Is that Fish in your Tomato? E-Book

Rebecca Nesbit

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 450

Beschreibung

What is genetic modification? What does it truly mean for us and the world around us? What are the risks and benefits? And, what's more, how does it even work?

The facts about GM are few and far between, but opinions from both sides of the debate are vocal and overpowering. Is that Fish in your Tomato?? is a beacon through the noise, explaining the origins and science behind GM, the environmental uncertainties and the public health concerns which have opponents worried.

No stone is left unturned in Nesbit's quest to explore the fact and fiction of genetic modification. In the process, she has created the quintessential, scientifically-informed guide to understanding the subject.

Leseprobe

Is that Fish in Your Tomato?

The Fact and Fiction of GM Foods

Rebecca Nesbit

Copyright © 2017 Ockham Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published in 2017 by Ockham Publishing in the United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-910780-16-9

Cover design by Armend Meha

www.ockham-publishing.com

Acknowledgments

I would never have reached the point where I could write this book without the support of my family, and a particular mention should go to my mother, Judy, who provided early feedback on my draft. I’m also grateful to Siân Deller and Rob Spencer for valuable feedback on the manuscript, along with Rob and Sarah from Ockham Publishing.

I receive support from far more friends than I could mention, but those who particularly encouraged me in writing this book include: Suzannah Watson, Beatrix Li, Charlotte Bratt, Lisi Bouchard and Valli Murthy, and of course my husband Phil Gould.

Many people gave their time freely for interviews and discussions which fed into the text and helped shape my understanding – I am extremely grateful to them all.

Ultimately, I would like to thank everyone whose research has brought evidence to the GMO debate, and everyone who has used this evidence in discussions, even when it is inconvenient. Thank you in particular to everyone who shares the information they read in this book with family and friends.

Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Birth of the ‘Frankenfood’ Debate

Chapter 3

The 21st Century

Chapter 4

How to Genetically Modify a Plant

Chapter 5

Insect Resistance

Chapter 6

Herbicide Tolerance

Chapter 7

More Food, Fewer Inputs

Chapter 8

GM Animals

Chapter 9

‘Superfoods’ and Enhanced Nutrition

Chapter 10

More Than Just Food

Chapter 11

Coexistence

Chapter 12

Human Health

Chapter 13

Patenting Life

Chapter 14

Corporate Control

Chapter 15

Regulations

Chapter 16

The Right to Choose

Chapter 17

GM in the Developing World

Chapter 18

Do We Need to Grow More Food?

Chapter 19

The Latest Innovation in a Broken System?

Chapter 20

Conclusion

Index

Chapter 1

Introduction

Two decades after the first GM foods went on sale, many news reports go something like this:

Reporter: Environmentalists have today released a report which shows the devastating effects of GM crops on farmland wildlife.

Camera zooms in on activist on the couch.

Activist: Yes, this is further proof of the dangers of genetically-modified organisms. The only people who benefit are the companies who developed this Frankenfood, and the rest of us pay the price.

Reporter: And how has the company responsible for this technology responded?

Cut to industry representative in a different studio.

Industry representative: I’m afraid the conclusions of the report are simply incorrect. It completely misrepresents the reality, which is that GM crops pose no more risk to health or the environment than conventional crops. In fact, they bring major benefits.

Cut back to the couch.

Activist: I’m sorry but that’s wrong. You are ignoring studies which link GMOs to cancer and to terrible environmental damage. We are gambling with our future by releasing untested and dangerous new technologies into the environment.

Industry representative: Any GM crop on the market has gone through years of rigorous testing. Major scientific societies around the world have agreed that GM crops are safe. And more than that, we are going to need to use genetic engineering to feed a population of 9 billion people.

Cut back to the news reporter who is thinking ‘job done, we’ve presented both sides of the argument’. You reach for the remote feeling none the wiser.

Life would be easier if we could firmly hold an extreme position on GM crops – it would be reassuring to have a conviction either that GM crops should be stopped at all costs or that they will solve world hunger. At risk of a spoiler alert, the evidence doesn’t conveniently support either of those world views. In the following 19 chapters I will look at the complexity surrounding the possibilities, the risks and the limitations of genetically modified organisms. We will cover everything from organ-donor pigs to purple tomatoes, and consider challenges which range from ‘superweeds’ to patents.

This book stems from my dissatisfaction with the ‘facts’ I was presented with by people on both sides of the debate. GMOs had always captured my attention, and I began to explore the science whilst working at Rothamsted Research, the world’s oldest agricultural research station. I was an ecologist studying butterfly migration, but was exposed to some of the complexities of creating a sustainable food supply. The stakes are high – few things are more important than our health and the environment. The concerns were too great to ignore, though I needed to throw out some long-held convictions.

Previously, the very negative view from environmental campaigners had rung true for me. Around the turn of the millennium, I was doing everything that an environmentally conscious teenager should do: I challenged the school’s recycling policy, attended Friends of the Earth meetings and argued vehemently against GM crops. As I learnt more, my opinions became increasingly sophisticated. During my time as a biology undergraduate, I wrote a very convincing essay arguing for a low-risk strategy when dealing with the environment. GM crops, I reasoned, aren’t a gamble we should be taking.

