Redesigning Life? Introduction: Challenging Biotechnology

This article is the introduction to the book Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (Zed Books), edited by Brian Tokar.

Perhaps once in a decade, a compelling new social or environmental concern will come to the forefront of public debate in the West, raising profound consequences for all life on earth, while thoroughly challenging our views of what kind of future is possible. The ensuing controversies provoke challenging questions about the very nature of our society and its institutions; they expose widespread myths and shatter foundational assumptions. In the 1950s, it was the problem of nuclear fallout and the looming threat of nuclear war. In the 1960s, citizens of the industrialized nations confronted their governments’ participation in a genocidal war in southeast Asia, while at the same time discovering the life-threatening effects of urban and industrial pollution, which made the air unhealthy to breathe and much of our water unsafe to drink.

In the late 1970s, a renewed antinuclear movement swept much of Europe and North America, focused on the proliferation of a new generation of weapons, and pledged to end the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. This movement halted the construction of nuclear power stations in all but a few Northern countries, and raised a profound challenge to militarism and the increasing centralization of political and economic power in society. In the late 1980s, a series of unusually hot summers — along with several major oil spills, crises over urban waste disposal, and a revival of environmental images in popular culture — helped bring the problem of global climate change to the center of public concern, debate and action. The particulars vary considerably across geographic and cultural boundaries, but the broad impact of these issues on public consciousness has been a widespread, international phenomenon.

Today, at the dawn of a new millennium, questions about biotechnology and genetic engineering have come to occupy a central place in shaping public debates about the future. With profound implications for our health, the environment, the future of agriculture, and the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature, today’s genetic technologies have aroused worldwide attention, provoked thousands of people to engage in political action, and galvanized a new international movement that has made the commercial use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) one of the most contentious public issues throughout Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the Americas as well.

Less than a decade ago, the implications of biotechnology were largely an esoteric concern. The discussion was mostly limited to scientists, ex-scientists, and those who sought to challenge the entire scientific enterprise. Biotechnology appeared to have only recently emerged from the annals of science fiction. Compared to more pressing concerns, from widespread hunger and the displacement of millions of impoverished peoples in Africa and elsewhere, the increasing militarization of Western societies, the extinction of countless living species and ecosystems, and worldwide assaults on basic human rights, concerns about biotechnology could safely be put aside for another day. Today, however, biotechnology and genetic engineering have become powerful symbols of what is most fundamentally wrong with our society: the unprecedented concentrations of political and economic power; economic globalization and the widening gap between the world’s rich and poor; the worldwide loss of food security; and the rise of a new technological and financial elite who act as if the earth and all its diverse inhabitants are little more than chess pieces that can be endlessly played and manipulated to satisfy the insatiable wants of an extravagantly wealthy few.

To its many proponents and vocal supporters around the world, however, biotechnology represents something profoundly different. For some, it has come to represent the fullest realization of technological power for human benefit. Biotechnology, we are told, will usher in a more productive and less environmentally damaging agriculture, more effective medical treatments, cures for intractable genetic diseases and, ultimately, an epochal transcendence of human limitations such as infertility and aging. Biotechnology, we are told, is the only possible solution to persistent problems of hunger, disease, population growth and environmental pollution. Not since the dawn of the nuclear age has a technology come to represent such diametrically opposite views of the future.

Indeed, commentators well across spectrum of opinion often appear to agree that the twenty-first century will be the Age of Biotechnology. It was the American magazine, Business Week, that first coined the phrase, “The Biotech Century.” In an issue published shortly after the announcement by Scottish scientists of the first successful cloning of an adult sheep, Business Week celebrated the potential medical breakthroughs, and especially the investment opportunities, that biotechnology seemed to promise. Successes in mapping the human genome, for example, were, according to Stanford University geneticist Richard Meyers, “expanding people’s imaginations, allowing them to think on a grand scale, asking and answering questions they would never have dreamed of before.”1

World renowned biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin also titled his 1998 book The Biotech Century. To Rifkin, who has initiated countless legal and political interventions against the unregulated development of genetic engineering in the United States, biotechnology embodies the most profound transformation in human consciousness since the European Renaissance. “Genetic engineering,” proclaims Rifkin, “represents our fondest hopes and aspirations as well as our darkest fears and misgivings . . . touch[ing] the core of our self-definition.”2 While recounting many of the hazards posed by genetically modified organisms, critiquing genetic reductionism, and exposing the core of eugenic ideology that lies behind much of today’s research in human genetics, Rifkin’s book also chronicles, with a persistent underlying fatalism, many of the biotech industry’s extravagant promises of future miracles. Even the popular American news magazine, Time, would soon echo in with a special issue on “The Future of Medicine” — the introductory essay was titled, once again, “The Biotech Century.”3

What is the nature of this technology that raises such a profound sense of awe among proponents and critics alike? What are the real consequences of current developments in genetic engineering, and what are their implications for our health, the environment, and society as a whole? How can we meaningfully evaluate the claims of biotechnologists and adequately challenge their assumptions when necessary? Why have these technologies become such a lightning rod for public debate and action? These are only a few of the questions that this book will seek to address. With 90 million acres of genetically engineered crops grown worldwide in 1999, and new biotech-based medical interventions being announced at an increasingly rapid pace, there is little doubt that these questions will have profound implications for our lives for many years to come.

