“Genetic engineering is to traditional crossbreeding what the nuclear bomb was to the sword.”
Andrew Kimbrell
One of my all-time favorite 1950s black-and-white horror movies is Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World. It is set in the Antarctic and stars James Arness as an extraterrestrial, humanlike creature whose body is made of porous, unconnected tissue, with no arteries and no nerve endings.
“Just a minute, doctor,” says Ned “Scotty” Scott, the lanky, bespectacled radio reporter covering the story. “Sounds like you’re trying to describe a vegetable.”
“I am,” answers Dr. Stern.
“An intellectual carrot!” Scotty exclaims. “The mind boggles!”
Equally astonishing is how extremely far real science has come since 1951, when the movie was made. Yes, the idea of a human vegetable is still far-fetched, but as we’re about to see, genetic engineers can now toy with plant DNA at will and are doing so to create fruits and veggies that are—well, not of this world.
The science-fiction–like adventure began in 1994, when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the Flavr Savr tomato. I was at ABC News when the story broke, and I flew to the west coast for an exclusive taste test, courtesy of Calgene, the Davis, California, company that reportedly shelled out an estimated $20 million to create the unusual fruit.786
Calgene’s scientists claimed to have successfully monkeyed with the tomato’s aging gene in a way that curtailed the normal rotting process. I saw it as a forever-young tomato, even though it eventually does putrefy.
“The Flavr Savr will be a better-tasting tomato than the supermarkets carry most of the year,” bragged Dan Wagster, Calgene’s CFO. “How we price it has yet to be determined but consumers will have more value than ever before.”787
I recall genuinely enjoying the tomato’s robust flavor and saying so in a segment for Good Morning America. Over at NBC, Tom Brokaw declared, “The tomato stays riper, longer than the nonengineered variety, and they say it’s tastier.”788 Mollie Davis, a food critic for The New York Times, averred that “the tomato was plump and juicy, far more supple than standard out-of-season tomatoes, possessing the deeper red hue and thinner skin of summer’s field tomatoes.”789
But the public didn’t buy into the hype and ultimately gave Calgene’s pioneering mutant tomato a big thumbs down. In 1997 it was withdrawn from the marketplace, and Calgene was purchased by Monsanto.
Today, there are five genetically engineered produce items we can buy at the grocery store: yellow summer squash, sweet corn, Rainbow papaya,790 Innate potatoes,791 and as of November 2017, Arctic apples.
The makers of Arctic apples—Okanagan Specialty Fruits (OSF) in Summerland, British Columbia—debuted their product in supermarkets around Oklahoma City.792 I’m no longer at ABC News, but the storyline and accompanying hype are very much the same as they were for the Flavr Savr tomato more than twenty years ago.
This time, scientists have successfully figured out a way to silence the four genes that cause apple flesh to turn brown when cut, bruised, or aged. The brown is from melanin, the same coffee-colored chemical that tans our skin.793
“Overall, U.S. apple consumption is still far below what it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s, while obesity rates have sharply risen,” says bioengineer Neal Carter, OSF’s founder and president. Arctic apples “offer families an unparalleled eating experience that’s also a wholesome, healthy snacking option.”794
The sales pitch doesn’t stop there. Turns out, an appalling number of apples are wasted each year—about 40% of the total. Many of them are partially eaten apples that people trash simply because of the flesh’s off-putting russet color. “We strongly feel,” says Carter, “that our non-browning apples can help reduce that number.”795
“But wait.” As those infomercial TV barkers always say, “There’s more!” Kids prefer eating apple pieces, rather than the whole fruit, says Carter, so “we have decided to initially offer Arctic apples in ready-to-eat bags of fresh cut apple slices.” Besides, he adds, not missing a beat, “fresh slices also highlight our unique non-browning benefit and give consumers the convenience factor they desire to suit their busy lifestyles.”796
Will people bite this time? Or will the Arctic apple go the way of the Flavr Savr tomato? Perhaps by the time you read this, the verdict will be in.
Whatever it turns out to be, companies other than Okanagan— which, by the way, is now owned by Intrexon, a huge, multinational biotech corporation797—have a huge stake in the outcome.
For instance, in December 2016, the FDA gave Del Monte Fresh Produce (DMFP) the go-ahead to sell its genetically engineered pink pineapple. “DMFP’s new pineapple,” the FDA explains, “has been genetically engineered to produce lower levels of the enzymes already in conventional pineapple that convert the pink pigment lycopene to the yellow pigment beta carotene. Lycopene is the pigment that makes tomatoes red and watermelons pink.”798
DMFP is being hush-hush about the fanciful new fruit, but it has reportedly partnered with Dole to grow them in Costa Rica and Hawaii.799 They’re not in the supermarkets yet, but perhaps they will be by the time you read this.