However, as the years went on an extreme position became increasingly hard to justify. As I learnt of the risks we’re taking with our current food production, I realised that we can’t afford to be idealistic about solutions. At the same time, our understanding of the effects of GM crops was increasing. Some people argue that we released the first GM crops without enough evidence that they were safe. Whether or not this is true, the information we gained from doing so has made it increasingly clear that GMOs aren’t inherently dangerous. As more evidence has built up, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and many other scientific societies from around the world have concluded that genetically modified crops present very similar risks to those developed through conventional breeding. Both GM and conventional crops do, however, raise some questions about the environmental and social impacts of food production.

Answering these questions requires knowledge about both science and society, and interpreting the evidence around GM foods is a pretty complex task. For a start, how do you collect all the information you need? Smallholders growing GM cotton don’t exactly submit information about wildlife on their land to a central database. And even if we have information about what happened when we introduced GM crops, it’s impossible to know what would have happened if we hadn’t. Crop yields could be increasing due to improved farm management, for example, rather than due to the GM crop. The same is true when you compare current yields of GM and non-GM crops: are farmers who grow GM crops acting differently to those who don’t? Still, there are ways to collect some of this information, and estimates have been made about the overall benefit.

Annual GMO reports from the agricultural consultancy PG Economics provide interesting reading. They present estimated economic benefits of US$18.8 billion in 2012 alone. Their calculations for environmental indicators estimate that insect-resistant crops have reduced pesticide spraying by 503 million kilos, which is a global reduction of 8.8%.

Such estimates are extremely interesting but, even if we could completely trust the accuracy of these global figures, they mask a huge variation in the impacts of GM crops. Different crops have different effects, both positive and negative, and the same is true for different environments and management practices. Economic benefits are also unevenly distributed, both between countries and within countries.

Take insect-resistant cotton, which has brought the greatest benefit where pests are at their worst, as we will see in Chapter 5. Before the introduction of insect-resistant crops, the pest problem either meant yields were drastically reduced or that farmers used large quantities of pesticides. The impact of insect-resistant cotton has often been positive, both for farmers and for insect diversity. There are situations, however, where it hasn’t been a success.

In the Andhra Pradesh region of India the initial introduction of insect-resistant crops caused yield losses. Insect resistance had only been put into cotton varieties suitable for irrigated land, yet these varieties were still introduced into areas prone to drought. Predictably, this wasn’t a recipe for success. These particular failures were nothing to do with genetic modification itself, yet show a major problem for local farmers which global statistics don’t reveal. Just because a crop brings benefits in theory, it doesn’t mean it always will in practice.

Even within one success story, new innovations often come with winners and losers. Take Syngenta’s product of the year 2014, Enogen corn, developed for ease of bioethanol creation. The company heralded it as a win-win-win solution, benefitting ethanol-production factories, farmers and rural communities (it didn’t add the fourth, presumably sizeable, win for itself), and no doubt the crop brought some benefits. Still, even if the alternative is fossil fuels, many would argue that a major loser in the story of biofuels from food crops is the environment. Again, this environmental risk isn’t caused by genetic modification itself, but is still a problem associated with the crop.

In parts of the world, growers and seed developers have deemed that planting GM crops will be a win for them, sometimes with incentives from governments. The area of farmland planted with GM crops has been steadily increasing for the last two decades. In 1996, 1.7 million hectares were planted with GM crops, and this had risen to 180 million by 2015. In 2015, GM crops were planted in 28 countries on six continents, and roughly three quarters of this was in just three countries: the USA, Brazil and Argentina. About 12% of the world’s cropland was planted with GM crops, and the vast majority of this was commodity crops.

In total, 18 million farmers grow GM crops. Eleven countries in South and Central America planted GM crops in 2014, mostly maize, cotton and soybean. Of the six Asian countries which grow GM crops commercially, cotton is the most common crop, with food crops being approved in just three Asian countries: China, Bangladesh and the Philippines. These include maize, eggplant, papaya and tomatoes.

The situation is very different in the EU, where a small amount of insect-resistant maize is grown, almost exclusively in Spain. However, Europe has approved more GM crops for import, and most of these imports end up in animal feed. In particular, the EU relies on imports for the majority of its soybean needs. With 83% of the land in soybean production planted with GM, it’s relatively hard to find a GM free option for this important component of animal feed.

Likewise, few African countries have GM crops approved for planting. Crops which have gained approval in South Africa include varieties of maize, cotton and rice, and GM cotton is grown in Burkina Faso and Sudan. Egypt has approved a variety of GM maize, although in 2015 none was actually grown. A further seven countries are conducting field trials. In 2015, 3.5 million hectares of GM crops were grown commercially in Africa.

The difference between continents is the result of both social factors and technology. So far, commercial crops for industrial agriculture have been the focus of development, with the crops which are important to subsistence farmers attracting much less attention. Currently, almost all the GM crops grown worldwide are resistant to herbicides or to pests, or to both. As we will see, there is a much greater diversity of crops in the pipeline, many of them explicitly created for the developing world.

These techniques are blurring the distinction between GM and ‘conventional’ breeding. Is it time to question exactly what we class as GM, and consider whether extra regulations for these crops are warranted? Certainly anyone who disagrees with GM because it is ‘unnatural’ might like to take a look at current plant breeding practices (as we do in Chapter 4). Although the ‘natural is best’ outlook is prevalent in the GMO debate, it is worth questioning its logic.

‘All natural’ has become great marketing, but it isn’t a way to guarantee benefits either from a health or environmental point of view. Fake fur is undeniably a more environmentally sound choice than catching an arctic fox. Likewise, modern pharmaceuticals are a more environmentally friendly (and effective) treatment for fevers and convulsions than rhino horns. From a health perspective too, natural isn’t always best. Even familiar foods such as potato can be harmful in their natural raw state. And unless you’ve invited your enemies for dinner, you no doubt cut off the rhubarb leaves before making a crumble.