Biotechnology has become the overarching term for a wide variety of new technologies, of which genetic engineering and the cloning of animals are only two of the best known examples. What all these technologies have in common is the simulation and manipulation, whether in a laboratory or industrial setting, of fundamental life processes at the cellular and molecular level. Modern biotechnologies include the selective culture of living cells and tissues to enhance the expression or selection of particular physical and biochemical traits, artificially stimulated fusion and fission of cells, chemical alteration of protein structures, the identification and mapping of unique genetic sequences, test tube (in vitro, literally “in glass”) fertilization of eggs, and the artificial implantation of human and animal embryos, including embryos produced by cloning. All these technologies rely on basic discoveries about the structure and function of living cells that have emerged only in the last half century, and have transformed the nature of biological research. In this volume we will focus on genetic engineering, cloning and the new reproductive technologies. Of all the new biotechnologies, these are by far the most controversial, and the ones with the widest implications for society as a whole.

Genetic engineering, or gene splicing, is the means by which segments of genetic material (DNA) from the cells of virtually any plant, animal or microorganism — usually the genes that are believed to encode a distinct biological function — can be isolated in the laboratory and inserted into the chromosomes of another, often unrelated organism. First, plant and animal genes were inserted into bacteria, and the mass cloning of these genetically altered bacteria made it possible to produce large quantities of substances such as Bovine Growth Hormone and human insulin. More recently, bacteria and viruses that naturally infect living cells have been loaded up with particular genes of interest, and the new genetic material is inserted by these infectious agents into an organism’s DNA. Today, in many cases, foreign genes are injected directly, using so-called “gene guns,” which use microscopic pellets of gold or tungsten to insert foreign genes at essentially random locations in the host’s chromosomes. Since the success rate of gene transfers by any of these methods is usually exceedingly low, “marker genes” for antibiotic resistance, herbicide tolerance, or other easily testable traits are included, making it possible for scientists or manufacturers to only select those cells that successfully incorporated the foreign, or “recombinant,” DNA.

Whichever of these methods is used, the splicing of genes is radically different from more familiar processes, such as splicing magnetic tape, or cutting and pasting sentences in a word processor. The regulation of gene expression, especially in multi-celled organisms, is a complex, interactive process, involving continual subtle alterations in the activities and interrelationships of many different genes. Most biological traits involve the interplay of several discrete genes, and individual genes are often assembled from DNA fragments that are dispersed along the chromosome. In recent years, scientists have observed that some genetic elements appear to jump around within a chromosome. There is sophisticated editing of genetic sequences, a wide range of hormonal effects, and numerous other phenomena that radically contradict simple, linear models of gene expression.4 This is one reason why experiments in genetic engineering often yield wildly unpredictable results, such as the petunias whose color genes were doubled in the hope of producing brighter flowers, but instead yielded growing numbers of white flowers, or the pig engineered to produce a human growth hormone, which turned out so weak, arthritic and overweight that it could barely stand up.5 Genetic engineers are rarely able to predict how a foreign strand of DNA from any organism will interact with the subtle genetic regulatory processes in a given cell.

These fundamental biological realities contradict one of the biotechnology industry’s most persistent claims: that genetic engineering is not essentially different from traditional, time-tested interventions such as the breeding of plants and animals, or using yeasts to make bread or beer. To use the same term, “biotechnology” to suggest a continuum from cultivating wheat to cloning sheep is a gross misrepresentation of both history and biology.

Ecologist Philip Regal of the University of Minnesota has emphasized the essential differences between traditional breeding and genetic engineering.6 First, breeding only involves exchanges of genes between animals or plants that are able to mate naturally; they must either be of the same species or, in special cases, closely related ones. When a horse and a donkey are bred together to produce a mule, the offspring are unable to reproduce. This is a virtually inviolable natural barrier to the kinds of exotic combinations of genetic traits that are now possible in the laboratory.7

Second, genetic crosses in nature involve the natural recombination of analogous DNA fragments that lie in the same location on the same chromosome of each parent. Plants might exchange traits for different colored flowers, and two animals might produce an offspring that shares some of the more noticeable traits of both parents. But breeding, as Dr. Regal emphasizes, “has not in fact involved simply ‘moving genes around’ and introducing new and functionally proven genes to chromosomes or genomes . . .” in random locations.8 Further, successive breeding to enhance a particular genetic trait almost always involves a loss in some other important traits, ultimately reducing the offspring’s fitness to survive in the wild. This is often not the case with organisms that have been genetically altered using recombinant DNA.

