MC Weekly Issue #14, March 28, 2006
“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”
Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.
We will design evolution (II).
On the front page of the Globe and Mail Monday morning this week as a feature article, “Will consumers have a beef with test-tube meat?“. And in the New York Times Science section, there appeared today an article, “Cloning May Lead to Healthy Pork“. What’s going on?
According to the Globe, “scientists can grow frog and mouse meat in the lab, and are now working on pork, beef and chicken. Their goal is to develop an industrial version of the process in five years. If they succeed, cultured or in vitro meat could be coming to a supermarket near you. Consumers could buy hamburger patties and chicken nuggets made from meat cultivated from muscle cells in a giant incubator rather than cut from a farm animal.”
The benefits could be enormous: meat could be engineered to have the nutrition portfolio of salmon, for example, thus greatly reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Further, theoretically in vitro meat could reduce the risk of diseases like mad cow and avian flu. Finally, engineered meat could reduce the environmental impact of soil depletion, irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides and energy now necessary to produce animals for slaughter. And it would reduce the amount of manure and other waste.
The Times article reported on scientists who have successfully cloned pigs that “make their own omega-3 fatty acids, potentially leading to bacon and pork chops that might help your heart.”
The Globe quoted Winston Churchill’s prediction in 1932 (!) that we would eventually be eating cultured meat: “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
Of course, this whole area of biotechnology is a controversial minefield. When we developed the Massive Change exhibition, we were positive it would generate the most controversy. And it did, though Wal-Mart managed to generate even more heated responses, which quite surprised us.
GMOs are organisms whose genetic material has been altered using a technique called recombinant DNA technology, which is the ability to combine DNA molecules from different sources into a one molecule in the lab. Hence, the proteins that an organism produces can be altered through the modification of its genes. The term generally doesn’t refer to organisms whose genetic makeup have been altered using traditional animal husbandry (mutagenesis), or cross-breeding, for example, the “featherless chicken” in Massive Change, or your pet cat or dog. Or almost all fruits and vegetables in your grocery store.
Though we mostly associate GMOs with plant crops, the technology has been applied to most forms of life, including pets, goats that can produce spider silk, and bacteria that form HIV-blocking “living condoms”.
According to New Scientist magazine: “GM tomatoes, as puree, first appeared on British supermarket shelves in 1996 (a different fresh GM tomato first appeared in the US in 1994), but the consumer furor that surrounded GM technology did not erupt until February 1999. This was because a controversial study suggested that a few strains of GM potatoes might be toxic to laboratory rats. Those experiments, subsequently criticised by other experts, were carried out in Scotland by biochemist Arpad Pustzai.
“What followed was a European anti-GM food campaign of near religious fervour. Spearheaded in the UK by environmental groups and some newspapers, the campaign would have far-reaching consequences. It culminated in an unofficial moratorium on the growth and import of GM crops in Europe and led to a trade dispute with the US.” GMOs are very rare in Europe today, but there are signs that public opinion is beginning to change. Some African countries have also opposed GMOs, to the point of turning back international food aid that contained them.
So far, scientists have genetically modified organisms primarily to make plants pest, disease and herbicide resistant, and there are successful examples including canola, cotton, sugar, potatoes, peas, onions, soya, wheat, corn, etc. Although still largely in the development phase, scientists have also been developing vitamin-A boosted “golden rice” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice ), and other plants that improve nutrition, are drought-resistant, salt-resistant, and insect-repelling (thus, reducing our dependency on pesticides). And there are myriad other possibilities in the labs, including caffeine-free coffee plants.
GMOs critics have raised the “Frankenfood” possibility: unforeseen, adverse health effects; or that they become insidious superweeds, killing off everything else where they are planted, or that they might mix with other non-GMO crops and wild plants, creating genetic pollution.
Finally, critics have argued that the biotech industry is creating monopolies - on Roundup Ready corn for example. And then there’s the whole issue of owning patents on nature. Monsanto has come under particular criticism in this regard ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto ).
According to New Scientist, “Companies have also investigated technology protection systems. One type of TPS, dubbed the Terminator system by its critics, is a genetic trick that means GM crops fail to produce fertile seeds. This prevents the traditional practice of putting seeds aside from the crop to replant the following year, forcing farmers to buy new seed every year. However, some biotech companies have pledged not to use this technology, despite the fact it could be a useful tool in preventing genetic pollution. A clever genetic variation on that theme, the Exorcist system, allows the production of fertile seeds, but with any foreign GM DNA spliced out and destroyed.”
Stewart Brand, who we have dubbed “the unwitting godfather of Massive Change”, recently wrote an incredibly provocative piece “Environmental Heresies” in Technology Review. I’ll let him have the last word (though I suspect my In Box will be full of dissenting voices).
“Along with rethinking cities, environmentalists will need to rethink biotechnology. One area of biotech with huge promise and some drawbacks is genetic engineering, so far violently rejected by the environmental movement. That rejection is, I think, a mistake. Why was water fluoridization rejected by the political right and “frankenfood” by the political left? The answer, I suspect, is that fluoridization came from government and genetically modified (GM) crops from corporations. If the origins had been reversed - as they could have been - the positions would be reversed, too.
“Ignore the origin and look at the technology on its own terms. (This will be easier with the emergence of “open source” genetic engineering, which could work around restrictive corporate patents.) What is its net effect on the environment? GM crops are more efficient, giving higher yield on less land with less use of pesticides and herbicides. That’s why the Amish, the most technology-suspicious group in America (and the best farmers), have enthusiastically adopted GM crops.
“There has yet to be a public debate among environmentalists about genetic engineering. Most of the scare stories that go around (Monarch caterpillars harmed by GM pollen!) have as much substance as urban legends about toxic rat urine on Coke can lids. Solid research is seldom reported widely, partly because no news is not news. A number of leading biologists in the U.S. are also leading environmentalists. I’ve asked them how worried they are about genetically engineered organisms. Their answer is “Not much,” because they know from their own work how robust wild ecologies are in defending against new genes, no matter how exotic. They don’t say so in public because they feel that entering the GM debate would strain relations with allies and would distract from their main focus, which is to research and defend biodiversity.
“The best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it. I would love to see what a cadre of hard-over environmental scientists could do with genetic engineering. Besides assuring the kind of transparency needed for intelligent regulation, they could direct a powerful new tool at some of the most vexed problems in the field.
“For instance, invasive species. Most of the current mass extinctions of native species is caused by habitat loss, a problem whose cure is well known-identify the crucial habitats and preserve, protect, and restore them. The second greatest cause of extinctions is coming from invasive species, where no solution is in sight. Kudzu takes over the American South, brown tree snakes take over Guam (up to 5,000 a square kilometer), zebra mussels and mitten crabs take over the U.S. waterways, fire ants and fiendishly collaborative Argentine ants take over the ground, and not a thing can be done. Volunteers like me get off on yanking up invasive French broom and Cape ivy, but it’s just sand castles against a rising tide. I can’t wait for some engineered organism, probably microbial, that will target bad actors like zebra mussels and eat them, or interrupt their reproductive pathway, and then die out.”
