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Excerpted from the January/February 2005 WORLD WATCH magazine© 2004 Worldwatch Institute

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T R E S PA S SClaire Hope Cummings

WORLD•WATCH January/February 200524

Hidden inside Hilgard Hall, one of the oldest build-ings on the campus of the University of California atBerkeley, is a photograph that no one is supposed tosee. It’s a picture of a crippled and contorted corncobthat was not created by nature, or even by agriculture,but by genetic engineering.q The cob is kept in a plas-tic bin called “the monster box,” a collection of bio-logical curiosities put together by someone who worksin a secure biotechnology research facility.

What the photo shows is a cob that apparentlystarted growing normally, then turned into another partof the corn plant, then returned to forming kernels,then went back to another form—twisting back andforth as if it could not make up its mind about whatit was. It was produced by the same recombinant DNAtechnology that is used to create the genetically mod-ified organisms (GMOs) that are in our everyday foods.When I saw this photo, I knew it was saying somethingvery important about genetic engineering. I thoughtit should be published. But the person who owns it isfrankly afraid of how the biotechnology industry mightreact, and would not agree. In order to get permissioneven to describe the photo for this article, I had to

promise not to reveal its owner’s identity. What the distorted corncob represents is a mute chal-

lenge to the industry’s claim that this technology isprecise, predictable, and safe. But that this challengeshould be kept hidden, and that a scientist who worksat a public university should feel too intimidated to dis-cuss it openly, told me that something more than justa scientific question was being raised. After all, if the newagricultural biotech were really safe and effective, whywould the industry work so hard—as indeed it does—to keep its critics cowed and the public uninformed? Wasthere something about the way genetic engineering wasdeveloped, about how it works, that was inviting acloser look—a look that the industry would rather wenot take? I had gone to Berkeley to see for myself whatwas going on behind biotechnology.

The University of California at Berkeley (“Cal”) isthe stage on which much of the story of genetic engi-neering has played out over the last 25 years. Thebiotechnology industry was born here in the San Fran-cisco Bay area, and nurtured by scientists who workedat Berkeley and nearby universities. Critical controver-sies over the role genetic engineering and relatedresearch should have in society have erupted here. Eventhe architecture of the campus reflects the major sci-entific and policy divisions that plague this technology.Two buildings, in particular, mirror the two very dif-ferent versions of biology that emerged in the last halfof the twentieth century, and reflect two very differentvisions for agriculture in the future.

Hilgard Hall was built in 1918, at a time when mas-

q Although I use the terms “biotechnology” and “genetic engineering”interchangeably, along with references to “transgenes” and “geneticallymodified organisms,” I am, in all cases, referring to recombinant DNAtechnology used to cross species boundaries. I am not using the term“biotechnology” in its general sense, which can include naturalprocesses. This analysis of genetic engineering will focus only on itsagricultural applications. It does not address issues that might apply tomedical or other uses.

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“I have the feeling that science has transgressed a barrier that should have remained inviolate.” —Dr. Erwin Chargaff, biochemist and the father of molecular biology

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Claire Hope Cummings

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tering the classi-cal form and cel-ebrating beautywere important,perhaps even in-tegral, to theaccepted functionof a building. Hil-gard’s facade isexquisitely deco-rated with friezesdepicting sheavesof wheat, beehives, bunches of grapes, cornucopias,and bas relief sculptures of cow heads surrounded withwreaths of fruit. Above the entrance, carved in huge cap-ital letters are the words, “TO RESCUE FOR HUMANSOCIETY THE NATIVE VALUES OF RURALLIFE.” The massive front door opens to a grand two-story hall graced with granite, marble, and carved brass.But behind that elegant entrance is a building left in dis-repair. Getting around inside Hilgard means navigatingworn marble staircases and dark corridors laced withexposed pipes and heating ducts. The room where themonster box photograph is kept is small and dank. Thisbuilding is home to the “old” biology—the carefulobservation of life, living systems, and their complexinteractions. Being inside Hilgard is a visceral lesson inhow Cal is neglecting the classic study of the intimateinter-relationships among agriculture, the environment,and human society.

Nearby, and standing in stark contrast to Hilgard'sfaded splendor, is a newer, modern office building,Koshland Hall. Koshland is not unattractive, with itspitched blue tile roof lines and bright white walls linedwith blue steel windows, but it was built in the mid-1990s in a functional style that, like most new campusbuildings, has all the charm and poetry of an ice cube.The interior is clean and well lit. Next to office doorshang plaques that name the corporations or foundationsthat fund the activities inside. This is the home of the“new biology”—the utilitarian view that life is centeredin DNA and molecules can be manipulated at will.Molecular biology is clearly doing well at Cal.

Koshland Hall was named after a distinguished

member of thefaculty, DanielKoshland, formereditor of the jour-nal Science andchair of Berke-ley’s Departmentof Biochemistry,now a professoremeritus. He hasthe unique dis-tinction of hav-

ing been present at the two most important scientificrevolutions of our time: he participated both in theManhattan Project, which developed nuclear weapons,and in the early development of molecular biology. Heis credited with “transforming” the biological sci-ences at Berkeley.

