Long before I began writing about food, I lived in a rural corner of Pennsylvania and grew up seeing farmers selling out to developers. Even at an early age, I understood why they gave up. Farming was a tough way to make a living. And even as I knew by heart, and still do, the smell of a ripe tomato on a hot August day, or the feel of cornstalks on my bare legs during games of hide-and-seek, I’ve always found the country—the real country, not the one that city dwellers drive to on weekends— filled with people who’ve been battered by its demands. I am not automatically opposed to something that might make farmers’ lives easier.
So when news stories started appearing about a little-known technology called genetic engineering, and we discovered, seemingly overnight, that some 60 percent of our processed foods contain genetically engineered ingredients, I didn’t know what to think. In food circles it is taken for granted that one would oppose genetic engineering. Chefs like Alice Waters, who have fought hard to use locally grown produce in their restaurants, argue that tampering with our crops is dangerous and shortsighted.
Other opponents of the techniques have become more visible in the past two years, on occasion breaking into laboratories and ripping out plants. Existing regulations, they say, are inadequate to protect people and plants from the potentially harmful consequences of this new science. Even those who haven’t assaulted the genetically modified flora find the idea of designing plants to suit human needs godlike, aggressive, or just frightening. But most of us have no idea what genetic engineering means.
Unfortunately, there are no simple answers to the many questions I have: Are the scare stories true? Will genetically modified crops really lead to the extermination of the monarch butterfly? Did rats really become sick when they ate genetically engineered potatoes?
In search of answers, which I’ll be presenting in a series of stories for Gourmet, I’ll be interviewing farmers, both organic and “traditional,” as well as food companies and passionate opponents of genetic modification. But first I needed to know how this technique actually worked, and I needed someone to give me a rationale for using it. I needed a scientist.
I quickly found myself concentrating on Dr. Roger Beachy, who not only had pioneered the technology of genetically engineering plants but considers ignoring its benefits morally wrong. While there are others like him, as director of the new Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, which is being developed with initial funding of $146 million, he is particularly influential.
Besides, Beachy actually grew up on a farm. A fit-looking man in his mid-fifties, he spent his childhood going to 4-H meetings, raising animals, and planting gardens, first on a farm in Ohio and later in Indiana.
Fifteen years ago, Beachy made history. He was on the team that developed the first genetically engineered food crop. They injected a tomato plant with genes that gave it the capacity to fight off the tomato mosaic virus, much like immunization. Since then, there have been rapid advances in the technology and quick (some say too quick) implementation of new techniques in farming crops like soy, corn, and cotton. As many as half of these crops in the United States are now planted using seeds that have been altered to give them genetic traits that make them easier to grow.
This was a big moment in agriculture, one that was expected to change the world. But then politics—and the opinions of both ordinary and celebrated citizens worldwide—intervened. Many large companies, even while insisting that the foods so many people have rejected are safe, have decided not to use any ingredients from so-called GM crops in some of their best-known brands. McDonald’s won’t use GM potatoes for its french fries (but will use modified oil for cooking); Frito Lay won’t put altered corn in its corn chips (but its parent company, Pepsi-Cola, uses syrup made with GM corn in its soft drinks).
This posturing perplexes Beachy. Virtually none of our food as we know it came from Mother Nature without some intervention by man, he says. What really stumps him is Seagram’s decision not to use genetically modified corn for its whiskey. “Can you imagine a guy at a bar ordering a 7 and 7, and saying, ‘But not with genetically modified corn’?” he asks, with a laugh.
As irrationally as these companies seem to be behaving, I can understand their dilemma. Their stand, simultaneously for and against the technology, reflects the confusion that consumers feel.
“Talk about the tomato,” Beachy says. Through manipulation by man over hundreds of years, the tomato, he says, has evolved from a plant riddled with a toxin called tomatine into the essential ingredient in our pasta sauces and salsas. And the plump yellow corn we eat today is nothing like its ancestor, teosinte, which has small dark kernels that fall easily from the cob. Nearly everything we eat, from broccoli and apples to wheat and corn, is as different from the original as an Internet mogul is from Cro-Magnon man.
Beachy says he’s driven to discover “what makes plants get sick,” an impulse encouraged by his farm childhood: “When you see an insect larva chewing up a leaf, you ask a lot of questions.” His father eventually left agriculture to become a Mennonite minister, and Beachy himself never wanted to be a farmer. Influenced by a few good teachers, he studied biology at Goshen College, took his doctorate at Michigan State University, and did postdoctoral work at Cornell University. He focused on how viruses affect plants, he says, in part because viruses are genetically simpler than other disease-causing agents. It seemed possible to understand their mechanics.
