Biotechnologists compare DNA to the digital codes that make up computer software, but computer programs are vastly simpler and better-understood than the genetic codes inscribed in DNA. According to Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, genetic codes are more like an interacting ecosystem than a linear computer program. “You can always intervene and change something in it, but there’s no way of knowing what the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 1998. “We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don’t get one rude shock after another.”46
The Hell in Health Food
Bea Stefani knows firsthand what it feels like to be a human guinea pig. She was just trying to lose a few pounds when, at the recommendation of her doctor, she started taking L-tryptophan in the summer of 1989. L-tryptophan is an essential amino acid that occurs naturally in meats, beans, brewer’s yeast, and peanut butter. In the late 1980s, it enjoyed a reputation as a popular “all natural” food supplement, recommended not only as a diet aid but as a natural treatment for insomnia, premenstrual symptoms, and depression. For Stefani, at first it seemed to work like a miracle, helping her to lose 25 pounds in two months. Then the problems started, beginning with an itching sensation.
“I had a very severe itch around my head and then my ears,” Stefani said. “Then it went all the way down my body. I thought I was allergic to some kind of soap. I changed all my laundry soap and all my bath soap but it didn’t help. I itched so bad that in my sleep, I’d be digging in my ears and make my ears bleed.”47
After the itching came aches and pains throughout her body. Stefani started losing her hair. Her skin felt hot to the touch. She began having severe muscle spasms and was admitted to a hospital. Doctors at first were baffled. She was one of thousands of people throughout the United States suffering from a previously unheard-of disease that eventually came to be called “eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome,” or EMS. Of the 5,000 people affected by the disease, 37 died and 1,500 were left permanently disabled with symptoms including paralysis and neurological problems, painful swelling and cracking of the skin, memory and cognitive deficits, headaches, extreme light sensitivity, fatigue, and heart problems. Bea Stefani still suffers severe pain, is no longer able to golf or ride a bicycle, and will probably have to take medication for the rest of her life. As EMS victims go, however, she was relatively lucky. At least her heart was spared, and she can breathe without a respirator.48
What shocked victims the most was the discovery that the cause of their disease came from the health food store. Their L-tryptophan, it turned out, was not as “natural” as the label had led them to believe. It was in fact one of the first genetically engineered dietary products to reach consumers.
Several different companies manufacture L-tryptophan, but the people who developed EMS had been consuming one particular brand made by Showa Denko, Japan’s third-largest chemical company. Showa Denko had safely manufactured L-tryptophan for many years previously using fermentation, which involves growing a large number of bacteria in a nutrient medium, similar to making a yogurt culture. To increase production, they introduced genetically modified bacteria that express higher quantities of tryptophan. Unfortunately, the modified process also apparently created a highly toxic tryptophan breakdown product. According to a study published in Science, Showa Denko’s product was contaminated with a “novel amino acid” not present in conventional tryptophan.49 The contaminant occurred in trace quantities and, because of its similarity to tryptophan itself, was difficult to detect or remove through filtration. Once ingested, however, it apparently overstimulated the body’s immune system, causing it to attack nerves and other body tissues. This immune system attack was what caused one of the disease’s most horrifying signatures: “ascending paralysis,” in which a person loses nerve control of the feet, followed by the legs, then bowels and lungs, finally requiring a respirator in order to breathe.
The Food and Drug Administration responded to the EMS outbreak by banning over-the-counter sales of L-tryptophan—not just Showa Denko’s brand, but all brands.50 EMS victims sued the company for an estimated $2 billion dollars in damages, and Showa Denko has quietly settled these cases out of court. On several occasions, FDA officials have downplayed or denied evidence linking the disaster to genetic engineering. If pressed, they will usually stress that such a link has not been proven. It has also never been disproven.51
Suppose for a moment that genetic engineering should introduce something like the L-tryptophan contaminant into your corn bread or the tomato that sits atop your salad. Were this to happen, standard food safety analyses will not detect it. They can detect the presence of known toxins based only on known properties of preexisting food. The “novel amino acid” in genetically engineered tryptophan was not a known toxin. By the standard that the FDA uses to regulate genetically modified foods, your killer tomato would be “substantially equivalent” to a safe one.
Moreover, industry’s refusal to countenance labeling of genetically engineered foods creates an additional risk. The labeling and packaging of L-tryptophan made it possible for the Centers for Disease Control to trace the link between Showa Denko’s contaminated product and eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome. In the absence of labeling for genetically modified products, however, it is impossible to determine who has been eating mutant soybeans and who has been eating natural ones. If something toxic enters the food supply, tracing it to its source will be difficult if not impossible.
