funk

  “The more we know about the biology of the plant,” Monsanto spokesperson Sara Duncan told me, “the more we pave the way for future advances.” For biotech companies, the field of genomics—sequencing an organism’s full DNA—provided a kind of real estate map. Rice was the first cereal crop and second plant overall to be sequenced, in 2005, five years after a rough draft of the human genome was assembled. It is relatively simple, a Rosetta stone for crop genomes, and lessons learned here can be applied to more lucrative corn and wheat. This is why three-quarters of it was already named in U.S. patent applications as of 2006. And why in the BASF-Monsanto collaboration that was becoming a climate-ready juggernaut, rice was the model crop.

  Out of more than thirty-five hundred mosquito species, the second to have its genome decoded was Aedes aegypti. The first, in 2002, was Anopheles gambiae, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s deadliest carriers of malaria and an important target of the Gates Foundation. After a researcher discovered that Anopheles gambiae is attracted to foul odors, the world’s richest foundation once spent $775,000 to test traps that smelled like human feet and Limburger cheese. The Gates Foundation has notably spent not a penny on helping the world cut carbon emissions. “We believe the best way for the foundation to address climate change is to help poor farmers adapt,” read an overview of its agricultural strategy. A stalk of GM rice seems nothing like a seawall, but to a technocrat it is the same—another patch, another software update for a world increasingly programmed by us.

  • • •

  OUTSIDE THE GREENHOUSE that was one of the BASF-Monsanto collaboration’s principal pieces, it was Belgium in wintertime when I arrived, but inside the twenty-six-thousand-square-foot space it was equatorial and hot—Deutsche Bank’s Wall Street tent all over again, only without the anaconda. The temperature was between eighty-two and eighty-six degrees, Marnix Peferoen told me as he removed his sweater, and the humidity was 70 percent. To my urban nose, it smelled rather like a brewery. The rice plants, in clear, plastic pots, each equipped with its own bar code and RFID transponder, were arrayed in perfect rows below thirty-thousand-lux lamps. The greenhouse was mostly empty of people, but a constant stream of Europop, synthetic and overproduced, blared from suspended speakers as we approached what was known as the Walking Plant System. Conveyer belts snaked through the building—“The same belts as in your car,” Peferoen said—jerkily moving seedlings from one side to another as robots snatched some out of the passing parade. There were more than fifty thousand plants, and they would be here until they flowered—three to four months. They had probes to measure their water levels and tags to mark their age. The level of drought stress was seen in the plants themselves: dark green healthy, light green thirsty. “We mostly hit them with drought at the time they’re flowering,” Peferoen said, “but we can also decide to keep water low the whole time.” In the summer, he said, the greenhouse’s blinds were drawn after 6:00 p.m., and it became “a complete black box”: shaded from the outside world so that the Oryza japonica plants would get only eleven and a half hours of daylight, as they would have in the Asian countryside. For experimental integrity, a computer randomized the seedlings’ placement in the room, and among them were seedlings free from any climate-ready genes, controls there to suffer—presumably worse—alongside their enhanced counterparts.

  We followed the conveyor belts to a tall box at the far corner of the greenhouse: the “imaging cabinet,” or ARIS—Automatic Rice Imaging System—which was like an MRI machine for plants. Each seedling visited it once a week to be photographed from seven different angles, including through the walls of its tailor-made clear pot. The goal was to measure “vegetative parameters.” In the images, total pixel area was a proxy for total biomass—“Data is extracted from the pixels. It’s the pixels,” Peferoen said, nodding excitedly—and root development was judged by the number and width of lines photographed underneath the plant. The seedlings raced through the machine at a blinding pace, eight hundred an hour, seven thousand a day, each illuminated for a few seconds by flashes of light, and were then cycled back into their artificial paddy. The images were 3 megabytes apiece, Peferoen said; approximately 50,000 pictures a day meant 150,000 megabytes of data a day. So they waited until Internet traffic was low to transmit it all to BASF’s computers for analysis, sending it out overnight in batches as the rest of Belgium slept.

