Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Foods by Nina Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown. Joseph Henry Press, $24.95, 370 pages.

The News & Observer

March 6, 2005

’Frankenfood’ or godsend?

By PHILLIP MANNING




A Boston College professor coined the word “Frankenfoods” for genetically modified (GM) food in 1992. It aroused images of the mad scientist creating an uncontrolled monster. A few years later, Prince Charles famously pronounced that scientists working on GM foods had strayed into “realms that belong to God and God alone.” Shortly thereafter, Greenpeace members wearing Haz-Mat suits and carrying anti-GM signs marched into a field of GM plants in Britain and destroyed it. So effective was the campaign to demonize GM crops, writes reporter Bill Lambrecht, that by 1999 “Europe was lost to genetically modified plantings for the foreseeable future....”

The antagonism toward GM foods reflects society’s uneasy relationship with science. We rely on science in almost every aspect of our lives, but many of us don’t trust it or understand it. A recent Rutgers University poll showed that 43 percent of Americans believed (incorrectly) that ordinary tomatoes did not contain genes, while GM tomatoes did.

In fact, we live in a world that heeds slogans more than science. But in “Mendel in the Kitchen,” two authors put the science back into the dilemmas posed by genetically engineered foods. Nancy Marie Brown is a science writer; Nina Fedoroff is a professor of genetics and molecular biology at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Their book may not get as much attention as a Greenpeace rally, but it should. GM crops have the potential to supply missing nutrients to the undernourished, improve the environment, and alleviate hunger.

The concept behind GM foods is simple. Identify a gene (or genes) that confers a beneficial property to some organism and insert that gene into a food plant that you want to have that property. Golden Rice is a good example. White rice lacks vitamin A. And in regions where rice is a dietary staple, many children eat little else. Consequently, their diet provides little Vitamin A, a deficiency that dims their eyesight and kills a million of them each year.

Rice actually has the gene that produces beta carotene, the precursor of Vitamin A, but the gene is not expressed in the grains. A Swiss scientist named Ingo Potrykus decided to find a promoter gene to turn on the beta carotene gene in white rice. After nine years of work, Potrykus and his colleagues inserted four promoter genes found in daffodils into white rice. The result was Golden Rice. This remarkable feat landed Potrykus on the cover of Time magazine in 2000 with a splashy headline, “This rice could save a million kids a year.”

However, genetic manipulation is a powerful tool, too powerful according to its opponents, a high-powered rifle compared to the scatter-gun of earlier technologies. So, they ask, why not just ban them altogether? The answer: New technologies are chancy, but in this case, the rewards justify the risks. Biofortified foods, such as Golden Rice, could deliver necessary vitamins to needy consumers. Bt corn, a GM crop with a built-in insecticide, saves farmers (and the environment) from spraying 2.6 million pounds of insecticides. Roundup Ready crops, such as GM soybeans, enable farmers to practice conservation tillage, which reduces soil erosion and conserves water.

The biggest challenge facing farmers lies ahead. The number of people on Earth is projected to grow by 3 billion by the middle of this century. The authors observe that “Many — probably most — of these people live in countries that are, even now, unable to provide their people with enough food....” To furnish hungry people with enough calories to survive will require a revolution in agriculture. And a promising route is GM foods.

Researchers recently discovered that inserting a single corn gene into ordinary rice plants increased yields by 10 to 25 percent. More work is needed to confirm this and test the new rice for safety and nutritional value. But that will happen only if the research is allowed to proceed.

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Despite the Frankenfoods moniker, genetic modification is just another tool in mankind’s 10,000-year history of altering food plants. At first we relied on DNA replication errors or mutations produced by the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Our ancestors then picked the plants they wanted and discarded the others. Simple selection has changed some plants dramatically. Teosinte, for instance, the ancestor of corn, looks nothing like a corn stalk, and its few seeds are inedible.

By the 1920s, scientists had learned how to cause mutations by blasting plants with radiation. The popular red grapefruit, Rio Red, was created by exposing buds of ordinary grapefruits to radiation at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Much of the wheat we consume today was made by similar methods. One popular variety of rice grown in California was created by exposing seeds to gamma rays from radioactive cobalt. None of these foods, according to the authors, were approved by federal regulatory agencies. In fact, they write, foods are subjected to scrutiny, “only if the genetic technique used to modify them was molecular [GM].” This standard, based on how food is developed, not on its safety, troubles the authors. They contend that GM foods are not inherently more dangerous than foods created by other techniques and should not be rejected out of hand by consumers or subjected to punishing regulations that hamper research and field testing. In other words, safety testing should depend on the plant and the nature of the modification, not on the technique used to make that modification. Many consumers would agree. They want to be assured that new foods are nutritious and safe to eat and not harmful to the environment.

Opponents point to problems specifically associated with GM foods. The most famous of these was the monarch butterfly flap. Two Cornell University scientists published a paper in 1999 based on lab studies, showing “that pollen from Bt corn kills the larvae of the monarch butterfly.” This incident spurred Greenpeace members to don butterfly costumes and pretend to die. In fact, this result was not surprising; Bt corn was designed to kill caterpillars. The real question is, Do Bt crops pose a significant danger to monarchs in the wild? Field studies began almost immediately. A summary of the results was published in 2001. Bt corn was not a deadly killer. So convincing were these studies that when the president of the National Butterfly Association was asked about the dangers Bt corn poses to monarchs, he replied, “In the Midwest, mowing roadsides and spraying herbicides is probably much more devastating, actually.”

When Ingo Potrykus published his work on Golden Rice, GM opponents erupted. Greenpeace, always quick with a catchy phrase, labeled Golden Rice “fools gold,” and others called it “an intentional deception.” The bewildered Potrykus attempted to defend his new rice, but his voice was lost in the uproar. Today, Golden Rice is still not commercially available to the millions who might benefit from it. But testing continues, the authors write, albeit slowly, “inside a Biosafety Level Four greenhouse,” the same facility “required of those who work with the deadly Ebola virus or anthrax.”
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