My idea of heaven is a great big baked potato and someone to share it with. – Oprah

• The potato• Solanum Tuberosum• It’s all about control

– The power is an amoral thing, like the Force

– And it’s not total, weather can ruin crops,

• The more control you have the more potential for disorder there is.

• The decadence of Versailles led to the chaos of the Fr. Rev.

• Monoculturing our food leads to unimagined complexities

Novelties of order

• When we exert control over nature unexpected thing pop up like edible potatoes. (Wild ones are bitter & toxic)

• Our systems give freaks a chance to catch on and thrive when they wouldn’t in the wilderness

Order v. Novel complexity

• Chemical fertilizers• Pesticides• Advanced machinery• Fuels to run above

• $ debt• Health issues• Erosion• Depletion of soil• Pollution

Who do you hear this argument from?

Mostly hippies

But also industrial farmers, politicians, and the very agribusiness that sold farmers this stuff in the first place.

Monsanto issued a statement that “current agricultural technology is unsustainable.”

They wouldn’t do this if they didn’t have the next thing.

In your face science

• In any ecosystem, even a garden Everything is effecting everything else.

• It’s nothing but variables.• WE NEED CONTROL

Genetic engineering History

• The name is new, the practice is not.

• Plants and animals have been bred for thousands of years.

• Human breeding has also been done now and then.

• All of this has worked by trying to enhance desired characteristics, without knowing how they are transmitted.

Why bother?

• Designing plants & animals “from scratch” – This is not going to happen

anytime soon

• Transgenic Engineering – Putting genetic information

from one type of plant or animal into another

• Cloning – Making genetic copies of

an existing plant or animal

• Let’s look at the latter two of these.

Transgenic pigs have jellyfish genes that make them glow in the dark. Really

• An organism is called “transgenic” if it has genetic information added to it from a different type of organism. – A.K.A. Genetically

Modified Organism (GMO)

• Viruses do something of this sort when they infect plants, animals or humans.

• Humans have begun to do this with plants and animals.

Transgenic Plants

• This is the work that is furthest along: – Corn with its own insecticide – Soybeans & cotton resistant to herbicides – Papayas resistant to viruses

• Transgenic crops are being grown in the Americas, South Africa, Europe, Australia and China

Papaya’s also called pawpaws

Edible, slightly spicy seeds

A folk contraceptive

Transgenic Animals 

• The work is less advanced here.

• Human genes have been inserted into: – Bacteria – Mice

• To produce various human proteins for treating diseases.

• Cows with increased milk production

Biosteel: Goats with spider silk gene

• Spider silk is amazingly strong

• The gene for it is put in goats

• The goat’s milk contains these super strong fibers that can make bullet proof vests

Advantages of Transgenic Engineering 

• Plants: – More disease-resistant – Larger yields – More transportable – More nutritious

• Animals: – Make proteins for medicinal

purposes – Make organs for transplant to

humans

Better cotton plants

• Colorado potato beetle can kill a potato plant overnight.

• 1995 Our friends at Monsanto genetically engineered NewLeaf Potatoes

• make bacterial toxins (Bacillus thuringiensis) in every cell. These pesticides should pulp the beetles digestive system.– Bt for short

Some people don’t like Monsanto

Bt has been around

• Bt is also sprayed as an environmentally friendly pesticide– Only harms one or two orders of insect.

Not helpful ones

• In 1985 a Belgian company put Bt in tobacco plants– Only hurts insects that eat plants– Safe for humans

• Bt-toxins present in peanut leaves (bottom) protect it from damage caused by European corn borer larvae (top)

• Is it a good idea?• Specifically who

wants this?• Who is this designed

for?• How are they framing

their argument ?

GMO’s

• There more than 50 mil acres of these

• Potatoes that absorb less fat when fried

• Lawns that don’t need mowed

• Food with vaccines in it

• Technicolor cotton

Some legal aspecs

• So you might own any NewLeaf potatoes you bought and grew, but the genes in them are owned by Monsanto.

• It’s against the law to save some and plant them next year.

• GMO’s are the biggest change to our relationship with nature since we started agriculture.

• They’re new enough to get patented, but not different enough to have to be labeled.

• Their new in patent offices and on farms, but nothing new in terms of the envi and supermarkets.

• So which is it?

• If agriculture enters the information age Monsanto wants to be the Microsoft

• It describes it’s technology as an “Operating System”

• This metaphor shows the P.O.V. they have in approaching agriculture– Is the farm a factory?– Is the forest a farm?– Is our food software?

• The Andes 1532, Spaniards show up to kill everyone and take the gold.

• 7 thousand years ago• Potatoes

domesticated• Peruvian blue variety

is similar to original

The Incan’s relationship to their potatoes

• New York 7 thousand years ago• Incan’s bred skinny, fat, red, pink, yellow, orange, smooth, russet, for

droughts, floods, sweet, bitter and many other varieties• Planting in near vertical regions meant specialized microclimates.• Impossible for monoculture

machu picchu

• An Andean farm is the opposite of an ordered orchard.– Weedy wild potatoes

intersperse their genes with domesticated ones

• But it can survive most things nature throws at it.

• Unlike Irish farms in 1845

• You can get variety, but there’s an interspecies limit.

• GMO’s overcomes that limit.

• Man can produce variability now.– Plants can have fireflies’

luminescence, flounders’ cold endurance, and bacterial disease resistance

• It’s not coevolution, it’s us telling them.– Control– I’m Rick James plants

One way to look at it

• We’ve put a little of our human intelligence into plants.– Plants with bt gene

take care of something we used to do.

History• Most of Europe• No one trusts the potato

(in Nightshade family) or the tomato

• Ger: Fred the great had to force people to plant it

• Louis XVI runs good politics – Has Marie where potato

flower necklaces, plants some spuds in royal garden and puts an elite guard on it up until midnight.