Finally, genetic engineering has the potential to access portions of the genome that are not usually subject to the processes of natural selection. A plant is no more likely to acquire the ability to secrete a bacterial toxin, than a breed of dogs is likely to grow an extra eye, or a goat is likely to sprout an elephant’s trunk. Yet these are just the kinds of monstrosities that today’s genetic engineers would aspire to create. For Regal, these three qualities underscore what is potentially the most dangerous aspect of genetic engineering: ” . . . the potential to create types of organisms that can interact with particular ecosystems and biological communities in novel competitive or functional ways . . .”9

More recent evidence suggests that the effects of gene splicing on the processes of genetic regulation in living cells may be even more disruptive than previously realized. In addition to the functional genes of interest, genetic engineers introduce an entire “construct” of promoters, marker genes and other functional DNA fragments to improve the success rate of their experiments. To genetically engineer plants, for example, scientists use powerfully disruptive promoter sequences from the DNA of viruses (usually a Cauliflower Mosaic Virus) to override the host cell’s regulatory genes and literally force the plant to express the artificially inserted genes.10

With “success” rates in the range of one in ten thousand to one in a million, genetic engineers attempt to leave as little to chance as possible. These added viral genes increase the instability of the host plant’s genome and improve the odds of hijacking the plant’s metabolism to express the imported genetic trait. This practice may have serious consequences, however. Dormant viruses may be activated, genes essential to the normal functioning of the plant may be shut off or “silenced,” and these viral vectors may open the possibility of further gene transfers to other, unrelated organisms, inducing new, unpredictable genetic recombinations that would not otherwise be possible.11 A group of European scientists has speculated that the rapid spread of genetically engineered organisms in the environment may be one factor in the emergence of so many new, highly virulent disease pathogens in recent years, many of which are simultaneously resistant to several different antibiotics.12

Indeed, even the relatively well-defined genetic modifications that have been developed and commercialized to date have introduced a plethora of unanticipated problems. Genetically engineered crops have been shown to harm beneficial insects such as ladybugs (ladybirds), lacewings and monarch butterflies, to cross-pollinate at higher rates than their non-engineered counterparts, and to be more susceptible to the effects of environmental stresses. Consuming these foods has been associated with unusual allergies, irritations of the digestive tract, the uncontrolled spread of antibiotic resistance, and possible distortions in the growth and development of vital organs. Biotechnology companies are seeking to develop plant varieties whose seeds are sterile, and to alter commercial species of trees and fish to grow dramatically faster than their non-engineered counterparts. Not only have sheep and cows been cloned, but they have simultaneously been genetically engineered to produce commercially useful proteins in their milk, with unknown effects on their metabolism and their health.

The social and ethical consequences of these technologies may prove to be even more disruptive than their ecological effects. Farmers face an unprecedented concentration of ownership in the seed and agrichemical industries, a problem that has very closely paralleled the development of genetically modified crop varieties. Some U.S. farmers have been punished with large fines for carrying on the age-old practice of saving seeds for replanting. Biotechnology companies are seeking out and patenting genetic information from plants, animals, and even humans from some of the remotest corners of the earth. These activities threaten traditional agricultural practices, and defy indigenous cultural norms limiting the uses of living materials. The agendas of medical research are being transformed by a narrow genetic reductionism that undermines research on the environmental causes of disease, while research on inheritable forms of gene therapy is ushering in a revival of eugenics, the once-discredited “science” of “perfecting” the human genetic stock. All these diverse concerns, and numerous others, will be explored in detail in the pages of this book.

One of the most significant, overarching impacts of biotechnology may well be this industry’s overwhelming drive to commodify all that is alive: to bring all of life into the sphere of commercial products. From microorganisms that lie deep within the boiling hot geysers of Yellowstone National Park — found to be the subject of a secret agreement between the U.S. National Park Service and a San Diego-based biotechnology company13 — to millions of human DNA sequences being mapped by both public and private agencies, all of life on earth is being reduced to a set of objects and codes to be bought, sold and patented.