The new biology

One hundred years ago, no one had heard of a “gene.”The word was not recognized until 1909, and even afterthat it remained an abstraction for decades. At thetime, scientists and others were making an effort to finda material basis for life, particularly heritability, the fun-damental function of life. The story of genetic engi-neering in the United States begins with the decisionto identify genes as the basis of life. But the ideologi-cal roots of this story go even deeper, into the nation’searlier history and attachment to the ideas of manifestdestiny, eugenics, and social engineering.

Early in the twentieth century, the new “science”of sociology made its appearance—along with thehighly appealing belief that social problems wereamenable to scientific solutions. In time, sociologybegan to combine with genetic science, giving strongimpetus to technocratic forms of social control, and par-ticularly to eugenics—the belief that the human racecould be improved by selective breeding. Until the1930s, the science of genetics had not developed muchbeyond Mendelian principles of heredity, but eugenicswas already being promoted as the solution to socialproblems. As the idea that genes determined traits in

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From the USDA Yearbook of Agriculture,1940, Farmers in a Changing World.

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people took hold, eugenics twisted it to foster the con-cept that there were “good” genes and “bad” genes,good and bad traits. Eugenics eventually gained a pow-erful foothold both in the popular imagination and inthe U.S. government, as well as in Nazi Germany. Eventoday, these notions underlie the decisions biotech-nologists make about what genes and traits are bene-ficial, what organisms are engineered, and who gets todecide how this technology will be used.

According to Lily Kay, an assistant professor of thehistory of science at Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology, genetic engineering came about as the resultof the concerted effort of a few scientists, who, alongwith their academic and philanthropic sponsors, hada shared vision about how they could use genetics toreshape science and society. In her book The Molecu-lar Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation,and the Rise of the New Biology, Kay writes that thisvision was not so much about underlying biologicalprinciples as it was about social values. The new biol-ogy that evolved from this thinking was founded ona strong belief in “industrial capitalism” and its per-ceived mandate for “science-based social interven-tion.” The potential for this idea, and the intentionalstrategy to use it for social purposes was clearly under-stood from the outset, says Kay. The developers of“molecular biology” (a term coined by the RockefellerFoundation) were confident that it would offer thema previously unimagined power and control over bothnature and society.

Science was molded to this agenda in 1945, whenVannevar Bush, the head of President Franklin D. Roo-sevelt’s wartime Office of Scientific Research and Devel-opment, wrote “Science, The Endless Frontier”—alandmark report that outlined how science could bet-ter serve the private sector. As Kay tells the story, at thatpoint the search for a science-based social agenda beganin earnest. It was funded and directed by business cor-porations and foundations acting together as “quasi-public entities” using both private and public funds toharness “the expertise of the human sciences to stemwhat was perceived as the nation’s social and biologi-cal decay and help realize the vision of America’s des-tiny.” Eventually, the combined efforts of corporate,

academic, and government interests began to bear fruitand “the boundary between individual and corporateself-interest, between private and public control, wouldbe increasingly blurred.”w

The story of how James Watson and Francis Crickdescribed the structure of the DNA helix in 1953 is wellknown. Less known, but of considerable consequence,is what followed. With little hesitation, they announcedthat DNA is “the secret of life”—and began to promotewhat was to become known as “the central dogma”—the notion that genetic information flows in only onedirection, from DNA to RNA to a protein, and that thisprocess directly determines an organism’s characteris-tics. This dogma was, as described by geneticist Mae-Wan Ho, author of Living with the Fluid Genome, “justanother way of saying that organisms are hardwired intheir genetic makeup and the environment has littleinfluence on the structure and function of the genes.”In her book, Dr. Ho argues that the central dogma istoo simplistic. She observes that not all DNA “codesfor proteins” and that the genome is fluid and interac-tive. Similarly, in a 1992 Harper’s Magazine article,“Unraveling the DNA Myth: The Spurious Foundationof Genetic Engineering,” Queens College biologistBarry Commoner writes that “the central dogma isthe premise that an organism’s genome—its total com-plement of DNA genes—should fully account for itscharacteristic assemblage of inherited traits. The prem-ise, unhappily, is false.”

Still, the singular view of “life as DNA” dominatedbiology in the late twentieth century, in part becauseits very simplicity provided the biological rationale forengineering DNA. Technological advances in otherfields—the study of enzymes that cut DNA, and bac-teria that recombine it—were teamed up with highspeed computers that provided the computational mus-cle needed. And yet, even as the old biology becamethe “new and improved” molecular biology, it was pro-moted with a social pedigree about how it would servethe public. Its mandate was the same one that was usedto colonize the “new world” and to settle the WildWest—the promise that this progress would provideeveryone a better life.

Judging by his comments, if James Watson had had{

w Kay, Lily E.The Molecular Vision of Life, Caltech, the RockefellerFoundation, and the Rise of the New Biology, Oxford University Press,1993, p. 23.

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his way, research would haveproceeded undeterred by anyconcerns over the hazards thatgenetic engineering posed. Hesaid he’d always felt that the“certain promise” of this revo-lutionary new technology faroutweighed its “uncertain peril.”But others, such as Paul Berg ofStanford University, were callingfor a more measured approach.In 1975 Berg joined other sci-entists concerned about the risksof genetic engineering in a meet-ing held at the Asilomar con-ference center, near Monterey,California. It was a rare collec-tive action, with participantscoming from a spectrum of universities, governmentagencies, and research institutes.