Without ‘natural vs man-made’ as a simple way to judge risks and benefits, we instead have to rely on the evidence. Specifically, we need to look at the evidence for each crop on a case-by-case basis. There’s a wide variety of GM crops under development, so we can’t conclude that all GMOs are good or all GMOs are bad. The differences between GM crops aren’t simply scientific; they are also social and economic. Who owns the technology, for example, and is it being used in a responsible way?

Many of the issues we have to consider aren’t unique to GM, even though they are often presented that way. The GM debate, so often fuelled by misinformation, can distract us from the real issues of sustainable food production. These issues are vitally important. Agriculture is by far the leading cause of deforestation, is responsible for 70% of freshwater extraction, and causes about a third of greenhouse gas emissions. Faced with a growing population and a changing climate, we have some very serious challenges to meet. Meanwhile, the current GM stalemate is draining resources both from people developing GMOs and from their opponents.

We have come a long way in the two decades since the first GM crop was commercialised, and thankfully the more dramatic early predictions certainly haven’t played out. In March 2000, Greenpeace released a briefing on GM crops entitled ‘The End of the World as We Know it’, accompanied by the tagline ‘Don’t do it’. It’s not entirely clear what the authors were envisaging, but I’m pretty certain the title was meant to indicate a more apocalyptic scenario than the one we’ve seen. The world does look decidedly different to the one we saw at the turn of the millennium, but GM has yet to cause a revolution. Instead, as we will see, it has brought both benefits and problems, and has the potential to bring more of both. With potential effects on our food system and our environment, the issue is too big to ignore.

Chapter 2

Birth of the ‘Frankenfood’ Debate

In 1992, New York Times Magazine’s food columnist Molly O’Neill predicted that GM food “could be the biggest boon to corporate profits since frozen foods were introduced in the 1930's, and it could also be a marketing nightmare”.

As the end of the 20th century came closer, it became clear that only one of these predictions was proving correct. It wasn’t the ‘best thing since frozen peas’ for the food industry, but this would be the start of a PR struggle lasting decades. Destruction of GM crops became a popular pastime for 1990s environmentalists, with protests as creative as making crop circles in the shape of question marks. Similarly, the biotech industry fought back.

Anti-GM sentiments had started brewing in the 1980s, and in 1991 Friends of the Earth set up a biotechnology programme to “inform policy-makers of the risks to the environment from genetically modified organisms”. It was only in 1994, however, that things really got interesting. This year saw the launch of the world’s first genetically modified food, and it was a hit.

It wasn’t a multi-national giant that was first to put GM food on the shelves, but a small, close-knit company from Davis, California. Calgene had created the Flavr Savr tomato, which looked set to be a poster child for biotechnology and to turn its inventor into an industry leader. Belinda Martineau, who helped bring Flavr Savr to market as a principal scientist at Calgene, has shared the story, warts and all, in her book First Fruit. She describes a journey of technical challenges, complex safety tests, regulatory hurdles and financial calculations that didn’t add up. Eventually, Flavr Savr provided the fame but not the fortune.

The tomato plant hasn’t made it easy to deliver ripe and tasty delicacies to your dinner plate. As any greenhouse owner knows, pick them too late and they rot, pick them too early and it’s green tomato chutney all round. The tomato industry has risen to the challenge by picking green tomatoes and then using ethylene gas to induce ripening. There’s little choice in the matter: tomatoes harvested with even a hint of red on them won’t survive the shipping. Artificial ripening does, however, come at the expense of flavour.

A tomato which doesn’t go off sounds like the holy grail for farmers, retailers and tomato lovers, and perhaps the Flavr Savr could be their dream come true. The altered gene in Flavr Savr coded for an enzyme that breaks down pectin, which is what causes the fruit to soften and rot. In Flavr Savr the gene was flipped, meaning less pectin and a tomato that is much slower to rot.

In the late 1980s Calgene produced its first mature Flavr Savr tomatoes, and tests showed these had the long shelf life the scientists had been striving for. The centrefold in Calgene's 1989 annual report was a photograph of juicy Flavr Savr tomatoes alongside their rotting non-GM counterparts. So far, they were on track for success. It was time to tackle the extensive testing needed to satisfy the regulators.

In the USA, regulation of GM foods is the domain of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Although Calgene could be held responsible if their foods were deemed unsafe, they were under no obligation to seek FDA approval before releasing Flavr Savr. However, they considered FDA approval imperative for public relations so made the commendable decision to make all the data supporting the application freely available to the public, whatever they found.

As the first company to enter the brave new world of commercialising GM foods, Calgene had to deal with the regulation both of general techniques of genetic modification and of the specific modifications made to Flavr Savr. To make sure the journey to market was as smooth as possible, they decided to plough ahead with approval for GM techniques while Flavr Savr was still under development.

The most worrying technique was the use of a ‘marker gene’ which made the GM plants resistant to the antibiotic kanamycin. These marker genes are used to identify which experimental plants contain modified DNA. By inserting an antibiotic resistance gene along with the desirable gene, scientists could use the antibiotic to detect whether the plant had been successfully modified.

In hindsight, resistance to an antibiotic used to treat humans might not have been a smart choice, especially for public relations. However, by this time Calgene had thousands of prototype plants containing the gene so Belinda and colleagues were committed. She explained: “We did not discuss these issues out loud. Rather, we seemed to silently agree there was no looking back.”

