Today in AgBioView - August 10, 2008
* Four Barriers to GM Food Revolution, and Why No One Is Talking About
Them
* New AgBiotech Website: GMObelus
* Forcing the Issues
* Nutritionally Improved Agricultural Crops
* Safety Assessment of GM Plants with Endogenous Gene Expression
* Money For Crop Research Just A Drop In The Bucket
* Edging Towards BioUtopia - Book Review
* Stalin's War on Genetic Science
Food Fight - The Four Barriers to the Genetically Modified-Food
Revolution- and Why No One Is Talking About Them
- Paul Roberts, Slate.com, August 8, 2008
http://www.slate.com/id/2196772/pagenum/all/#page_start
Discussion of the article at
http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/3525/ShowForum.aspx?ArticleID=2196772
Could this be the turning point for genetically modified food? As food
prices have soared around the world, agro-industry companies like
Monsanto and Syngenta, along with their allies in Washington, have been
carefully positioning GM technology as our last, best hope against a
global food catastrophe. Since traditional crop-breeding methods aren't
keeping up with soaring food demand, they argue, we have no choice but
to re-engineer our crops at the molecular level to give bigger yields.
Appealing as this argument sounds, it misses the real obstacles facing
GM. Yes, traditional crop science is struggling. And yes, rising food
prices might help consumers and lawmakers overcome their fears about
GM's safety (especially as some of those concerns are overblown). But
neither change will alter the fact that GM crop technology itself isn't
ready to save the world. Despite GM's potential, the technology faces
substantial technical and economic barriers before it will spark a
second green revolution-barriers that aren't being discussed in the
newly energized debate over genetically modified food.
For starters, for all the talk of saving the world from hunger, the GM
industry isn't focusing on crops that are truly relevant to global food
security. Today, most GM research targets big Western cash crops: Two of
the best-selling GM products are corn and soybeans engineered to
tolerate the popular herbicide Roundup. But these high-tech seeds are
designed for large-scale, mechanized farmers in North and South America
and are of no use to the billions of developing-world farmers who make
up three-quarters of the global-farming work force-but without whom
lasting global food security can't be achieved.
By contrast, relatively little GM investment is going into the crops
that do matter to poor farmers-cassava, sorghum, millet, pigeon pea,
chickpea, and groundnut. These crops are more nutritionally balanced
than corn or soybeans and are far better suited to the local soils and
often-tough climates of poor nations. Yet, because poor farmers can't
afford high-tech seeds, GM companies have little incentive to invest
research dollars to improve "marginal" crops. Instead, they focus on the
money makers: According to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization,
just four commercial crops-corn, soybeans, canola, and cotton-account
for 85 percent of all GM crops planted worldwide.
GM companies also aren't being honest about what this technology can
do-and what it can't. In the rush to exploit the current crisis, the
industry routinely promises to re-engineer crops to give massive
yields-Monsanto has vowed to double grain yields by 2030-or to grow with
less water or to thrive in degraded soils. But delivering on such
promises will be much harder than is currently acknowledged. Whereas
making corn tolerate Roundup required the manipulation of just one gene,
boosting yield is vastly more complex, says Kendall Lamkey, a
crop-breeding expert who chairs Iowa State University's Department of
Agronomy. Yield is the expression of a plant's reproductive success, and
reproduction takes nearly all of a plant's survival "skills," from its
capacity to cope with temperature changes to its resistance to bugs. In
other words, says Lamkey, to boost yields through genetic modification,
GM companies must manipulate thousands of genes-and so far, they've had
limited success.
In fact, many breeding experts believe that the fastest way to boost
yields isn't by engineering new seeds but by exploiting the untapped
potential of existing seeds. As Lamkey points out, the yields for corn
and soybeans on America's top-performing farms are more than double the
national average for those same crops. (In 2007, the top soybean farmer
produced 154 bushels per acre, compared with the national average of
around 41 bushels.) That means there is considerable room for
improvement before these seeds are maxed out. These "top producers"
aren't using different seeds; instead, they're benefiting from better
soils, using better farming practices, and applying lots of water,
fertilizer, and other chemicals-factors that GM technology won't
influence anyway.
