Genetics of Original Sin (24 page)

Another difficulty is that scientists do not always agree
on the nature of the problems or on the interventions those problems call for. Such disagreements are almost unavoida-ble in view of the partly conjectural aspect of the discussions. The future projections on which recommendations are based are uncertain and debatable. Scientists, being prudent and critical, as required by their profession, feel obliged to underline those uncertainties, a fact the opponents of certain measures and the experts on which they call do not fail to exploit.

The resistance of certain political and economic groups against envisaged measures are not the sole causes of discord. The environmentalists themselves—a minority of them, at least—also bear some responsibility. Regrettably, the movement they have launched has too frequently let itself be dominated by a vocal minority that conflates justified concerns with ideological and political positions that are foreign to science and, sometimes, even opposed to it. Environmental protection, this eminently respectable, essential, and just aim, is increasingly linked with systematic hostility against technological innovations, whatever they may be, and even against the scientific enterprise in general, accused of being mainly responsible for the ills that are being fought, with no regard for the powerful aid it can provide to this fight for environmental improvement.

There is a surprising difference between the United States and Europe in this respect. In the United States, new technologies have mostly been accepted with little opposition. In Europe, environmentalism has become intimately mixed with political objectives. Certain extremist groups even go so far as to amalgamate technological realizations with the capitalistic system, which they hold responsible for the harmful consequences of globalization and do not hesitate to combat by any method, including violence and lawlessness. Even in its more pacifist manifestations, ecological activism too frequently bases
its stands on assertions of poor scientific credibility and on arguments that are more passionate and irrational than objective and rigorous.

The debate about nuclear power illustrates this problem. Nuclear power has drawbacks. Its installations are subject to accidents that, even though rare, can be major disasters, as shown by the Chernobyl catastrophe. There is also the serious problem of nuclear waste, whose safe disposal has not yet been satisfactorily solved. Nuclear power stations need a lot of cooling water and contribute significantly to the warming of waterways and resulting damage to aquatic life. The vulnerability of nuclear power stations against terrorist attacks is also a threat. There is, in addition, the risk, particularly acute in some parts of the world, of a drift from civilian to military applications of nuclear technology.

Despite these many drawbacks, the reality of figures must be faced. Human energy needs are enormous and growing every year. So far, most consumption occurs in industrialized nations. But there is every reason to anticipate the day when each household in China, India, and other developing parts of the world will have—or demand—a refrigerator, a television set, a dishwasher, and other appliances, if not one or two automobiles. The planet's stores of fossil fuels are finite and will be exhausted in a few centuries. In the months that have gone by while I finish writing this book, the world has increasingly been shaken by the vertiginous rise in the price of oil and its equally sudden collapse because of severe self-inflicted damage to the global financial system. Whatever these fluctuations, oil supply is bound to dry up in a not-too-distant future. Coal
and natural gas will soon follow. In addition, fossil fuels have serious defects. Their retrieval is not environmentally harmless or risk-free, and their use produces carbon dioxide, contributing to global warming. Whether renewable, nonpolluting energy sources will suffice to cover growing needs is far from certain. Few, if any, entirely reliable projections have been made. It is remarkable, in this connection—and deeply deplored by many Greens—that one of the first advocates of ecology, James Lovelock, the father of the “Gaia” model, has recently admitted, albeit reluctantly, that the energy requirements of the world will not be met without nuclear power.

All these factors should be included and weighed carefully in a rational, public debate. But such care and rigor are hard to come by. The fear of radiation, its invisibility and treacherous effects (inducing cancer, for example), its immense destructive capability when accidentally unleashed, have all been exploited to inflame the general public against nuclear power. In several European countries, including my own (Belgium, a pioneer in the development of nuclear power, on which it depends for more than 50 percent of its electricity), the decision has been made to abandon nuclear power, even though no adequate alternatives have been proposed to meet future needs.

The tide seems to be turning in this respect. In the United States, where nuclear energy has long suffered from neglect, nuclear plant construction is about to resume on a large scale. Even in Europe, voices are increasingly raised against the ban imposed by several countries on the development of nuclear power. In Belgium, the decision has been taken to prolong three nuclear power plants beyond the date foreseen for their closing.

The systematic hostility against genetically modified organisms is an even sharper illustration of ill-conceived environmentalism. How animals can be modified with the help
of cloning techniques was briefly mentioned in
chapter 16
. Much more important, in terms of economic and political fallout, is the production of genetically modified plants. The technique used to this end is different from cloning and merits a brief digression, because its history shows in exemplary fashion how fundamental research carried out for the sole purpose of understanding a natural phenomenon can lead in totally unforeseeable manner to practical applications of major importance.

The story begins with a plant disease called crown gall, more commonly known as plant cancer, which is revealed by unsightly outgrowths, or tumors, on affected trees. Early studies of this disease showed it to be caused by bacteria, which were called
Agrobacterium tumefaciens
(tumor-causing) for this reason. This was a major discovery in itself: a cancer-causing microbe! The manner in which the microbe acts proved equally remarkable. It was elucidated in the 1970s by two Belgian investigators, the late Jozef Schell and Marc van Montagu, who found that the bacteria possess a special gene-insertion mechanism by which they inoculate into the plant cell a set of genes that are then incorporated into the cell's genome and expressed to produce the tumor. The investigators further used their findings to develop a procedure in which the bacterial inoculation system is disconnected from the tumor-generating genes and exploited to insert chosen foreign genes into plant cells, in place of its nefarious cargo. Thus, a major basic discovery was turned into a new and particularly powerful biotechnological tool. This example, of which many others could be cited, deserves to be heeded by decision makers who too often are willing to support only investigations aimed at solving a practical problem and likely to lead in the short term to useful and, if possible, profitable applications.