The only choice was to convince the FDA that this gene was both necessary and that it was safe to consume.

In 1990 Belinda was one of the scientists who reluctantly accepted the task of doing the experiments needed to satisfy the regulators. She was convinced by the stark realisation that “without the regulatory approval we were seeking and the subsequent successful commercialisation of the Flavr Savr tomato, the stability of the entire company was in jeopardy. What we were really undertaking was science for survival.”

A question which clearly needed addressing was whether Flavr Savr tomatoes could make bacteria in the human gut resistant to kanamycin. This task fell to Belinda, and with trepidation she embarked on experiments to determine how thoroughly DNA gets broken down in the digestive system, and whether the kanamycin-resistance gene could jump from the tomatoes to bacteria. She survived the smell of the synthetic gastric fluids used in experiments and was rewarded with the results she’d hoped for.

Even making many worst-case scenario assumptions, she calculated that for every 1,000 Flavr Savr consumers one gut bacterium might become resistant to kanamycin. This doesn’t sound too bad given that one person’s gut contains around 1012 bacteria which could theoretically take up the gene. What’s more, other studies were showing that kanamycin resistance was already common in human gut bacteria. Her colleagues came to the same conclusions for bacteria in agricultural soil, which was important for the environmental impact assessment. Spirits were high when the kanamycin assessment was sent to the FDA in 1990.

Meanwhile, the media was taking an interest in the potential for Flavr Savr tomatoes, to the delight of Calgene’s business department. In their excitement they decided that promises of longer shelf life weren’t enough. Their marketing claims went a step further, to say that the tomatoes would be firm enough to survive shipment even if they were harvested when they were ripe. And to truly place Flavr Savr as a premium product, they claimed that they would taste better than standard tomatoes.

It seemed a logical assumption, but Belinda described the scepticism of some of her scientific colleagues: “It would have been one thing if we were simply claiming that the Flavr Savr tomato could linger on the grocer's or consumer's shelf weeks longer than the typical fresh tomato. But a vine-ripened fresh tomato that could survive the shipping process? That tomato was purely hypothetical.”

This scepticism turned out to be wise. The first shipping test was to see whether vine-ripened tomatoes could survive a 2,000 mile truck ride from Mexico. In Belinda’s words: “The results of the test were clear before the vehicle had come to a stop. Tomato puree was seeping from the back end of the truck. The cargo was beyond salvage. One Calgene official repeatedly muttered, ‘It's over, it's over.’ Two others used snow shovels to transfer the mess into dumpsters.”

Although Flavr Savr was delivering big improvements to shelf life, the plans for improvements between field and shelf didn’t seem to be working out. There was a reason why the industry had stuck to transporting green tomatoes, and Flavr Savr wasn’t necessarily going to change this. The team kept working.

Alongside these technical hurdles, the regulatory path was proving to be more challenging than they’d bargained for. The FDA responded to the initial kanamycin assessment with a request for more data. ‘Unintended consequences’ hadn’t been adequately assessed, including the implications of where the new genes were inserted in the tomato’s DNA. In many ways GM in the ‘90s was a pretty crude process. Scientists knew which gene they were adding, but couldn’t control where it would end up (the fact that the FDA approval, when it eventually came through, would arrive via fax also gives an insight into the technology they had available in the lab compared to today’s biologists). If, for example, the genes were inserted in the middle of the gene for a vitamin, this could change the tomato’s nutritional value.

Samples of ripe Flavr Savr were sent to the National Food Laboratory in California, and their vitamin and mineral content was compared to non-GM tomato varieties. Thankfully, analysis showed there was no reason to be concerned by the levels of vitamins or minerals.

To be as conservative as possible in their safety assessment, they also performed an ‘acute oral toxicity test’. This is a standard approach to uncover toxic effects on animals. Belinda explained: “Although tomato fruit was a far cry from being a single, pure chemical substance like the ones usually tested using this approach, no one at Calgene could think of a better way to reveal unintended changes we could not imagine.”

At the IIT Research Institute in Chicago, pureed tomatoes were fed to healthy rats using a syringe. After two weeks the rats were euthanised and autopsies were performed. The researchers concluded that there had been no toxic effects from the Flavr Savr. These results were promising but preliminary, so were followed by 28 day feeding experiments (‘wholesomeness studies’). This time the results looked worrying. Some of the rats fed on one particular variety of Flavr Savr had developed lesions in their stomach linings.

A ‘flabbergasted’ Belinda was instructed to repeat the tests. All the available fruit from the offending variety was immediately harvested, and this time the fruit samples were freeze-dried to increase their concentration. This way the rats got more fruit, so if the tomatoes were the culprits the lesions would be more likely to occur. The results of this experiment caused Calgene employees to relax a little. Lesions were again found in rats fed Flavr Savr tomatoes, but they were also found in rats fed non-GM tomatoes. What’s more, they were found most often in rats fed water rather than tomato. Increasing the concentration of tomato had no effect, further supporting the conclusion that Flavr Savr was not the cause.

To tackle the problem from another direction, Belinda’s team decided to investigate whether the lesions could be caused by an increased level of toxins. Tomatoes naturally produce toxins, but these aren’t present at high enough concentrations to be harmful to humans (a clear example of the toxicologists’ mantra ‘the dose makes the poison’). Calgene therefore sent samples to the University of Maine to test for raised levels of tomatine toxin. To Calgene’s relief, the results came back negative.