To be fair, GM technologists may eventually master the complexity of
yield-but not without spending lots of money and lots of time; Monsanto
says it will need at least two decades for its big yield boosts. That
means the world has little hope for quick relief-and that GM companies
have little hope for a quick return on their investment. Thus, for all
the hype about using GM to solve the current crisis, or to end hunger
generally, the industry will be financially inclined to focus on simpler
projects with faster payoffs, such as new varieties of commercial crops
bred to tolerate herbicides and pesticides.
Even if GM companies do manage to improve crops that truly matter for
food security, these miracle seeds won't help if they're not accessible
to poor farmers. That means companies must either price seeds cheaply
enough for farmers to buy each year or stop objecting when poor farmers
save and reuse the seeds the following year. Today, Monsanto and other
seed companies object strenuously to seed saving, which they call "seed
piracy" and which they claim deprives them of profits. Yet seed saving
is central to food security for the billions of farmers too poor to buy
new seeds every season. More to the point, while pirated profits are a
real issue among wealthy Western farmers, it's a bogus concern in the
developing world, where poor farmers were never going to buy new
seeds-and certainly not expensive GM seeds-every year anyway.
In fact, many critics believe the GM industry's objections to seed
saving have less to do with lost profits in the developing world than
with the industry's long-term goal of owning, literally, the seed
sector. When seeds are conventionally bred, breeders don't own
them-anyone can use or improve the seeds. But genetic modification
allows a company to claim property rights over a particular DNA
blueprint and to charge a licensing fee for each and every copy-much as
Microsoft now claims an interest in each and every copy of Windows. By
relaxing its proprietary zeal and allowing seeds in the developing world
to be "open source," the GM industry could do much to bolster claims
that it is really trying to help poor farmers.
Finally, if the industry wants public support, it can no longer dismiss
public concerns about the risks of GM crops-health risks for humans but
also the ecological risk that GM crops will escape farms and contaminate
the wilderness. True, some concerns are overblown. Ecological
contamination, or "gene flow," is a real threat only when pollen from a
GM crop in a farm field finds a nearby wild relative; in the United
States, most commercial crops such as corn or soybeans don't have any
wild relatives. But gene flow is a possible concern in places like
Chile, where commercial potatoes do have wild elatives. Human health
risks are even less clear-cut. Though we've yet to see credible reports
of GM foods causing human health problems, we've also not had the
benefit of credible long-term health studies.
Until such studies have been completed, the GM industry needs to stop
regarding a skeptical public as a nuisance. And even if GM technology is
shown to be safe, the industry needs to accept that many consumers may
still choose not to eat genetically modified foods. That means no more
lawsuits against food companies that market their food as "GM free."
That also means no more lobbying against laws requiring that foods with
GM ingredients be labeled as such. Consumers have a right to know what's
in their food.
What would the industry get in return for such good behavior? Money, for
one. Whatever one thinks of the GM industry, it's hardly fair to force
private companies to make products for farmers so poor they can't pay.
Once upon a time, breeding new crops for poor farmers was inseparable
from the West's larger food-aid strategy and was managed-and
financed-largely by governments. (Indeed, most of the green revolution
miracle crops from the 1960s were bred by government- and
foundation-backed researchers.) Since then, much of the public-sector
breeding enterprise has been dismantled (partly at the behest of the
seed industry, which was tired of competing with public agencies),
leaving a massive gap in our system for developing critical new crops.
GM companies say they (and their technologies) offer the best means of
closing that gap. But it's hard to see why these companies would invest
heavily in regionally appropriate, but potentially unprofitable, crops.
Rather, what's more likely is that the industry will use the promise of
a solution to the food crisis to press for more regulatory flexibility
and more consumer acceptance-and then use that freedom to keep making
the same big-money cash crops they always have.
We shouldn't be shocked by such pragmatism. Seed companies, like any
company, are in business to make money. But our policy toward GM
companies should be no less pragmatic. If we want private companies to
take on what is essentially a public job-helping farmers too poor to
participate in the market economy-we're going to have to pay them to do
it. So let's make a deal: In return for targeting vital regional and
local crops, and for making the seeds accessible to poor farmers, GM
companies will get hefty subsidies for research and development of these
crops.