Beyond miracle tomatoes, apples, and pineapples is a burgeoning cornucopia of manmade plants and animals collectively called genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Here are some examples of how far scientists are now venturing to tamper with plant DNA.
Fish Genes
In the 1990s scientists at DNA Plant Technology (DNAP) in Oakland, California, had a clever-sounding idea. Take the genes that protect arctic fish from freezing to death, insert them into a tomato’s DNA, and—presto!—you’ll have a frost-tolerant fruit.800
DNAP bioengineers followed through on the idea and successfully inserted antifreeze genes from a winter flounder into a tomato. They even received US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approval to plant the GMOs in a test field. In the end, however, DNAP did not take the fish-tomato to market.801
Some blame the company’s abrupt decision to abort on the public’s revulsion of the idea. “Believe me,” says Jane Rissler, deputy director and senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned scientists, “they would be doing it if people were not objecting to it.”802
But DNAP disputes the accusation, saying the flounder’s antifreeze genes simply failed to work well in the tomato plant. “The initial experiments showed insufficient technical effect to proceed with further experimentation and development,” said Scott Thenell, then-director of regulatory affairs for DNAP, which is now out of business. “It simply was not worth pursuing.”803
Bacteria Genes
In 1987 scientists at Plant Genetic Systems in Ghent, Belgium, published a report announcing their creation of a new life form: a tobacco plant with genes from a common soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).804 Their Bt-tobacco “thing” proved to be super-resistant to insects, because the bacterium’s genes produce so-called Cry proteins deadly to all kinds of pests, though not to humans.805
Since then, scientists have inserted Bt-genes into the DNA of many crops we eat every day: corn, soy, cotton (as in cottonseed oil), potatoes, eggplants, and others.806 And the strategy seems to be working. According to a 2016 study led by Kansas State University, the increasing number of farmers planting Bt-corn between 1998 and 2011 “is associated with a clearer decline in insecticide use.” On average, a Bt-corn farmer uses 11% less insecticide than a conventional-corn farmer.807
But there is a significant fly in the ointment.
The dreaded corn rootworm beetle, for one, is developing a resistance to the Bt-gene’s protection. “Resistance of corn rootworm to Bt-corn has been documented in parts of Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois,” reports the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It adds “that other parts of the Corn Belt, where corn rootworm infestations are common and the use of Bt corn is high, are also at risk for resistance.”808
The threat is a potential show-stopper, says a 2016 study led by Iowa State University and published in Scientific Reports. “The evolution of resistance and cross-resistance threaten the sustainability of genetically engineered crops that produce insecticidal toxins derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).”809
Human Genes
Genetic engineers are even inserting human genes into the DNA of many plants. These plant–human “things” are part of a larger experimental industry called biopharming. Biopharmers envision enslaving vast quantities of GM plants to mass-produce a dizzying array of industrial products—starches, fats, oils, waxes, plastics, etc.—as well as plant-grown medicines called farmaceuticals.
One big category of farmaceuticals comprises edible vaccines. These inoculations are delivered not by needle, but by eating, say, the leaves of a plant whose DNA has been re-engineered to produce antibodies.810
The biopharming craze began in the late 1980s but didn’t take off right away because of some technical hurdles. Also, in 2002 the USDA and other federal regulators were spooked when experimental corn plants infused with animal genes contaminated food crops in Nebraska and Iowa. The errant experiment was run by ProdiGene, a biopharming company in College Station, Texas.811
There is conflicting information about which animal genes Prodi-Gene spliced into the corn’s DNA, but the two foremost possibilities appear to be genes for producing a vaccine to fight diarrhea in pigs and genes to produce a controversial HIV vaccine.812 In any case, the USDA fined ProdiGene $3 million and put an immediate kybosh on permitting any other farmaceutical field trials.813
Today, however, biopharming’s fortunes are rebounding, with many predicting an explosive comeback.