Was the ‘good’ feeding study enough to negate the previous ‘bad’ results? It was a question that Calgene employees didn’t know how to answer, though as Belinda explained: “One thing was certain. The prospect of carrying out more wholesomeness studies was unappealing. The group’s plan of action, therefore, didn’t call for any.” Pathologists from outside Calgene would analyse information from all the studies, and then it would be up to the FDA to decide.

In this instance, the FDA did accept the evidence as safe, and Calgene’s journey into the uncharted territory of approvals for GM foods proved worthwhile. On 18th May 1994 Calgene employees arrived at work to find a banner above the front door reading ‘FDA Approval’ and at noon champagne was served while a news crew recorded the celebration. This came not a moment too soon for Calgene, which was by now millions of dollars in debt. They lost no time in letting the sales commence.

Three days later, the world’s first genetically modified tomatoes arrived on the shelves of just two American grocery stores. Bright-red booklets in the shape of tomatoes accompanied each purchase, briefly explaining the genetic engineering process.

Belinda wasn’t the only person to be excited on the launch day, and she described the Flavr Savr’s first appearance: “[At] the store in Davis, where Calgene is located, they had to ration the tomatoes – the store owner said you could only buy two a day. And literally, Calgene couldn't keep up with the demand. They were that popular.”

This enthusiasm continued, and the following May Flavr Savr tomatoes were shipped to 1,700 stores, selling for up to twice as much as other tomatoes. Their popularity was fuelled partly by the success of a blind taste test in which employees of high-end restaurants declared their surprise at the sweet and juicy tomatoes.

Sales may have been looking good, but Calgene continued to report losses of millions of dollars. Flavr Savr, meant to help them back into the red, wasn’t helping. They still hadn’t properly solved the problem of the tomato’s ability to survive shipping once ripe, and so transportation was difficult and expensive. This was compounded by the challenges of harvesting ripe tomatoes: you can pick green tomatoes together, but ripe tomatoes are ready for harvest at different times. Once you took shipping costs into account, Flavr Savr was actually selling at a considerable loss. Calgene’s lack of experience in the tomato business was painfully obvious.

Its financial plight prompted Calgene to accept a first investment from Monsanto in 1995, although that wasn’t enough to reverse the trend. Finally, in 1997, Monsanto bought all remaining shares. This marked the end of the road for the Flavr Savr.

Despite this disappointment for everyone who had worked to make the Flavr Savr dream a reality, their experiences of regulation and commercialisation weren’t in vain. They had paved the way for others in the industry, and the mid-1990s were exciting times for biotech. Other companies were hot on Calgene’s heels in bringing GM foods to market. While Calgene’s plans for fresh tomatoes began to unravel, the story with tomato paste was panning out quite differently.

The first GM product to go on sale across the Atlantic in the UK was a tomato paste. It was made with tomatoes developed by Zeneca which, like Flavr Savr, had a longer shelf life. This modification meant the paste could be produced more cheaply, no doubt one of the reasons it proved popular. Despite the front of the tins announcing in large letters that the paste was made with genetically modified tomatoes, over 1.8 million cans were sold in British supermarkets between 1996 and 1999.

During this time, however, the mood began to change. Initially, the biotech industry was largely unconcerned by public opinion. Throughout the 1980s they’d been warned about the dangers of public resistance both to milk from hormone-fed cows and to GM. When the 90s came along and none of this had fully materialised, it looked a bit like crying wolf. And for a while, things progressed very well indeed: in 1996 Monsanto shareholders got a 62% return on investment.

There were worrying signs, however. The protesters who paid Calgene a visit ranged from Greenpeace to the Union for Concerned Scientists. Predictably, some of the opposition was accompanied by misinformation. One rumour claimed that the tomatoes were cubes (now that would be a shipping company’s dream), another that a fish gene had been added, with potentially dire consequences for anyone allergic to fish. The latter rumour provided great material for anyone wishing to illustrate genetic modification as ‘playing God’, and some imaginative images of fish-tomato hybrids sprang up.

Still, it wasn’t the protestors who had put the nails in Flavr Savr’s coffin. Even though the tomatoes were labelled as GM and were more expensive than other premium tomatoes, consumers were not deterred. Most environmental advocacy groups agreed that Calgene had done a good job of demonstrating Flavr Savr’s safety with publically-available data. Belinda explained: “There were many reasons why the Flavr Savr tomato eventually flopped but public outcry at the fact that it was genetically engineered was not one of them. Almost without exception during the course of its brief commercial run, demand for the Flavr Savr tomato outdistanced supplies.”

This trend was not to continue. Despite the initial positive sales, the level of public resistance in Europe became hard to ignore. Not a problem, thought those at the top, the public just needs to be educated. In 1996, Monsanto opened information hotlines in the UK and Germany, with little effect. As the softer attempts at education failed, Monsanto embarked on an advertising campaign which would be a monumental disaster. Looking at the ads, it’s not hard to see why.

The headline of one advert managed to simultaneously belittle those who cared about world hunger and over-hype the role of biotech: “Worrying about starving future generations won’t feed them. Food biotechnology will.” To counter images of mutant vegetables, Monsanto tried to play the ‘natural’ card. The advert explained that GM seeds had “naturally occurring beneficial genes inserted into their genetic structure”. I was half expecting them to go on to give one of these genes a positive name, in the same way that hair care adverts invent names for molecules in shampoo.