Would such a deal be enough to ignite a gene revolution? If the main
obstacle to GM miracles is lack of financial and political support, as
the industry argues, then such a deal could be the catalyst for serious
innovation. But if, as many critics believe, the real obstacle here is
that GM technology simply isn't all that its proponents claim, that the
real challenges of food insecurity-degraded soils, political
instability, lack of water, and soaring energy costs-are beyond the
reach of a single technology, that, too, would quickly become clear. In
either case, by reframing the GM debate as a challenge to do the
revolution right, we can encourage a more constructive conversation
about the real role that this technology might play in the future of
food security.
---
Paul Roberts is a journalist specializing in resource economics. His
latest book, The End of Food, was published in June.
---
See readers' responses including this one
http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/1603247.aspx?ArticleID=2196772
New AgBiotech Website
A new website covering news and commentary in the field of agricultural
biotechnology has just "gone live" on the web. Known as GMObelus (a
cryptic name with a simple explanation), it is edited by Andrew Apel --
who has been guest editor here in the past, and will be again, shortly.
Although GMObelus differs significantly from other online publications
in the field, it is meant to complement them, rather than to compete
with them.
GMObelus takes a noticeably different approach to selecting and editing
the daily news, and ends each week with a commentary that wraps up the
week's events.
In addition, it offers those who register with the website a free, and
highly secure, method of posting their own insights on the news.
The intended result of this format is to offer the ag biotech community,
and the general public, a running account of the latest political,
business, legal, and scientific developments regarding GMOs in
agriculture. In addition, it presents the 'lighter side' of genetic
engineering -- a development late in coming, but nonetheless welcome.
You are all invited to register with GMObelus, and to contribute your
insights.
Please visit http://www.gmobelus.com for more information. Last week's
wrap-up is posted below.
Forcing the issues
- Andrew Apel, GMObelus, August 8, 2008
http://www.gmobelus.com/news.php?viewStory=92
The issues surrounding the use of biotechnology in agriculture are
mainly political creations, and there are various ways to force them.
The week's news offer many examples of how such issues can be forced --
and examples of what's being done by people who would rather solve
issues than create them.
The European Union is forcing the issue by proposing to ban a vast array
of agricultural chemicals, including those necessary for the control of
nematodes and blight in potato fields. Technology is available which
would allow potatoes to ward off these threats, but GM potatoes are
effectively banned. (And not just in Europe.) The issue will either be
faced while the legislation is on the table, or later, during a potato
shortage.
Europe could perhaps deal with the issue as Canada has done, by simply
compensating potato farmers for their losses. That wouldn't fix consumer
prices, though, which is an issue Canada did not force upon itself.
Another way to force the issues is by laying out regulations for public
comment in countries where the controversy over biotechnology is
intense. That's what Thailand, Australia and New Zealand have just done,
and what the UK's National Food Policy threatens to do. The biggest
self-induced fracas could be in Poland, which aspires to harmonize its
GM crop regulations with European regulations by means of 'coexistence'
rules which make coexistence impossible.
This can actually be done unwittingly. It happened in Australia, where a
farmers' association has has asked for government protections for the
production of GM crops which amount to 'coexistence' legislation. If the
government responds, the farmers will likely find themselves embroiled
in issues they never meant to raise.
Still another way to force the issues is to politicize the peer-review
process, and publish articles without scientific merit in scientific
journals and other places.
Then there's the method of advertising the issues, which South Korean
beverage giant Jinro is likely to use as part of making its alcoholic
liquor 'non-GMO'. This is related to the method of contracting with
farmers to produce non-GM soy, which Japanese grain trader Marubeni
Corp. will be doing shortly in the US. Both of these methods invite
what's come to be known as a 'contamination scandal'.
Then there's blocking a field trial which scientists have approved, or
confiscating and destroying a shipment containing rice which scientists
developed but did *not* approve -- measures similar to, but arguably
more civilized than, attacking a farmer's crop of GM maize.
At the same time, there are a number of people who work harder on
solving issues, than on raising them. This week, they came up with a
solution for striga, Africa's most deadly weed. They located a family of
virulence proteins involved in both plant and human disease, and
embarked on developing drought-resistant potato and soy. And that's the
short list. We know who these people are, and they aren't politicians.
Nutritionally Improved Agricultural Crops
- Martina Newell-McGloughlin, Red Orbit, August 9, 2008
Agricultural innovation has always involved new, science-based products
and processes that have contributed reliable methods for increasing
productivity and sustainability. Biotechnology has introduced a new
dimension to such innovation, offering efficient and cost-effective
means to produce a diverse array of novel, value- added products and
tools. The first generation of biotechnology products commercialized
were crops focusing largely on input agronomic traits whose value was
largely opaque to consumers.