In his introductory remarks, David Baltimore of MITnoted that the participants were there to discuss “a newtechnique of molecular biology,” one that “appears toallow us to outdo the standard events of evolution bymaking combinations of genes which could be uniquein natural history.” He went on to say that they shoulddesign a strategy to go forward that would “maximizethe benefits and minimize the hazards.” They pro-duced a 35-page report that detailed their concernsabout creating new pathogens and toxins, the emergenceof allergens and disease vectors that could cause can-cer or immune disorders, as well as “unpredictableadverse consequences” and the specter of “wide eco-logical damages.”

Then, in the last hours of the meeting, on the verylast night, a couple of the participants pointed outthat the public had the right to assess and limit this tech-nology. What happened next was pivotal. These sci-entists believed they were entitled to benefit from theextraordinary potential of genetic engineering andthey argued that they could find technological fixes forany problems that might emerge. Susan Wright, authorof Molecular Politics, a history of biotech regulatorypolicy, recalls that there was virtual unanimity for the

became doctrine. Asilomardefined the boundaries ofpublic discourse, and thequestions about potentialhazards that were raisedthere went unanswered.

Public Policy: The Endless Frontier

The inoculation that Asilomar gave biotechnologyagainst the ravages of government control was given abooster shot a few years later when executives from theMonsanto Corporation visited the Reagan White House.The industry sought and obtained assurance that theywould not be blindsided by regulation. After all, theseearly developers of GMOs were agrochemical compa-nies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, Novartis, and Mon-santo, who were the sources of pervasive chemicalpollution that resulted in the environmental laws thatwere passed in the 1960s. This time, they were intenton getting to the lawmakers before the public did.

The resulting “regulatory reform” was announcedin 1992, by then Vice President Dan Quayle, at a pressconference in the Indian Treaty Room near his office.It was custom-made for the industry. The new policyleft just enough oversight in place to give the industrypolitical cover, so that they could offer assurances tothe public that the government was watching out forthe public interest when in fact it was not. The regu-latory system that was adopted, which is essentiallywhat is still in place today, is basically voluntary and pas-

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idea that scientists wouldcreate a central role forthemselves in policymak-ing—to the exclusion ofsociety in general. Fromthen on, Wright says, this“reductionist discourse”

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sive. It’s a “don’t look, don’t tell” arrangement wherebythe industry doesn’t tell the government about prob-lems with its products and the government doesn’tlook for them.

Quayle said that government “will ensure thatbiotech products will receive the same oversight asother products, instead of being hampered by unnec-essary regulation.” The rationale for this policy was aconcept called “substantial equivalence,” which meansthat GMOs are not substantially different than con-ventional crops and foods. The science journal Naturedubbed substantial equivalence a “pseudo-scientificconcept…created primarily to provide an excuse for notrequiring biochemical and toxicological tests.” Nev-ertheless, it was adopted by all three agencies respon-sible for food and agriculture—the United StatesDepartment of Agriculture, the Environmental Pro-tection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administra-tion—and it is the reason there have been no safetystudies of GMO foods, no post-market monitoring, nolabels, no new laws, no agency coordination, and noindependent review.

Henry Miller, head of biotechnology at FDA from1979 to 1994, told the New York Times in 2001 thatgovernment agencies did “exactly what big agribusinesshad asked them to do and told them to do.” DuringMiller’s tenure at the FDA, staff scientists were writ-ing memos that called for further testing and warningthat there were concerns about food safety. But the manin charge of policy development at FDA was MichaelTaylor, a former lawyer for Monsanto. And, accordingto Steven Druker, a public-interest lawyer who obtainedthree of these internal FDA memos, under Taylor “ref-erences to the unintended negative effects of bioengi-neering were progressively deleted from drafts of thepolicy statement.”

Taylor went on to become an administrator at theUSDA in charge of food safety and biotechnology, andthen became a vice-president at Monsanto. All threeagencies continue to employ people who are eitherassociated with biotech companies or who formerlyworked for them. At least 22 cases of this “revolvingdoor” between government and industry have been doc-umented. Biotech lawyers and lobbyists serve in pol-

icy-making positions, leave government for high pay-ing jobs with industry, and in some cases return togovernment to defend industry interests again. Still, dis-mantling regulatory oversight was only part of indus-try’s overall strategy to commercialize GMOs.

Breaking the biological barriers

All the big agrochemical seed companies—DuPont,Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred, and Dekalb—were bettingthe farm on genetic technologies in the 1980s. But justone crop, corn, stood in their way. Corn was becom-ing the “Holy Grail” of agricultural biotechnologybecause these companies knew that if this idea was evergoing to be commercially viable, it had to work withcorn—which is of central importance to American agri-culture. As they raced to find a way to genetically engi-neer corn, they perfected the complicated steps requiredto transform plants into transgenic crops. It all cametogether in June 1988, when Pioneer Hi-Bred patentedthe first viable and replicable transgenic corn plant.