And although it may surprise some opponents of genetic engineering, they have a few goals in common with Beachy. Much of his career has focused on moving toward sustainable food production, on reducing the use of pesticides, herbicides, and fumigants, and on halting deforestation. For the earth to heal from years of chemical damage, he says, we must accept plants genetically engineered to resist weeds and pests.
Until recently, plants were altered by mixing the male of one plant with the female of another to achieve traits other than those that might have occurred through natural pollination. For centuries, cross-breeding meant a human hand picking pollen and transferring it to another plant. In the past few decades, technology has driven the process. Radiation and chemicals have been used to create mutations that might yield desirable traits. Genetic engineering takes the technique to a whole new level, allowing the specific selection of a gene, or a set of genes, rather than the wholesale mixing of two parents. In traditional breeding, genetic modification can take from seven to 30 years, whereas with direct gene transfer, results are sometimes attained in as little as a year or two. And, rather than just mixing the genes, of, say, a grapefruit with those of an orange, it is now possible to breed some of the genes from a fish with the genes of a tomato.
That’s probably the heart of the issue in genetic modification, and the heart of the difference in perspective between people like Beachy and me and you. When I ask him how he feels about using the genes of animals in plants, he sort of shrugs, so I push for an explanation. “No one is proposing using animal genes in food right now,” he says. “The public is just too upset by that idea.” When I ask whether they have a reason to be upset, he shrugs again. Scientists, he says, consider a gene a gene, regardless of whether it’s in a fish or a tomato. A gene from a flounder that helps an organism withstand chilling is not seen as a flounder gene, but as an anti-chill gene; so when it goes into a tomato, scientists don’t think, Wow, look at that tomato with the soul of a flounder. To them, genes are simply combinations of chemicals that are similar in all living organisms, be they worms or people (see “Breaking the Code,” below).
A scientist could easily become absorbed in the possibilities that gene transfer presents, and in the elegance of the science itself. Yet unlike many of his peers, who regard those who do applied research as second-class citizens, Beachy strives to do work that finds a life beyond the scientific paper. And he’s impressed by the gains so far. In the United States between 1996 and 1998, he says, the use of insecticide on cotton crops declined by about a million pounds because the seed had been altered to make it resistant to pests. “Why would you not adopt a technology that saves on the environmental load?” he asks.
Even so, many organic farmers and environmentalists counter that Beachy and his gang of scientists are the devil’s own, out to remake the food supply for companies driven only by profit. Beachy, however, seems stunned by the opposition. “When people came out and said that this might not be safe—something we considered safe&,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “We expected that organic farmers would love it.” Corporations could have done a better job explaining the changes, he says. But he doesn’t absolve himself, or his peers. Scientists, he says, were “pretty naive” in pursuing their work without considering how the public would view changes in food, with which we all have a personal relationship. “We were quiet, and complacent about it.”
Educating people about the new science is a daunting task. Beachy and his colleagues tell me stories of people who insist they “never eat DNA,” having no awareness that every living entity contains DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), or who, when asked to define DNA, say it’s “something that scientists put in food.”
By the fall of 2001, when construction of the Danforth Center headquarters should be complete and its 15 labs fully staffed, it will be one of the largest independent facilities focusing on plant biology and its applications in sustainable agriculture, food, and nutrition. A tax credit was provided by the state of Missouri. And the biggest grants have come from the Monsanto Fund and the Danforth Foundation, which traces its beginnings to money from Ralston Purina, the food company where Donald Danforth, the center’s namesake, was once president. (Ralston Purina has no ties to the Danforth Center.) Despite the vested interests of its donors, the institution’s autonomy is crucial to Beachy, who left his job at the Scripps Research Institute to create the new center. None of the sponsors will have any claim on the work, although companies that sponsor specific research in the center can make licensing agreements to commercialize it. “I wouldn’t have taken the job if it had been funded by a single company,” says Beachy, “because then its research would have reflected only that company’s interests.”
For Beachy, the work is a crusade. His goal is to train scientists from developing countries here so they can bring the knowledge home with them. Some people feel that such an approach is forcing GM technology on other countries, yet Beachy insists that these countries are desperate for ways to stop the blights that kill their crops.
“When consumers are uninformed,” he says, “that causes changes in policy that affect the rest of the world. That’s a moral conflict.” But what about the criticism that natural diversity in South America, Asia, and Africa will be reduced by these techniques, leading to fields of monoculture (those with one crop alone), as in the U.S.? Jungles and rain forests will only be saved, he says, if the land that is currently being farmed can be made more productive.