The coming generations of crop plants can be grouped into four broad
areas, each presenting what, on the surface, may appear as unique
challenges to regulatory oversight. The present and future focus is on
continuing improvement of agronomic traits such as yield and abiotic
stress resistance in addition to the biotic stress tolerance of the
present generation; crop plants as biomass feedstocks for biofuels and
''biosynthetics''; value-added output traits such as improved nutrition
and food functionality; and plants as production factories for
therapeutics and industrial products. From a consumer perspective, the
focus on valueadded traits, especially improved nutrition, is of
greatest interest.
Developing plants with these improved traits involves overcoming a
variety of technical, regulatory, and indeed perception challenges
inherent in the perceived and real challenges of complex modifications.
Both traditional plant breeding and biotechnologybased techniques are
needed to produce plants with the desired quality traits. Continuing
improvements in molecular and genomic technologies are contributing to
the acceleration of product development. Table I presents examples of
crops that have already been genetically modified with macronutrient and
micronutrient traits that may provide benefits to consumers and domestic
animals.
Read on at
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1516636/nutritionally_improved_agricultural_crops/
Safety Assessment Considerations for Food and Feed Derived from Plants
with Genetic Modifications that Modulate Endogenous Gene Expression and
Pathways
- Kier, L., Petrick, J. 2008. Food and Chemical Toxicology. 46:
2591-2605.
The current globally recognized comparative food and feed safety
assessment paradigm for biotechnology-derived crops is a robust and
comprehensive approach for evaluating the safety of both the inserted
gene product and the resulting crop. Incorporating many basic concepts
from food safety, toxicology, nutrition, molecular biology, and plant
breeding, this approach has been used effectively by scientists and
regulatory agencies for 10-15 years. Current and future challenges in
agriculture include the need for improved yields, tolerance to biotic
and abiotic stresses, and improved nutrition.
The next generation of biotechnology-derived crops may utilize
regulatory proteins, such as transcription factors that modulate gene
expression and/or endogenous plant pathways. In this review, we discuss
the applicability of the current safety assessment paradigm to
biotechnology-derived crops developed using modifications involving
regulatory proteins. The growing literature describing the molecular
biology underlying plant domestication and conventional breeding
demonstrates the naturally occurring genetic variation found in plants,
including significant variation in the classes, expression, and activity
of regulatory proteins. Specific examples of plant modifications
involving insertion or altered expression of regulatory proteins are
discussed as illustrative case studies supporting the conclusion that
the current comparative safety assessment process is appropriate for
these types of biotechnology-developed crops
Money For Crop Research Just A Drop In The Bucket
- Sue Kirchhoff, USA TODAY, July 30, 2008
WASHINGTON - A deadly wheat fungus known as stem rust is shriveling
crops from Africa to the Middle East, threatening the breadbasket of
Pakistan and India, and could eventually reach the United States.
The potential threat to food supplies and the economy is enormous, yet
Congress and the White House during the past several years did not react
to urgent pleas from U.S. scientists for millions of dollars to develop
wheat varieties resistant to stem rust. Instead, the main federal lab
working on the disease fought budget cuts.
Help now appears to be on the way. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
this spring promised $27 million to Cornell University to run an
international research effort to thwart stem rust: a fungus borne by the
wind, on clothing or in cargo holds that creates sores on wheat stems
that blacken and wipe out once-healthy plants. In Congress, pending
spending bills would increase research. But the inability of the federal
government to react quickly to a potential crisis - about 90% of all
commercial wheat varieties are susceptible to the new strain of the
disease - is a telling statement about the beleaguered state of federal
crop science funding.
U.S. government spending for agricultural research has been largely flat
for a decade. Priorities have shifted from long-term efforts that
increase yields, a development that has contributed to the current
global food crisis as the world copes with shrinking grain supplies and
record prices.
Limited funds have been siphoned to emerging areas such as biofuels,
nutrition and food safety while aid to international research bodies has
been reduced, says Phillip Pardey, director of the International Science
and Technology Practice and Policy Center at the University of
Minnesota.