  Ghent, Belgium, was one of the birthplaces of biotechnology, where in the early 1980s scientists learned how to transport genes into plants by infecting them with bacteria. By the time I visited this BASF subsidiary, CropDesign, the industry had grown so much that I had three media handlers from three different countries. The German, the American, and the Belgian had sat me for hours at a mustard yellow table in a room with mustard yellow walls and buffeted me with PowerPoint presentations. The German provided stats on GM crops: In 1997, the year before BASF, the “chemical company,” had jumped into genetic modification, 25 million acres were planted worldwide. In 2011, 400 million. In 2020, herbicide tolerance—the trait that made the industry’s fortunes up to now—would be worth less than 100 million euros. The traits that constituted what CropDesign called “intrinsic yield”—drought tolerance, salt tolerance, stress tolerance—would be worth 2 billion euros. The Belgian explained what Norman Borlaug had achieved in the 1960s with the Green Revolution: density. “Take the individual corn plant forty years ago and the individual corn plant today,” he said, “and the difference is not that much. The big difference is that when I was a child, I could run through the cornfields and build houses in the cornfields. Now there is no way you could get in between them.” Monsanto had recently pledged to double corn, soybean, and cotton yields.

  CropDesign’s CEO came in to explain that what I was seeing was part of the company’s trademarked TraitMill process, a “highway from gene selection to patent filing.” Promising creations from the greenhouse were sent on to field trials in the United States or Brazil or to another BASF subsidiary in Germany, where they documented changes to amino acids with every tweaked gene. So far, 150,000 patents had been filed—one for every amino change. “We only file when we see validated data in the crop,” he clarified. Already, they had identified traits for 50 percent higher yield, 30 percent larger seeds. The CEO’s pride in the system shone through bursts of corporate-speak. “TraitMill is the largest validated crop-based platform for the development of productive traits,” he said, beaming. “And it’s IP-protected!”

  • • •

  THE TYPICAL FLIGHT RANGE of Aedes aegypti, genetically modified or not, is about a hundred meters, and the walk between Luke Alphey’s office and Oxitec’s mosquito nursery was at least twice that. I still hadn’t seen an OX513A, so before he and I grabbed lunch, we took a stroll through the industrial park. Dengue comes in boom-and-bust cycles, he reminded me. “The only time anyone really notices,” he said, “is like when albopictus showed up in the United States, or now dengue in Key West.” The important thing was to keep our resolve during the inevitable lulls.

  Inside the nursery, staffers and grad students in white lab coats huddled over microscopes, and in one room I peered through an eyepiece to see a modified Aedes larvae glowing red. “All of our constructs have these fluorescent markers,” Alphey said, thanks to coral and jellyfish genes Oxitec had inserted. He pushed open a door, and we stepped into what looked like an oversize closet. It was a steady eighty-two degrees inside. Two dozen BugDorm-brand insect cages ringed the moldy walls. The overhead lamp emitted a distracting electric hum. To the side stood the unlucky employee who spent her whole day inside this humid, mosquito-filled room, which seemed a decent analogue for Key West or the Caymans but for the lack of sunsets. Here Oxitec was producing two million mosquitoes a week, Alphey said. He showed me a tray of water with dozens of larvae and a few that had already become pupae, which swam around looking like tiny, tiny tadpoles. “In the light, they all huddle in a corner,” he said. “See? In the dark, they mellow out.”
He showed me a foot-long strip of paper that had perhaps forty thousand dried eggs. They kept for a long time—long enough to ship around the world. Add to water, put in a vacuum, get mosquitoes: “You can get a nice synchronous emergence.” He showed me a small plastic cup barely filled with what he said were a million eggs. They looked like coffee grounds.

