GE: Brave New World

In the final of a four-part series, CARROLL DU CHATEAU looks at the ethical issues that genetic engineering raises for our future.

The concept that the genetic engineering debate is about facts is philosophically naive, says John Naughton, author of Brief History of the Future and a director at the Open University of Cambridge.

"It's never like that in these issues," he says. "It is actually an argument about values which arouses deep tensions."

The Irishman is right. The controversy over GE has much more to do with intrinsic values than science and safety.

Certainly, genetic engineering holds a key to global sustainability and your and my long-term health. But at the same time it arouses our deepest fears: about creation, scientists playing god, animal rights and the delicate relationship we all have with the environment.

The notion of purity of species - that a lamb is a lamb, a chick a chick and a dog a dog - is buried deep in each one of us.

Much of the tension is driven by major misconceptions as the long-overdue food safety debate becomes more and more tangled with the equally urgent GE debate. Mention a food safety issue and many of us assume that the food in question is genetically engineered.

GE, with no related deaths to its name, is perceived as far more dangerous than pesticides, fungicides and herbicides which are known carcinogens.

Denis Dutton, associate professor of philosophy at Canterbury University, suggests that the "so-called moral objections to cross-species recombination (GE) are based on ignorance. Every person reading this newspaper shares 50 per cent of his or her DNA with a banana. All life is one - and that's not a nebulous mystical claim, it's a scientific fact."

As Dutton points out, the only reasons to be for or against GE are empirical: "Will it make us happier, improve our health, increase our lifespans? Will it make farming easier and more productive ... part of any technology ought to be to improve human well-being - human flourishing, as Aristotle put it."

And will it? For medicine, definitely. For food production, maybe.

Scientists, conservationists and agriculturists do agree on one thing - that contemporary farming methods are biologically damaging and, in the long term, unsustainable. By 2050, when the world population reaches eight billion, we will need new answers.

Right now, however, in the developed world at least, food is cheap and plentiful. Driven mainly by supermarket groups, the price of food - and farmers' margins - have dropped dramatically. In the 1950s, 40 per cent of the household budget went on food. Now, led by North America, it's down to 12 per cent, with most of the cost in processing.

What we want now, as displayed by the huge backlash against genetically engineered food and the exponential rise in organics, is not cheaper food but healthier and safer food. And we're willing to pay for it.

In New Zealand, where our future still rides on primary production, questions on whether to go with GE technology or opt for organic production are crucial.

It is no surprise that the Government has taken months setting boundaries for the high-powered Royal Commission into GE which will start on June 1.

Bas Walker, of the Environmental Risk Management Authority (Erma), says we have to decide whether we want the technology, whether it is important to our future and, if so, what kind of restraints we want.

Despite complaints from the Greens, Environment Minister Marian Hobbs is satisfied that the field-testing moratorium, that will be concurrent with the commission, will mean "issues around safety and biodiversity are on hold. What's not on hold is ethics and the absolute importance of people being informed."

Hobbs is also concerned about "the whole dimension of the tangata whenua in relation to GE. As she points out, a Maori claim regarding spiritual property rights over native flora and fauna, which is before the courts now, has yet to be resolved.

GE sits awkwardly beside the Maori belief that everything in the universe has its own whakapapa and is therefore linked through the gods Rangi and Papa.

And, says senior lecturer Dr Alexander Gillespie of Waikato University, author of International Environmental Law Policy and Ethics, the Maori voice must be taken seriously.

"The typical response to this type of claim (which is also raised by many non-indigenous groups) is that they are ridiculous emotional responses or anachronisms which have no place in the Brave New World of science," Gillespie says. "However, such condemnations of ethical responses are out of place with both international feeling on similar issues and national concerns on many environmental fronts."

Which brings us to one of the refreshing aspects of the New Zealand debate, the attitude of our scientific community which, Guy Salmon of the Ecologic Foundation points out, "doesn't have a deep-rooted sneery and paternalistic attitude to lay-peoples' worries [as found in Britain]."