Opponents of genetically modified foods, of course, dismiss the arguments of Beachy and other like-minded advocates as hypocritical, coming as they often do from large corporations focused on making profits from large commercial crops in this country. But Beachy’s stand has been strongly expressed in his work.
Nine years ago, Beachy and French scientist Claude Fauquet founded a research program, the International Laboratory for Tropical Agricultural Biotechnology (ILTAB), that focuses on improving agriculture in developing countries. One of ILTAB’s scientists, Nigel Taylor, tells me he’s trying to make the cassava plant both easier to grow and more nutritious. Six hundred million people consume cassava on a daily basis, but in Africa the crops are being decimated by the cassava mosaic virus, spread by the whitefly. “We have plants growing in our greenhouse which have been genetically engineered to have an elevated resistance to that virus,” he says. “We hope to send this to Africa for controlled field testing by year’s end.”
People in the U.S. might not see any benefit in these techniques, says Taylor, and he doesn’t argue that they should be adopted in this country. But, he notes, the developing world, with 80 percent of the world’s population—projected to be 90 percent by 2050—must strive to produce more food from the same cultivated area.
To the average American consumer, the whole business may seem so strange that it must be dangerous. And it’s getting stranger still. The first generation of seeds were modified to have characteristics that made them easier to farm. Now work is being done on more complex trait transfers, which may lead to foods that will more directly benefit people: A tomato with more nutrients that may keep cancer at bay, and a rice enriched with beta-carotene that could possibly prevent hundreds of thousands of cases of blindness in the developing world were recently created; and, ironically, in two years’ time Monsanto expects to launch an oil that lowers cholesterol. Why don’t people just use less oil, you ask? Well, habits are hard to change, and making processed foods healthier could save lives.
Just as we may soon be able to cure hereditary diseases because of the mapping of the human genome, we may be able to shore up our plants to resist the vagaries of weather and insect infestation. The benefits of the new techniques are clear, yet with each advance will we face a drawback? No dangers to human health have thus far been documented from genetically engineered food, yet scientists admit that all technology carries a degree of risk. Are we manipulating nature, or simply recognizing our connection to it? The debate resembles an endless Ping-Pong match. We can’t promise to feed the world’s poor, and we can’t say that we don’t need our scientists to find new ways of farming. We know that moving forward can be dangerous. But if Roger Beachy is right about the world’s need for food, the greater danger may lie in standing still.
Breaking the code
The work done by Roger Beachy and other plant biologists has been built on the discoveries made in genetics during the past five decades. Recently, the genetic map of a human being was decoded; now, the role of each gene will have to be determined. Much the same process has been going on in the world of plant research.
Every living organism, be it a rat, a tulip, or a human, is made up of proteins whose creation is directed by deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.
If DNA is the language of genes that codes for the form a species will take, then the language consists of an alphabet of only four letters: the chemical units known as A, C, G, and T. All living things share many genes—the ones that make basic biological systems work, for instance—with more than 50 percent of DNA not coded for any trait at all. That’s why we humans actually share a good percentage of our DNA with a banana, separated only by the number and the sequencing of that A, C, G, and T.
When plant genes are modified, it means that a gene is added that expresses a trait that might be desirable. In conventional plant breeding, tens of thousands of genes are exchanged between the parents through sexual crossing, even though there may be just one sought-after trait. Then, plant breeders begin a long, tedious process of “back crossing,” in which they attempt to retain the desired trait(s) and eliminate the DNA encoding for undesirable characteristics. When a plant is genetically modified by the new techniques, which people in the field call transgenic, a particular gene (or several genes) will be picked up from another plant or organism and inserted into the plant. Insertion must take place at the plant’s embryonic state so that the new gene(s) become integrated into the plant’s native genetic background and therefore all derived cells within the adult plant are transformed.
With animals, you would transform the egg. With plants, you transform the plant tissue. Scientists take a young plant and put it in a dish with sugars, nutrients, and growth hormone. This prompts cell division and results in the production of a mushy callus. That tissue is then picked off and placed in fresh medium, and in a few weeks the cells divide. Scientists refer to the result as target tissue. Then, one of two methods can be used to introduce a new gene. Scientists can use an agrobacterium, an organism which in nature can transfer genes from one place to another. Or they can use a “gene gun.” In this device, gold particles are coated with genes, pressure in the machine is built up, and shock waves allow particles to penetrate the cell. Those cells are then cultured and a complete plant is regenerated from the single cell that received the new gene. In this way, all cells in the plant contain the new gene, as do progeny from the plant.