Private industry and non-profit sources, such as the Gates Foundation,
are stepping into the breach. Congress, in a recent, five-year farm
bill, took a major step toward boosting agriculture science programs,
and the World Bank has promised a broad effort to increase global food
development. But the U.S. government, a longtime leader in financing
research aimed at increasing world harvests, is still behind soaring
need as the world stares down the most serious food crisis in a
generation and the United Nations calls for doubling food production by
2030.
"The agriculture-research system ... has eroded very significantly over
the past few decades and was, and is, unable to respond adequately to a
threat such as (stem rust)," says Ronnie Coffman, chair of the Cornell
Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, who is administering the
Gates Foundation grant.
The last major wheat rust epidemic, in the 1950s, destroyed about 40% of
the U.S. spring wheat crop. Worldwide, even a far more limited outbreak
than that of the 1950s could have a huge impact, because wheat is nearly
a third of grain production, and global food stockpiles are the lowest
in decades.
"Food, over the past half-century, has basically been taken for granted
in this country," Coffman says.
By the numbers
From 1970 to 2005, the U.S. population grew by 100 million and the
economy grew 293%, but Agriculture Department research funding rose by
$650 million, or just 1.85% a year. By comparison, in that same period
Congress approved $22.6 billion in increased research at the National
Institutes of Health, Jeffrey Armstrong, dean of the College of
Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University, said in
a presentation at a Chicago Federal Reserve seminar.
U.S. agricultural productivity rose at a 2% pace from 1950 to 1989, but
has slowed to a 1.1% rate from 1990 to 2002, according to Pardey.
Worldwide yields for wheat, corn and rice are rising about half as fast
as a decade ago. "The slowdown effect is kicking in," Pardey said of
flat spending for crop research and slower yield growth.
Lower productivity may not sound like a big deal, but it means billions
of dollars in higher costs and lower profits for farmers, and more
stress on limited land and water. The ethanol industry, which will
consume a third of this year's U.S. corn crop, is banking on enormous
gains in corn yields to remain viable. New technologies are also needed
to meet federal goals for other, alternative biofuels. Global warming
and changing weather patterns are increasing the urgency to find new
crop varieties.
Adding to the difficulty of reorienting research priorities is the fact
that federal funds have been flowing increasingly to pet projects of
members of Congress. Lawmakers in some years allocate as much as a fifth
of overall agriculture research, education and economic funds, which
totaled about $2.5 billion last year, through earmarks for such things
as high-desert landscaping or urban aquaculture, says the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.
Crop scientists are divided on congressional earmarks. Cornell's Coffman
says earmarks have sustained some important, low-profile crop-research
programs. But Richard Standiford, of the University of California
system, says his state is shortchanged by earmarks and does better under
competitive programs.
Prodded by the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant
Colleges, Congress in a new five-year farm bill created a program for
competitive funding into food safety, organic agriculture and other
areas. Scientists hope the competitive research will also free up
additional funds elsewhere, and pending spending bills do include
increased aid.
Fred Cholick, dean of agriculture at Kansas State University, says
stepped up research is vital given global warming, growth of the
biofuels industry and surging demand worldwide.
Industry-funded research has increased dramatically as federal funding
has stalled, helping pick up the slack. Private firms are also mounting
initiatives to address tight global food supplies. Agriculture giant
Monsanto, a worldwide leader in developing seed and plant varieties, in
June said it would provide a five-year, $10 million grant to improve
rice and wheat yields, with the research to be overseen by experts on
food production in poor countries. Monsanto will also try to double
yields of its genetically modified corn and soybeans.
Industry-financed research, though, has its limits in feeding a hungry
world. Corporations, with a bottom line to meet, are more likely to
focus on areas that benefit rich nations, or to shy away from long-term
projects with uncertain payoffs.
Chris Hurt, agricultural economist at Purdue University, notes that
major crop-science advances in recent decades have relied on publicly
financed research that was widely disseminated, as opposed to closely
held corporate research. Companies, Hurt says, take the approach, "If
you want this (private) technology, you have to pay us for this
technology."
New green revolution
In the mid-20th century, foundation money - mainly from the Ford and
Rockefeller foundations - fueled the international push to increase crop
yields to match the nutritional needs of a growing global population.
The so-called Green Revolution spread plant-breeding techniques
pioneered by Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug, the Iowa-born researcher,
during the 1940s through the 1960s. It eventually doubled crop
production in developing nations and brought India from the brink of
starvation.
