GMO’s Are Dead, Folks, Science Has Already Moved On by Richard Manning

Once upon a technologically optimistic time, the founders of a swaggering
biotech startup called Calgene bet the farm on a tomato. It wasn’t just any
old tomato. It was the Flavr Savr, a genetically engineered fruit designed to solve a problem of modernity….author Richard Manning tells us GMO’s are Dead, Science has already moved on
to ‘marker assisted breeding’ without the inevitable random disasters of gene-splicing.

Wired Magazine: GMOs Are Dead, the Science Has Moved On

Web Note:

Aside from several factual inaccuracies in this article (GE crops overall
have not reduced pesticide use, but rather increased their use; genetically altered cotton
offers only a short-term reduction in pesticide use — after a few years weed
and pest resistance causes more herbicide and pesticides to be used), this
article by Richard Manning in Wired magazine is of major importance.
Gene-mapping, combined with organic production and traditional cross-breeding (sometimes called “Marker Assisted Breeding), not gene-splicing, life form patents, and industrial agriculture, represents the real future of farming.

Ronnie Cummins

GM WATCH daily http://www.gmwatch.org
—
Researchers are beginning to understand plants so precisely that they no longer need anything as crude as transgenics to achieve traits like drought resistance, durability, or increased nutritional value.

Robert Goodman, the former head scientist at Calgene who now works with the
McKnight Foundation, overseeing a $50 million program that funds genomics
research in the developing world. “The public argument about genetically
modified organisms, I think, will soon be a thing of the past,” he says. “The science has moved on.”
—
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/food.html?tw=wn_tophead_4

Super Organics

Forget Frankenfruit – the new-and-improved flavor of gene science is
Earth-friendly and all-natural. Welcome to the golden age of smart breeding.

By Richard Manning

Back when we all lived in villages, getting fresh, flavorful tomatoes was
simple. Local farmers would deliver them, bright red and bursting with
flavor, to nearby markets. Then cities and suburbs pushed out the farmers,
and we began demanding our favorite produce year-round. Many of our tomatoes
today are grown in another hemisphere, picked green, and only turn red en
route to the local Safeway. Harvesting tomatoes this way, before they’ve
received their full dose of nutrients from the vine, can make for some
pretty bland fare. But how else could they endure the long trip without spoiling?

Flavr Savr was meant to be an alternative, a tomato that would ripen on the
vine and remain firm in transit. Calgene scientists inserted into the fruit’s genome a gene that retarded the tendency to spoil. The gene-jiggering worked – at least in terms of longer shelf life.

Then came the backlash. Critics of genetically modified food dubbed the
Flavr Savr “Frankenfood.” Sparked by the Flavr Savr’s appearance before the
US Food and Drug Administration, biotech watchdog Jeremy Rifkin set up the
Pure Food Campaign, stalling FDA approval for three years and raising a
ruckus that spread to Europe. When the tomato finally emerged, it demonstrated that there was no accounting for taste at Calgene. Flavr Savr wasn’t just oddly spelled; it was a misnomer. Even worse, the fruit was a
bust in the fields. It was highly susceptible to disease and provided low yields. Calgene spent more than $200 million to make a better tomato, only to find itself awash in red ink. Eventually, it was swallowed by Monsanto.

But the quest for a longer-lasting tomato didn’t end there. As the Flavr
Savr was stumbling (Monsanto eventually abandoned it), Israeli scientist
Nachum Kedar was quietly bringing a natural version to market. By crossbreeding beefsteak tomatoes, Kedar had arrived at a savory, high-yield fruit that would ripen on the vine and remain firm in transit. He found a
marketing partner, which licensed the tomato and flooded the US market
without any PR problems. The vine-ripened hybrid, now grown and sold worldwide under several brand names, owes its existence to Kedar’s knowledge of the tomato genome. He didn’t use genetic engineering. His fruit emerged
from a process that’s both more sophisticated and far less controversial.

Welcome to the world of smart breeding.

The tale of the Flavr Savr is a near-perfect illustration of the plight of
genetically modified organisms. A decade ago, GMOs were hailed as
technological miracles that would save farmers money, lower food prices, and
reduce the environmental damage unintentionally caused by the Green
Revolution – a movement that increased yields but fostered reliance on
chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and wanton irrigation. Gene jocks said
they could give us even greater abundance and curb environmental damage by
inserting a snip or two of DNA from another species into the genomes of
various crops, a process known as transgenics.

