Earlier this year, the scientific community celebrated the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure and function of DNA by Watson and Crick. There was a host of parties, conferences and special issues. Fifty years ago when the ‘secret of life' was unveiled, expectations were high that this milestone discovery had given us the key to understanding the laws of heredity …. and the power to change them. Fifty years later, many believe we have now reached that point. Scientists are now able to move genes – and the inherited traits they code for – with apparent ease between species, families and kingdoms.
Watson and Crick's interpretation of how genetic information is translated and passed on is simple and straightforward: DNA is the master molecule that embodies all genetic information of any living being – be it a bacterium, an animal or human being – and rules its expression in the organism and its transmission to the next generation. Inheritance is a simple and unidirectional process, with DNA as the master-molecule transmitting and directing the biological functions of all living beings. The developers of this theory coined it the “Central Dogma”, and this Dogma is still the backbone of molecular biology today. It is also the basis on which today's multi-billion genetic engineering industry is built. If genes form the universal code of life, they can surely be slotted into plants, animals and – yes, why not? – humans, to produce the desired effect. Scientists went to work to develop techniques to move genes around. So now we have pigs with genes from cows producing bovine growth hormone, plants with genes from bacteria producing natural pesticides, and bacteria with human genes to produce insulin. So if the trick works, what is the problem?
The problem is that the trick doesn't work. Or at least not the way it should. As Barry Commoner explains on page 6 in this Seedling, the incompleteness of the Central Dogma became dauntingly clear when the deciphering of the human genome was finally published in 2001. It turns out that the entire human genome consists of 30,000 genes, less than one third of the number originally calculated to take into account the number of different proteins and inherited traits that humans have. So we have more proteins than genes. If that is the case, what instructs the building of proteins that do not have a corresponding gene? The only logical conclusion is that each gene is responsible for a whole range of different proteins and traits and/or that other regulatory mechanisms exist in protein production.
Recent research has shown that both these conclusions are true. It is now known that proteins themselves help define what other proteins are going to do by influencing their three dimensional structure. It has also been established that there are many other types of genetic interactions in the cell, including those where proteins feed back information to DNA. It was also recently found that the parts of DNA that did not seem to code for any protein production (and therefore arrogantly called ‘junk DNA' by the decoders of the human genome), do produce molecules that interfere with protein production and are therefore an essential part of the cell's regulatory system.
Death of the Dogma?
The Central Dogma was useful to explain the basic functioning of the DNA 50 years ago, but is totally outdated in the light of recent research in the areas of molecular biology, cell physiology and other scientific disciplines. This conclusion should have delivered a devastating and mortal blow to the Central Dogma on its 50th anniversary. We should have seen a challenging discussion amongst scientists on how to move on from here – how to further our understanding of the complexities of the functioning of the cell and the laws of hereditary. And we should have seen a final and collective funeral of the Central Dogma, which was long overdue. But this did not happen. Why?
Because there is a multi-billion dollar industry that clings tightly to the 50-year-old Dogma as the fundamental principle on which it generates its revenues. Genetic engineering – the moving of genes from one organism to another – only makes sense if you believe in the sole supremacy of DNA, in the dominance of the gene. It only makes sense if you discount all other scientific observations which complicate the hereditary process as interesting but irrelevant. And it only makes sense if you are prepared to consider the thousands of ‘abnormalities' resulting from genetic engineering as the consequence of the usual margin of error in research, rather than an indication that something might be fundamentally wrong with the theory.
Private interests take over
If the main objective of research is not to further scientific knowledge but to make money, complexities in the functioning of genes are unwelcome distractions. Companies involved in genetic engineering need to be able to assure their clients and regulatory authorities that the transgenic crops and animals they sell will do exactly what they were designed to do: tolerate herbicides, kill off insect pests or produce specific molecules. They need a theoretical foundation that explains precisely – and predictably – how the new gene will behave in the new host. They need the Central Dogma. This is probably the main reason why the mounting evidence that questions the simplistic ‘one gene, one trait' logic is still being ignored by the majority of the scientific establishment.