The Terminator
By its very nature, the capital-intensive technology of genetic engineering both reflects and deepens a growing trend toward corporate monopolization of agriculture. “The past half century in American agriculture has witnessed not only the flow of people from farms to cities but also the flow of information—and with it economic and technological power—from farmers to agricultural corporations,” observed Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times in a 1997 op-ed piece. “The introduction of gene-altered crops, and the licensing used to protect them, is one of the final steps in the reduction of farmers to what one agricultural foundation calls ‘bioserfdom’—becoming mere suppliers of labor.”52 As gene engineers move in to dominate and monopolize the global market for seeds and medical products, they are turning the ancient craft of farming, which is still practiced successfully with stone-age tools in many parts of the world, into a high-tech “agribusiness” that must conform first to the coercions of the “free market” and second to the arcane precepts of Tomorrowland’s neoscientific priesthood. Instead of producers of food and fiber, farmers in this new world order will become mere reproducers of Monsanto’s intellectual property, like clerks at a biological Kinko’s.
“One of the ironies of the development of this issue is the contrast between the enthusiasm of food producers to claim that their biologically engineered products are different and unique when they seek to patent them and their similar enthusiasm for claiming that they are just the same as other foods when asked to label them,” notes Julian Edwards, the director general of Consumers International.53 From the point of view of companies like DuPont, Novartis, and Monsanto, the ability to patent and therefore exert corporate control over life itself is the true magic that makes biotechnology worthwhile. Genetic engineering turns seeds themselves into “intellectual property,” so the farmers using the seeds don’t own the right to save seeds from their harvest for use in the next planting. Monsanto likes to use the analogy of renting a car—at the end of the rental period, the car is returned.54 This new arrangement makes it illegal for farmers to engage in the time-honored practice of saving seeds, a practice that is especially common in the Third World. In the United States and Canada, Monsanto has pursued this concept to the point of hiring private investigators to swipe plants from farmers who didn’t buy their seeds to see if they are planting Monsanto’s transgenic varieties. Monsanto has also encouraged its farmers to sni
tch on neighbors they suspect of planting transgenics without paying for them. In Canada, Monsanto sued Percy Schmeiser, an elderly farmer, for intellectual property theft. He swears he never planted Monsanto’s transgenic seed, yet it showed up in his field, quite possibly through genetic drift—that is, contamination of his crops by windblown, genetically engineered pollen.
To tighten the noose even further, in May 1998 Monsanto acquired a technology that anti-biotech activists quickly dubbed “the Terminator.” Developed with your tax dollars by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Terminator (known formally as the “Technology Protection System”) is a genetic construct that, once fully developed, can be spliced into any crop, rendering all of the plants infertile in the second generation. This makes it the ideal platform for companies to introduce patented genetic traits they don’t want farmers to save from season to season, thus enabling Monsanto to enforce its “rights” without the use of strong-arm tactics. “The Terminator will allow companies like Monsanto to privatize one of the last great commons in nature—the genetics of the crop plants that civilization has developed over the past 10,000 years,” observed the New York Times.
After the Terminator Technology became a lightning rod for public outrage, Monsanto announced in late 1999 that for the time being it would suspend plans to commercialize the technology—over the objections, it should be noted, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As co-owner of the Terminator patent, the USDA wants to see the technology move forward so it can recoup the money it invested to develop it. Now research is proceeding into an alternative that has been dubbed the “Traitor technology”—a sort of “Terminator II” that disrupts plant reproduction until sprayed with an activator chemical.
Terminator-like technologies pose a threat even to farmers who don’t use the seeds. “Pollen from crops carrying the new trait will infect the fields of farmers who either reject or can’t afford the technology,” says Neth Dano, director of the Philippines-based SEARICE, an organization that works with farmers in Southeast Asia. “When farmers reach into their bins to sow seed the following season they could discover—too late—that some of their seed is infertile.” Monica Opole of the Community Biodiversity Development and Conservation Program in Kenya agrees. “Farmers could find that their neighbor bought the technology and it cross-pollinated into their field, leaving them with dead seeds,” she warns. “Who knows how this technology will interact with nature, especially as it spreads out over time and inevitably crosses with farmers’ varieties?”55
Regulatory Underkill
Government regulatory agencies are supposed to provide an important check on otherwise unrestrained corporate power. With respect to the planting of genetically modified crops, however, the U.S. government has done just about everything except help drive the tractor. The biotech industry excels in the fine art of cultivating Washington politicians. “Monsanto, which makes large donations to both the Democratic and Republican parties and to congressional legislators on food-safety committees, has become a virtual retirement home for members of the Clinton Administration,” observed the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Trade and environmental protection administrators and other Clinton appointees have left to take up lucrative positions on Monsanto’s board, while Monsanto and other biotech executives pass through the same revolving door to take up positions in the administration and its regulatory bodies.” Mickey Kantor, the chairman of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and a former U.S. chief trade negotiator, now sits on Monsanto’s board of directors.