In some cases, GMOs have fulfilled their promise. They’ve allowed US farmers
to be more productive without as much topical pesticide and fertilizer [wrong!]
[???]. Our grocery stores are stuffed with cheaply produced food – up to 70
percent of all packaged goods contain GM ingredients, mainly corn and
soybean. GM has worked even better with inedible crops. Take cotton. Bugs
love it, which is why Southern folk music is full of tunes about the boll
weevil. This means huge doses of pesticides. The world’s largest cotton
producer, China, used to track the human body count during spraying season.
Then in 1996, Monsanto introduced BT cotton – a GMO that employs a gene from
the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis to make a powerful pesticide in the
plant. BT cotton cuts pesticide spraying in half; the farmers survive.

But while producers have embraced GMOs, consumers have had a tougher time
understanding the benefits. Environmentalists and foodies decry GMOs as
unnatural creations bound to destroy traditional plants and harm our bodies.
Europe has all but outlawed transgenic crops, prompting a global trade war
that’s costing US farmers billions in lost exports. In March, voters in
Mendocino County, California, banned GMO farming within county lines.

Opponents have found an ally in crop scientists who condemn the
conglomerates behind transgenics, especially Monsanto. The company owns
scores of patents covering its GM seeds and the entire development process
that creates them. This gives Monsanto a virtual monopoly on GM seeds for
mainline crops and stifles outside innovation. No one can gene-jockey
without a tithe to the life sciences giant.

Which brings us back to smart breeding. Researchers are beginning to
understand plants so precisely that they no longer need transgenics to
achieve traits like drought resistance, durability, or increased nutritional
value. Over the past decade, scientists have discovered that our crops are
chock-full of dormant characteristics. Rather than inserting, say, a
bacteria gene to ward off pests, it’s often possible to simply turn on a
plant’s innate ability.

The result: Smart breeding holds the promise of remaking agriculture through
methods that are largely uncontroversial and unpatentable. Think about the
crossbreeding and hybridization that farmers have been doing for hundreds of
years, relying on instinct, trial and error, and luck to bring us things
like tangelos, giant pumpkins, and burpless cucumbers. Now replace those
fuzzy factors with precise information about the role each gene plays in a
plant’s makeup. Today, scientists can tease out desired traits on the fly –
something that used to take a decade or more to accomplish.

Even better, they can develop plants that were never thought possible
without the help of transgenics. Look closely at the edge of food science
and you’ll see the beginnings of fruits and vegetables that are both natural
and supernatural. Call them Superorganics – nutritious, delicious, safe,
abundant crops that require less pesticide, fertilizer, and irrigation – a
new generation of food that will please the consumer, the producer, the activist, and the FDA.

Nearly every crop in the world has a corresponding gene bank consisting of
the seeds of thousands of wild and domesticated relatives. Until recently,
gene banks were like libraries with millions of dusty books but no card
catalogs. Advances in genomics and information technology – from processing
power to databases and storage – have given crop scientists the ability to not only create card catalogs detailing the myriad traits expressed in individual varieties, but the techniques to turn them on universally.

One of the smart breeder’s most valuable tools is the DNA marker. It’s a tag
that sticks to a particular region of a chromosome, allowing researchers to
zero-in on the genes responsible for a given trait – a muted orange hue or
the ability to withstand sea spray. With markers, much of the early-stage
breeding can be done in a lab, saving the time and money required to grow
several generations in a field. Once breeders have marked a trait, they use
traditional breeding tactics like tissue culturing – growing a snip of plant
in a nutrient-rich medium until it’s strong enough to survive on its own.
One form of culturing, embryo rescue, allows breeders to cross distant
relatives that wouldn’t normally produce a viable offspring. This is
important because rare, wild varieties often demonstrate highly desirable
characteristics. After fertilization, a breeder extracts the premature
embryo and fosters it in the lab. Another technique – anther culture –
enables breeders to develop a complete plant from a single male cell.

The science behind some of these techniques makes transgenics look
unsophisticated. But the sell is simple: Smart breeding is the best of transgenics crossed with the best of organics. It can feed the world, heal the earth, and put an end to the Big Ag monopoly.