The hype around new technologies regularly leads to disillusionment – I’m yet to own a 3D printer, and it turns out that Apple’s intelligent personal assistant, Siri, does not in fact know everything you need. Early promises are often not fulfilled, or at least not quickly enough, and in this way Monsanto helped set the biotech industry up for a fall. One advertisement promised: “Less chemical use in farming, saving scarce resources. More productive yields. Disease-resistant crops.”

In addition to pro-biotech propaganda, they did try to address some of the dissenters’ concerns: “Of course, we are primarily a business. We aim to make profits, acknowledging that there are other views of biotechnology than ours.” I have no idea what the acknowledgement meant in practice, or how this was meant to allay any fears. Needless to say, it didn’t.

As well as adverts, the US$1.6 million European media blitz included leaflets, hotlines and a consumer website. It claimed to be providing consumers with “the information they need to make informed decisions”.

Plenty of people had already made up their minds and didn’t feel they needed Monsanto’s input into their decisions. Two days after the launch of Monsanto’s campaign, the UK’s Prince Charles wrote an essay in the Daily Telegraph making associations between BSE and GM in terms of unpredictable consequences, unknown effects and uncertain science. To him, GM crops were “enough to send a cold chill down the spine”. This debate was not going away.

In 1998 rifts between the two camps grew deeper following the claims made by Dr Árpád Pusztai. Hungarian-born Pusztai had spent time in a refugee camp in Austria before dedicating 36 years to studying plant proteins at the Rowett Research Institute in Scotland. He started a media storm with an interview on the UK’s World in Action TV show where he told viewers he wouldn’t eat GM food. It’s no surprise that he caught the world’s attention by saying “I find it very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs.”

Pusztai had done a study feeding rats with potatoes modified to produce a pesticide which occurs naturally in snowdrops. He told the media that the rats fed GM potatoes were less healthy than those fed non-GM potatoes. Many scientists loudly disagreed, and so the ‘poisoned rat debate’ began.

In his experiment, the organs of the rats that had eaten GM potatoes weighed less than the organs of those fed non-GM potatoes, and their lymphocytes (immune cells) were depressed. Pusztai showed that rats could safely eat the pesticide on its own; in fact it even protected them against salmonella. He therefore concluded that it must be the new gene itself, or DNA inserted with it, that was the problem. His message was that “the damage to the rats did not come from the lectin, but apparently from the same process of genetic engineering that is used to create the GM foods everyone was already eating”.

The media interest in the days following the World in Action broadcast was intense, and the story was covered on TV and radio stations around the world. Pusztai started to became very uncomfortable about what he was hearing on the news. “I heard things that really disturbed me,” he said. “My head was buzzing ... the whole thing was getting totally out of hand.”

Meanwhile, scientists at the Rowett Institute reviewed Pusztai’s data and discovered that some of the experiments he’d spoken of weren’t even finished, to the alarm of the Institute Director, Professor Philip James.

Following the discovery that the experiments hadn’t actually been completed, Pusztai was suspended and misconduct procedures were used to seize his data and ban him from speaking publicly. His annual research contract was not renewed, although he was offered the chance to continue as a lecturer. At the age of 69, we would retire with a cloud over his career.

Preventing Pusztai from speaking publically did nothing to halt the flow of media coverage. The debate took a turn for the worse with claims the potatoes were modified with a gene from jack bean that is poisonous to mammals. This misinformation was formalised in a press release issued by the Rowett Research Institute. James says this press release was approved by Pusztai, though Pusztai says he didn’t see it before it went out.

Whatever the status of the press release, Pusztai had been given permission to do the initial interview, and their press officer was present at the start of filming. Looking back on it a decade later, Dr Pusztai described James as excited by the media attention: “The director kept running around like a blue-arsed fly. This was a tremendous public relations business for him.”

Exactly what happened in the early stages of the debate is unclear; James claims to have had grave doubts about the interview, but afterwards he called Pusztai to congratulate him. Pusztai has described James’s subsequent behaviour as irresponsible: “Apparently he thought the best way to extricate himself from the responsibility for having misled the public … was to tell the world that I got ‘muddled’ or even that I ‘took’ data from a colleague who was absent at the time.”

Pusztai was widely condemned for going public with his conclusions before they were published in a scientific journal. The GM potato was an experimental model and wasn’t available as food, so their urgent publicity wasn’t needed to protect consumers. When giving evidence before the UK government’s Science and Technology Select Committee in 1999, Pusztai estimated that his experiments were 99% complete. What was missing, however, was the chance for other scientists to take a critical look at his work.

One of the highest profile criticisms of the study came from the Royal Society in London. A committee of experts concluded that Pusztai’s experiments were badly designed and the statistics he’d used were inappropriate. One major flaw was that a diet of raw potatoes is bad for rats regardless of whether or not the potatoes are genetically modified. Another possibility is that that the effects he was seeing were due to changes in the potatoes occurring because of a different laboratory process used, tissue culture, and not the introduced gene at all. As a result, many scientists see the Pusztai affair as disproportionately damaging to the GM debate.

Professor Chris Leaver, a plant scientist at Oxford University, believes that NGOs decided to make a play using him. He said: “I think it did a lot of damage because ... the vast majority of people were somewhat neutral at the time. I think he got hijacked and then he got out of his depth.”

When giving evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, the Rowett Institute summarised the way many scientists felt: “Dr Pusztai's concerns about the need for devising new safety tests for transgenic lectins are, in our view, valid. We judge, however, that his experiments to date are far too crude and preliminary to justify any claims for novel findings of either lectin-related or general biotechnological significance.”