This process of commodification takes a number of different forms. First, and foremost, biotechnology seeks to alter the fundamental patterns of nature so as to better satisfy the demands of the commercial marketplace. Wherever the patterns of nature are not well suited to continued exploitation, biotechnology offers the promise of redesigning life forms to satisfy the demands of the economic system. Where soil fertility and plant health are undermined by monocropping and chemical fertilizers, biotechnologists make crops tolerant to herbicides so growers can use more noxious chemicals to destroy weeds, and also try to make cereal grains fix nitrogen like legumes. Where industrial-scale irrigation lowers the water table and makes the soil saltier, they offer to make food crops more resistant to drought and to salt, instead of addressing the underlying causes of these problems.

Where marketable fish species like salmon have difficulties surviving year round in far northern hatcheries, genetic engineers try to splice in frost resistance from cold-water species such as flounder, and also make them grow dramatically faster. If naturally bred livestock cannot satisfy the demand for ever-increasing profit margins, commercial breeders might instead offer clones of their most productive animals. Instead of addressing the effects of excessive pulp and paper production on the biological integrity of native forests, timber companies will seek to raise plantations of genetically engineered trees that grow faster, and have an altered chemical makeup that may be more amenable to chemical processing. In each instance, biotechnology helps perpetuate the myth that the inherent ecological limitations of a thoroughly nature-denying economic and social system can simply be engineered out of existence.

The biotechnology industry is also in the forefront of patenting living things. They have brought the agenda of life patenting into the European Parliament, as well to global institutions such as the World Trade Organization. The U.S. government has threatened trade sanctions against countries such as India that have resisted the patenting of life. Meanwhile, corporate bioprospectors are surveying the entire biosphere, from the arctic to the tropics, in search of DNA sequences to study, manipulate and patent. The identification and patenting of human genes is also proceeding at a staggering pace, despite successful campaigns on behalf of three indigenous nations to overturn the patenting of their genes by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.14 The U.S. Patent Office has been flooded with literally millions of requests for patents on so-called “expressed sequence tags,” fragments of DNA that have become a primary analytical tool for researchers seeking to accelerate and simultaneously privatize the work of the international Human Genome Project.

At the same time, the biotechnology industry is broadening the range of living “materials” that are available to be bought, sold and marketed as commodities. Genes and gene sequences are only one step. Hundreds of for-profit fertility clinics in the U.S. and elsewhere are purchasing human eggs and sperm from willing “volunteers” and offering them for sale. Recent breakthroughs in cloning have suggested the very real possibility that an above-ground market in human cells, tissues and even laboratory-created organs may soon complement the shadowy but lucrative international trade in human organs for transplantation.15 Will our consumer society have the ethical fortitude to resist a future where human embryos, selected for particular genetic traits, will become available on the so-called “free market” as well?

In institutional terms, the biotechnology industry represents an unprecedented concentration of corporate power in two areas that are central to human survival: our food and our health. The late 1990s saw a heretofore unimaginable wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions in virtually every economic sector, and now the three pivotal areas of seeds, pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals are increasingly dominated by a small handful of transnational giants, all centrally committed to the advancement of biotechnology. The first company to join the global top five in all three of these areas was Novartis, formed in 1996 through a merger of the Swiss companies Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz.16

Today, with recurring waves of new mergers in the pharmaceutical and agricultural biotech industries, the concentration of corporate power in these areas has grown to truly staggering proportions. By 1999, five companies — AstraZeneca, DuPont (owner of Pioneer Hi-Bred, the world’s largest seed company), Monsanto, Novartis and Aventis, controlled 60 percent of the global pesticide market, 23 percent of the commercial seed market and nearly all of the world’s genetically modified seeds.17 Aventis — formed from the merger of the chemical giants Hoechst and Rhone Poulenc — was also the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, and Novartis and AstraZeneca were numbers four and five, respectively, in global pharmaceutical sales.18

Many factors helped create the economic climate for these mergers, some technological and some purely financial. One key factor, though, is the extent to which diverse areas of plant, animal and human biotechnology rely on common laboratory methods and the use of huge, often proprietary databases of genetic sequences. In the late 1990s, many corporate managers believed that companies able to control key technologies in several of these areas would be in a position to extend their technological benefits across disciplines, leading to faster product development and faster commercialization of new discoveries.19 The move toward greater corporate consolidation in agriculture and medicine is thus significantly driven by developments in biotechnology, while at the same time, profits from the sale of herbicides and other chemicals are channeled toward the development of new genetically modified life forms.20