– After midnight peasants came and stole what was worth guarding

• Potatoes could grow in boggy land Roundheads had left Irish with– Some say first potato washed

ashore from wreck of Spanish Armada

– Easy to grow. No plowing just burying.

– Easy to cook– With some milk you have a

nutritionally complete diet • Helped Irish escape English

oppression & tyranny.• Control• Part of why English are the big

potato hold outs

1794 UK wheat harvest fails

• Great potato debate

• UK needs potato, it’ll feed the poor cheaply

• Wait, since they’re eating so much the Irish are just reproducing way too much (IR pop had gone from 3 mil to 8 mil in the last c.)– The potato is a damned root

making the Irish more like animals and less civilized.

Actually won the chicago golden gloves at seventeen

• Bread, leavened wheat = civilized. – Processed by hard working

English, infused with air, spiritual

– A traded commodity

• Potato = just food. – Thrown from mud into a pot

by lazy Irish– Not easily stored or traded

as a commodity– Easy food & easy sex will

lead to overpopulation and misery

– Economists worried about the potato

• 1845, Phytophthora infestans fungus proves economists right.

• Potatoey Doom.

• 1 in 8 Irish will die over the course of 3 years

• Within a decade the population was halved as people fled.

• This is because of monoculture, the Garnet Chile potato is immune, but it wasn’t planted.

How you get genes into plants

• Transformation: A cell’s uptake and expression of foreign genetic material – By viruses: transduction– Between bacterian: conjugation– Animal cells: transfection

The gene gun

• An actual .22 caliber gun• A heavy metal (W, Au, Ag)

coated with plasmid DNA is air propelled at a gel.

• Besides relevant genes, an antibiotic gene accompanies the payload as a marker.– So you expose cells to a

pathogen and any who survive have the marker and the relevant gene you want

– The marker is also a genetic Product Code

There’s still variability.

• If new gene winds up on wrong part of genome its no go

• Sometimes results can be potatoes superior in ways new gene can’t explain

• Is it just throwing DNA against a wall and seeing what sticks?

• Once they made red petunias, but when the Temp hit 90 they all turned white

• This is not like putting software into a computer

Uncontrolled

• This is the question raised about GMOs

• Bt plants make Bt pollen that bees carry off.

• Bt is building up in the soil. We consider it safe now, but there may be unintended consequences – DDT was thought to be

safe until we learned how long it stays in the envi, and the effect it has on bird eggs.

The paradox

• GMO depend on the plasmid’s ability to take genes across species.

• The envi safety of the tech depends on the integrity of species in nature and their ability to reject alien genes.

• Could cross pollination happen between NewLeaf potatoes and local relatives?

• Superweeds? Self-replicating pollution?

• We’ve seen the evolution of resistance to man-made chemicals but what will happen if nature becomes resistant to a natural pesticide like bt?

Monsanto’s solution

• By the time resistance arises we’ll have new GMO’s

• This is an underlying faith in the advancement of technology that underlies a lot of P.O.V.

• The national debt, baby-boomers use of social security, global warming, oil.– All issues that some feel we’ll

come up with a solution for when things get too bad.

– We pretty much always have before.

– Except we sill don’t know what to do with Nuclear waste.

We do have mouths to feed• Current pesticides kill everything but…

– Farmers would like to spray less chemicals.– NewLeafs have less poison in them than a Russet– But why spend $ to get a profit that will mostly go to

buying more expensive seeds?• Is that basically laundering money for Monsanto?

• A farmer in ID pays ~ 1950$ per acre in chemcials electricity and water to grow 2000$ worth of potatoes– NewLeaf might save the

farmer some $

– A big time farmer might have 10K acres of computer monitored spuds. ~ 500K profit?

• An organic farmer is going to hate Monsanto & the big farms.

• And customers might not want GMO

• Other customers might want whatever is cheap.

Organic farming tactics

• Rotate crops to confuse pests• Plant strips of peas along potatoes, peas

attract beneficial insects that feed on pests• Introduce predatory ladybugs• Plant a variety of potatoes so if one fails

there are fall backs– You can eat organic potatoes right from the

field, no poisons. People will pay for that

• Similar to Peruvians

Industrial vs. Organic• Bigger• Monoculture, McD’s wants

Russets you grow russets. • $ for Pesticides• Higher Yield, except during

droughts• Centralized• Simple • Capital and E input intensive• Use more water

• Smaller• Biodiversity• Screw McD’s other people will

pay me• Knowledge and Labor

intensive• More time because of crop

rotation• Localized• Intricate• 10-15% less yield, except

during droughts. • People pay a lot more for

organic• Some countries subsidize it

Other issues

• The technology exists to put “terminator genes” in crops so that seeds from crops will be sterile– You will have to buy new seeds every year.

• “traitor” genes keep genetic extras turned off until you spray a chemical onto the plant.– A control on the spread of genes, but also

something you have to pay for every year.

Beautiful big picture

• You can talk with anyone in America about TV and we all have that in common. We are unified.

• You know what to expect from a McD’s in Tokyo because those fries will come from ID.

• We all have similar desires regarding mates, money, entertainment. So we like monoculture.

Greenwashing

• Farmers didn’t want to pay the $ for New Leaf

• In 99 there were 55K acres of NewLeaf out there, a small fraction of that now.

• McDonald’s said it wouldn’t buy any New Leaf potatoes

Monsanto vs. McDonald’s

Revenue $21.5864 billion (2006)

Net income $3.544 billion (2006)

Employees 465,000 (2005)

Revenue $7.344 billion (2006)

Net income $689 million (2006)

Employees 16,500 (May, 2006)