by CARROLL DU CHATEAU
Dinnertime in the Jones household. First there's dad with his vege garden out the back and a liberal supply of sprays and insecticides in the shed.
Then there's son Nick, a Greenpeace member who refuses all sprayed and genetically engineered food. Next comes baby Sophie, who can drink only GE soy-milk formula.
Presiding over the kitchen table is mum. Her housekeeping budget is tight, the nearest supermarket almost devoid of organic food, and food content labels are too small for her to read easily.
Worse, her brother Peter is severely ill with Parkinson's Disease - one of the conditions which scientists are hoping to cure with GE stem-cell therapy.
What do they eat? What should she buy? Should they be scared of GE foods or delighted at the possibilities that genetic engineering can offer people like Peter?
Most important, who can they trust to steer them in the right direction? The science of recombinant DNA is so controversial that protagonists can't even agree on a name for it.
Those against it use the more aggressive term, genetic engineering. Those for the technology settle for the gentler term, genetic modification. Either way, genetic engineering (lets avoid the euphemism) is a complex and controversial issue - and one that is vital to the New Zealand's future as an exporter of primary produce and agricultural, horticultural and scientific skills.
Dr Jim Watson, chief executive of Genesis Research, the country's largest biotech company, points out that if New Zealand pulled the plug on biotechnology our whole scientific community would have the building blocks of research taken away.
On the other hand, there is no reason why New Zealanders should be forced to eat imported GE food and crops. Watson is convinced that genetic engineering offers the answers to many of life's mysteries.
"We are going into an era of discovery which in size is totally unprecedented throughout the entire history of civilisation," he says, "and whether we turn our back on it or not, it will happen."
In practice, genetic engineering looks so harmless. At HortResearch in Mt Albert the atmosphere is clinical yet relaxed. Verne Lee, a master's student in plant chemistry, dressed in cargo shorts and T-shirt, bends intently over a battery of test-tubes and carefully drips in the enzymes used to join invisible shavings of DNA.
For him, genetic engineering is no big deal. As molecular biologist Gavin Ross says, "We [and other research facilities throughout the country] have been doing this since the early 80s."
Then there's the other side to GE: the time-lock doors, the security, the hand-washing, the ban on eating any GE food - even the juicy cherry tomatoes in the greenhouse - and the harassed managers who stand to lose their jobs if the moratorium on GE testing goes ahead and the entire facility is forced to stop work.
Ross, who sincerely believes in the public's right to rigorous debate and regulation over GE, says: "Funding for GE work has been scaled right down in the past two years. We can live with a moratorium on field testing but we couldn't exist without the lab work. If that stops there'll be a general exodus of scientists."
Part of the public concern comes out of confusion about the different types of genetic modification.
The term genetic engineering applies to the science of recombining and rearranging a cell's DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). DNA tells cells to build the proteins that create their specific characteristics.
The science can be simply adding enzymes which make a gene work harder or stop work altogether, adding extra genes from a close relative to the original DNA (intergenic), or adding a gene from an unrelated species (transgenic).
Although more readily achievable than before, GE is still in its infancy. Overall the science is relatively difficult, highly competitive, very expensive - and part of a huge international scientific surge.
While farmers have been playing around with genes, using traditional selective breeding methods for thousands of years, over the past three decades scientists have been delving into the DNA of plants and animals to make breeding and selection for various traits more precise and - in comparison - unthinkably quick.
Most of the work has centred on the investigation of gene function, working out gene sequencing, and experiments transferring genes from one piece of DNA to another to see if they do the same job in different organisms.
The technology is already well advanced. Want to introduce vegetable genes into animals, animal genes into humans, fish genes into birds, tree genes into elephants? Scientists, somewhere, can do it.
They can also, as Lee demonstrates, merely work to improve the pest-resistant qualities of tamarillos and tomatoes.
The commercial spinoffs from GE began in the late 1970s with the development of GE pharmaceuticals, beginning with insulin and followed by growth hormone and blood-clotting Factor 8 (widely used by haemophiliacs).
Nearly 20 years later the first commercial GE food arrived in the United States. Since then 300 million Americans have regularly eaten GE soy, maize, rice and tomatoes in ever-larger quantities.
So far, not one death or even an illness has been attributed to it.
It was not until the first GE foods were exported to Britain from the United States that concerns were raised. Pressure groups, headed by Greenpeace and backed by an issues-hungry press, alerted British shoppers to possible dangers of genetic engineering.