Today, the Gates Foundation has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars
for agriculture research and has joined with the Rockefeller Foundation
to create the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, AGRA. The first
major initiatives are seeking to improve seed varieties in Africa, where
the population is malnourished in several nations.
Meanwhile, stem rust continues to threaten wheat harvests worldwide. The
USDA's Cereal Disease Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, the
only domestic facility with a full-time researcher working on stem rust,
faced a $300,000 cut - about 17% of its funding - in the annual budget
proposed by the White House. That would slow the lab's work on a host of
potential threats to crops. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has restored
funding for the program in a pending spending bill. USDA has 10
scientists elsewhere working on facets of the problem.
Dangerous wheat rust strain spreads
Wheat rust has been around since the Romans, but until recently it had
been largely under control. Improved strains of wheat provided
protection to farmers for most of the past half-century, but new forms
of the disease have evolved.
The latest threatening strain of stem rust was discovered in Uganda in
1999, and the so-called Ug99 has spread from East Africa to Yemen and
Sudan and is now in Iran. The prevailing winds could carry the spores
into India and Pakistan. The USDA this fall will release the first lines
of wheat with genes for resistance to Ug99, and commercial breeders can
use them to develop new varieties. The breeds were developed by the
USDA's Agricultural Research Service, which patched together funding,
working in collaboration with researchers worldwide.
At the Minnesota lab, director Marty Carson says researchers are still
years away from a new wheat type with both resistance to Ug99 and other
desirable traits, like hardiness.
"We're somewhat fortunate here that we detected this new (strain of
wheat stem rust) as soon as we did," Carson says. "Hopefully we've
bought a little bit of time in order to prepare for it. Right now (the
worry) is what happens if it gets into South Asia?"
In addition to whatever federal money Carson's lab receives, the Gates
Foundation grant will provide money for work in Minnesota. The Gates
grant will also finance stem rust research in Kenya, Ethiopia, Mexico
and other countries.
Kathy Kahn, an executive of the Gates Foundation, says it's "hard to
overstate the seriousness" of the stem rust problem. "Given (high) world
food prices, even a 10% loss in (wheat) production would be
devastating," she says. "We've taken our eye off the ball on things like
wheat rust. When you haven't seen the disease for a long time, you get
complacent."
Edging Towards BioUtopia - Book Review
http://robertshepherd.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/edging-towards-bioutopia-book-review/
As a PhD student in life sciences, I'm more than comfortable with
language having a high concentration of technological jargon, acronym
and newly constructed terms. I noticed Griffith University academic
Richard Hindmarsh's new book, Edging Towards BioUtopia, in the 'recent
arrivals' section of the school library, and was interested by the grab
line from the cover: "A New Politics of Reordering Life and the
Democratic Challenge."
Edging Towards BioUtopia book cover
Hey, I'm one of those people 'reordering' life, why don't I have a read?
Within 23 pages of picking up the book, I'd had my first good belly
laugh and yet another realisation of how important it is that academics
dedicate their writing style and narrative skills to being easily
interpreted by people outside their own microcosm.
To quote Richard Hindmarsh in my Worst Academic Technobabble of 2008
(thus far) award:
"In summary, uncertainties about the techno-nature proposed in the
science, regulation and emergent or proposed outcomes of genetic
engineering, in large part drives the questioning of genetic
engineering, and the mobilisation of worldwide resistance to both the
release of GMOs into the environment and to the notion of a
biotechnolgogically recast futurenatural."
I'm not going to begin pulling apart all the threads of academic babble
that makes that such a horrible sentence (and admittedly, the book did
start to flow at least a little better as Hindmarsh was able to bring
his true skills to the table as a policy historian), so will rather
concentrate on what I see as some of the flawed arguments in what
Hindmarsh critiques as the pervading evil force that is the "BioElite".
From what I can tell through the his coded language, one of Hindmarsh's
key complains about GMOs is the "BioElite's" push for a lack of
discovery-based regulatory oversight, and the obsfucation of scientific
rigor in the name of agribusiness. I find it so highly ironic then that
the tiny four paragraphs that he dedicates to the few published
descriptions of differential cellular-morphology of animals fed GMOs are
as one sided and grossly negligent of the growing body of knowledge of
GMO safety, as anything that has ever been published pro GM. Instead, he
just frames further minor evidence in pushing the science into
supporting the negative aspects of what he refers to as the "BioUtopian
Futurenatural" narrative.