At the time that Watson and Crick published their findings, the vast majority of plant breeders were working in the public sector. This is a situation that has drastically changed in the past few decades. By the mid-1990s in the US, there were twice as many plant breeders active in the commercial sector than in universities and government agencies combined. This imbalance is fast shifting further towards the private sector: in that same period public plant breeding lost 2.5 scientists per year, while the private sector witnessed a growth of 32 scientists per year [1]– a process that has only accelerated since then. Meanwhile, the corporations behind genetic engineering moved into high gear. Since the mid-1990s a tremendous wave of corporate concentration means that now a mere handful of corporate giants – Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dupont – control the bulk of all commercial crop research and development This shift has had an important impact on agricultural research more broadly, with scientists in public and private research looking to the enticing shortcuts offered by genetic engineering, to the detriment of conventional plant breeding.
Most people in the private sector are quick to point out that genetic engineering needs plant breeding to deliver the seeds to the farmer, and that it is just one tool in the toolbox of the plant breeder. But there is an ever-widening gap between the worlds of genetic engineering and plant breeding, and plant breeders are becoming an endangered species. Funding for conventional plant breeding is drying up fast, especially in industrialised countries. “Plant breeding is getting dumped along the wayside for not being sexy enough” claims Greg Traxler, a US agricultural economist. [2] It is the combination of a ruthless privatisation process and a reckless betting on an outdated Central Dogma that now diverts the bulk of the financial and intellectual investment in crop improvement towards genetic engineering.
The adoption of increasingly strict Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regimes – especially in industrialised countries – has been the crucial enabling factor in this process. Both a cause and a consequence of the privatisation process, the introduction of plant variety protection regimes in the 1970s and the awarding of patents on life forms in the 1990s transformed genes into commodities by allowing companies to own and monopolise them. Initially applauded by many plant breeders as due recognition of their hard work, their mood is now turning as the consequences become clear: “Plant variety protection was the death knell for public breeding programmes'” now admits Michael Gale of the John Innes Centre, Britain's leading public plant-science research institute. [3]
The situation is getting to a point where even highly respected and otherwise conservative institutions such as the Royal Society – the UK's National Academy of Science – are raising the alarm. In presenting their report on the impact of IPRs on scientific development, they denounce the ‘gold rush mentality' that now dominates in genetic research. [4] The new slogan of molecular geneticists seems to be ‘Who gets there first, gets the gene'. In this climate of rampant privatisation, monopoly control and the staking of the claims to the genome, scientists seem to have lost the interest or capacity to incorporate the latest scientific developments into their thinking. Neither do they seem to recognise that the push towards transgenic agriculture is based on an outdated theory of the laws of heredity.
Solving the hunger problem
With the scientific basis of their work flawed, and hardly any practical results to show off, the gene giants urgently needed an ideological basis to defend their investments in genetic engineering. They found it in the 800 million or so people that go hungry every day. Coming from nowhere – the role of the private sector in agricultural research in developing countries has traditionally been close to zero [5]– a battle is now being waged to conquer the markets and the farmers fields in the Third World for transgenic agriculture. The argument being put forward is that we now finally have a great new tool – genetic engineering – to help combat hunger.
Hardly a week goes by without some flashy conference in some capital city in the South that bring together the nations scientists and policy makers to discuss how to reap the benefits of this new revolution for the poor. Invariably a small army of scientists from Monsanto, Syngenta or some US or European research centre paint a rosy international picture. National scientists are brought in to tell the story of how genetic engineering should be applied at the national level. Complementing this is a bewildering myriad of new acronyms, (ABSP, ABSF, BIO, ISAAA….the list goes on) representing institutions funded by industrial interests specifically set up to impose genetic engineering on the South.
Solving hunger has never been the business of the transnational corporations now behind genetic engineering, and never will be. A simple reminder about where and how transgenic crops are being used – and who is behind them – shows what is really at stake (see box). The picture emerging is one of a handful of extremely powerful corporations developing less than a handful of crops in a handful of countries, mostly for animal feed and export markets. Hardly a picture that addresses the complexity of the world food problem.