A particularly staggering result of this trend has been the increasing domination of the worldwide seed industry by companies that specialize in chemical production and biotechnology. In 1999, ten companies controlled a third of the world’s seed trade, and three companies best known for their chemical and biotechnology products — DuPont, Monsanto and Novartis — accounted for nearly 20 percent of all seed sales. During the late 1990s, Monsanto, the world’s most aggressive promoter of genetic engineering, bought several of the most important commercial seed companies, including DeKalb Genetics, Asgrow and Holden’s in the United States, Brazil’s Sementes Agroceres, and Unilever’s Plant Breeding International, which was once a public institution based at Cambridge University.21 The company spent over a year trying unsuccessfully to acquire the Mississippi-based Delta and Pine Land Company, developer of the notorious Terminator sterile seed technology. This rash of corporate takeovers in the seed industry has helped many farmers see that biotechnology may represent the greatest threat yet to the independence and stability of agricultural producers all over the world; a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal suggested that farmers were about to become “more like Detroit’s auto parts makers,” mere subcontractors to a tiny handful of global corporations.22

The most significant obstacle to this strategy of corporate consolidation over the life sciences has been the worldwide opposition to genetically modified foods. The genetic engineering controversy in Europe escalated to the point where, by the summer of 1999, several companies were beginning to divest their agricultural divisions to protect lucrative profits in the pharmaceutical sector. Major players on New York’s Wall Street and in Europe’s financial capitals helped create the phenomenon of “life science” mergers, and were now suggesting that it may have gone too far. With genetically engineered crops rapidly becoming an economic “liability to farmers,” Germany’s Deutsche Bank anticipated “a major change in the market’s view of GMOs”: “We predict that GMOs, once perceived as the driver of the bull case for [the chemical] sector, will now be perceived as a pariah.”23 Monsanto was pressed to renounce the use of “Terminator” sterile seed technology, even though they did not own the notorious Delta and Pine Land Terminator patent. The Wall Street Journal soon announced that Monsanto, once the seemingly invincible world leader in biotechnology, would be worth significantly more to investors if it were to simply be broken up.24 Monsanto’s merger with the pharmaceutical giant Pharmacia and Upjohn, announced at the end of 1999, may be only the beginning, as the merged company had to pledge to sell off 20 percent of its agricultural division (which retains the Monsanto name) to avoid further depressing the value of its stock.25

Still, biotechnology represents an estimated $13 billion in corporate investments worldwide, with over 75 percent of this invested in the United States. There are some 1300 companies involved, and just over 150,000 people employed in the biotechnology industry.26 Unlike the computer and telecommunications industries, where new startup companies can generate almost unbelievable short-term returns for investors, small biotech companies are often unable to ever bring a product to market. Developments in biotechnology are far more speculative, and new drugs and foods far more difficult to bring to market than innovations in computer software or internet applications. Many new biotechnology companies either disappear, or become subcontractors to the transnational “life science” giants. The trend is clearly toward “fewer small organizations and more larger ones,” Nobel prize winning biologist Phillip Sharp told the magazine Technology Review at the end of 1999, with smaller entrepreneurial firms devoting increasing attention to cultivating and maintaining ties with their corporate patrons.27 The New York Times, reporting the views of numerous venture capitalists and Wall Street investment analysts, described this phenomenon, with no intended irony, as an example of “corporate Darwinism.”28

This unprecedented concentration of corporate power in the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries is only one of many factors driving today’s intense debates over biotechnology. Public reactions to genetic engineering, cloning and other recent developments have been aroused by a staggeringly wide range of health, environmental, ethical and political concerns. First and foremost, millions of people worldwide see products of genetic engineering as a serious threat to their health and the health of their families. After decades of corporate scandals over unsafe pharmaceuticals and pesticides, tainted beef, and other such outrages, the potential health consequences of genetically engineered foods are one more risk that people simply do not wish to have forced on them. In a 1999 report, the British Medical Association validated the growing public concern, urging more comprehensive health studies and a moratorium on the commercial planting of engineered crops, until there is a scientific consensus on the potential long-term effects.29

Environmental concerns have also been in the forefront of the public debate over GMOs. The discovery in 1999 of the deadly effects of pollen from genetically engineered corn on immature monarch butterflies — with an almost fifty percent mortality rate for larvae that were exposed to the altered pollen — dramatized the environmental consequences of genetic engineering in an easily comprehensible fashion. Effects on other beneficial insects, the threat of “super weeds,” genetic contamination from engineered trees and fish, and the surprising death of soil microbes exposed to an experimental genetically engineered bacterium in an Oregon laboratory30 have all contributed to raising the level of environmental concern. Ultimately, no one can predict the full effects of releasing countless millions of new, reproducing, genetically manipulated organisms on the earth’s diverse natural ecosystems.