“No foods in history have been subjected to as much scrutiny in advance by the federal government as those improved through biotechnology,” claims Michael J. Phillips, who himself created controversy when he left his position as director of a National Academy of Sciences panel that was reviewing the safety of GM foods to become executive director of the industry’s main lobby group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization. In reality, not only are biotech foods exempt from special health safety testing and labeling, testing for their environmental safety is equally lax. It is up to the USDA to ensure that genetically modified crops are ecologically safe. In 1999, however, the New York Times reported that the agency has not rejected a single application for a biotech crop and that many scientists say “the department has relied on unsupported claims and shoddy studies by the seed companies.”56
Far from being antagonists, government agencies and the biotech companies they regulate often appear to be a club of elite insiders, accustomed to having their way and suspicious of “outsiders” (i.e., the general public) who try to influence or question their decisions. And they have good reason to be suspicious, because their own opinion research has told them that the public’s opinion of biotech foods is sharply opposed to their own. In 1997, an opinion poll conducted by biotech giant Novartis found that 93 percent of Americans were in favor of labeling biotech foods. Other polls conducted in recent years by the USDA and Time magazine reached roughly similar conclusions. Scores of environmental, consumer, family farm, and animal welfare groups have been campaigning, litigating, protesting, publicizing, and writing letters about the issue. In 1998, when the USDA issued a proposal that would have allowed GM foods to be classified as “organic,” 275,000 people sent the agency letters opposing the proposal.
Government and industry insiders rationalize the gulf that separates them from popular opinion by dismissing citizen concerns with the usual rhetoric about the public’s ignorance. Terms such as “Luddite” and “loony” abound as the biotechnicians compete among themselves to see who can express the most contempt for the intelligence of the great unwashed masses. In the Financial Post of Canada, business columnist Terence Corcoran attacked critics of Monsanto and biotech foods as “radically slanted,” “alarmist,” “scaremongering” industry bashers. “They want to save the world from killer tomatoes,” he complained. “Frankenstein Food is now part of the language in Britain. Genetic research has been compared with Nazi experiments in genetics. Intimidated by media hysterics and an alarmed public, supermarkets no longer carry genetically modified food.”57 Gene Grabowski, a spokesperson for the Grocery Manufacturers of America, complained about the “shrill statements and outrageous tactics by people who are attacking biotech foods.”58 Europe’s rejection of biotech foods prompted Richard Morningstar, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, to complain bitterly that “politics and demagoguery have completely taken over the regulatory process” and that “the outlook for the resolution of this issue is bleak.” Europe’s impertinence led the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal to write, “In Europe, across the whole food technology front, confusion and hysteria have displaced reason and economics,” characterizing biotech critics as “zealots” and complaining that “on matters of trade and technology, the mob has been running the show for a while.”59
New Scientist, one of England’s leading science journals, offered similar reasoning in its coverage of the Arpad Pusztai affair. In retrospect, it concluded, the Rowett Research Institute’s decision to fire Pusztai was a “blunder” because it had created a “martyr,” thus giving “ammunition on a plate” to “conspiracy theorists” and environmental fanatics. “Nothing sets a nation’s pulse racing like a food scare,” it added. New Scientist’s coverage also provides a telling indicator of the consistency with which pro-biotech forces hold to their conclusions about the safety of biotech foods, regardless of new facts as they arise. When the Pusztai story first broke in August 1998, New Scientist joined the rest of the media chorus in repeating the “Con A” fallacy promulgated by the Rowett Institute: “Pusztai and his colleagues gave potatoes a gene from the South American jack bean,” it stated. “But the product of the jack bean gene, concanavalin A, has long been known to be harmful. It is one of many toxic proteins called lectins with which plants defend themselves against insects. Other lectins include ricin, the poison used on an umbrella tip to kill Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978. Iain Cubitt, chief executive of Axis Genetic
s in Cambridge, was alarmed by the publicity given to the findings. ‘Everyone has known for years that concanavalin A is toxic, so if you put this in a potato and it ends up toxic, why is that such a surprise?’ he says.”60
By February 1999, however, everyone knew that Pusztai’s potatoes had used the snowdrop lectin and not Con A. As the facts changed, therefore, so did New Scientist’s opinion about the safety of lectins. “What is still woefully unclear is what Pusztai’s experiments really mean for the safety of GM foods,” it wrote. “The lectin gene used in his potato could certainly be hugely important—and not just to the food industry. It may yet end up warding off insect pests from rice, a staple crop for millions. Pusztai’s one indisputable result—that the lectin does not in itself harm rats—is therefore reassuring.”61
Crisis Containment
“Although most U.S. consumers aren’t aware of it, ingredients made from genetically modified crops are present in various products made by Coca-Cola Co., Kellogg Co., General Mills Inc., H.J. Heinz Co., Hershey Foods Corp., Quaker Oats Co., McDonald’s Corp.—and on and on,” the Wall Street Journal reported on October 7, 1999. “Nothing would please these companies more than for Americans to remain oblivious or indifferent to this fact. But that’s hardly likely.” Pointing to the situation in Europe, the Journal noted that “regulators in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Canada are devising strategies for labeling such foods, and many other countries are considering similar actions. Increasing the likelihood that such concerns will spread to the U.S., the same organizations that incited the GMO consternation in Europe—among them Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth—are considering ways to awaken Americans to the issue. . . . If pressure builds in the U.S. to label all genetically modified foods, the impact on sales could be chilling. . . . Such a backlash would also be a devastating blow to U.S. biotechnology pioneers Monsanto Co. and DuPont Co. The premium prices they are charging farmers for genetically modified seed is only now beginning to help them recoup the billions of dollars they invested in biotechnology research and acquisitions.”62
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