This page was created as part of an undergraduate assignment for Davidson College, NC.

    

Peter Lowry

12/13/02

 

The Death of a Controversy

One side predicts “doom and gloom” (“Much Ado About Nothing.”) in a warning against something.  The other side heaps unbelievably lofty praise in support of the same topic.  That’s usually how a controversy goes.  In the debate concerning the use of genetically-modified organisms, or GMOs, this pattern fits all too well.  On one side, groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth predict that the introduction of genetically-modified crops and other GMOs will wipe out the natural version of the plant or animal they were derived from, cause irreversible harm to their consumers, and create unstoppable “superweeds” that cannot be contained or killed (www.foe.org, www.greenpeace.org).  On the other hand, proponents of genetically-modified (GM) technology, usually in the form of biotechnology companies or small academic research groups, say that GMOs will be able to cure blindness, eradicate disease through vaccine introduction, and be the only way to feed the earth’s human population as it rockets past six billion.  The truth is probably somewhere in between; we most likely won’t see entire wild populations of plants and animals disappearing at fault of their GM cousins, and the world will probably never see the elimination of the hunger problem.  The debate over whether or not we should research, develop, or use GMOs, however, will solve itself soon.

 

It is easy to see the basis for the arguments set forth by Greenpeace and other anti-GMO organizations and individuals.  GM technology is new, and so radical, that it can accomplish things that fiction never thought possible.  Don’t know when your plants need watering?  Insert a firefly gene, and have them light up when they are thirsty.  Want to eat pork, but worried about it not being good for you?  Insert a spinach gene to make the pork less fatty (“Scientists cross pigs with spinach”).  Want to clean up your soil?  Insert a gene that allows plants to live in and uptake this arsenic, then simply pick the plants and dispose of them (“Researchers say genetically modified plant cleans arsenic”).  These three genetically-modified breakthroughs are not fiction.  They have already been accomplished, and the possibilities for more advances are limitless.  However, these types of innovations are contrary to people’s notion of what is “normal,” and the fear of the unknown becomes more influential than the potential benefit that the new organism presents (www.greenpeace.org).

 

Other anti-GMO arguments are more concrete.  There is the possibility that the introduction of GMOs into the wild, whether accidental or on purpose, could introduce the GMO genetic information into the wild population.  This could affect the fitness and/or the reproductive capabilities of the entire wild species, and could cause serious damage or even extinction.  There is also the possibility that the opposite will happen.  Genetic material from GM crops has been found to transfer to closely-related weeds.  A genetic resistance to pesticides, as is found in “Roundup Ready” crops, could transfer to these weeds, making it resistant to the very thing designed to eliminate it.  The resistance genes have also been found to “stack” – that is, multiple resistance genes have simultaneously been found in individual plants.  Weeds with multiple genetic pesticide resistances could become superweeds, and could spread uncontrollably while causing severe damage to crops (www.foe.org, www.greenpeace.org).

 

Human health is also at jeopardy, opponents to GM technology say.  In general, GM technology introduces novel proteins into organisms that have unknown effects on humans.  Anti-GMO organizations fear that these proteins, which are not present or are markedly less prevalent in their wild-type cousins, can cause medical problems ranging from allergic reactions to cancer.  Allergens, or “potential allergens,” depending on the source, were found in a brand of GM corn called Starlink Corn.  This corn made it into the food supply for the US, even though the government had approved it only for animal feed.  And while no GM product has been implicated in any health-related incident, opponents say that it is too soon to say.  GM products may have already caused serious problems and it just can’t be proven.  GM products may cause disease and death on a long-term scale.  The point is, we cannot be sure (www.foe.org, www.greenpeace.org).

 

It is also easy to see how the above arguments can be made into a positive – that is, that a new, radical, limitless technology can and should be used in every way to solve many of the world’s most pervasive problems.  Is uncertainty in the safety of the technology enough to force its annihilation?  If we can make a banana tree grow a vaccine, why should we keep it from being used in third world countries where vaccines are currently unavailable?  Isn’t golden rice, a strain of rice with increased vitamin A content, the savior for impoverished people whose vitamin A deficiency causes blindness and even death?

 

Pro-GMO organizations have rebuttals to the questions raised by their opponents.  Are GM products unsafe?  Supporters of GM technology would argue that, in almost a decade of having GM food in our food supply, not one single instance of GM-related disease or death has been reported.  Will GMOs cause the extinction of species?  Proponents would say no; the acquired GM genes in other species often bring a survival cost in the wild, which would allow wild-type animals to out-compete organisms with engineered genes.  Do GM crops facilitate the creation of superweeds?  Again, pro-GMO groups don’t think so.  The acquisition of resistance genes makes weeds less fit when the pesticides are removed, so beyond the sprayed field, these weeds would not survive.  So the argument has hit a near stalemate – neither side gives an argument that is significantly more effective than the other side.  Yet neither side is willing to give in (“Much Ado About Nothing.”). 

