FEATURES
The Biotech Century
Playing Ecological Roulette with Mother Nature's Designs
By Jeremy Rifkin


We are in the midst of a great historic transition into the Biotech Age. The
ability to isolate, identify and recombine genes is making the gene pool
available, for the first time, as the primary raw resource for future
economic activity on Earth. After thousands of years of fusing, melting,
soldering, forging and burning inanimate matter to create useful things, we
are now splicing, recombining, inserting and stitching living material for
our own economic interests. Lord Ritchie-Calder, the British science writer,
cast the biological revolution in the proper historical perspective when he
observed that "just as we have manipulated plastics and metals, we are now
manufacturing living materials."

The Nobel Prize-winning chemist Robert F. Curl of Rice University spoke for
many of his colleagues in science when he proclaimed that the 20th century
was "the century of physics and chemistry. But it is clear that the next
century will be the century of biology."

Global "life-science" companies promise an economic renaissance in the coming
Biotech Century--they offer a door to a new era of history where the genetic
blueprints of evolution itself become subject to human authorship. Critics
worry that the re-seeding of the Earth with a laboratory-conceived second
Genesis could lead to a far different future--a biological Tower of Babel and
the spread of chaos throughout the biological world, drowning out the ancient
language of creation.

A Second Genesis

Human beings have been remaking the Earth for as long as we have had a
history. Up to now, however, our ability to create our own second Genesis has
been tempered by the restraints imposed by species boundaries. We have been
forced to work narrowly, continually crossing close relatives in the plant or
animal kingdoms to create new varieties, strains and breeds. Through a long,
historical process of tinkering and trial and error, we have redrawn the
biological map, creating new agricultural products, new sources of energy,
more durable building materials, and life-saving pharmaceuticals. Still, in
all this time, nature dictated the terms of engagement.

But the new technologies of the Genetic Age allow scientists, corporations
and governments to manipulate the natural world at the most fundamental
level--the genetic one. Imagine the wholesale transfer of genes between
totally unrelated species and across all biological boundaries--plant, animal
and human--creating thousands of novel life forms in a brief moment of
evolutionary time. Then, with clonal propagation, mass-producing countless
replicas of these new creations, releasing them into the biosphere to
propagate, mutate, proliferate and migrate. This is, in fact, the radical
scientific and commercial experiment now underway.

Global Powers at Play

Typical of new biotech trends is the bold decision by the Monsanto
Corporation, long a world leader in chemical products, to sell off its entire
chemical division in 1997 and anchor its research, development and marketing
in biotech-based technologies and products. Global conglomerates are rapidly
buying up biotech start-up companies, seed companies, agribusiness and
agrochemical concerns, pharmaceutical, medical and health businesses, and
food and drink companies, creating giant life-science complexes from which to
fashion a bio-industrial world. The concentration of power is impressive. The
top 10 agrochemical companies control 81 percent of the $29 billion per year
global agrochemical market. Ten life science companies control 37 percent of
the $15 billion per year global seed market. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical
companies spent more than $3.5 billion in 1995 buying up biotech firms.
Novartis, a giant new firm resulting from the $27 billion merger of Sandoz
and Ciba-Geigy, is now the world's largest agrochemical company, the
second-largest seed company and the second-largest pharmaceutical company.

Global life-science companies are expected to introduce thousands of new
genetically engineered organisms into the environment in the coming century.
In just the past 18 months, genetically engineered corn, soy and cotton have
been planted over millions of acres of U.S. farmland. Genetically engineered
insects, fish and domesticated animals have also been introduced.

Virtually every genetically engineered organism released into the environment
poses a potential threat to the ecosystem. To appreciate why this is so, we
need to understand why the pollution generated by genetically modified
organisms is so different from the pollution resulting from the release of
petrochemical products into the environment.

Because they are alive, genetically engineered organisms are inherently more
unpredictable than petrochemicals in the way they interact with other living
things in the environment. Consequently, it is much more difficult to assess
all of the potential impacts that a genetically engineered organism might
have on the Earth's ecosystems.

Genetically engineered products also reproduce. They grow and they migrate.
Unlike petrochemical products, it is difficult to constrain them within a
given geographical locale. Finally, once released, it is virtually impossible
to recall genetically engineered organisms back to the laboratory, especially
those organisms that are microscopic in nature.