The about-face began in 2012, when the FDA approved the world’s first farmaceutical for humans: Elelyso, made by Protalix, an Israeli company, in partnership with Pfizer.814 The drug—an enzyme called taliglucerase alfa—is produced by carrot plants modified with human genes. Elelyso is meant to treat Gaucher disease, which is most common among Ashkenazi Jews.815
That landmark achievement was followed by another in 2014, when an Ebola epidemic struck West Africa. Responding to the crisis, the FDA approved the emergency use of an experimental farmaceutical called ZMapp, a cocktail of antibodies produced by tobacco plants with humanlike genes. Miraculously, the drug—made by Mapp Biopharmaceutical in San Diego, California—appeared to save the lives of seven people, including two infected American aid workers who were on the brink of dying.816
ZMapp has since been tested on seventy-two patients in a controlled study that yielded mixed results.817 ZMapp appears to be completely safe, the study concludes, but is barely more effective than conventional Ebola treatments. “There’s reason for optimism, but I think we can do better,” says Erica Ollmann Saphire, a biologist at Scripps Research Institute. “I think science can do better.”818
That stubborn belief—that science can do better—is certain to keep driving biopharming’s current resurgence. As of this writing, companies worldwide are developing and testing scores of human–plant “things”— including transgenic rice, moss, alfalfa, and duckweed—designed to produce farmaceuticals for everything from the flu to non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.819
In the 1990s, as genetically modified foods started proliferating, I decided to do Good Morning America segments every year at Thanksgiving to show viewers what percentage of their traditional holiday meal was being replaced by GMOs. The speed of the takeover has been—to borrow Scotty’s phrase—mind-boggling.
Today, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, more than eighteen million farmers in twenty-eight countries are growing genetically engineered crops. That’s a one-hundred-fold increase in total acreage since 1996.820
According to the USDA, 94% of all soy beans, 92% of all corn, and 96% of all cotton grown in this country are GMOs.821 That means an estimated 75% to 80% of everything we eat these days contains GMOs— from bread and tortillas to sodas and cooking oils.822
Most of the time we’re not aware of it, because GMO food labels have not been required in the United States. The European Union began requiring GMO labels in 1997.823
In 2016 the US Congress finally did pass a labeling law; but it doesn’t take effect until July 2018. At least, that’s the plan. “We’re a little behind to get this done by 2018,” confesses Andrea Huberty, a USDA senior policy analyst. “We’re still on track, but a little behind.”824
Even when the law does take effect, it will not require GMO information to be printed on the food labels. Companies will have the option of enciphering the information in a QR code—which is readable only by scanning it with a smartphone—or merely referring consumers to a website or 1-800 phone number.
People wary of GMOs decry the subterfuge and are demanding more transparency. By contrast, farmers who believe GMOs are completely safe object even to this minimal kind of required labeling. “I don’t think that it’s the best bill that we could have,” complains Richard Wilkins, president of the American Soybean Association, “but it’s the best bill we could pass.”825
Any honest and thoughtful discussion about the safety of GMOs must begin with both sides acknowledging that even foods produced by Mother Nature aren’t always safe to eat—among them, of course, many varieties of delicious-looking but poisonous mushrooms and berries. Even produce labeled “organic” or bred by using traditional artificial breeding techniques is not guaranteed to be safe.
Here are two examples that prove it.
Killer Zucchini
In early 2002 scores of New Zealanders reported getting sick after eating zucchini. The symptoms resembled those of stomach flu: cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting.
After investigating, botanists determined that most of the culprits were organic zucchinis, scrupulously farmed without pesticides or any other “unnatural” interventions. Moreover, they were grown from vintage seed varieties with a low tolerance for insect attacks—a significant point, it turned out, because aphids were unusually active during that year’s growing season.
Without the aid of chemical pesticides, the organic zucchini plants were forced to fend off the aphid invasion entirely on their own. Which they did, by deploying a battalion of built-in, natural insecticides called cucurbitacins. The end result was that, by the time the zucchinis were ripe and ready to eat, the natural levels of cucurbitacins were so elevated they made people ill.
In retrospect, says William Rolleston, founder of New Zealand’s Life Sciences Network and acting president of the World Farmers Organization, “the organic growers should have responded to the insect infestation with pesticides, or withdrawn their product from the market for food safety reasons.” Obviously, he adds, just by “certifying food as organic does not make it safe.”826
Killer Potato
At the top of anybody’s list of failed artificial breeding experiments is the notorious Lenape potato, named after a tribe of indigenous Americans also known as the Delaware Indians.827
In 1967 scientists at Pennsylvania State University and the Wise Potato Chip Company created the small, white, round spud by cross-breeding a wild Peruvian potato with a domesticated Delta Gold potato.828 The Lenape boasted exceptional disease resistance and a low-sugar content, which produced potato chips and fries with a beautiful, golden brown color.
The prized Lenape was released with great fanfare. But very quickly, people reported feeling nauseous after eating it. Some even had convulsions.829
Scientists soon discovered the wonder-spud contained dangerously high levels of solanine, a natural chemical that accounts for the Lenape’s remarkable disease resistance. Solanine—an alkaloid akin to nicotine, caffeine, and cocaine—is what turns a potato poisonously green if over-exposed to sunlight.830 It also makes people sick.