 

Meanwhile, biotechnology has invaded the traditional methods of breeding crops.  Biotechnological advances are blurring the line between what is genetically-modified and what is traditionally-bred.  The distinction between the two will continue to blur until there is a only a continuum telling how technologically advanced a crop is.  The blurring of the line drawn between GMOs and “natural” organisms will erode at the GMO debate until arguing for or against GMOs will not only be moot, it will be impossible.

 

Biotechnology is now being used in traditional breeding in an effort to increase the effectiveness and specificity of traditional plant breeding methods.  Researchers have begun to use biotechnological techniques in traditional breeding to compete with the results achieved with GM technology.  The advances include "marker assisted breeding" (Rashidi) and high-throughput tissue culture, two techniques that will radically change the way crops are bred. 

 

Marker assisted breeding is a technique that can be used to determine whether or not a specific gene is being expressed in plants.  To determine this, the target gene sequence must be known.  A marker, a molecule with a part that fluoresces and a part that attaches to the target gene, is then designed to specifically attach to the gene of interest.              The marker is then combined with the genetic material of many plants, and the resulting solutions are analyzed to determine which individual plants fluoresce (and therefore contain the gene of interest) and which ones do not.  This method is used instead of simple survival-based breeding, in which plants are grown in conditions that stress the plant.  The surviving plants are then interbred with each other to yield a strain of plants that is resistant to that specific stress.  However, marker-assisted breeding gives researchers a few crucial advantages over survival-based breeding.  First, it allows the identification of more than one specific gene at once.  The presence or absence of many genes can be determined at the same time, making the process of identifying the best-fit plants more scientific and less reliant on subjective breeder decisions.  Also, marker-assisted breeding can make these determinations within days of the inception of the new plant.  When a plant is only a few cells in size, it can be determined whether or not it contains specific target genes, whereas survival-based breeding takes weeks, months, or even years to make a less-accurate determination of the same type ("Fingerprinting Vegetables - DNA-Based Marker Assisted Selection.").

 

Marker-assisted breeding is often used in conjunction with high-throughput tissue cultures, another biotechnological technique.  Scientists have the ability now to grow parts of plants in a test tube – a technique called tissue culture – that vastly increases the sample size that can be grown in a small lab.  Instead of planting whole plants in a plot of dirt, shelves of rows upon rows of test tubes can be grown in incubators, with each test tube holding a small piece of growing plant cells and a solution to sustain it.  Test tubes containing tissue cultures are exposed to stressors as with normal traditional breeding, and the plants are often analyzed with genetic markers.  The resulting “best fit” plants are then bred.  Because of the increased sample size from the high-throughput tissue culture and the increased accuracy benefited from marker-assisted breeding, this biotechnologically influenced traditional breeding method is more effective at accurately producing progeny that are better fit and more drastically different than their wild-type relatives ("Fingerprinting Vegetables - DNA-Based Marker Assisted Selection.").

 

With these techniques, traditionally-bred plants have achieved results similar to GM plants.  For example, traditional breeding methods using marker-assisted breeding and DNA-based analysis techniques produced a tomato plant strain that could grow in high salinity areas – something that had been achieved with GM technology just months earlier.  True, there are things that traditionally-bred plants will never be able to do.  A corn plant will never light up when it is thirsty unless a gene from another species (a transgene) is inserted.  But with tools like genetic markers and tissue cultures, the gap is closing.

 

So how do we identify which organisms are genetically engineered and which are traditionally-bred?  With every new technique, the line becomes more blurred.  Biotech companies know that the marketability of their products suffer if they are labeled as genetically-modified or genetically-engineered.  To avoid that stigma, they are constantly downplaying their methods of introducing the novel gene, and emphasizing the benefits that such technology imparts.  On the other hand, traditional methods are constantly becoming more like genetic engineering.  And so expands the continuum.

 

Genetic engineering is still the “worst” out of the technologies; transgenic organisms would therefore be placed at one end of the spectrum.  Crops growing naturally in the wild would most likely be placed at the other end, with true organic farming not far behind.  In the middle of those two extremes comes the confusion.  GMOs with genetic modification within their species, plants mutated via irradiation, plants grown under small stresses such as heat or drought, plants modified by electroporation, by gene gun use, or by agrobacterium genetic transfer, plants grown with marker-assisted breeding, and others make it difficult to draw the dividing line between GM and non-GM organisms.  According to most sources, irradiation is a “traditional,” and therefore “acceptable” method by which plants can be modified.  Organisms that have an extra promoter inserted in front of a gene (which causes increased production of the protein for which the gene codes) are considered GMOs.  But which is safer?  Is it safer to eat organisms with more of what they naturally produce, or plants with uncontrolled genetic mutations?