An accompanying and worrisome trend is that the world's public agricultural research institutions are increasingly getting pulled into these developments. Strapped for cash through budget cuts and structural adjustment programmes, they are increasingly joining the flight towards genetic engineering. The International Agricultural Research Centres – the movers and shakers behind the Green Revolution – are now looking for a place to hide in the genetic turmoil. Their stated mandate is to deal with hunger around the world. But after decades of failing to link in with the concerns and needs of peasant farmers that produce most of the food in the South, and after many years of resulting budget cuts from their donors, the only place they have left to go is to cut deals with corporations to get a slice of the biotech cake. By doing this, they risk not only becoming even less relevant to farmers in the South, but also becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.
The state of GM crops in 2002:
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The same is happening with the UN agency responsible for food and agriculture around the world: the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Traditionally a place where developing country governments had a political platform to debate issues of their concern, this agency is fast succumbing to pressure from industrialised governments and corporations alike (see box over page). The FAO seems more focused on organising flashy conferences on biotechnology co-hosted by the major chemical companies, rather than searching for sustainable alternatives. The FAO is increasingly becoming a central conduit for the entry of genetic engineering and the corporations behind it to developing countries. A similar trend can be seen at the national level in many countries in the South, where agricultural research institutions – stripped of cash and recognition – are increasingly entering into ‘partnership' agreements with corporations and foreign research partners. Who can blame them for getting sucked into the glamorous world of genetic engineering where funding is abundant and international recognition is assured?
Apart from sidestepping the real causes of hunger in the world – and by drawing away political attention and funding from them – these initiatives that push genetic engineering do something even more alarming: they bring a potentially dangerous technology based on an outdated genetic theory into the heart of the world's centres of crop diversity.
“No single organisation is capable, single-handedly, of meeting
the challenge of feeding the planet's 840 million hungry. Public
and private sectors must join forces with national and international organisations.
We must be willing to share responsibilities, risk and resources to achieve
shared objectives. There is now both a moral imperative and an economic
obligation to build a joint coalition, where international organisations,
governments and the private sector work side by side to span the divide
between rich and poor.” |
Broaden the focus
We cannot escape the conclusion that marriage between a simplistic, outdated concept of genetics and a powerful capital-driven conglomerate of industrial interests is propelling us speedily away from much-needed efforts to develop solutions with farming communities and policy makers to address the food problem.
We need to refocus. We need to get beyond our obsession with the gene. An increasing number of scientists are arguing that it is time to move away from the Mendelian pedigree breeding approach, which focuses on uniform varieties carrying specific genes to the next generation and eliminating others. Instead, the starting point should be the farmer's field, where desired traits are incorporated into all the plants of a crop, in all its genetic diversity. The entire population is screened to isolate a small majority of plants with the best traits to be used in the next breeding cycle. This “population breeding” approach – which is actually something that farmers have been doing for millennia – is often considered a nightmare by industrial plant breeders who are used to working with uniform pure lines. But it is an approach that delivers durable genetic improvement – more durable than single gene approaches, be they genetically engineered or not. And it is an approach that costs nothing. Farmers don't need a company to do the breeding for them, they can do it on their own farms.
One of the pioneers in this field was Melaku Worede, who back in the 1980s led Ethiopia's National Genetic Resources Centre towards an innovative approach that consisted of giving the materials in his genebank back to farmers for them to experiment with. It yielded spectacular results. [6] More recently, scientists have further developed the argument against single gene breeding approaches, because of their role in drastically increasing pesticide use around the world. Farmers in Mexico managed to triple bean yields using basic population breeding methodologies within just two breeding cycles, and managed to eliminate the use of pesticides in the process. [7] The key element in this strategy was to keep biodiversity in the farmer's field and work with it there.
But the question we really need to ask ourselves goes beyond the issue which type of plant breeding to apply. It is about addressing the whole gamut of issues that peasant farmers face – in all its complexity – in their food production systems. In most cases the challenges they face have nothing to do with agronomy, but are about access to land, markets and credit, or are framed by labour issues and gender aspects. But when agronomic questions do come in to play, it is very often not the genetic potential of the crops and animals that is the most limiting factor. Instead farmers talk about soil fertility, agroecology, integrated crop management, or water retention and supply.