  The adult OX513As clung to the walls of the BugDorms, hundreds per cage. When they flew, there was barely a sound. Aedes aegypti doesn’t have the annoying buzz of other species, and it seemed appropriate that warmer temperatures might affect its range: Like climate change, people didn’t really notice it until it was in their face—and then they tried all manner of crazy things to stop it. Below the cages, I noticed, was “the Executioner,” a handheld bug zapper shaped like a tennis racket: insurance for whenever a mosquito made a break for it. “What we’re doing in here is optimization,” Alphey said. Oxitec wasn’t shipping these eggs to the tropics, not yet. “We want to just try and improve the rearing process, or the cost gets unbearable. What’s the best number of adults to have in the cage, and how long do you keep them in the cage, and how do you feed them, and when?” For now, Oxitec fed the mosquitoes fish food. “Like you give a goldfish,” Alphey said, “but you can grow them on yeast powder, dog biscuits, cat food—whatever organic material happens to be in the water.” For all the groundbreaking genetics, there was also this mundane side of the business, he said: “How do you make large numbers of inexpensive yet fit, healthy, sexy male mosquitoes?”

  It was a question befitting our Anthropocene epoch. Godlike power was beginning to feel normal, even tedious. In the United States, genetically modified crops have penetrated the market almost completely since their arrival less than twenty years ago: They make up 94 percent of our planted cotton, 93 percent of our soybeans, 88 percent of our corn. They have spread to two dozen other countries, and the value of the global GM market has jumped by 7,500 percent. The numbers will only rise along with the temperatures, for the world is on the verge of seeing not only crops with drought-resistant tweaks but millions more farmers—Chinese, Nigerian, Indonesian, Brazilian—with just enough money to buy genetically modified seeds. It is Oxitec, not Monsanto, that may be the true harbinger: Scientists are warming up to the idea of modifying bacteria and wild animals—not just crops—to adapt to the new climatic reality. In 2012, a study by NYU professor S. Matthew Liao proposed reengineering humans themselves to produce smaller, less resource-hungry, less emissions-intensive offspring. Months later, the first conferences on using “de-extinction” and “synthetic biology” to preserve the natural world were convened by the National Geographic Society and Wildlife Conservation Society. The Sahel need not become the Sahara if we can create a GM bacteria that induces plants’ roots to grow. The polar bear need not ever go extinct. We can already manipulate stem cells. We can already reconstruct lost genomes. We can already clone. If a species disappears because Arctic sea ice disappears, we already have the power to bring it back to life.

  Compared with what the future could hold, Alphey’s mosquitoes were straightforward. All the OX513As in the room came from a single forebear Alphey had created a decade ago. From then on, this line had not been a GM program so much as a breeding program. “When I say we make transgenics by injecting DNA into their anuses, people then think that every one of those millions has to be injected. And they think, that’s never going to be economical—and they’d be right but wrong. You do that once.” I tried to follow along as he excitedly explained the process. In 2002, after he’d made the synthetic DNA, a technician had lined up a bunch of tiny Aedes eggs, all facing in the same direction. “Then you inject them with this fancy laser needle,” he said. “The cells that form at the posterior pole are the GM-line precursors. They’re going to become the sperm and the eggs when this little egg turns into an adult. If you can get your DNA into one or more of those cells and it’s taken up into chromosomes—which is a very low-efficiency process—then a proportion of the sperm or eggs that the adult produces will have your bit of DNA in it.” As Alphey talked, a renegade mosquito alit on his neck, and he mindlessly swatted at it. It was old-fashioned but deadly effective.

  TWELVE

  PROBLEM SOLVED

  OUR GEOENGINEERED FUTURE

  Nathan Myhrvold’s new laboratory was unmarked and, from the outside, unremarkable: a 27,500-square-foot former Harley-Davidson service center in an industrial suburb of Seattle, near a plumbing-supply distributor and the evangelical Blue Sky Church. Among the cars in its parking lot, I counted an equal number of Priuses and Mercedes-Benzes—three and three—and near its entrance I saw a growing pack of technology bloggers and local television crews, here for a ribbon cutting. We were allowed inside before Myhrvold arrived, and present already were some of his scientists and inventors in white lab coats, standing casually at their stations, spread out across a checkerboard floor. We could not yet see any of the lasers, and we could not see any of the mosquitoes that we understood would be shot down by the lasers. Nor could we see the solution to climate change, even if, rumor had it, it was being invented and patented here.