Developed industrially, this gene-insertion technology has led to a large number of valuable applications. Thus the ability to destroy harmful insects, to defend themselves against pathogenic fungi or viruses, or to resist certain herbicides has been conferred to plants as widely different as corn, rice, soybeans, beets, potatoes, and bananas, to mention only a few.

The same gene-insertion technique has also been used to generate nutritionally enhanced plants. Rice, for example, has been treated to produce large quantities of vitamin A, the so-called yellow rice. In another application, the production of allergy-causing proteins has been turned off in soybeans and peanuts.

Other types of changes have been induced for industrial purposes. Potatoes have been engineered to produce large quantities of amylopectin, a form of starch that is widely used to make glossy paper coatings, clothing finishes, and adhesive cement (but renders the potatoes unfit for human consumption). Trees have been modified to make less lignin, the structural component responsible for their hardness, so that they can be exploited more efficiently for the production of biofuels. The list goes on lengthening. Using this technique, any desirable, genetically determined quality can be conferred by insertion of the appropriate gene into the appropriate plant.

One would expect such technology to be hailed enthusiastically, especially as some of its main benefits are expected to favor impoverished and malnourished Third World populations. This has not happened. On the contrary, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become targets of particularly vicious attacks.

A salient objection expressed in anti-GMO propaganda has been that a genetically implanted character could be transmitted to neighboring wild varieties and “contaminate” them. The objection, to say the least, is strange. Humans, without knowing the molecular mechanisms they employed, have been genetically manipulating plants and animals for ten thousand years, creating varieties that have little in common with their prehistoric ancestors. A Cro-Magnon individual suddenly transferred into the modern world would be hard put to recognize our corn, wheat, tomatoes, and other cultivated plants, or our pigs, horses, cows, goats, and sheep. All these and other domesticated varieties have been generated empirically by means of hybridization and crossing techniques selected for the sole purpose of producing organisms that were useful and profitable to humans at the time, with no concern for any environmental drawback. Here, for the first time, a change can be introduced knowingly and responsibly, under carefully controlled conditions. And the procedure is categorically rejected!

Another objection is that GMO food could be unfit for human consumption. The term “Frankenfood”—from Frankenstein, the monster-creating scientist imagined in the famous 1818 novel by Mary Shelley—is the scare word invented to highlight the danger. This argument is even less valid than the preceding one. There is no a priori reason to suspect that the organisms carrying such foreign genes would be more toxic than the natural versions of those organisms. The often evoked risk of allergies is, of course, real, as it is with many natural substances. This and other possible dangers can easily be screened by control procedures. Large populations in the United States have been consuming “Frankenfood” for years without ill effect.

In Europe, the Greens have succeeded in manipulating
public opinion to the point that growing GMOs is prohibited in several countries and, if allowed under restricted conditions, as in France, is exposed to lawless destruction. In most European countries, GMO food is authorized for consumption only on condition that the consumers be clearly warned that they are exposing themselves to “risk” at their own peril. A recent decision allowing a small amount of GMO material to be included in commercial food products without warning caused an explosion of protests. People were shown on television expressing their refusal to eat such disgusting “pig's food.” Faced with this kind of indoctrination, defenders of rational objectivity are almost powerless.

Even manipulations designed to favor the opposition's aims are rejected. Thus the “enviropig,” which has been developed for the specific purpose of protecting the environment against the harmful effects of excreted phosphorus (see
chapter 15
), has been fiercely combated. A representative of a major, international environmental defense organization called it a “Frankenpig in disguise.” Similarly, those who want GMO food banned because of its hypothetical risk of causing allergies oppose manipulations that are aimed at preventing real allergies. Vitamin A–enriched “yellow rice” is still awaiting permission to be cultivated, some ten years after its creation.

Part of the opposition to GMO technology is political and ideological, fuelled by hostility against the perceived ills of capitalism and globalization. The technology is in the hands of a few multinational companies, which, because of the large investments required, were the only entrepreneurs able to develop it. Understandably, they want a fair return on their investment; and their motivation is not always innocent. Thus, creating a plant variety resistant to a given herbicide is particularly profitable to the manufacturer of that particular herbicide, which is the only one among such substances that can prevent harmful
herbs from invading the area occupied by the herbicide-resistant plants without attacking the latter. Commercial companies are often accused of coercing Third World populations, making them dependent users of GMOs. The so-called
terminator
gene, which prevented second-generation seeds from being used to produce new crops and made purchase of new seeds necessary every year, did, indeed, fulfill this purpose; that gene has since been removed from GMOs. The fight goes on.

The argument against GMOs that most impresses the general public is that they are “unnatural.” Inserting a foreign gene into a living organism is viewed as a crime against nature, an attempt at “playing God,” an expression used by the heir to the British throne. Nature, in a revival of the doctrine defended by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is seen as sacred, inherently good, to be revered and not manipulated.

Such sanctification of nature is irrational and rests on no objective argument. Nature is neither good nor bad; it is neutral. Natural selection is blind; it has as much solicitude for the AIDS virus as for penicillin-producing molds, for the scorpion as for the poet. What favors survival and proliferation under prevailing conditions is automatically selected, whatever the nature of the advantaged organism. It is precisely one of humankind's privileges to be able to oppose this blind process and to manipulate nature at will. Humans have, from the onset, interfered with natural processes and exploited these processes for their own benefit, and it was, for them, natural that they did so. It is ironic that, at the very moment when it has become possible for us to take such actions responsibly
and knowingly, defenders of the environment oppose progress and advocate keeping to the old procedures, on the pretext that they are more respectful of nature.