Sex, Bombs and Burgers (30 page)

Fifteen years later, little had changed for the second Iraq war. Concerned citizens in New York, in one example, began organizing “counter-recruitment” rallies in the face of what they saw as increasingly aggressive attempts by military recruiters to draw in students from high schools in poor areas such as East Harlem. Barbara Harris, one of the protesters, passed information on to students about the financial aid they could receive for college. “If a young person wants to enlist, at least he or she knows what it’s about, what the truth about recruiting is. They can decide if that’s the best choice for them.”
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Nevertheless, the United States has moved quickly to try to fight hunger as a conflict motivator in Iraq, particularly with GMOs. In 2004 the U.S.-led Coalitional Provisional Authority government, in place since the 2003 invasion, handed control back to Iraq’s own government and issued its controversial one hundred orders. The rules were designed to transform the
country from a centrally planned economy to a market-driven one, but critics suggested they were really intended to facilitate a form of American economic colonialism. Order 81—which sounds like the ominous directive given by the evil Emperor to exterminate the Jedi in the
Star Wars
movies—clearly opened the door for American GMO producers. The order’s Plant Variety Protection clause allows for the patenting of new plant forms, or genetically modified crops. Iraq’s agricultural system was badly shattered during the first Gulf War and wasn’t allowed to fully recover because of American and British sanctions afterward, but it is still in better shape than Afghanistan’s. With the worldwide Islamic Jurisprudence Council having approved GMOs for consumption in 2000, it will only be a matter of time before Iraqi farmers are awash in Roundup Ready products. In Afghanistan, where the agriculture system is little better than it was in the Stone Age, it’ll be a while yet.

Patenting Humanitarianism

But the enemies of GMOs don’t buy the “make food not war” argument or the promises of humanitarianism put forward by purveyors. While Prince Charles has called the playing of the Africa card “emotional blackmail,” Greenpeace continues to maintain that the only people who benefit from genetically modified foods are the shareholders of the large biotech companies. The proof is in the pudding, says Greenpeace Canada’s anti-GMO campaigner, Eric Darier. The technology to provide drought-resistant or nutrient-enhanced crops is possible, but the only seeds to have been commercialized since the mid-nineties are those that are tied to chemical fertilizers. “There’s nothing new per se. There were a lot of promises and we
Greenpeace were saying that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was for Monsanto to control the seed market and to be able to push their own herbicides,” he says. “It’s a very sophisticated way of controlling the market.”
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Some farmers who plant Monsanto seeds, both in North America and in India, have in fact complained about the company’s “technology user agreements,” which contain a number of restrictive clauses. One such limitation, for example, prevents farmers from saving seeds from year to year. Critics say this clause is intended to force farmers to buy new seeds every year, but Monsanto insists it’s because GM products, just like Norman Borlaug’s hybrid seeds before them, don’t reproduce very well.

The other major impediment to humanitarian uses of GMOs, critics say, is the actual patenting of the seeds themselves. In 1999 a German plant science professor named Ingo Potrykus, the biotech incarnation of Borlaug, came up with a seed he called Golden Rice while working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
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The genetically engineered rice, which is yellow or orange in colour, produced significantly higher levels of vitamin A and was positioned to solve one of the biggest malnutrition problems in the world. The World Health Organization says up to 250 million preschool children in 118 countries suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can lead to blindness and ultimately death.
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Researchers at the Institute of Food Technologists peg the number of deaths per year at between one and two million.
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Suddenly, as the new century approached, the potential to use the newest food technology to save a significant number of lives looked like it would finally be realized.

But Potrykus found that, despite the fact that he had created his rice in an academic setting free from corporate influence,
the issue of intellectual property still crept up. Not only had Monsanto and other companies patented all their seeds, they had also protected the techniques used to make them. Potrykus’s Golden Rice, it turned out, was unknowingly in potential violation of seventy different intellectual and technical property rights held by thirty-two different companies. If the rice were to be disseminated to poor farmers, each of those rights would have to be negotiated, a fact Potrykus found deplorable:

It seemed to me unacceptable, even immoral, that an achievement based on research in a public institution and with exclusively public funding, and designed for a humanitarian purpose, was in the hands of those who had patented enabling technology early enough or had sneaked in a material transfer agreement in the context of an earlier experiment. It turned out that whatever public research one was doing, it was all in the hands of industry (and some universities).
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Potrykus soon changed his tune, though, when AstraZeneca, the large Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company that held much of the intellectual property used in Golden Rice, offered to negotiate a deal that would allow farmers free access to the patents. Potrykus then turned his criticism on the various regulatory agencies around the world, particularly in Europe, that demanded his rice jump through all sorts of hoops to get approval.

Ten years after it was invented, Golden Rice was still not available anywhere in the world. Food scientists who back GMOs are livid that such strict regulatory review is being enforced when so many people are dying. It’s a situation that illustrates
just how emotional and paranoid people in the developed world have become about food, a luxury that people in the developing world don’t have. Bruce Chassy, the associate director of the biotechnology centre at the University of Illinois, says products like GMOs should receive the same sort of regulatory fasttracking that drugs like AIDS medications get. “We can’t spend thirty months monitoring a drug while people are dying,” he says. “I have a problem with this moral equation. What is it about one to two million people dying a year from vitamin A deficiency that doesn’t make you want to try out just about anything?”