Ethical and religious considerations have played a central role in debates over biotechnology as well. Some opponents are moved by ethical concerns for the integrity of nature, as well as the threat to human identity posed by cloning, human embryo selection and the intensification of research into inheritable (germ-line) gene therapies. Others speak from a religious commitment to protecting God’s creation from interventions that are harmful at best, and diabolical at worst. Genetic engineering also violates religious strictures against consuming certain foods or combinations of foods, especially where such foods cannot be clearly identified before they are eaten. The proper relationship between our human communities and the rest of the natural world is a subject of philosophical reflection and debate in many diverse cultures. Whether one is motivated primarily by secular or religious concerns, the profound ethical implications of genetic engineering and other new biotechnologies have proved impossible to ignore.

Farmers around the world have played a distinctly important role in debates about the effects of engineered organisms on nature and society. In India, hundreds of thousands of farmers have demonstrated against the corporate ownership of seeds. In southern France, farmers and cheesemakers concerned about the effects of U.S. trade sanctions have dumped truckloads of rotten fruit and manure at the doors of McDonalds’ restaurants. American farmers were in the forefront of early campaigns against the introduction of genetically engineered recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) for dairy cows, and are in the untenable position of having first been sold on the purported benefits of genetically engineered seed, and only later informed that these crops are of lesser value on the world market than traditional varieties. “GMOs have become the albatross around the neck of farmers on issues of trade, labeling, testing, certification, segregation, market availability and agribusiness concentration,” said Gary Goldberg, the head of the American Corn Growers Association, in response to agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland’s announcement that the company would no longer accept genetically engineered crop varieties that had not been approved in Europe.31

All these concerns, and numerous others, have helped inspire powerful grassroots movements against genetic engineering and other biotechnologies around the world. Activists in Europe have pressured their governments to limit imports of engineered crops from the U.S., won key concessions from major supermarket chains and food processors, and taken direct action against experimental plots of genetically engineered crops. In India, some farmers have uprooted or burned test plots of Monsanto’s pesticidal cotton varieties, while others have reasserted the importance of traditional seed saving and convinced the Indian Supreme Court to consider whether the planting of GMOs represents a violation of fundamental constitutional rights. Canadian activists joined with skeptical government scientists to successfully pressure their government to prohibit the use of engineered Bovine Growth Hormone. Indigenous activists throughout the world have objected to the appropriation of their crops, their medicinal wild plants and their own chromosomes for genetic information that can be patented and sold by transnational companies. In the United States, where a virtual media blackout helped delay the GMO debate by several years, food companies have begun promising to avoid genetically engineered ingredients, and public demonstrations against genetic engineering have become more and more visible.

This book is divided into four sections: the first three will highlight particular facets of genetic engineering and other biotechnologies, highlighting the wide-ranging consequences of these technologies for people and the environment; the fourth brings together voices from the growing worldwide opposition. First we will examine the effects of genetic engineering on our health, our food, and the environment. We will challenge the biotech industry’s persistent claim that their technology is necessary to feed a growing world population, and then address the specific impacts of genetic engineering on food safety and the environment. Part 2 will look at the controversies surrounding medical genetics and the genetic manipulation of humans. We will consider the implications of cloning, gene therapy, new reproductive technologies, and other developments, show how recent discoveries in human genetics have enabled the emergence of a disturbing new, market-oriented eugenics, and see how the agendas of medical research and health care have been distorted by the exaggerated claims of genetic engineering proponents.

The third part of the book examines the institutional roots of genetic engineering, specifically the corporate and government agencies that have created today’s biotechnologies and forced its products into our food supply. This section will also examine the impacts of biotechnology and genetic research on people around the world, and explore the ways in which the biotech industry’s agenda of patenting life specifically threatens the world’s remaining land-based traditional peoples. Finally, the fourth section highlights the growing resistance to genetic engineering by people in every corner of the world. Activists from the North America, India and Europe will tell their stories, examine their successes (and shortcomings), and discuss the movement’s prospects for the future.

A brief word on terminology is in order before we proceed. In this book, the terms genetic engineering, genetic modification and genetic alteration are used interchangeably. Activists in the United States are increasingly adopting the European usage, GMOs, for genetically modified organisms. There is something troubling about this term however. In the 1970s and early eighties, proponents and opponents alike referred to either “genetic engineering” or “genetic manipulation.” This began to change around 1988, when the European Commission adopted the term “genetic modification” in its first proposed directive on the release of engineered organisms.32 It was clear from the beginning that this usage was intended to soften the public impact of discussions of this technology. Of course, “engineering” implies a degree of certainty and predictability that this technology has never even approached, and today the term GMO has come to represent all the potential horrors of genetic manipulation. Clearly this is why the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, adopted in Montreal in January of 2000, sought to institutionalize an even more absurd and meaningless euphemism, LMO, for “living modified organism.”