Take it from Robert Goodman, the former head scientist at Calgene who now
works with the McKnight Foundation, overseeing a $50 million program that
funds genomics research in the developing world. “The public argument about genetically modified organisms, I think, will soon be a thing of the past,” he says. “The science has moved on.”

In the mid-’80s, a grad student in plant breeding at Cornell University was
handed a task that none of her peers would take. Her name: Susan McCouch.
Her loser assignment: Create a map of the 40,000 genes spread across the
rice genome. In 1988, the completion of that work would be heralded as a
scientific breakthrough. Sixteen years later, it’s beginning to shake corporate control of science.

A genome map is a detailed outline of an organism’s underlying structure.
Until McCouch came along, rice – the most important food for most of the
world’s poor – was an orphan crop for research. Big Ag was interested only
in the Western staples, wheat and corn. But good maps enlighten – geologists
once looked at maps of South America and Africa and figured out that the
edges of the two continents fit together, giving rise to the idea of plate
tectonics. McCouch’s map was just as revealing. Researchers compared it to
the genomes of wheat and corn and realized that all three crops, along with
other cereal grasses – more than two-thirds of humanity’s food – have
remarkably similar makeups. The volumes of research into corn and wheat
could suddenly be used to better understand developing world essentials like
rice, teff, millet, and sorghum. If scientists could find a gene in one,
they’d be able to locate it in the others.

By extension, characteristics of one crop should be present in related
plants. If a certain variety of wheat is naturally adept at defeating a
certain pest, then rice should be, too; scientists would just need to switch
on that ability. McCouch started her project as a way to unlock the door to
the rice library; it turned out she cut a master key.

Still at Cornell, McCouch is now learning how crossbreeding domesticated
rice with wild ancestors can achieve super-abilities that neither parent
possesses. “We’re finding things like genes in low-yielding wild ancestors,
which if you move them into cultivated varieties can increase the yields of
the best cultivar,” McCouch says. “Or genes of tomatoes that come out of a
wild background – they make a red fruit redder. We also have ways to make
larger seeds, which can yield bigger fruit.” Generations of unscientific
plant breeding have inadvertently eliminated countless valuable genes and
weakened the natural defenses of our crops. McCouch is recovering the
complexity and magic.

Food scientists around the world are picking up on her work. In China,
researcher Deng Qiyun, inspired by McCouch’s papers, used molecular markers
while crossbreeding a wild relative of rice with his country’s best hybrid
to achieve a 30 percent jump in yield – an increase well beyond anything
gained during the Green Revolution. Who will feed China? Deng will. In
India, the poorest of the poor can’t afford irrigated land, so they grow
unproductive varieties of dryland rice. By some estimates, Indian rice
production must double by 2025 to meet the needs of an exploding population.
One researcher in Bangalore is showing the way. H. E. Shashidhar has
cataloged the genes of the dryland varieties and used DNA markers to guide
the breeding toward a high-yield super-rice. In West Africa, smart breeders
have created Nerica, a bountiful rice that combines the best traits of Asian
and African parents. Nerica spreads profusely in early stages to smother
weeds. It’s disease-resistant, drought-tolerant, and contains up to 31
percent more protein than either parent.

This is not exclusively a matter of crafting new rice varieties in the
developing world. Irwin Goldman, a horticulture professor at University of
Wisconsin-Madison, cites McCouch’s work as critical to the progress he’s
made with carrots, onions, and beets. For example, he has spawned a striped
beet through some sophisticated genome tweaking – and in the process
revealed methods to improve the appearance and taste of all sorts of
vegetables.

Beet genes make two pigments of a class of chemicals called betalain. When
both are present, the beet is red. Switch off one gene, as happens in
natural mutations, and the beet is gold. Switch it on and off at different
stages and the beet becomes striped. Creating a striped beet is not hugely
important by itself – striped heirloom varieties date back to 19th-century
Italy. What’s significant is that Goldman pinpointed the genes responsible
for the trait and figured out how to turn them on.