Golden Rice finally went into field tests in the Philippines in 2008 and may become commercially available to farmers there in 2011, but its long road to market highlights the problems of using GMOs for humanitarian purposes. Critics say the issue of patents slows down and discourages research into non-profitbased uses of GMOs, while advocates argue it’s the overly cautious approach of regulators, influenced by the emotionally charged scaremongering of critics, that is impeding progress.

Ultimately, barring a huge disaster, GMOs will continue their spread. With the continued growth in population, food will become scarcer, which means that conflict—war and terrorism—will likely only increase. As Chassy puts it: “There’s this giant train barrelling down the tracks at us and it’s going to cause more civil unrest and suffering in the world than anything conceivable.”

If we think there’s a lot of conflict in the world today, we ain’t seen nothing yet. If GMOs are indeed, as Prince Charles says, a giant experiment, it may just be an experiment worth trying.

People are willing to have sex with inflatable dolls, so initially anything that
moves will be an improvement.
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—EUROPEAN ROBOTICS NETWORK CHAIRMAN HENRIK CHRISTENSEN

There aren’t a lot of benefits to being a journalist. The pay isn’t great, there’s the constant stress of deadlines and people are always indirectly blaming you, “the media,” for sensationalism, blowing things out of proportion or, my favourite, reporting something “out of context,” the default excuse of people caught saying something they shouldn’t have. There are a few bright sides, though. We tend to get a lot of free coffee and sandwiches and every now and then we get to interview one of our childhood heroes (kung fu action star Jackie Chan comes to mind). And on the rarest of occasions we see or experience something that completely blows our mind and makes up for all the bad coffee.

That’s what happened to me in January 2008, while I was covering the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. After wading through the crushing crowds and the sensory overload that is the convention floor, I staggered out to the parking lot for my appointment with the “Boss,” the robot vehicle built in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University engineers. Just two months earlier the souped-up General Motors SUV had won the DARPA Urban Challenge, in which fully automated vehicles raced around a ninety-six-kilometre track in a simulated
city environment. After explaining how the vehicle worked—it used a combination of radar, laser sensors, cameras and GPS positioning—project manager Chris Urmson took me for a ride around the obstacle course set up in the parking lot.

With me in the passenger seat and Urmson in the back, the Boss lurched to life and began to drive the oval-shaped course, deftly veering around the garbage can and pylon obstacles. I sat there open-mouthed, staring in awe at the empty driver’s seat and the steering wheel as it eerily turned itself left, then right, then left again. I had a flashback to
Knight Rider
, the eighties show I watched as a kid in which David Hasselhoff drove an intelligent car named KITT. (The tricked-out Trans Am could drive itself, have conversations with people and even, in one outrageously silly episode, help Hasselhoff gamble by somehow magically controlling his dice.) Here was KITT in reality. My mind reeled at what was happening, and what it meant. Sure, I’d seen robots on TV and even a few simple ones working in person, yet here one was
chauffeuring
me around.

After a few laps around the course, the Boss unexpectedly veered left, jerking me out of my reverie. The car plowed into some garbage cans set up on the side of the obstacle course, then came to an abrupt stop. “That’s never happened before!” Urmson exclaimed from the back seat. Having seen too many movies, I immediately started thinking the machine was turning on us, as in
I, Robot
or
The Matrix
. A few tense seconds passed as I tried to remember how Sarah Connor had defeated Arnold Schwarzenegger in
The Terminator
, but then the Boss came back to life. The car calmly backed up and resumed its course. The test drive ended a few minutes later and Urmson set to figuring out what had happened. It turned out the Boss’s cameras weren’t
able to see the lane markings on that particular patch of the course, hence the swerve. There was no harm or damage, but still, I thought, robot cars evidently have some way to go before they can be trusted on the streets.

The process will indeed take some time as robotic features are added one at a time, Urmson said. Some GM vehicles already incorporate technology used in the Boss, such as lane and blindspot
detectors that alert drivers when they are swerving. Next up will be a form of robotic cruise control where the car can detect how fast or slow the vehicles in front of it are going, then adjust its own speed accordingly. Eventually, self-driving cars will be allowed on highways, since traffic there is more straightforward than on city streets, and drivers will be freed up to do other things on long-distance journeys. “It’s going to be phased in gradually but we expect a fully autonomous, self-driving car to be on the road in the next decade,” Urmson said. “That means during a long road trip, I can read, watch a movie or even sleep.” A GM executive listening in on our conversation also suggested that once the bugs are worked out, robot drivers will be safer than humans because they have no emotions. “There will be no more road rage, because it’s logical. It’s like Mr. Spock.”
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The IBM of Robots?

The reality of the impending revolution hit me that day in Las Vegas. Robots are no longer science fiction; they aren’t just automated arms in car factories or cutesy toy dogs anymore. They are here, they work (mostly) and they will soon be everywhere. Self-driving cars will be only one small phase of the coming wave. The global robotics market, made up mostly of those automated arms, was pegged at $17.3 billion in 2008 and is expected to
grow massively over the next decade as new uses take off—up to $100 billion by one estimate.
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There are now an estimated fifty-five million robots in homes around the world in the form of toys, vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and security monitors, and some people believe it won’t be long before every household has one. Indeed, the government of South Korea has mandated such a plan to be in effect by 2020. Robots will soon feed us, clothe us, wash us, keep us company and fetch us beer from the fridge. Eventually, we’ll even have robots to control those robots. Many look at the industry’s ramping growth and compare it to the early personal computer market of the seventies. “We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not physically present,” says Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
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