Papers that Hindmarsh briefly mentions include some very detailed
structural anatomical analysis of organs from mice fed on long term
diets of GM-crops. Here I have summarised them to indicate the one-sided
nature of their common anti-GM usage:
read on at
http://robertshepherd.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/edging-towards-bioutopia-book-review/
Stalin's War on Genetic Science
- Jan Witkowski, Nature 454, 577-579 (July 31, 2008) nature.com
Review of book: "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's
Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century by
Peter Pringle Simon and Schuster: 2008. 384 pp. $26"
It is not surprising, given the parlous state of Russia in the years
following the Revolution, that its political system put ideology and
practical outcomes above all else, including scientific fact. This was
most evident in agriculture, where it was imperative to produce more
food by whatever means. The consequences were tragic for the Russian
people and for Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, Russia's greatest geneticist.
Vavilov fell foul of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko who, through political
manipulation and intrigue, came to dominate Soviet genetics.Peter
Pringle's compelling book, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, tells the
story of the Lysenko affair with verve and pace. Pringle makes it clear
how Vavilov's patriotism, dedication to science and determination to be
open-minded led to his downfall and death.
Vavilov was born in 1887 in Moscow into a comfortable, bourgeois family.
In 1906 he entered the Petrovskaya Agriculture Academy, or Petrovska,
one of many institutes established after the devastating famine of 1892.
Russian agricultural practices lagged behind those of other European
countries and the United States, and efforts to reform them were
unsuccessful. Vavilov undertook "to work for the benefit of the poor,
the enslaved class of my country, to raise their level of knowledge".
This pledge, Pringle explains, drove Vavilov throughout his life.
After graduating, Vavilov spent a year researching wheat with Robert
Regel at the Bureau of Applied Botany in St Petersburg, before embarking
on a two-year tour of European laboratories. His stay with William
Bateson in Cambridge, UK, was the highlight. Bateson was the leading
proponent of Gregor Mendel's work on inherited traits, rediscovered 10
years earlier, and wrote the first genetics textbook, Mendel's
Principles of Heredity, published in 1909. Bateson's enthusiasm for
Mendelian genetics seems to have rubbed off: Vavilov based his life's
work on Mendelian principles and their elaboration by, among others, fly
geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. Bateson had led an expedition to the
Russian Steppes in 1886 to examine the interactions of environment and
species variability. Pringle suggests that this may have inspired
Vavilov to undertake similar expeditions to search for crop varieties
whose traits made them suitable for particular environments, such as dry
or cold regions.
On Vavilov's return to Russia and the Petrovska, he was sent to
investigate why soldiers on the Persian front were falling ill after
eating bread. Vavilov used the assignment to collect varieties of plants
growing in the harsh climate of the Pamir mountains, in the hope that
these hardy plants might be cultivated in northern Russia to provide
more food for the Soviet people. Vavilov endured great hardship in
travelling to such remote regions, trips that would now be unthinkable
without insulated jackets, mobile phones and satellite navigation.
Vavilov returned from the Pamirs in 1916 to find Russia in political
turmoil. In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and by October, the
Bolsheviks had seized the reins of government, plunging the country into
civil war. Nevertheless, Vavilov's career began auspiciously - he took
up a full professorship at the University of Saratov, a large city on
the Volga river some 700 kilometres southeast of Moscow. Vavilov mounted
expeditions to Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, North and South America
and the Mediterranean, seeking plants that might increase agricultural
productivity in Russia. He regarded this as an essential task after the
disastrous collapse of Soviet agriculture that followed the
consolidation of land and labour known as collectivization that began
around 1929. Vavilov's collection of 250,000 seeds of cultivated plants
and their varieties was the most extensive in the world. In 1930, he was
appointed director of the Institute of Genetics of the USSR Academy of
Sciences in recognition of his position as the country's leading plant
geneticist and his international reputation. Just six years later,
Vavilov was in disgrace.