Genetic myopia
The focus on genetics has made many scientists and policy makers blind to other approaches and technologies to work on productivity problems on the farm. This ‘genetic fix' has dominated agricultural development thinking since the Green Revolution – and is now being reinforced by the hype around genetic engineering. We are being blinded by the gene.
The ‘genetic trap' is probably a better description of that thinking. It has lead us to a situation where molecular genetics has become the King of Science – and biotechnology the Mother of all Technologies – to the detriment of other much needed scientific disciplines and technological approaches. Go and visit some of the national agricultural research institutes across the world in Kampala, Los Baños, Lima, or Wageningen. Talk to the people working on soil fertility, rotation techniques, crop ecology, multicropping, integrated past management, or farming systems. Most likely, you will hear them complaining bitterly about not being able to move on, having no staff, no budget for field work, and no research equipment. If you press them a bit, you'll also hear that they feel they have no status, that their work is being looked down on.
Then cross the campus and visit the molecular biology department or the recently opened biotech-nology division. You'll be greeted by fully stocked and staffed laboratories, researchers busy writing for prestigious scientific journals or running around to international conferences. You'll probably see large logos and advertisements from some of the big biotech companies in recognition of a joint project or funding agreement. The atmosphere will be bubbling with energy and swimming in support. But it is the agroecologists, the soil fertility scientists and the researchers looking into integrated pest management that are likely to make a more relevant contribution to make to farmers in their country. Especially if they work with farmers using participatory methodologies (see p 23). Hidden from the gene glamour, this is where some of the most spectacular results are being achieved (see box). And it is here that, intellectually and scientifically, the most exciting discoveries are being made.
The picture emerging is one of two totally different ways of doing agriculture, of producing the food we eat – one led by corporations and one by farmers. There are also two totally opposed ways of supporting that agriculture with research. The gap between them is increasing, to the extent that there are hardly any crossover points left. We have some important choices to make before the foundations of agriculture crumble beyond repair.
Increasing productivity ... sustainably A few years ago, Jules Pretty and his colleagues from the Essex University in the UK launched an ambitious project to audit progress towards sustainable agriculture in the world. They compiled a database of 208 cases from 52 countries, involving 9 million farmers and 29 million hectares – all involved in sustainable agriculture projects and experiments. The documentation shows that, without genetic engineering or institutional plant breeding, tremendous achievements in productivity and sustainability can be made. Examples include:
Source: Jules Pretty, ‘Feeding the world' – In:
‘SPLICE', August/September 1998, Volume 4, Issue 6. For the
full study, see: www2.essex.ac.uk/ces/ResearchProgrammes/
CESOccasionalPapers/SAFErepSUBHEADS.htm |
| [1] |
Steven Price, Nature Biotechnology, No. 10, p 938, October 1999. |
| [2] |
Jonathan Knight, “Crop improvement: a dying breed,” Nature 412, pp 568-570, 6 February, 2003. |
| [3] |
ibid. |
| [4] |
The Royal Society, Keeping Science Open: the effects of intellectual property policy on the conduct of science. London, April 2003. www.royalsoc.ac.uk/ |
| [5] |
According to an IFPRI study, on average private agricultural
R&D in developing countries amounts to less than 6% of the total R&D
in agriculture. See: PG Pardey and NM Beintema, Slow Magic – Agricultural
R&D a Century After Mendel? IFPRI, Washington 2001. |
| [6] |
Melaku Worede, “Ethiopia: a genebank working with farmers.” In: David Cooper et al Growing Diversity, IT publications, London, 1992 |
| [7] |
Raoul Robinson, Return to Resistance: Breeding Crops to Reduce Pesticide Dependence, IDRC, Canada, 1995. For the Mexico case, see: www.idrc.ca/books/reports/1996/18-01e.html |
Reference for this article: GRAIN, 2003, Blinded by the gene, Seedling, July 2003, GRAIN
Website link: www.grain.org/seedling/seed-03-07-1-en.cfm
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