In the end, the secret of recombining DNA wasfound not so much through a process of tedious, repet-itive experimentation as of that traditional, Wild-Westway of getting what you want—using stealth and bruteforce. The primary problem genetic engineers faced washow to get engineered DNA into target cells withoutdestroying them. For some plants, like tobacco and soy-beans, the problem was solved by the use of stealth. Asoil microbe that produces cancer-like growths in plantswas recruited to “infect” cells with new modified DNA.This agrobacterium formed a non-lethal hole in the wallof a plant cell that allowed the new DNA to sneak in.But that method did not work with corn. For corn, amore forceful cell invasion technique was called for, onethat resulted in the invention of the gene gun.

One day in December 1983, during the Christmasbreak at Cornell University, three men put on booties,gowns, and hair coverings, picked up a gun, and enteredthe university’s National Submicron Facility. John San-ford, a plant breeder at Cornell, and his colleagues, thehead of the facility and a member of his staff, were aboutto shoot a bunch of onions to smithereens. For years,

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they had been looking for ways to speed up the con-ventional plant breeding process using genetic trans-formation techniques. Like other researchers, they hadhad difficulty forcing DNA fragments through the rel-atively thick walls of plant cells. They’d tried usinglasers to drill mini-holes in cell walls and everything fromion beams to microscopic needles to electric shocks, butthese methods either failed to deliver the payload ordestroyed the cells in the process.

Then one day, while waging a backyard battle withsome pesky squirrels, Sanford got the idea of using agun. He figured out how to load the gun with speciallycoated microscopic beads, and then he and his friendstried the idea out on the onions. Soon, pieces of onionwere splattered everywhere and the smell of onions andgun powder permeated the air. They kept up this odor-ous massacre until they figured out how to make it work.It seemed implausible, even laughable, at the time. Butthe gene gun, which uses .22-caliber ballistics to shootDNA into cells, is now found in biotechnology labo-ratories all over the world.

Although it is clearly a “hit or miss” technique,transferring DNA is actually straightforward. The trickypart is getting the target plant to accept the new genes.That requires overcoming billions of years of evolu-tionary resistance that was specifically designed to keepforeign DNA out. You simply can’t get a fish and a straw-berry to mate, no matter how hard you try—or at leastyou couldn’t until now. Genetic engineers are nowable to take a gene that produces a natural anti-freezefrom an arctic flounder and put it into a strawberry plantso that its fruit is frost resistant. But this feat can onlybe accomplished through the use of specially designedgenes that facilitate the process. Along with the traitgene, every GMO also contains genetically engineeredvectors and markers, antibiotic resistance genes, viralpromoters made from the cauliflower mosaic virus,genetic switches and other constructs that enable the“transformation” process.

Once all these genes are inserted, where they endup and what they may do are unknown. The only pre-cise part of this technique is the identification andextraction of the trait DNA from the donor organism.After that, it’s a biological free-for-all. In genetic engi-

neering, failure is the rule. The way you get GMOcrops to look and act like normal crops is to do thou-sands and thousands of insertions, grow the ones thatsurvive out, and then see what you get. What youfinally select for further testing and release are those“happy accidents” that appear to work. The rest of themillions of plants, animals and other organisms that aresubjected to this process are sacrificed or thrown out—or end up in some lab technician’s monster box.

Process, Not Product

The public controversy over GMOs has focused largelyon the products, on how they are marketed, and on whatis planted where. But it now appears that the processused to make them, and the novel genetic constructsused in the process, may constitute greater threats tohuman and environmental health than the productsthemselves. There are documented reports of aller-genic reactions to GMO foods. According to a reportin Nature Biotechnology, for example, the commonlyused cauliflower mosaic virus contains a “recombina-tion hotspot” that makes it unstable and prone to caus-ing mutations, cancer, and new pathogens. The BritishMedical Association and the U.S. Consumer’s Unionhave both warned about new allergies and/or adverseimpacts on the immune system from GMO foods. Andpublic health officials in Europe are concerned that anti-bacterial resistance marker genes in GMOs could ren-der antibiotics ineffective. There have been only about10 studies done on human health and GMOs, and halfof them indicate reasons for concern, including mal-formed organs, tumors, and early death in rats.

There are also increasing reports of a phenomenonpreviously thought to be rare, “horizontal gene trans-fer,” which happens when genes travel not just “verti-cally” through the normal processes of digestion andreproduction, but laterally, between organs in the bodyor between organisms—sort of like Casper the Ghostfloating through a wall. Geneticist Mae-Wan Ho, whohas been documenting this phenomenon, says it’s hap-pening because the new technology “breaks all therules of evolution; it short-circuits evolution altogether.It bypasses reproduction, creates new genes and gene

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combinations that have never existed, and is notrestricted by the usual barriers between species.”

In 2001, the world’s most widely grown GMO,Monsanto’s Round-up Ready soybean, was found to con-tain some mysterious DNA. Monsanto claimed it wasnative to the plant. When it was shown instead to bethe result of the transformation process, Monsantocouldn’t explain how it got there. And it has beenshown that the nutritional profile of the transgenic soy-bean is different than that of the conventional variety.