A book of this magnitude clearly depends on the cooperation and active engagement of a large number of people. All the contributors are to be thanked effusively for taking time out of their inordinately busy schedules of activism, research, teaching, lecturing, lobbying and other important activities to pull together the very best of what their work has to offer. Special thanks are due to Zoë Meleo-Erwin, who played a central role in the initial development of this book, and to Beth Burrows, who helped me track down several of the contributors, and kept insisting on the compelling need for such a book whenever the obstacles seemed insurmountable. Sidney Solomon and Heidi Freund helped shape the eventual format of the book, and Robert Molteno of Zed Books offered much encouragement and numerous helpful suggestions.

Finally I wish to thank two larger groups of people without whose support and encouragement this book would never have happened. First, I am always indebted to all my incredibly dedicated colleagues, students and friends at the Institute for Social Ecology and Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont for allowing me to take the necessary time away from my other responsibilities in order to see this project through. Second, I need to thank all the grassroots activists in Vermont, New England, across the United States and around the world whose tireless labors and unsurpassed inspirations have made the worldwide campaign against genetic engineering the incredibly dynamic, inspiring movement it truly is.

“It is not inconceivable,” wrote the New York bureau chief for Britain’s international business magazine, The Economist, in an editorial on the European GMO debates, “that in a decade’s time people will look back on the current rows about food as a turning point for both globalization and what used to be called the Western alliance.”33 By all accounts, this is a very apt observation. People throughout the world have become disenchanted with a globalized economy that consistently undermines democracy, stifles people’s aspirations, and threatens to absorb every remaining inch of the earth’s surface, every surviving traditional culture, and ultimately everything that is alive into its insatiable sphere of speculative markets, exploitable assets and tradable commodities. Debates over food, biotechnology and the commodification of life have clearly become key flash points for a growing worldwide resistance to corporate globalism and its horrific designs for our future.

Like many aspects of the global economy, the biotechnology industry tries to paint itself as institutionally invincible, and as the very embodiment of human progress and enlightenment. Biotech companies are closely allied with national governments and international financial institutions and, for much of the last quarter century, the biotechnology industry has been a darling of the world’s financial markets. However the speed with which Monsanto’s top officials were demoted from prophets to pariahs, in response to widespread public rejection of their biotech food products, offers hope that this industry’s appearance of invincibility will have been a very short-lived phenomenon.

Just over two decades ago, another new technology was being promoted as the key to prosperity and human progress. It, too, represented the commercialization of dramatic new scientific discoveries, and its advocates foresaw limitless improvements in human well-being. This technology had the full political and economic clout of the world’s military establishments underwriting its development, and was also supported by many of the world’s most powerful corporations. That technology was nuclear power.

The United States government was confidently predicting that by the year 2000, several hundred nuclear power stations would be providing most of the country’s heat and light, and sustaining the development of an limitless array of new electronic wonders. Today, we may indeed have more new electronic devices than we know what do with, but nuclear power in the U.S. peaked at just over 20 percent of our nation’s supply of utility-generated electricity, and its contribution has been essentially flat since the early 1990s.34 Nuclear technology continues to play an important but limited role in a few key areas of medical diagnostics, but there has not been a single new commercial nuclear reactor ordered in the United States since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

Less than two weeks after the aforementioned commentary on globalization and GMOs was published in the New York Times, The Economist published an extended editorial on the increasing difficulties facing genetically engineered crops in the global marketplace. They quoted a seed industry consultant, formerly affiliated with Monsanto’s subsidiary Calgene: “These [biotechnology] companies have great faith in their technology,” he said. “They see themselves as the semiconductor industry of the 21[st] century.” “But given the size of public opposition,” The Economist‘s editorialist cautioned, “proponents of GM foods could be risking the fate of a rather different technology that once looked high-tech and futuristic — nuclear power.”35

Today’s activists against genetic engineering have inherited a great deal from the antinuclear campaigns of twenty years ago, including a decentralized approach to organizing, a commitment to nonviolent direct action, and an overarching belief that even the most technically daunting issues are not beyond the reach of an engaged and empowered citizenry. There is much cause for hope that the movement against genetic engineering and the commodification of life will continue to achieve comparable successes.