The risks in releasing novel, genetically engineered organisms into the
biosphere are similar to those we've encountered in introducing exotic
organisms into the North American habitat. Over the past several hundred
years, thousands of non-native organisms have been brought to America from
other regions of the world. While many of these creatures have adapted to the
North American ecosystems without severe dislocations, a small percentage of
them have run wild, wreaking havoc on the flora and fauna of the continent.
Gypsy moth, Kudzu vine, Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, starlings and
Mediterranean fruit flies come easily to mind.

Whenever a genetically engineered organism is released, there is always a
small chance that it, too, will run amok because, like non-indigenous
species, it has been artificially introduced into a complex environment that
has developed a web of highly integrated relationships over long periods of
evolutionary history. Each new synthetic introduction is tantamount to
playing ecological roulette. That is, while there is only a small chance of
it triggering an environmental explosion, if it does, the consequences could
be significant and irreversible.

Spreading Genetic Pollution

Nowhere are the alarm bells going off faster than in agricultural
biotechnology. The life-science companies are introducing biotech crops
containing novel genetic traits from other plants, viruses, bacteria and
animals. The new genetically engineered crops are designed to perform in ways
that have eluded scientists working with classical breeding techniques. Many
of the new gene-spliced crops emanating from laboratories seem more like
creations from the world of science fiction. Scientists have inserted
"antifreeze" protein genes from flounder into the genetic code of tomatoes to
protect the fruit from frost damage. Chicken genes have been inserted into
potatoes to increase disease resistance. Firefly genes have been injected
into the biological code of corn plants. Chinese hamster genes have been
inserted into the genome of tobacco plants to increase sterol production.

Ecologists are unsure of the impacts of bypassing natural species boundaries
by introducing genes into crops from wholly unrelated plant and animal
species. The fact is, there is no precedent in history for this kind of
"shotgun" experimentation. For more than 10,000 years, classical breeding
techniques have been limited to the transference of genes between closely
related plants or animals that can sexually interbreed, limiting the number
of possible genetic combinations. Natural evolution appears to be similarly
circumscribed. By contrast, the new gene-splicing technologies allow us to
bypass all previous biological boundaries in nature, creating life forms that
have never before existed. For example, consider the ambitious plans to
engineer transgenic plants to serve as pharmaceutical factories for the
production of chemicals and drugs. Foraging animals, seed-eating birds and
soil insects will be exposed to a range of genetically engineered drugs,
vaccines, industrial enzymes, plastics and hundreds of other foreign
substances for the first time, with untold consequences. The notion of large
numbers of species consuming plants and plant debris containing a wide
assortment of chemicals that they would normally never be exposed to is an
unsettling prospect.

Much of the current effort in agricultural biotechnology is centered on the
creation of herbicide-tolerant, pest-resistant and virus-resistant plants.
Herbicide-tolerant crops are a favorite of companies like Monsanto and
Novartis that are anxious to corner the lucrative worldwide market for their
herbicide products. More than 600 million pounds of poisonous herbicides are
dumped on U.S. farm land each year, most sprayed on corn, cotton and soybean
crops. Chemical companies gross more than $4 billion per year in U.S.
herbicide sales alone.

To increase their share of the growing global market for herbicides,
life-science companies have created transgenic crops that tolerate their own
herbicides (see "Say It Ain't Soy," In Brief, March/April,1997). The idea is
to sell farmers patented seeds that are resistant to a particular brand of
herbicide in the hope of increasing a company's share of both the seed and
herbicide markets. Monsanto's new "Roundup Ready" patented seeds, for
example, are resistant to its best-selling chemical herbicide, Roundup.

The chemical companies hope to convince farmers that the new
herbicide-tolerant crops will allow for a more efficient eradication of
weeds. Farmers will be able to spray at any time during the growing season,
killing weeds without killing their crops. Critics warn that with new
herbicide-tolerant crops planted in the fields, farmers are likely to use
even greater quantities of herbicides to control weeds, as there will be less
fear of damaging their crops in the process of spraying. The increased use of
herbicides, in turn, raises the possibility of weeds developing resistance,
forcing an even greater use of herbicides to control the more resistant
strains.

The potential deleterious impacts on soil fertility, water quality and
beneficial insects that result from the increased use of poisonous
herbicides, like Monsanto's Roundup, are a disquieting reminder of the
escalating environmental bill that is likely to accompany the introduction of
herbicide-tolerant crops.