Every molecular biologist, geneticist, zoologist and plant biochemist I spoke to agreed with the need for a moratorium on GE. They don't talk down and they all accepted the concept of the containment of GE experiments - with no bitterness about their careers.

There is, however, a real fear that New Zealand will get left behind in the race to develop and patent GE technology.

The smart money thinks that the voluntary moratorium on field trials during the 12-month commission is a "political cop-out" and disastrous for our international competitiveness.

Dr William Rolleston, of the Life Sciences Network, says: "The biotechnology sector needs an assurance that decades of research will not be dissipated. [Without that] the future for New Zealand's agriculture and economy looks pretty bleak."

From a regulatory point of view, New Zealand is already ultra-cautious - and GE is expensive. Barry Scott, professor of molecular genetics at Massey University, who also sits on the Erma board, acknowledges that "thoroughly understandable" anti-GE attitudes and stringent regulatory costs have had a huge effect on science in the lab and already restrict scientists' ability to be part of the international flow of information.

"Most universities are struggling to maintain a viable research effort," says Scott, who suggests that scale of risk is the most important thing any moratorium should look at.

Though contained lab work is obviously extremely low-risk, field-testing - which is riskier - could cost more in regulatory charges.

In other areas New Zealand is way behind Europe. For example, in Britain most of the activist sector has moved on from GE safety issues. The debate now raging - and the one that drove through Britain's three-year moratorium on GE test cropping - relates to its possible effect on the environment.

Harry Griffin, of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, says: "At the very highest level the consensus is that GM foods are safe to eat. Why? Because they've been eaten by two million Americans for six years and in huge quantities by their cattle. Risk/benefit figures show conclusively that the new biotech is worth the risk, especially compared with cellphones, cars and so on."

One of the biggest challenges for GE is to angle research away from products like Roundup-Ready Soy, developed by biotech companies such as Monsanto in an attempt to get a double payment (seed and chemicals) from farmers, and towards products that might actually do what Denis Dutton, quoting Aristotle, suggests and help humans to flourish.

Already, in labs round the world, brilliant GE products such as biodegradable plastics and oil-gobbling bacteria are being developed. Over the next few years we can expect much more (see The Way Ahead on this page).

Until now the science has been distorted by the American corporate view that close links with business generates healthy competition. Their position is that patenting such things as the raw data from the human genome (the sequence of DNA "letters" in an organism's chromosomes) project is acceptable because it will help business to generate enough money to push competition within science and ensure progress.

Over the next few years biotech companies and scientists are expected to buy this raw data and use it to work out how each human gene works, ascertain the genetic roots of diseases, and design individually tailored medicines for individuals.

The fact that the initial breakthroughs into DNA started in fusty old English universities are largely ignored. And the ultimate aim of science, to use technology to help all humans - rich and poor - to flourish has been compromised in many cases.

In the United States they also rely on market forces to argue the consumer point of view. The day after President Clinton called for free access, saying that "raw fundamental data on the human genome, including the human DNA sequence and its variations, should be available to scientists everywhere," shares in Celera Genomics group fell 27 per cent.

Celera is the company which is vying not just with the Cambridge-based Sanger Centre, but the American Government-funded official genome reading programme, and is already charging large pharmaceutical companies up to $US5 million ($10.2 million) each for access to its results. It has ambitions to corner the genome in the same way Microsoft cornered PC software. By the middle of last month, however, stockmarket scruples had disappeared and Celera stocks moved sharply higher.

Over the past six months international agritech companies that dreamed of combining pharmaceuticals and crops have suffered much the same fate. Last December Monsanto announced plans to merge with Pharmacia and Upjohn and is now widely tipped to sell its agricultural division.