This type of smart breeding may one day lead to something as useful as a
high-yield rice that’s naturally rich in beta-carotene, which our bodies
convert to vitamin A. For years, genetic engineers have been trying to
introduce so-called golden rice to Asia, where vitamin A deficiency causes
millions of people to go blind every year. Creating the GM version wasn’t
easy – it required the insertion of two daffodil genes – but it wasn’t
nearly as difficult as getting it to the people. As with the Flavr Savr,
golden rice drew the ire of the Frankenfood crowd while running afoul of
some 70 patents. A natural counterpart wouldn’t encounter such problems.
Far-fetched? Maybe, considering that there’s no known naturally occurring
rice containing beta-carotene. [this is contradicted by Syngenta] Then
again, we never thought carrots had vitamin E – until Goldman found some.

By scouring the carrot gene bank, Goldman discovered several exotic
varieties of carrots (ranging in color from yellow to orange, red, and
purple) that make vitamin E. Capitalizing on that native ability is a matter
of tagging the relevant genes and crossbreeding the wild relatives with
ordinary, everyday carrots. Gene bank searches are also revealing a whole
host of antioxidants, sulfur compounds, and tannins – chemicals that bring
sharp color and strong tastes – that have been stripped out of our
lowest-common-denominator crops over the centuries. Many of these qualities
not only fight cancer and increase the nutritional value of our vegetables,
but also make them taste better while helping plants fight disease. We now
have the ability to bring these traits back.

And we can do it quickly. It often takes seed companies several years to
establish a new variety. To recover their investment, they release seeds
that don’t usually pass on the parents’ traits, forcing farmers to buy new
seed every year. Smart breeding, by contrast, is faster and cheaper because
much of it can be done in the lab – reducing the time and expense of growing
countless varieties in the field. Goldman’s work is funded by university
dollars, which allows him to give away the spoils. He links up with local
organics growers, farmers’ markets, and the expanding counter-agribusiness
food movement and hands out open-pollinated seeds – ag’s version of open
source.

Richard Jefferson is an iconoclastic American bluegrass musician living in
Australia. He’s also a brash biotechnologist intent on wrestling control of
our crops away from Big Agriculture. As head of Cambia (the Center for the
Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture), a plant
science think tank in Canberra, he’s sowing the seeds of a revolt, citing
the open source ethos of Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman as inspiration.
“In the case of almost every single enabling technology, the corporations
have acquired it from the public sector,” he says. “They have the morals of stoats.”

If McCouch and Goldman are making an end run around GMO by improving on
methods that predate genetic engineering, Jefferson is taking a direct
approach. All three scientists use an expanded knowledge of plant genomes to
create new crop varieties. But where McCouch and Goldman do gene bank
searches and study genome maps to figure out which plants to bring together,
Jefferson digs into the genome itself and moves things around. He doesn’t
insert anything – he calls transgenics “hammer and tong science; as dull as
dishwater” – but he’s not above tinkering. His big idea: manipulate plants
to teach ourselves more about them.

Jefferson made a name for himself as a grad student in 1985 when he
discovered GUS, a clever little reporter gene that causes a glow when it’s
linked to any active gene. He distributed GUS to thousands of university and
nonprofit labs at no cost – but charged the Monsantos of the world millions.
He used the money to establish Cambia, which invents technologies to help
developing world scientists create food varieties without violating GMO patents.

Transgenic researchers treat the genome like software, as if it contained
binary code. If they want an organism to express a trait, they insert a
gene. But the genome is more complicated than software. While software code
has two possible values in each position (1 and 0), DNA has four (A,C,T, and
G). What’s more, a genome is constantly interacting with itself in ways that
suggest what complexity theorists call emergent behavior. An organism’s
traits are often less a reaction to one gene and more a result of the
relationship between many. This makes the expression of DNA fairly mysterious.

Jefferson is out to master this squishy science with a practice he calls
transgenomics. You are different from your siblings because your parents’
genes were unzipped during reproduction and the 23 chromosomes on each half
rejoined in a unique pattern. The same thing happens in plants. Jefferson
has modified native genes to act as universal switches that turn a plant’s
latent genes on and off. Simply put, he’s rigging the reproductive shuffle.

In a process he calls HARTs – homologous allelic recombination techniques –
Jefferson manipulates genomes (no insertions allowed) to force plants to
mimic other crops. “We’re taking inspiration from one plant and asking
another plant to make that change in itself,” he says. One example Jefferson
likes to talk about is sentinel corn – a plant-sized version of the GUS gene
that would turn red when it needs water. It may not sound like much, but by
the time a traditional corn plant wilts, it’s usually too late. More efficient irrigation would mean the difference between profit and loss – or nourishment and starvation.