His nemesis Lysenko was born in 1898 into a peasant family. Unusually
for the time, he attended a school of agriculture and horticulture;
clever and ambitious, he aspired to make great contributions to Soviet
science. His big break as an agricultural researcher came in 1927, when
the newspaper Pravda reported his work on changing the time of sprouting
in seeds by exposing them to differing periods of cold temperatures,
known as vernalization. The reporter noted that Lysenko was working for
the people, not carrying out research for its own sake by studying the "hairy legs of flies". Lysenko promoted himself as the discoverer of
vernalization, although it had been known since 1858, and trumpeted it
as a solution to the Soviet Union's chronic food shortages.
Lysenko claimed that plants could be 'educated' so that the changed
germination time became heritable after several generations of
vernalization. This was a variant of Lamarckism, or the inheritance of
acquired characters, that had been discredited first by August
Weismann's distinction between germ cells and somatic cells, and second
by Mendel's work. Scientists rejected Lysenko's claims, but by skilful
manipulation of the political situation throughout his career, Lysenko
scaled the Soviet scientific hierarchy. He was twice awarded the Order
of Lenin, and became president of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural
Sciences of the USSR, a full member of the country's Academy of Sciences
and a member of the Supreme Soviet.
The conflict between Lysenko and the 'Mendelian-Morganists' came to a
head in 1936 at a conference at the Lenin Academy. Despite geneticists'
devastating scientific critique of Lysenko's claims, the
government-controlled press declared Lysenko the winner. Attacks on
Vavilov's position increased and Lysenko consolidated his position.
Senior scientists in the Soviet administration were among the victims of
Stalin's Great Purge, when perhaps as many as one million
anti-revolutionaries and enemies of the people were executed over two
years, including Muralov, president of the Lenin Academy. Lysenko took
his place to become Vavilov's boss.
In October 1939, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union held another genetics conference. This again ended in
triumph for Lysenko.
Why were the reins of Soviet agriculture held by a charlatan whose
policies were disastrous? As Pringle makes clear, Lysenko prospered
because he promised rapid advances in agriculture that were seized on by
a Soviet government desperate to feed thousands of citizens dying of
starvation. Lysenko promised Stalin that new strains of wheat and other
crops with desirable traits could be produced within 3 years, much
quicker than the 12 years that Vavilov required. Perhaps as importantly,
Lysenko's views of genetics were in sympathy with prevailing Marxist
dogma.
Experts, by virtue of their education and role, were members of the
bourgeoisie and regarded with suspicion in Russia. There was a strong
political movement to replace the intelligentsia with elevated peasants
and other members of the proletariat, even if they were untrained and
ill-fitted to their new posts. Lysenko was one such example. Vavilov, by
contrast, was an educated, well-travelled businessman's son who was
thought to be susceptible to foreign influences.
And why did Vavilov not fight Lysenko earlier and more aggressively?
Pringle demonstrates that Vavilov was guided by his student pledge to
help the Soviet people and that he was committed to exploring all leads,
however improbable, that might increase food production. Vavilov
encouraged many scientists, including Lysenko, to test different
approaches. Naively, Vavilov did not expect that Lysenko would play by
political rather than scientific rules. At a 1948 session of the Lenin
Academy, Stalin was so determined that Lysenko should triumph that he
drafted Lysenko's opening remarks himself, emphasizing the correctness
of Lamarckian thinking. A letter included in the official report ended: "Glory to the great Stalin -- coryphaeus of progressive science!"
Neither Vavilov nor his work featured in this session. Following the
1939 conference, Lysenko had progressively dismantled Vavilov's
institute, but Vavilov had remained free even as criticism of him became
ever more vituperative. Then, on 6 August 1940, while collecting plants
in the Ukraine, Vavilov was seized by the Soviet secret police and taken
to Moscow. Pringle's account of Vavilov's 11-month interrogation is
horrifying. In July 1941, Vavilov and two colleagues were tried and
sentenced to death. Vavilov's appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme
Soviet was turned down, but a personal plea to the head of the secret
police led to his sentence being commuted to life imprisonment. His
colleagues were shot. Vavilov died of starvation on 26 January 1943 in a
prison in Saratov, the city where he had begun his illustrious career 26
years before.
Even now, politics continues to trump good science, as is evident from
the delays in reducing global carbon emissions. Pringle's very readable
account is a timely reminder that public policies must be based on
rational decisions drawn from the best data available.
Edited by C. S. Prakash. Please email agbioworld@yahoo.com if you have
any comments or suggestions!