A new report, based on peer-reviewed scientific lit-erature and USDA documents,e has found that sig-nificant genetic damage to the integrity of a plant occurswhen it is modified, including rearrangement of genesat the site of the insertion and thousands of mutationsand random modifications throughout the transgenicplant. Another study, by David Schubert of the SalkInstitute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California,found that just one transgenic insertion can disrupt 5percent of the genes in a single-cell bacterium. Trans-lated into plant terms, that means 15,000 to 300,000genes get scrambled. Industry was given a blank checkby government allowing it to commercialize the tech-nology prematurely, before science could validate thetechniques being used or evaluate the safety of theproducts being developed.

Strategic contamination

Even before GMOs were released in the mid-1990s, theywere thought by some scientists to be promiscuous.Now that GMO contamination is running rampant, it’shard to believe that the biotech industry wasn’t awareof that risk. The industry would have had to ignore earlywarnings such as a study done at the University ofChicago which found one transgenic plant that was 20times more likely to interbreed with related plants thanits natural variety. But now, because herbicide-tolerantgenes are getting into all sorts of plants, farmers haveto contend with “super-weeds” that cannot be con-trolled with common chemicals, and American agri-culture is riddled with fragments of transgenic material.The Union of Concerned Scientists recently reportedthat the seeds of conventional crops—traditional vari-

eties of corn, soybeans, and canola—are now “perva-sively contaminated with low levels of DNA originat-ing from engineered varieties of these crops.” Onelaboratory found transgenic DNA in 83 percent of thecorn, soy, and canola varieties tested.

GMO contamination is causing mounting eco-nomic losses, as farmers lose their markets, organicproducers lose their certification, and processors haveto recall food products. The contamination is evenbeginning to affect property values. Consumers areeating GMOs, whether they know it or not, and evenGMOs not approved for human consumption haveshown up in our taco shells. New “biopharmaceutical”crops used to grow drugs have leaked into the humanfood supply. And across the nation, hundreds of openfield plots are growing transgenic corn, rice, and soy-beans that contain drugs, human genes, animal vaccines,and industrial chemicals, without sufficient safeguardsto protect nearby food crops.

It’s not only food and farming that are affected. Partof what makes GMOs such an environmental threat isthat, unlike chemical contamination, GMOs are livingorganisms, capable of reproducing and recombining,and once they get out, they can’t be recalled. Now thatthere are genetically engineered fish, trees, insects, andother organisms, there’s no limit to the kind of envi-ronmental surprises that can occur. The widespreadecological damage discussed at Asilomar is now a real-ity. In just one example of what can happen, a studyfound that when just 60 transgenic fish were releasedinto a wild population of tens of thousands of fish, allthe wild fish were wiped out in just 40 generations. Andwhat will happen when there are plantations of trans-genic trees, which can disperse GMO pollen for up to40 miles and over several decades? Without physical orregulatory restraints, GMOs pose a very real threat tothe biological integrity of the planet. As GMO activistssay, it gives “pollution a life of its own.”

The unasked question that lingers behind all the sto-ries of GMO contamination is: what is the role of indus-try? How do the manufacturers of GMOs benefit fromgene pollution? The fact is, the industry has never lifteda finger to prevent it and the biological and political sys-tem they have designed for it encourages its spread.

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e “Genome Scrambling—Myth or Reality? Transformation-inducedMutations in Transgenic Crop Plants” by Drs. Wilson, Latham, andSteinbrecher is available at www.econexus.info.

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The industry callscontamination an“adventitious pres-ence,” as if it were abenign but unavoid-able consequence ofmodern life, like background radia-tion from nucleartesting.

In the UnitedStates, there are nolegal safeguards inplace to protect thepublic—not evenlabels. Labels wouldat least provide theconsumer with ameans for tracingthe source of anyproblems that occur. Plus, without liability laws, theindustry avoids accountability for any health or envi-ronmental damage it causes. It opposes independenttesting and then takes advantage of the lack of data tomake false assurances about its products’ safety. TheWallStreet Journal reported in 2003 that “makers of genet-ically modified crops have avoided answering questionsand submitted erroneous data” on the safety of theirproducts to the federal government. They have spenthundreds of millions of dollars on massive public rela-tions campaigns that use sophisticated “perceptionmanagement” techniques all aimed at falsely assuringthe public, and government agencies, that their prod-ucts are useful and safe.

Beyond their not having to label and segregateGMOs, biotech companies can manufacture, sell, anddistribute them without having to take expensive pre-cautions against contamination. They do not have tomonitor field practices or do any post-market studies.When farms or factories are contaminated with GMOs,the industry is not held responsible for clean-up costs,as would be the case with chemical contamination.Instead, massive GMO food and crop recalls have beensubsidized by taxpayers. Industry not only doesn’t pay

for a farmer’s losses;it often sues thefarmer for patentinfringement andmakes money on thedeal. Monsanto, inparticular, has prof-ited richly by extort-ing patentinfringement finesfrom farmers whosecrops were inadver-tently contaminated.

In September2004, a studyreported that herbi-cide-resistant genesfrom Monsanto’snew bioengineeredcreeping bentgrass

were found as far away as measurements were made—13 miles downwind. Monsanto’s response was thatthere was nothing to worry about; it had proprietaryherbicides that could take care of the problem, assur-ing more the sale of its products than a limit to the con-tamination. By assiduously avoiding any responsibilityfor the proliferation of GMOs, and by defeating attemptsby the public to contain them, the agricultural biotech-nology industry has thus virtually ensured that GMOcontamination will continue unabated. A biotech indus-try consultant with Promar International, Don West-fall, put it this way: “the hope of industry is that overtime the market is so flooded that there’s nothing youcan do about it. You just sort of surrender.”