Notes

1. Quoted in John Carey, et. al, “Special Report: The Biotech Century,” Business Week, March 10, 1997, p. 80.
2. Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World, New York: Putnam, 1998, p. xii.
3. Walter Isaacson, “The Biotech Century,” Time, January 11,1999, pp. 42-43.
4. John Rennie, “DNA’s New Twists,” Scientific American, March 1993, pp. 88-96.
5. Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of Life, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993, pp. 175-76. The petunia experiments are described in Ricarda Steinbrecher’s chapter in Part 1.
6. P.J. Regal, “Scientific principles for ecologically based risk assessment of transgenic organisms,” Molecular Ecology, Vol. 3, pp. 5-13, 1994.
7. Even so-called “wide crosses” of unrelated plants require a recent evolutionary history of close genetic interaction. See Michael K. Hansen, “Genetic Engineering is not an extension of conventional plant breeding,” New York: Consumer Policy Institute, February 2000.
8. Regal, op. cit., p. 7. Emphasis in original.
9. Ibid.
10. Hansen, op. cit.
11. Mae-Wan Ho, et. al., “Gene Technology and Gene Ecology of Infectious Diseases,” Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease,” Vol. 10, 1998, pp. 33-59; Mae-Wan Ho, Angela Ryan and Joe Cummins, “Cauliflower Mosaic Virus Promoter — A Recipe for Disaster,” Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease,” Vol. 11, 1999, at http://www.scup.no/mehd/ho.
12. Ho, et. al. (1998), ibid.
13. Jim Robbins, “Yellowstone’s Microbial Riches Lure Eager Bioprospectors,” New York Times, October 14, 1997, p. B10; Christopher Smith, “Park Deal: Some Call it ‘Biopiracy’,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 9, 1997; see also http://www.edmonds-institute.org.
14. The NIH obtained patents on genetic material collected from the Guaymi of Panama, the people of the Solomon Islands, and the Hagahai of Papua New Guinea. See the collected papers in Cultural Survival Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 1996.
15. Kimbrell, op. cit.
16. RAFI (Rural Advancement Foundation International) Communiqué, “The Life Industry,” September 1996, at http://www/rafi.org.
17. RAFI, “Seed Industry Giants: Who Owns Whom?” September 1999.
18. RAFI Communiqué, “The Gene Giants: Masters of the Universe?” March/April 1999, p. 9.
19. Ann M. Thayer, “Living and Loving Life Sciences,” Chemical and Engineering News, November 23, 1998, pp. 17-24
20. For example, sales of glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup accounted for half of Monsanto’s operating income in 1996, even before the company divested its industrial chemicals division. See Kenny Bruno, “Say it Ain’t So, Monsanto,” Multinational Monitor, Vol. 18, No. 1-2, January/February 1997; Mark Arax and Jeanne Brokaw, “No Way Around Roundup,” Mother Jones, January-February 1997.
21. See Brian Tokar, “Monsanto: A Checkered History,” The Ecologist, 28(5), September/October 1998, p. 259.
22. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., “Fun Facts to Know and Tell About Biotechnology,” Wall Street Journal, November 17, 1999.
23. “Appendix 2: GMOs are Dead,” in Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown investor’s report on DuPont Chemical: Ag Biotech: Thanks, But No Thanks?, July 12, 1999, p. 18. This Appendix was apparently released by Deutsche Bank as an independent report to investors on May 21, 1999.
24. Scott Kilman and Thomas M. Burton, “Monsanto Feels Pressure From the Street,” Wall Street Journal, October 21, 1999.
25. Robert Langreth and Nikhil Deogun, “Investors Cool to Pharmacia Merger Plan,” Wall Street Journal, December 21, 1999.
26. Riku Lahteenmaki, “Investment indicators show US is still ahead,” Nature Biotechnology, Volume 16, February 1998, p. 149; Rifkin, op. cit., p. 15.
27. Stephen Hall, “Biotech On the Move,” Technology Review, November-December 1999, p. 68.
28. Andrew Pollack, “Weed-Out Time in Biotechnology: Once-Hot Industry Feels the Impact of Corporate Darwinism,” New York Times, December 16, 1998, p. C1. For a somewhat rosier view, see Justin Gillis, “Wall Street Makes it Official: Biotech Has Arrived,” Washington Post, August 22, 1999, p. H1.
29. “The Impact of Genetic Modification on Agriculture, Food and Health: An Interim Statement,” British Medical Association, Board of Science and Education, May 1999.
30. These results are discussed in the chapters by Martha Crouch, Beth Burrows and Ricarda Steinbrecher in Part 1 of this book.
31. American Corn Growers Association press statement, “Corn growers call on farmers to consider alternatives to planting GMOs if questions are not answered.” August 25, 1999.
32. Les Levidow and Joyce Tait, “The Greening of Biotechnology: From GMOs to Environment-Friendly Products,” Occasional Paper 21 of the Open University Technology Policy Group, Milton Keynes, UK, August 1990.
33. John Micklethwait, “Europe’s Profound Fear of Food,” New York Times, June 7, 1999.
34. U.S. Department of Energy, “Nuclear Power Plant Operations,” at http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/energy.overview/monthly.energy/mer8-1. In 1989 this represented 6.6% of total U.S. energy use (Nucleus, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 1991, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Union of Concerned Scientists, p. 2).
35. Editorial: “Food for Thought,” The Economist, June 19, 1999, p. 21.