However, as well as being a food-scientist, I am also sufficient of a historian to know that such campaigns will not last - and that eventually the new techniques will be considered the norm.
Those who doubt this should read about the anti-pasteurisation campaign of the 1920s; the campaign against the chlorination of water supplies in the 1900s; and remember the attitude of that period about tinned (now referred to as canned) foods. Would they REALLY like to go back to the days of water-borne cholera epidemics, milk-born tuberculosis infection - or a food supply which was subject completely to the seasons (green vegetables and fruits only available in summer, or even the usual necessity to remove insects and/or slugs from the lettuce bought from the greengrocer) ?
The current "Luddite" campaign against the application of genetic-modification to food crops does not, of course, extend to the production of medicinals - where the technique has, among other things, been for some years been the basis of most insulin supplies for diabetics - so, no doubt, the latest development from the Norwich food campus, featured in local TV this morning - a modified broccoli variety in which the anti-cancer properties are multiplied nearly 100-fold - harbours the beginning of the turn of the tide. Can't you picture them all queueing up for the anti-cancer (GM) broccoli when it comes on the market in a few year's time??? {Actually the TV presenter was EXCEEDINGLY careful not to use the term GM -though the lady from the John Innes Centre WAS able to talk of cloning.]
And that time question is really the heart of the matter in discussion of "why GM?"
Genetic modification, in its simple meaning of changes in the genome of a species, has been going on since the beginning of life on earth - and is the 20th-century explanation for what Darwin described in The Origin of the Species. Furthermore genetic modification "engineered" by man began before the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to settled agriculture. There is no domesticated animal and no crop the world over which has not been intentionally genetically-modified by the intervention of man.
Just consider domestic pets - how little does the Pekinese or spaniel dog resemble its ancestor the common wolf? Consider your garden - how little do those glorious multi-coloured flowers you grow compare to their wild ancestors?
These changes have come about by - selective breeding - that is by man's manipulation of the sexual couplings over - usually a huge number - of generations. We just do not know when the modern horse, the modern varieties of dog, cat, cow and so on originated - their origins are so buried in the pre-history of human civilisation. And the same applies to such basic crops as wheat and rice - they also are not "natural" - they were "engineered" by early man by "unnatural" cross-breeding between species in the same genera which, probably inadvertently, produced crops more suited to man's needs.
Then, perhaps few of my readers can remember the long-straw wheat varieties which used to be grown in Britain (and elsewhere) in the 30s - so subject to lodging (flattening) by a rain storm, and so subject to fungal infection. This all changed with the "green revolution" of the 1960s - with the breeding of modern "dwarf" high-yielding varieties - which, incidentally meant that for the first time for nigh on 100 years British farmers were able to grow wheat which gave good British bread without relying on the importation of strong wheat from Canada.
Was the development of these dwarf varieties "natural" or "organic"? How was it done?
Well, it was done by crossing cultivated varieties with wild varieties by painstaking laboratory work, which involved delicately removing the male parts of the "flower" from one of the "parents" and the female parts from the other to produce an artificial mating with the pollen from one selected variety with the germ in the stigma of the other. And then growing the resulting seed and selecting those particular plants which looked promising for further crossing. Whether useful results had been achieved was never sure until sufficient seed had been grown to mill to flour for testing - a very time-consuming process - even allowing the co-operation of plant laboratories in the northern hemisphere with others in the southern hemisphere to give two crops each year.
Taking into consideration that there are something of the order of 20,000 to 50,000 genes which are randomly mixed in sexual reproduction it should be obvious how time-consuming and chancy it is for the traditional processes of plant breeding to produce a new variety which has both the good qualities of the old variety together with the desired new properties, such as dwarfism or particular resistance to fungal infection, that one is trying to produce.
The new techniques embraced in the terminology GM, on the contrary, involve the incorporation in the new organism a single or small group of genes, already known or presumed to convey the desired property, and then propagation by cloning without the sexual reproduction which introduces further "shuffling" of the genetic code. Consequently, although normal sexual reproduction remains necessary to propogate the new crop variety to commercial quantity the whole breeding procedure is both dramatically shortened and relies much less on chance.
Where then do the fears of GM arise?
IMHO the fears are artificially propagated by the media - and what better news story is there than a scare story? - and by such wealthy organisations as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth who depend on scare stories to ensure their continuing supply of donations !!!! It seems so strange to me that while objecting to the use on crops of artificial fungicides etc. they campaign so vigorously against a technique which promises so clearly the production of new varieties combining resistance to fungal attack with desirable nutritional and eating qualities; and at the same time constantly reiterate that "we do not know the possible dangers", while doing their best to prevent crop trials designed to test such possibilities.
The main story propagated is that the scientists are planning introduction of "strange genes" into all of nature to produce poisonous monsters. IMHO what I have said in the paragraphs above should be enough to quench such stories except among those who believe in ghosts and fairies...
The further point is that such "strange genes" have not yet been found - that is not to say that they could NEVER be found - just as before the 1940s a chemist could say nature has only 92 chemical elements - though since then a whole number of transuranic elements have been found or been manufactured in the atomic pile. However, it should be borne in mind that the work on the human genome has already demonstrated that something over 50% of human genes are shared throughout the living world - including such plants as the cabbage and the wheat plant, while something more than 90% are shared throughout the animal kingdom. A gene is merely a "chemical" with a particular arrangement of elements which acts as a code message to DNA in growth. Any particular gene does not "belong" to a particular plant or animal any more than a nitrogen atom in a manufacture fertilizer is any different from a nitrogen atom in farmyard manure... Once transferred to a new organism the gene becomes part of that organism and has no "memory" to associate itself with the organism it came from!
This, of course, looks like leading me to a discussion of a whole series of other misconceptions, associated with the words "natural" and "organic" - but this would require a further article and so here I stop, with just the final comment that it is easy for those in the well-fed north to discount the need for higher-yielding crops - while millions in the south continue to live on the edge of hunger.
© Copyright E.C.Apling, May 2000