The most alarming case of GMO contamination isthe discovery of transgenes in corn at the center of theorigin of corn in Mexico. From the time GMO cornwas first planted in the U.S. Midwest, it took only sixyears it to make its way back home in the remote moun-tainous regions of Puebla and Oaxaca, Mexico. Igna-cio Chapela, a Mexican-born microbial biologist, wasthe scientist who first reported this contamination in2001. Early in 2002, I visited the area with Dr. Chapelato investigate the cultural and economic implications

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of his findings. While I was there I got a first-hand lookat the complicity of government and industry in thespread of GMO contamination.

The genetic diversity of corn, the world’s mostimportant food crop after rice, has been fostered forthousands of years by Zapotec and hundreds of otherindigenous farming communities who have lived inthese mountainous areas since before the Spanisharrived. Now their traditional land-based ways of life,the sacred center of their culture, and the source of theireconomic livelihood, corn, has been imperiled by thisnew form of colonization. The farmers I talked to therewere well informed, but worried about their culturaland economic survival. What they did not understandwas how transgenic corn got into their fields.r

Early press reports blamed the farmers themselves,based on the observation that in order to help supporttheir families and communities, some of them travel tothe U.S. to work as migrant workers. But in fact, itturned out that the cause of the contamination was theMexican government and “free trade” rules. AlthoughMexico had banned the commercial planting of trans-genic corn, under pressure of NAFTA and the biotechindustry it was importing corn from the U.S. that it knewwas contaminated. It then distributed this whole-ker-nel corn to poor communities as food aid, withoutlabels or warnings to rural farmers that it should notbe used for seed. This highly subsidized corn, which isbeing dumped on third world farmers at prices that arelower than the cost of production, undermines local cornmarkets. But instead of taking steps to stop the spreadof this contamination, or to protect its farming com-munities, or even to guard its fragile biodiversity, theMexican government, the international seed banks,and the biotech industry all deflected public and mediaattention to a convenient scapegoat—Dr. Chapela.

The suppression of science

Chapela and his graduate student, David Quist, hadpublished their findings in the peer-reviewed JournalNature.t They had actually made two findings: first,that GMOs had contaminated Mexico’s local varietiesof corn—in technical terms, that “introgression” had

occurred. And second, they found that once transgeneshad introgressed into other plants, the genes did notbehave as expected. This is evidence of transgenicinstability, which scientists now regard with growingconcern. But allegations of such instability can be dan-gerous to make because they undermine the centraldogma’s basic article of faith: that transgenes are sta-ble and behave predictably. Not surprisingly, the indus-try attacked the first finding, but was foiled when theMexican government’s own studies found even higherlevels and more widespread GMO contamination thanthe Nature article had reported. The industry thenfocused its attack to the finding of transgenic instability.

For over a year, the industry relentlessly assailedQuist and Chapela’s work, both in the press and on theInternet. As the debate raged on, scientists arguedboth sides, fueled, Chapela says, by a well developedand generously funded industry public relations strat-egy that did not hesitate to make the attacks personal.Monsanto even retained a public relations firm to haveemployees pose as independent critics. The outcomewas unprecedented. The editor of Nature published aletter saying that “in light of the criticisms…the evidenceavailable is not sufficient to justify” the publication ofthe original paper. This “retraction” made reference tothe work of two relatively unknown biologists, MatthewMetz and Nick Kaplinsky. At the time, Kaplinsky wasstill a graduate student in the Department of Plant andMicrobial Biology at UC Berkeley. Metz had finishedhis work at Berkeley and was a post-doctoral fellow atthe University of Washington. What few knew was thattheir role in the Nature controversy was linked toanother dispute that they, Quist, and Chapela, hadbeen involved in. That earlier dispute, too, was aboutthe integrity of science. And in that case, Chapela hadled the faculty opposition—and Quist had been a partof the student opposition—to private funding ofbiotechnology research at UC Berkeley.

The Pie on the Wall

The University of California at Berkeley is a “landgrant” institution, meaning that it was created to sup-port California’s rich agricultural productivity. But by

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r The full story of how GMOs got into native corn in Mexico is told in“Risking Corn, Risking Culture,” by this author, Claire Hope Cummings,World Watch, November/December 2002.

t Quist, D. and Chapela, I., “Transgenic DNA Introgressed into Tradi-tional Maize Landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico,” Nature, 414:541–543November 29, 2001.

January/February 2005 WORLD•WATCH 33

the late 1990s, Cal had all but abandoned its originalmission. Berkeley had become the national leader in col-lecting royalty payments on its patents, many of whichrelated to the development of genetic engineering. Thisdevelopment was facilitated by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allowed universities to patenttheir research, even if it was publicly funded. By the fallof 1998, the private funding of research at Berkeley wasin its full glory. That year, the dean of the College ofNatural Resources, Gordon Rausser, announced that hehad brokered an unprecedented research deal with theNovartis Corporation, then a multinational Swiss agro-chemical and pharmaceutical giant.