The new pest-resistant transgenic crops pose similar environmental problems.
Life-science companies are readying transgenic crops that produce insecticide
in every cell of each plant. Several crops, including Ciba Geigy's
pest-resistant "maximizer corn" and Rohm and Haas's pest-resistant tobacco
are already available on the commercial market. A growing body of scientific
evidence points to the likelihood of creating "super bugs" resistant to the
effects of the new pesticide-producing genetic crops.

The new generation of virus-resistant transgenic crops pose the equally
dangerous possibility of creating new viruses that have never before existed
in nature. Concerns are surfacing among scientists and in scientific
literature over the possibility that the protein genes could recombine with
genes in related viruses that find their way naturally into the transgenic
plant, creating a recombinant virus with novel features.

A growing number of ecologists warn that the biggest danger might lie in what
is called "gene flow"--the transfer of genes from altered crops to weedy
relatives by way of cross-pollination. Researchers are concerned that
manufactured genes for herbicide tolerance, and pest and viral resistance,
might escape and, through cross pollination, insert themselves into the
genetic makeup of weedy relatives, creating weeds that are resistant to
herbicides, pests and viruses. Fears over the possibility of transgenic genes
jumping to wild weedy relatives heightened in 1996 when a Danish research
team, working under the auspices of Denmark's Environmental Science and
Technology Department, observed the transfer of a gene from a transgenic crop
to a wild weedy relative--something critics of deliberate-release experiments
have warned of for years and biotech companies have dismissed as a remote or
nonexistent possibility.

Transnational life-science companies project that within 10 to 15 years, all
of the major crops grown in the world will be genetically engineered to
include herbicide-, pest-, virus-, bacterial-, fungus- and stress-resistant
genes. Millions of acres of agricultural land and commercial forest will be
transformed in the most daring experiment ever undertaken to remake the
biological world. Proponents of the new science, armed with powerful
gene-splicing tools and precious little data on potential impacts, are
charging into this new world of agricultural biotechnology, giddy over the
potential benefits and confident that the risks are minimum or non-existent.
They may be right. But, what if they are wrong?

Insuring Disaster

The insurance industry quietly let it be known several years ago that it
would not insure the release of genetically engineered organisms into the
environment against the possibility of catastrophic environmental damage,
because the industry lacks a risk-assessment science --a predictive
ecology--with which to judge the risk of any given introduction. In short,
the insurance industry clearly understands the Kafka-esque implications of a
government regime claiming to regulate a technology in the absence of clear
scientific knowledge.

Increasingly nervous over the insurance question, one of the biotech trade
associations attempted early on to raise an insurance pool among its member
organizations, but gave up when it failed to raise sufficient funds to make
the pool operable. Some observers worried, at the time, and continue to
worry--albeit privately--over what might happen to the biotech industry if a
large-scale commercial release of a genetically altered organism were to
result in a catastrophic environmental event. For example, the introduction
and spread of a new weed or pest comparable to Kudzu vine, Dutch elm disease
or gypsy moth, might inflict costly damage to flora and fauna over extended
ranges.

Corporate assurances aside, one or more significant environmental mishaps are
an inevitability in the years ahead. When that happens, every nation is going
to be forced to address the issue of liability. Farmers, landowners,
consumers and the public at large are going to demand to know how it could
have happened and who is liable for the damages inflicted. When the day
arrives--and it's likely to come sooner rather than later--"genetic
pollution" will take its place alongside petrochemical and nuclear pollution
as a grave threat to the Earth's already beleaguered environment.

Allergic to Technology?

The introduction of new genetically engineered organisms also raises a number
of serious human health issues that have yet to be resolved. Health
professionals and consumer organizations are most concerned about the
potential allergenic effects of genetically engineered foods. The Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) announced in 1992 that special labeling for
genetically engineered foods would not be required, touching off protest
among food professionals, including the nation's leading chefs and many
wholesalers and retailers.