The Lenape was withdrawn from the marketplace in 1970, but— spoiler alert—it is still being used for breeding stock. In fact, if you’re a lover of potato chips or French fries, chances are you are eating the children and grandchildren of the ill-fated Lenape—including the Atlantic, Trent, Belchip, and Snowden varieties.831
Unlike The Thing in the movie, GMOs are not blood-thirsty monsters. But they do raise legitimate questions about what unchecked genetic engineering is capable of doing to the natural world—and our food supply.
In 2016 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine sought to reassure the public that, for the most part, GM foods are safe to eat. They pointed out, for instance, that we and our livestock have been consuming GM crops for some years now without any noticeable ill effects.
I’m inclined to agree but with one important caveat. Our past experience with hugely popular products such as violet rays, radium, and other forms of radiation; smoking; DDT; lead paint; and cell phones teaches us it can take many decades for their harmful effects to become obvious.
What’s more, our tinkering with the DNA of GM crops is still very much in its juvenile stages—creating relatively simple changes to their flavor, color, shelf life, and insect and herbicide resistance. The safety of GM foods will truly be put to the test in the coming years, as our genetic tampering gets more daring.
According to the aforementioned National Academies report, there are already some warning signs. For instance, herbicide-resistant crops are passing on their resistance to weeds, creating superweeds. That presents “a major agronomic problem,” the study says, because it is forcing farmers to increase their use of potent, chemical herbicides to keep the superweeds in check.832
Genetic engineering is also creating powerful conflicts of interest. Case in point: Monsanto sells expensive, patented, herbicide-resistant crop seeds—including those in the popular, USDA-approved “Roundup Ready Xtend” line of GMOs. Monsanto also sells the patented herbicides to which their seeds are resistant: glyphosate (Roundup) and dicamba.833 In other words, they’re making money with both hands.
Monsanto’s high-priced, proprietary products dominate agriculture so much now, farmers aren’t able to freely trade seeds, as they once did. They fear Monsanto will sue them for patent infringements.
Scores of farmers are suing the company, claiming its death grip on the industry is forcing them out of business. These suffering farmers will soon “have to put up their equipment for auction,” says Arkansas farmer Kenneth Qualls, a party to one class-action lawsuit, “and the people bidding on it [i.e., Monsanto’s customers and allies] will be the ones who put them out of business.”834
There’s also concern about what the rising use of herbicides and herbicide-resistant crops is doing to the environment. For instance, to Monarch butterflies.
While at ABC News, I aired various segments on the winsome, fluttering, orange-and-black insects. I even traveled to the mountains of central Mexico, where Monarchs spend their winters, hibernating in pineapple-sized clusters that hang from the trees there like giant Christmas ornaments.
I learned Monarch butterflies are being devastated by wanton, illegal deforestation of those mountains—mainly, Mexicans cutting down trees for firewood. Changing weather patterns are also a problem, disrupting the Monarchs’ migrations up and down North America.835
But a study by scientists in the United States and Mexico reveals there’s another major threat: “the loss of breeding habitat in the United States due to the expansion of GM herbicide-resistant crops, with consequent loss of milkweed host plants.”836
Monarchs lay their eggs in, and their larvae feed on, milkweed plants.837 But the increased use of herbicide-resistant crops and herbicides is displacing and devastating the all-important milkweed plants throughout the United States.
From 1990 to 2010, the study says, the amount of milkweed and number of Monarchs in the Midwest alone fell by 58% and 81%, respectively.838 During the same time, according to the USDA, the fraction of herbicide-resistant soybeans, corn, and cotton planted in the United States rose to 93%, 70%, and 78%, respectively.839 So, as the acreage of herbicide-resistant GM crops soared, the population of Monarchs plummeted.
There’s more disquieting news.
Many people defend our explosive use of GM crops by claiming that, acre-for-acre, they’re more productive than natural crops and are, therefore, our best hope for ending world hunger. But the National Academies report cautions against such hype, stating “there is no evidence from USDA data that they [GM crops] have substantially increased the rate at which U.S. agriculture is increasing yields.”840
The general public, too, is cautious concerning the hype about GM foods. The Pew Research Center found 39% of Americans believe GM foods are less healthy than regular foods; only 10% believe GM foods are better for us.841 Among Europeans, the GMO-wary percentages are even higher.842
If you think only benighted laypeople are concerned about the safety of GM foods, you are mistaken. Well-informed experts are as well, citing the colossal difference between modern genetic engineering and age-old, traditional breeding.