Novartis was giving just one department of theCollege, the Department of Plant and Microbial Biol-ogy, $25 million over a 5-year period. The deal wasfraught with conflicts of interest, not the least of whichwas that Novartis employees served on academic com-mittees and got first license rights to the Department’sresearch products. Novartis proudly announced that“the ultimate goal” of the agreement was “to achievecommercialization of products.” This took privateintrusion into the public sector to a new level, allow-ing private investors to profit directly from public invest-ment in research, and arousing concerns about theincreasing privatization of public research institutionsacross the country.

In true Berkeley fashion, the controversy eruptedinto protests. When the deal was announced in Novem-ber 1998, I covered the press conference. It was heldin a packed room upstairs in Koshland Hall, home ofthe Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. Novar-tis executives stood shoulder to shoulder with UCBerkeley administrators and leading faculty. They alllooked on benevolently while the agreement was for-mally signed. Then the speeches started. Steven Briggs,president of Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute,the foundation that funnels corporate money to the uni-versity and gets government research and tax credits forNovartis, signed the deal on behalf of Novartis. Briggs,who is an expert on the corn genome, called the agree-ment—without the least suggestion of irony—“thefinal statement in academic freedom.”

The person most responsible for the Novartis deal,

Dean Rausser, was proud of his considerable connec-tions in the private sector. While he was dean, he builta consulting company worth millions. During the pressconference, he stood at the front of the room with theother key participants. The press and other guests wereseated in folding chairs facing them, and students saton the floor along the walls. Hefty security men inblue blazers with wires dangling from their ears werelined up along the back wall. I was in the front row.Suddenly I felt a commotion erupting behind me.Something rushed past my head, missed its intendedtarget, and splattered on the wall behind the fronttable. Then another object followed, grazed DeanRausser, and landed on the floor at his feet. It all hap-pened fast, but I soon realized that I was in the mid-dle of a pie-throwing protest. In their hallmark style,which is humorous political theater, the “Biotic Bak-ing Brigade” had tossed two vegan pumpkin pies (it wasThanksgiving week, after all) at the signers of theNovartis agreement.

As campus security guards wrestled the protestersto the floor and then pulled them out of the room, theAP reporter who was sitting next to me jumped up andran out to call in her story. I stayed and watched DeanRausser, who had been speaking at the time. He justlooked down, brushed some pie off his suit, then smiledand shrugged. I got the distinct feeling he was enjoy-ing the moment. He went on with his presentation, andfor the rest of the time he was speaking, pie fillingdrooled down the wall behind him.

As a child of the ’60s and a member of the UCBerkeley class of 1965, I was reminded of the winterof 1964, when Mario Savio gave his famous “rageagainst the machine” speechy on the steps of the cam-pus administration building. When it began, the FreeSpeech Movement was about academic freedom but itenlarged into demonstrations against the war in Viet-nam and support for the civil rights and women’s move-ments. A lot was achieved, especially in terms ofenvironmental protection. But it was always about whocontrols the levers of “the machine,” as Savio called it.By 1998, however, the conservative backlash that wasprovoked by these protests was in full bloom. Privateinterests had successfully dismantled the regulatory

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y In that speech Savio said that there comes a time when “the opera-tion of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart,that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part and you’vegot to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon thelevers, upon all the apparatus, and you got to make it stop....”

WORLD•WATCH January/February 200534

system, invaded the ivy tower, and taken over the intel-lectual commons. The corporate executives and theiracademic beneficiaries who were there to celebrate theNovartis agreement clearly had nothing to fear—a factthat was neatly affirmed by Dean Rausser’s shrug.

The Novartis funding ended in 2003. By then, fac-ulty and graduate students who were on both sides ofthe debate had gone their separate ways. Dr. Chapelastayed, and continued to teach at Berkeley. As 2003 drewto a close, he was up for a tenure appointment. Eventhough he’d garnered extraordinary support from fac-ulty, students, and the public, his role in opposing cor-porate funding on campus apparently cost him histeaching career. After an unusually protracted process,the University denied him tenure. In 2004, a 10-per-son team at Michigan State University that had spenttwo years evaluating the Novartis-Berkeley agreementconcluded that the deal was indeed “outside the main-stream for research contracts with industry” and thatBerkeley’s relationship with Novartis created a conflictof interest in the administration that affected theirtenure decision against Dr. Chapela.

Instead of applauding the bravery of scientists whoquestion biotechnology, or at least encouraging furtherscientific inquiry, the industry and its cronies in the aca-demic world denounce their critics. Dr. Chapela has nowjoined a growing number of scientists who have paida high price for their integrity. Others have lost jobs,been discredited in the press, told to change researchresults or to repudiate their findings.u And for eachvictim whose story is told publicly, there are others whohave been silenced and cannot come forward. Theimplications of the trend toward the privatization ofresearch and the repression of academic freedom go farbeyond the question of where the funds come from andwho decides what gets studied. It’s a trend that deeplyundermines the public’s faith in science, and the resultis that society will lose the means to adequately evalu-ate new technologies. It may also mean that we adopta view of the natural world so mechanistic that we willnot even recognize the threats we face.