Jefferson’s greatest hope to challenge Big Ag comes in what’s known as
apomixis – plant cloning. He wants to teach all sorts of crops to clone
themselves the way dandelions and blackberries do naturally. When a plant’s
seeds produce genetically identical offspring, there’s no need to buy hybrid
seeds every year. Jefferson and rival scientists claim to have several paths
to apomixis – but the race is competitive and no one’s offering details. The
real problem, says Jefferson, is not developing the methods, but releasing
them into a world of patents. “I am not a technological optimist who thinks
that if you put a technology out there, everything is going to be fine,” he
says. “How you put it out there matters as much or more than what it is.”

His solution is to create an open source movement for biotechnology. In his
vision, charitable foundations, which have paid for most of the world’s
public-interest crop science, would fund platform technologies and provide
free licenses to public and private scientists. Commercial end products
would be encouraged, but the basic technology, the OS, would remain in
public hands. To get the whole thing started, Jefferson is offering up Cambia’s portfolio of patents.

It’s tempting to reach for the Linux versus Microsoft analogy to describe
Cambia’s plan to unlock some of the astounding technologies that remain
dormant in labs and greenhouses. It’s powerful, but also decentralized,
networked, and accessible – democratic. It’s like Monsanto’s mainframe giving way to biotech’s equivalent of the PC.

Agriculture is one of the most ill-conceived human endeavors. We plow down
stable communities of hundreds of species of plants to get single-row crops.
We replace entire ecosystems with pesticides, fertilizers, precious fresh
water, and tractor emissions. Then, after every harvest, we start all over
again. Organic agriculture breaks this cycle. But it’s just a Band-Aid on the wound.

Add the knowledge and tools of biotechnology, though, and we are on the
verge of something enormous. Plant genomes carry age-old records that reveal
the complex manner by which nature manages itself. Researchers around the world – McCouch, Goldman, and Jefferson are a few examples – are learning to not only read those records but re-create them.

Which is not to say success is automatic. This new era of food won’t arrive
with a technological big bang. But that’s a good thing. Single events are
too easy to control and monopolize. A steady trickle of innovation will buy
time to get the marketing right. Public perception is as complex as the
genome, and just as important to master. The science is taking hold. If the
business side can clearly communicate what superorganics are – and what they
are not – these new foods will not only change the way we eat, they’ll change the way we relate to the planet.

How Smart Breeding Works

The mission: Develop rice that’s resistant to bacterial blight and will thrive around the globe.

SEARCH Food scientists scour the rice gene bank, consisting of 84,000 seed
types, in search of varieties with blight immunity.

INSERT MARKER Scientists extract DNA from selected varieties and tag the
blight-immunity gene – previously identified by researchers – with a
chemical dye.

CROSSBREED A network of researchers around the world cross disease-resistant
varieties with thousands of local versions. With some plants, this means
merely putting two varieties in a room. Self-pollinating rice requires
manual pollen insertion.

ANALYZE The offspring are analyzed to detect the presence of the immunity
gene. Those containing the gene are planted in a field.

TEST Mature plants are exposed to bacterial blight to confirm resistance.
Those that don’t die, and maintain desired traits from the local variety,
are distributed. Unless

REPEAT Sometimes, the process reveals several genes responsible for a trait.
Three genes confer resistance to different blight strains. In such cases,
breeders repeat the crossbreeding until all genes are turned on.

END RESULT A rice plant with broad resistance to bacterial blight that will
thrive in local conditions.

Richard Manning (rdmanning51@earthlink.net) is the author of ‘Against the
Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization.’

[Share your thoughts at OCA’s web forum!]

Organic Consumers Association
6101 Cliff Estate Rd, Little Marais, MN 55614
E-mail:Staff ? Activist or Media Inquiries: 218-226-4164 ? Fax: 218-353-7652
Please support our work. Send a tax-deductible donation to the OC

The official website of Conrad Miller M.D.

GMO’s Are Dead, Folks, Science Has Already Moved On by Richard Manning

Leave a comment Cancel reply