With two percent of adults and eight percent of children having allergic
responses to commonly eaten foods, consumer advocates argue that all
gene-spliced foods need to be properly labeled so that consumers can avoid
health risks. Their concerns were heightened in 1996 when The New England
Journal of Medicine published a study showing genetically engineered soybeans
containing a gene from a Brazil nut could create an allergic reaction in
people who were allergic to the nuts. The test result was unwelcome news for
Pioneer Hi-Bred International, the Iowa-based seed company that hoped to
market the new genetically engineered soy. Though the FDA said it would label
any genetically engineered foods containing genes from common allergenic
organisms, the agency fell well short of requiring across-the-board labeling,
leaving The New England Journal of Medicine editors to ask what protection
consumers would have against genes from organisms that have never before been
part of the human diet and that might be potential allergens. Concerned over
the agency's seeming disregard for human health, the Journal editors
concluded that FDA policy "would appear to favor industry over consumer
protection."

Depleting the Gene Pool

Ironically, all of the many efforts to reseed the biosphere with a
laboratory-conceived second Genesis may eventually come to naught because of
a massive catch-22 that lies at the heart of the new technology revolution.
On the one hand, the success of the biotech revolution is wholly dependent on
access to a rich reservoir of genes to create new characteristics and
properties in crops and animals grown for food, fiber and energy, and
products used for pharmaceutical and medical purposes. Genes containing
beneficial traits that can be manipulated, transformed and inserted into
organisms destined for the commercial market come from either the wild or
from traditional crops and animal breeds (and from human beings).
Notwithstanding its awesome ability to transform nature into commercially
marketable commodities, the biotech industry still remains utterly dependent
upon nature's seed stock--germplasm--for its raw resources. At present, it is
impossible to create a "useful" new gene in the laboratory. In this sense,
biotechnology remains an extractive industry. It can rearrange genetic
material, but cannot create it. On the other hand, the very practice of
biotechnology--including cloning, tissue culturing and gene splicing--is
likely to result in increasing genetic uniformity, a narrowing of the gene
pool, and loss of the very genetic diversity that is so essential to
guaranteeing the success of the biotech industry in the future.

In his book The Last Harvest, Paul Raeburn, the science editor for Business
Week, penetrates to the heart of the problem. He writes, "Scientists can
accomplish remarkable feats in manipulating molecules and cells, but they are
utterly incapable of re-creating even the simplest forms of life in test
tubes. Germplasm provides our lifeline into the future. No breakthrough in
fundamental research can compensate for the loss of the genetic material crop
breeders depend upon."

Agricultural biotechnology greatly increases the uniformity of agricultural
practices as did the Green Revolution when it was introduced more than 30
years ago. Like its predecessor, the goal is to create superior varieties
that can be planted as monocultures in agricultural regions all over the
world. A handful of life-science companies are staking out the new biotech
turf, each aggressively marketing their own patented brands of "super
seeds"--and soon "super" farm animals as well. The new transgenic crops and
animals are designed to grow faster, produce greater yields, and withstand
more varied environmental and weather-related stresses. Their cost
effectiveness, in the short run, is likely to guarantee them a robust market.
In an industry where profit margins are notoriously low, farmers will likely
jump at the opportunity of saving a few dollars per acre and a few cents per
pound by shifting quickly to the new transgenic crops and animals.

However, the switch to a handful of patented transgenic seeds and livestock
animals will likely further erode the genetic pool as farmers abandon the
growing of traditional varieties and breeds in favor of the commercially more
competitive patented products. By focusing on short-term market priorities,
the biotech industry threatens to destroy the very genetic heirlooms that
might one day be worth their weight in gold as a line of defense against new
resistant diseases or superbugs.

Most molecular biologists and the biotechnology industry, at large, have all
but dismissed the growing criticism of ecologists, whose recent studies
suggest that the biotech revolution will likely be accompanied by the
proliferation and spread of genetic pollution and the wholesale loss of
genetic diversity. Nonetheless, the uncontrollable spread of super weeds, the
buildup of resistant strains of bacteria and new super insects, the creation
of novel viruses, the destabilization of whole ecosystems, the genetic
contamination of food, and the steady depletion of the gene pool are no
longer minor considerations, the mere grumbling of a few disgruntled critics.
To ignore the warnings is to place the biosphere and civilization in harm's
way in the coming years. Pestilence, famine, and the spread of new kinds of
diseases throughout the world might yet turn out to be the final act in the
script being prepared for the biotech century.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

This article is adapted from Jeremy Rifkin's new book The Biotech Century:
Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (Tarcher/Putnam).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L
Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask]
if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------