  When Myhrvold showed up, he was flanked by Maria Cantwell, Washington State’s junior senator. He was bearded and rumpled, all boyish smiles and gesticulating arms, while she had a studied calm. He wore loose-fitting khaki pants and a jacket but no tie, while she wore a black pantsuit. The conceit of the media event was that Myhrvold was giving Cantwell a private tour, and we in the media clustered around them, politely stepping out of view of one another’s cameras when the need arose, so as not to ruin the effect. “This is Philip,” Myhrvold said at the first station, introducing a young man in a lab coat. “He just got his Ph.D. at Princeton.” Philip showed them software that modeled malaria epidemics in Madagascar. The research, Myhrvold explained, was partly underwritten by Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation—which would try almost anything to stamp out mosquito-borne malaria. “Bill is an investor in our company,” he said. “This stuff is sort of pro bono, but some of it, I think, will have a very profitable spin-out—we’ll do well by doing good.”

  At Microsoft, Myhrvold had been Gates’s in-house futurist and chief technology officer. At Cambridge, he had been a theoretical physics researcher under Stephen Hawking. He was a subject of Malcolm Gladwell profiles, darling of TED talks, and author of a 2,438-page, fifty-two-pound “modernist” cookbook—a man both celebrated and feared in tech circles. The grand opening of this lab, those of us following the tour understood, was meant to be a retort to critics of his post-Microsoft business, a $5 billion investment firm called Intellectual Ventures (IV). The company was accused of being a “patent troll”: quietly buying up patents without producing anything of its own, and using the patents to extract licensing fees from those who did produce things—Verizon, Intel, Nokia, Sony—anytime it decided its intellectual property rights were violated. Its business model, critics said, was to threaten to sue. At the time of the ribbon cutting, IV had twenty-seven thousand known patents, though outside consultants believed a higher number was hidden among more than a thousand affiliated shell companies. IV spent a million dollars a year lobbying against patent reform. But in articles and interviews, Myhrvold rejected the “troll” label: The company had earned more than a billion in royalties but at the time of the tour had yet to sue anyone. And the lab was proof that IV was creating its own patents—some “five hundred to six hundred a year,” he said.

  From Philip’s computer bay, Myhrvold led Cantwell and the rest of us into a conference room where eleven chairs flanked a long table. Flat-screen monitors hung in all four corners of the room, all showing the same video: a mosquito flapping along in slow motion until it was hit by a laser beam and it spiraled out of view. “Here’s where we get together with various scientists to brainstorm new ideas,” Myhrvold said. “We bought the fancy table and chairs in a bankruptcy auction. We’re trying to expand our activities, making these long-range bets, whereas the rest of th
e world is retrenching.” In the next room, he described a kind of hyper-insulated cooler to keep vaccines refrigerated for months in places without consistent electricity. “It’s like a Coke vending machine,” he said. We then donned goggles and filed through a door marked with a caution sign: “Big Scary Laser. Do not look into beam with remaining eye.” Inside IV was developing a method to test for malaria using lasers rather than blood work, another Gates project. In a nearby room was the insectary: a mosquito-filled closet much like the one I saw at Oxitec, BugDorms and all. “We grow our own,” Myhrvold said to Cantwell. “If ever you need to convince some people in Congress to do the right thing, you just need to hold a meeting here and lock the door.” A doctor in a lab coat was standing by. “She has a Ph.D. in mosquitoes,” he said. He gestured behind her. “See, there’s the raisins. Turns out we mostly feed them raisins.”

  With the cameras rolling, Myhrvold soon offered Cantwell a steaming ball of liquid-nitrogen-dipped citrus foam inspired by his cookbook. But the main event was the mosquito zapper: We huddled over a partial prototype, a camera zoom lens that captured the bugs mid-flight so their flight patterns, wing-beat frequencies, and speeds could be analyzed. The idea was to be able to distinguish enemies from innocents—mosquitoes from bumblebees, bloodsucking females from innocuous males. In the final design, a low-powered laser would do the targeting, tracking the bugs on a screen as if it were a video game, or the cold war, and a more powerful laser would take them out. Cantwell climbed up a ladder to watch mosquitoes being targeted inside a ten-gallon aquarium—a green flash every time it locked on. “It’s hitting about every two seconds,” she said. “It can do about fifty per minute,” Myhrvold corrected her.