Amongst the criticisms, Pusztai was even rumoured to live in a gothic mansion bought with the proceeds of guest appearances as an eco-champion. The mansion is one of the easiest fantasies to dismiss in the story of the GM debate, though he has since given hundreds of lectures around the world.

To many anti-GM campaigners, Árpád Pusztai is a hero. He gave the public information that they needed to hear even at the expense of his career. As Pusztai himself said: “I was publicly funded and I thought the public had a right to know.”

In this messy debate it is easy to forget to disentangle the different arguments. There are lots of scientific reasons to doubt Pusztai’s conclusions, and I will discuss the safety of GM foods in Chapter 10. But even if we don’t accept his claims, it doesn’t mean he was treated fairly. And likewise, even if he wasn’t treated fairly it doesn’t mean that the whole scientific community has a policy of crushing anyone who expresses doubts over GM. The way the fiasco was handled was arguably heavy-handed, but we need to look at the safety of GM foods and the way the scientific community communicates its findings as separate issues.

It is also interesting that Pusztai gets all the blame for the debate being more damaging to the image of GM than the data warranted. Speaking as a former science press officer, I would be mortified if this had happened on my watch. And as for those who disciplined Pusztai, could they have done more to put forward an accurate message?

The change in the public mood in the reaction to Pusztai’s potato-eating rats was reflected in the BBC’s 1998 background briefing on genetically modified food. This focussed on GM’s potential as an ‘unseen threat’. Naming supermarkets which stocked the tomato paste, the BBC warned that “scientists are ready to bombard the world with genetically modified food”. Such was the level of concern that the European Union placed a moratorium on the production of GM crops from 1998 to 2003. It was still legal to import certain approved GM products, but by the second half of 1999 all of the major supermarket chains in the UK had withdrawn GM foods.

The strength of the anti-GM backlash and the level of hype surrounding Pusztai’s claims prompted the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee to produce its first report on GM foods. The report, published in 1999, highlighted their fear that: “GM technology and its potential benefits may be permanently lost to the UK unless there is rational debate.”

The report is far more positive than the mood at the time, and this wasn’t welcomed by many campaign groups and members of the public. It did, however, outline the potential benefits and risks, and recognise that scientific findings don’t always produce the clear-cut answers the public, press and policy-makers are looking for. Some of their general conclusions are still worth remembering today:

“No human activity is entirely risk-free. Certainly no food is. This is not, however, a reason to trust unquestioningly in new technologies such as modern genetic modification. Risks must be identified, evaluated and minimised.

“It would be deeply regrettable if the UK forfeited all the potential economic and social benefits offered by GM technology on the basis of unfounded scare stories. If the UK is to reject it, it should be on the basis of scientific assessments of identifiable risks or well-considered value judgements not the result of journalistic hyperbole and unfounded fear.”

The Committee’s worry about scare stories was certainly playing out. As the 20th century drew to a close, the hypothetical concerns of those who spoke out against GM were gradually being backed up with more case studies. Unfortunately, the debate has been shaped partly by stories that turned out to be untrue.

In 1999, it was the turn of the monarch butterflies to take the centre of the GM stage. The monarch, a beautiful butterfly common in the Americas, has an incredible life cycle. Caterpillars which eat their way to adulthood in the USA will migrate south in the autumn as butterflies. They then spend the winter in Mexico’s cloud forests, with tens of thousands clustered together on individual trees. Come the spring they will begin a northwards journey of thousands of kilometres and then lay their eggs so the cycle can continue. There are fears, however, that this may be under threat, with monarch populations declining at an alarming rate.

Monarchs have captured imaginations around the world – they have even been taken to the international space station – so it’s not surprising that a study suggesting they were being killed by GM crops hit the headlines. The USA was widely growing Bt maize, which has a gene inserted for a naturally-occurring insecticide. The study claimed that pollen from Bt maize was poisonous to monarch caterpillars. Although monarchs don’t eat maize, the pollen gets blown onto the caterpillars’ foodplant, milkweed.

Claims that butterflies were being poisoned by pollen didn’t hold up to scrutiny because the laboratory study used far higher concentrations of pollen than monarchs encountered in the wild. However, by the time this was established the monarch had become a flagship for the dangers of GM crops. Agriculture is indeed a major factor in monarch declines, particularly with reductions of milkweed on farmland. However, there is no simple link between GM maize and the monarch’s troubles.

What’s still open for debate is whether a more meaningful version of these experiments should have been carried out before Bt maize was grown commercially. However, even if such early experiments had been undertaken to show that toxicity of Bt maize wouldn’t threaten the monarchs, this doesn’t solve controversies of indirect effects. Could GM crops cause an even greater loss of wildlife habitat than non-GM varieties? I will return to this story in Chapter 6.

Another pervasive argument against GM which arose in the 1990s is the so-called ‘terminator gene’. This controversial technology is designed to support existing plant breeder’s rights and patent rights. These ‘Genetic Use Restriction Technologies’ (GURTs) could allow scientists to create crops which produce sterile seeds. Canadian NGO Rural Advancement Foundation International correctly identified a better PR opportunity with a catchier title, and coined the term ‘terminator’.

Most companies view seeds they have developed in the same way the software industry sees its proprietary products. If you want to keep using them, you have to keep paying. This is also true for seeds produced through other breeding methods, and large companies are notorious for suing farmers who save and replant seed without paying royalties. Some form of protection is essential for companies to survive; the money from selling patented seeds doesn’t just line the investors’ pockets, it is used for future research and development.