If science were free to operate in the public inter-est, it could provide the intellectual framework forinnovations that work with nature, instead of against

it. There already are technologies that use natural solu-tions to heal the wounds of the industrial age, formu-late sustainable food production and energy solutions,create new economic opportunities through the imag-inative use of ecological design, and build local self-reliant communities that foster both cultural andbiological survival. So we do have a choice of tech-nologies, and nature remains abundantly generous withus. What we do not have, given the perilous environ-mental state of the planet, is a lot of time left to sortthis out. And as long as the critics are silenced, we canbe lulled by the “certain promises” of genetic engi-neering, that it will provide magic answers to those ageold problems of hunger and disease, and in doing so,be diverted from attending to its “uncertain perils.”

The Nature of Trespass

Trespass, in legal parlance, means “an unlawful actthat causes injury to person or property.” It connotesan act of intrusion, usually by means of stealth, force,or violence. It also implies the right to allow or to refusean intrusion. A trespass occurs when that right has beenviolated. Genetic engineering technology is a trespasson the public commons. This is because of the waytransgenics are designed and the way “the molecularvision” has been pursued. This vision required that sci-ence be compromised to the point where it wouldoverlook the complex boundary conditions that formthe very foundation of life. It had to have the hubristo break the species barriers and place itself directly inthe path of evolution, severing organisms from theirhereditary lineage. And it requires the use of stealthand violence to invade the cell wall, and the implant-ing of transgenic life forms into an involuntary par-ticipant with organisms that are especially designed toovercome all resistance to this rude intrusion.

This trespass continues when ownership is forced onthe newly created organisms in the form of a patent. Thepatenting of a life form was widely considered immoral,and until the U.S. Supreme Court approved the patent-ing of life in 1980, it was illegal. With that one deci-sion, private interests were given the right to own everynon-human life form on earth. We clearly are, as Pres-

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u The stories of four such scientists and their reflections on theirexperiences can be heard on a recording of a remarkable conversationamong them called “The Pulse of Scientific Freedom in the Age of theBiotech Industry” held on the UC Berkeley campus in December, 2003.A link to the web archive is available at http://nature.berkeley.edu/pulseofscience/pix/conv.txt1.html.

January/February 2005 WORLD•WATCH 35

ident Bush recently declared,“the ownership society.” Now,when GMOs enter the bor-derless world of free trade andpermeate every part of the webof life, they carry within themtheir owner’s mark and effec-tively privatize every organismthey infiltrate. This is made allthe more unacceptable becausethis expensive technology is sounnecessary. Most of what agri-cultural biotechnology sells,such as insect-resistant plantsand weed-control strategies, isalready available by othermeans. Traditional plant breed-ing can produce all theseadvances and more—includ-ing increased yield, drought or salt resistance, and evennutritional enhancements. The whole point of the com-mercial use of the genetic engineering technology is thepatents, and the social control they facilitate. The rea-son GMOs were inserted into crops is so that agbio-chemical companies could own the seed supply andcontrol the means and methods of food production, andprofit at each link in the food chain.

Genetic engineering is a manifestation—perhapsthe ultimate manifestation—of the term “full spec-trum dominance.” In this case, the dominance isachieved on multiple levels, first by exerting biologicalcontrol over the organism itself, then by achieving eco-nomic control over the marketplace and then through“perceptual” control over public opinion. GMOs aredisguised to look just like their natural counterparts,and then are released into the environment and thehuman food chain through a matrix of control that iden-tifies and disables every political, legal, educational,and economic barrier that could thwart their owners’purpose. Arguably, this description suggests a moresinister level of intention than really exists. But the factremains that denial of choice has been accomplished andit is crucial to this strategy’s success. As a Canadian GMOseed industry spokesperson, Dale Adolphe, put it: “It’s

a hell of a thing to say that theway we win is don’t give theconsumer a choice, but thatmight be it.”

Agricultural genetic engi-neering is dismantling our oncedeeply held common visionabout how we feed ourselves,how we care for the land,water, and seeds that supportus, and how we participate indecisions that affect us on themost intimate personal andmost essential communitylevel. The ultimate irony of ourecological crisis, says DavidLoy, a professor and author ofworks on modern Westernthought, is that “our collec-

tive project to secure ourselves is what threatens todestroy us.” But still, there are problems with makingmoral arguments like these. One is that we lack a prac-tical system of public ethics—some set of commonstandards we can turn to for guidance. Another is thatit does not address the most serious threat to our secu-rity, which is that no amount of science, fact, or evenmoral suasion is of any consequence when we are leftwith no options.

At the end of my inquiry I came to the conclusionthat genetic engineering, at least as it is being used inagriculture is, by design, inherently invasive and unsta-ble. It has been imposed on the American public in away that has left us with no choice and no way to optout, biologically or socially. Thus, the reality is that theevolutionary legacy of our lives, whether as humanbeings, bees, fish, or trees, has been disrupted. We arein danger of being severed from our own ancestrallines and diverted into another world altogether, thephysical and social dimensions of which are still unknownand yet to be described.

Claire Hope Cummings is a lawyer and environmen-tal journalist. She wrote about genetically modified ricein the May/June 2004 issue of World Watch.

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Not genetically engineered: naturally occurring exoticLatin American samples collected for the Germplasm

Enhancement for Maize Project of the USDA

Keith Weller/USDA ARS