“Such intervention [genetic engineering] must not be confused with previous intrusions upon the natural order of living organisms,” warned the late Nobel Prize-winning Harvard biologist George Wald. “All such earlier procedures worked within single or closely related species. The hub of the new technology is to move genes back and forth, not only across species lines, but across any boundaries that now divide living organisms.”843
People who do not grasp what Wald is saying here—that there is a fundamental difference between genetic engineering and conventional breeding—are my greatest concern. Consider, for example, American journalist Michael Specter—author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. “Genetic engineering,” he claims, “is only one particularly powerful way to do what we have been doing for eleven thousand years.”844
Whether it results from genuine ignorance, ideology, or a hidden agenda, such insouciance ignores the unique, perilous reality we are now facing. It risks lulling us into a false sense of safety.
As mere breeders, we could surely produce, say, a purple pumpkin. But it would take years of painstaking work to do so.
Today, armed with our knowledge of DNA and the powerful editing tools of genetic engineering—like CRISPR—we can, in principle, create a purple pumpkin in a matter of days, if not sooner. This sudden, god-like capacity portends a massive, unprecedented assault on the natural processes of heredity that have steered the trajectory of life since Earth’s creation.
“With the insertion of the right snippets of DNA,” says Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, “new strains can be created that are variously cold-hardy, pest-proofed, perennial, fast-growing, highly nutritious, multipurpose, water-conservative, and more easily sowed and harvested. And compared with traditional breeding techniques, genetic engineering is all but instantaneous.”845
Interestingly, Mother Nature appears to be a genetic engineer of sorts. On their own, genes have the uncanny ability to hop from one organism to another. It’s called horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or gene hopping. One disputed study even goes so far as to claim that because of gene hopping, the human genome is infused with fully 145 genes from ancient plants, fungi, and other foreign microorganisms.846
Many hypesters use this information to defend genetic engineering. If gene splicing is good enough for nature, they declare, it should be good enough for us. Surely, there’s nothing to fear.
The argument sounds eminently reasonable, but it is seriously flawed. Just because a process happens naturally doesn’t mean it is safe for us to mimic—especially on a grand scale.
Rainfall, a thoroughly natural process, results from moisture accreting onto tiny airborne particles called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), which ultimately produces raindrops. But that doesn’t make it safe for us to seed clouds—to dust them artificially with CCNs on a grand scale. Can you imagine the disruption to Earth’s weather patterns—and world politics—if Americans, say, decided to hog the atmosphere’s moisture budget with a permanent, self-serving cloud-seeding initiative? It would spell disaster.
There is another critical difference between genetic engineering and traditional breeding.
As mere breeders, we’re able to mate only certain species. We can mate a horse and a donkey to produce a mule, for example, or a lemon and a mandarin orange to produce a Meyer lemon.
But as genetic engineers, the possibilities are limitless. As we’ve seen, we can even “mate” a fish with a tomato.
Genetic engineering also gives us the power to elevate recessive traits over dominant traits—the very opposite of what nature does—on an unmatched scale. We have no way of knowing what effect such a willful affront will mean to the plant kingdom and ecosystem as a whole.
Ultimately, genetic engineering gives us the power to destroy diversity, by promoting the dominance of expensive, patented, GM crops over all other varieties. As far back as June 1988, more than two dozen African scientists warned that such a high-priced, domineering technology will not “help our farmers to produce the food that is needed in the 21st century. On the contrary, we think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millennia and that it will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves.”847
So, no, genetic engineering is not, as Specter and others would have us believe, “only one particularly powerful way to do what we have been doing for eleven thousand years.” It is an entirely different beast. As fundamentally different as mixing chemicals is from triggering a nuclear chain reaction.
Genetic engineering gives us the power to play God as never before, but without his wisdom or humility. If you doubt this, consider the hubris of the DNA pioneer James Watson. “If we don’t play God,” he boasts, “who will?”
In my opinion, our best hope of securing a great future and avoiding a grim fate lies with people who see with crystal clarity genetic engineering’s unmatched power, promise, and peril. People such as Eva Novotny, former University of Cambridge astrophysicist and member of Scientists for Global Responsibility.
“There is no evidence that unlike species have ever [naturally] crossed during the billions of years that life has existed on earth,” she explains. “We must not be so arrogant as to assume that we are more clever than Nature, lest we precipitate an irreversible chain of biological evolution that ends in catastrophe.”848
Unless we comprehend the unprecedented power genetic engineering gives us to alter the genetic landscape, we will not use it with proper reverence and restraint. If we behave as if genetic engineering is just another form of conventional breeding, we risk moving blithely forward and visiting mayhem on the natural world—and our food supply.
That inexcusable ignorance is, above all, The Thing I fear most.