But is a temporary stumble on Wall St enough to encourage the kind of revolution in thinking around biotechnology that is so obviously needed? Probably not. Right now the genome-sequencing races and patent arguments speed on, fuelled by thousands of computers and flanked by dozens of other gene-sequencing projects throughout the world - corn, soybean, cotton, rice, forestry trees, grasses, grapes, fruit and livestock - and racing towards the time when they can use this information to track characteristics, create disease profiles and sell the information to genetic engineers. In February Celera published in Science magazine the genome sequence of the fruitfly Drosophilia .

Where does that leave New Zealand, with its lone pine tree-genome sequencing project and, back in the lab, under-funded scientists steering through a labyrinth of regulations?

Jim Watson, of Genesis, says that the problem is to draw the line in the right place, so that drug development is encouraged and inefficient monopoly discouraged.

Guy Salmon agrees. "Competitiveness is a real issue. We're going to be faced with people who can provide products much more cheaply. We have to be quite careful about rejecting gene technology outright."

Salmond believes that the Royal Commission should include a debate about organic versus sustainable agriculture.

"Going totally organic is a fairly challenging task," he says. "For me, the argument's all about making New Zealand not organic, but sustainable. It's about having a sustainable impact on the environment that nature's own processes can manage."

Former Heinz Wattie chief David Irving's vision of New Zealand is to "utilise our natural advantages, have products verified by a reputable source and capture the imagination of world consumers. To absolutely distance ourselves from genetics is clearly wrong. I'd like to see our knowledge-based industry applied to our land-based industry."

Dutton is convinced that the genie is already out of the bottle, that GE "advances" will happen whether New Zealand is ready or not.

"The biggest technology of the 21st century is not the Internet, which is just geewhizz and neat but basically a tool. No, it's biotechnology. And, while Europe and probably New Zealand cling luddite-like to the past, the 21st century is going to belong to Asia.

"The Japanese and Chinese will have no qualms. Along with the Americans they'll control the technology and when we need it - as we definitely will - we will have to buy it from them.

"GE is in its infancy, yet it promises cures for the cruelest diseases that have plagued mankind. Someday we'll have pesticide-free farming with crop yields that are dramatically higher than today's - improving the quality of food rather than degrading it - and that will be a great human advance."

The way ahead is complicated. GE has polarised opinion not just of the masses but of scientists and physicians too, in a way almost no other debate has done.

Alasdair Palmer, in the London Sunday Telegraph, says that the European Parliament has condemned attempts to clone people as "unethical, morally repugnant, contrary to respect for the person and as a grave violation of human rights which cannot, under any circumstances, be justified or accepted. For those who believe in God, the clone is a being without an immortal soul, created in violation of His authority."

In the book Improving Nature? The science and ethics of genetic engineering, authors Dr Michael Reiss, biologist and priest, and Roger Straughan, moral philosopher and ethical adviser to the European Union, suggest that the answer lies in education and the polling of public attitudes, followed by a government system that takes notice of what people say.

"Our hope is that governments and other legislative bodies, such as the European Parliament, will take seriously the need to obtain the informed view of the general public before framing legislation."

Derek Burke, one of the people responsible for much of Britain's regulatory framework, has a more global view.

"The issues are wider than just GM, for they bear on the wider question of how society uses science to create wealth," he says. "This is one of the running issues of the next century - how we balance personal, national and international needs in a world where all significant decisions are taken at the global level and where the use of new technology will be one of the main drivers of economic growth."

The Economist has suggested it is important to get GE into perspective. "The conflict over GM crops is pitting the defenders of technology against the champions of nature as if there was only one way of making agriculture more productive and more sustainable on a global scale. This is clearing a nonsense."

Which brings us back to the human perspective. The science of genetic engineering is intrinsically exciting, promising virtually limitless potential. Where it has gone wrong is in its links with industry. Instead of working for the public good, biotech companies hellbent on profit have captured under-funded scientists and forced their research in one direction.

It is not the science that is the problem, it is the way it is being used.

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GE DEBATE - A Herald series

GE lessons from Britain

GE links

GE glossary

GE discussion forum