Monsanto’s website explains its reasons for suing farmers who illegally replant its seeds: “When farmers purchase a patented seed variety, they sign an agreement that they will not save and replant seeds produced from the seed they buy from us. They understand the basic simplicity of the agreement, which is that a business must be paid for its product. The vast majority of farmers understand and appreciate our research and are willing to pay for our inventions and the value they provide. They don’t think it’s fair that some farmers don’t pay.”

The problem is that saving seeds is a common practice in many developing countries, where it isn’t always practical for companies to collect their royalties. Without this ‘brown-bagging’ of seeds, some farmers simply couldn’t make a living. Biotechnology had taken this seed-saving debate up a notch: if companies create a crop which produces sterile seeds then even the poorest farmers would be committed to paying each year.

The first patent application related to terminator technologies goes back to 1991 and was filed by DuPont. This was granted in 1994, and a terminator technology patent was granted to Zeneca shortly after. The greater outcry, however, came when US taxpayers’ money was used for terminator research.

In 1998, the United States Department of Agriculture and the Delta & Pine Land Company were granted a patent for ‘seed-embedded protection technology’. A British researcher, Melvin Oliver, had been employed by the Department of Agriculture to lead the project. He justified his work by saying: “My main interest is the protection of American technology. Our mission is to protect US agriculture, and to make us competitive in the face of foreign competition. Without this, there is no way of protecting the technology.”

To many, however, this wasn’t justified protection of businesses, it was an unethical way to treat farmers. Fierce protests raged worldwide, and the protestors won the battle. In June 1999, as a result of the huge opposition from charities, farmers and the wider public, Zeneca announced that it would not market terminator seeds. A few months later Monsanto followed suit. A de facto global moratorium was soon placed on this technology, which is still upheld today.

This could be seen as a battle won, though to me it leaves a large question unanswered – can we not think of a better way to help the poorest farmers make a living than ensuring they are still able to break the law? There was an outcry at the idea of a technology preventing farmers from saving seeds, yet we already allow this to be done with contracts. Even with terminator genes currently out of the picture, the balance of power between multi-national companies and the farmers who buy from them is a major debate, as we will discuss later on. Commercial crop varieties produced by conventional breeding methods come with restrictions, just as GM seeds do.

It’s still worth noting that there is also a potential flipside of terminator genes; they could theoretically be used in the containment of GMOs. If a GM plant can’t reproduce, you reduce the risk of these plants ‘escaping’ into the wild.

Arguments about terminator genes, monarchs and poisoned rats provided fuel for the fire of public disapproval. As a result, the anti-biotech lobby were slowing the development of GM foods. But they weren’t preventing it. We entered the 21st century with fireworks, hangovers and a fundamental void between many industry scientists and the consumers they were striving to please.

The scale of this divide is perhaps best illustrated by stories of a Calgene reunion in 2000. Belinda showed photos of her two children, listened to accounts of her friends’ new jobs, then broached the subject of the public debate over genetically modified food. She was greeted with enthusiastic renditions of the same arguments which had characterised the industry’s attitudes throughout the ‘90s, starting with ‘the public doesn’t understand the technology’. Almost 100 million acres had been planted with GM crops in 1999, which her colleagues took as proof that the anti-biotech food crusade had proved ineffective and the controversy would soon blow over.

This certainly wasn’t Belinda’s assessment of the situation: “I was taken aback. The FDA had received some 35,000 comments from the public in response to its meetings on the regulation of genetically engineered foods held the previous November and December. After sending the FDA only a couple of dozen comments regarding the approval process for the Flavr Savr tomato, the general public in the United States appeared to be making up for lost time. After a moment of stunned silence I therefore informed my scientific acquaintances that they were in denial.”

The events of the following decade certainly proved she was right.

Chapter 3

The 21st Century

The stroke of midnight on 1st January 2000 was a victory for technology. The much-feared millennium bug failed to strike, and we were left with working computer systems and computing power growing at an exponential rate. In the agricultural world bugs were of course continuing to thrive, and GM technology wasn’t getting the same lucky break. Europe was, and still is, a hub of anti-biotech feelings, and campaign groups actively exported these views to other parts of the world. Perhaps the most shocking GM stories from the early 2000s came from Africa.

In 2002 southern Africa was hit by famine. Flooding followed by drought caused harvests to fail. Combined with deteriorating economic conditions and the high rates of AIDS infection, this led to devastating hunger. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) responded to the situation with emergency food aid, much of which came from the USA and other donor countries who grow large quantities of GM grains. However, health and environmental fears led to resistance from many of the recipients. Some countries, including Lesotho and Mozambique, took a simple solution to preventing environmental damage: milling the GM grain so that no seeds could be grown.

Others took a firmer stance. Zimbabwe stopped the GM food aid from entering the country, and the Zambian government prevented the distribution of GM grain which had already arrived. With almost 3 million of his citizens facing famine, Zambia’s President Mwanawasa justified the rejection by saying: “I will not allow Zambians to be turned into guinea pigs no matter the levels of hunger in the country.”

To try and alleviate fears, a delegation of Zambian scientists and economists were invited on a tour of labs in Europe, America and South Africa. Their report, however, simply caused Mwanawasa to strengthen his views, voicing the remarkable opinion about the GM grains that he would “rather die than eat poison”. Others pointed out that GM foods imported from South Africa were available in Zambian supermarkets, and that Americans are suffering no side effects from eating GMOs. Zimbabwe relented and accepted milled grain, while Zambia resisted until it had experienced two more years of famine.