 

Many questions arise when trying to arrange the different methods of plant modification into a worst-best continuum.  Which is “worse” than the others?  Which are “acceptable” technologies to pursue, and which ones should be restricted?  Which products should be available for food production?  At what point do we decide that no evidence of harm is proof enough to accept GMOs as just another technology, and not a foreign, fear inspiring menace?  Most importantly, what is a GMO?

 

Since the beginning of man’s first attempts at growing crops for food, the human race has introduced an artificial factor in the genetic modification of plants.  We have always been genetically-modifying our crops.  For millennia it was accidental; mankind did not understand the idea behind genetics.  Then plant breeding became purposeful.  Though genetics was not yet a word or a science, it was known that breeding different plants together could yield larger, hardier plants the next year.  After Mendelian genetics came into being, and Watson and Crick described their discovery of DNA, plant breeding took on a whole new dimension.  It became a science, and the rate of progress and discovery skyrocketed.  Genetic engineering and genetic modification came next.  But the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.  Humans were still just modifying the genetic information in their crops.  We were simply doing it faster and more accurate than ever before. 

 

So why is there a controversy?  As researchers find new ways to increase the speed and accuracy of traditional breeding methods, and genetically-engineered organisms become less new, taboo, or frightening, and the general public experiences them more every day, the line will blur further.  Talk of “Frankenfoods” will lose its shock value when the public does not see any evidence of that type of danger.  We will gradually accept GMOs, realizing that all organisms are genetically modified organisms.  Every living thing is genetically modified, whether through eons of evolution or through five minutes of electroporation.  We will introduce GMOs into society, unlabeled and undifferentiated from traditionally-bred foods.  We will regulate them based on their safety alone, not their genetic origin.  We will realize that everything was new and frightening at one point in time.  We will forget that there was a debate over the development and use of these technologies.  We will come to see genetic engineering and traditional breeding methods as one and the same; they will be partners in creating crops that are faster growing, healthier, bigger, and better.  And both sides, ever so slowly, will see the death of one of the major scientific debates of the genetic age.

 

 

 

 

Sources Cited

 

"Fingerprinting Vegetables - DNA-Based Marker Assisted Selection."  UC Davis Vegetable Research and Information Center. February 2000.

 

Friends of the Earth Online.  www.foe.org , last viewed 10/31/02.

 

Greenpeace Online.  www.greenpeace.org , last viewed 10/31/02.

 

“Much Ado About Nothing.”  New Scientist, May 18, 2002.  Cited from http://www.biotech-info.net/much_ado.html, last viewed 12/11/02. 

 

“Scientists cross pigs with spinach.”  BBC News online.  Cited from http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_1780000/1780541.stm.  Last viewed 1/24/02.

 

 

Other Sources Consulted

"Alternatives to Genetic Engineering."  Union of Concerned Scientists Online, last viewed 10/31/02.   www.ucsusa.org/food_and_environment/biotechnology/page.cfm?pageID=348

 

Daniell, Henry.  (2002)  "Molecular strategies for gene containment in transgenic crops."  Nature Biotech 20, 581-586.  Also on biotech.nature.com

 

"Gene flow."  European Environment Agency.  glossary.eea.eu.int, last viewed 11/01/02.

 

"Fingerprinting Vegetables - DNA-Based Marker Assisted Selection."  UC Davis Vegetable Research and Information Center. February 2000.

 

Friends of the Earth Online.  www.foe.org , last viewed 10/31/02.

 

Greenpeace Online.  www.greenpeace.org , last viewed 10/31/02.

 

Hails, Rosie S. (2000)  "Genetically modified plants - the debate continues."  Tree 15, 14-18.

 

Kasuga, Mie; Liu, Qiang; Miura,  Setsuko; Yamaguchi-Shinozaki, Kazuko; and  Shinozaki, Kazuo.  "Improving plant drought, salt, and freezing tolerance by gene transfer of a single stress-inducible transcription factor."  Nature America, Inc.  1999.

 

MacPherson, Kitta.  "Golden Rice:  Grain of Hope for Starving, Seed of Destruction for Foes."  Newhouse News Service Online, last viewed 10/31/02.  http://www.newhouse.com/archive/story1c020102.html

 

"Starving Africa Should Accept GMO Food, US Says."  World Environment News Online, last viewed 10/31/02.  www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=17051

 

Thompson, Larry.  "Are Bioengineered Foods Safe?"  U.S. Food And Drug Consumer Magazine, January-February 2000.  Also on www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2000/100_bio.html

 

Welsh, James R.  Fundamentals of Plant Genetics and Breeding.  New York: Wiley, 1981.

 

"What Is Biotechnology?"  Union of Concerned Scientists Online, last viewed 10/31/02.  www.ucsusa.org/food_and_environment/biotechnology/page.cfm?pageID=340

 

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