Alerted, they recoiled. GM food, especially unlabelled GM food, was unacceptable to Britons still reeling from the spectre of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), otherwise called mad cow disease.
Within months seven leading supermarket chains - including Iceland, Sainsbury and Marks and Spencer - ignored EU regulations and dropped all products containing GM ingredients.
A New Zealand Herald Digipoll last May revealed that New Zealanders were equally suspicious of GE foods - 61.9 per cent would not buy GE products and more than half (55 per cent) did not trust the companies involved in GE production to ensure that products were safe.
Why the outcry? Because genetic engineering brings together five innate and legitimate fears.
First, fear for personal safety - that food produced using GE may cause long-term problems such as cancer or immunity to antibiotics. The question here is: When a gene or a set of genes is transposed, will their former role be faithfully reproduced? Will introduced genes create unexpected proteins when they hit foreign DNA? Can scientists reliably predict which genes will transfer allergens, making previously safe foods dangerous for people with allergies?
Underpinning this side of the controversy is the "substantial equivalence" regulatory system adopted by the United States Bush Administration in 1992, controlled by the Food and Drug Administration.
Substantial equivalence means that if a new food - putting aside how it was produced - is found to be essentially similar to the conventional variety, then it would not require extra testing.
If it proved to be different then extensive testing is demanded. This will certainly be the case for the new generation of products, for example soybeans with different oil compositions.
On this basis no laboratory tests were carried out on the first, or any, GE foods to determine whether tampering with DNA could produce unexpected effects, particularly over the long term.
Nor were companies required to conduct toxicity tests such as those used for pharmaceuticals, pesticides and food additives. Potential long-term effects of the science - tested by feeding GM food to laboratory mice, which have very short lifecycles and would therefore show problems in a few years - were also sidestepped. The damage from that one move, which was diligently shepherded through the regulatory process by "life sciences" company Monsanto, was catastrophic.
As Watson says: "The reason the world accepts new drugs, particularly those that are genetically engineered, is because of the testing procedures. Yet for GE foods there was no testing.
"That's the heart of the problem. Yes, there has been some internal company testing, but that doesn't compare in any way, shape or form to the stringency demanded in the pharmaceutical world."
Dan Cohen, of HortResearch, questions whether ordinary toxicity testing with GE foods is feasible.
"Many of our regular foods would prove toxic if they were tested as the major component of diet - berryfruit, celery, or even carrots - but these are all very healthy at normal dietary levels," he says.
From a commercial point of view, substantial equivalence made sense. It is estimated that pharmaceutical-style testing would have delayed access to the marketplace by five years and added about $50,000 to the cost of every product.
So, despite its flaws, substantial equivalence became the benchmark. It was accepted by the OECD in 1993, endorsed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation in 1996, and adopted in essence by the European Union, Australia and New Zealand.
The second fear relates to environmental safety.
Conservationists and ecologists are concerned that crops like Roundup Resistant maize, which has been GEed to tolerate the herbicide so it can be blanket-sprayed, will obliterate weeds and wildflowers - and eventually the insects and birds that feed on them.
Dr Brian Johnson, of Britain's statutory conservation agency English Nature, puts it bluntly: "We know what effects herbicide-tolerant crops will have on wildlife. There is overwhelming evidence demonstrating that the use of more effective pesticides over the past 20 years has been a major factor causing serious declines in farmland birds, arable wild plants and insects."
Conservationists also worry that plants that have been genetically engineered to resist pests and weedkillers will cross with wild relatives, mutate, then take over the countryside.
The third concern is that major biotechnology companies, using gene patents and agrichemicals and focusing hard on money and profit rather than health and human welfare, will lock farmers into their powerful empires. Within a decade, critics say, the world's seed stock will be controlled by a cartel.
The fourth fear comes down to trust. How can people - especially Britons - trust politicians and scientists who lied to them over mad cow disease?
Fourteen years ago British politicians, backed by their scientists, insisted that there was no way the BSE agent could be transmitted from beef to humans. A decade later they had to eat their words and acknowledge that a number of deaths had been ascribed to exposure to the BSE agent.
Roger Morris, professor of animal health at Massey University, who is analysing the history of the BSE epidemic, predicts that anything between 500 and 5000 BSE-related (known as variant CJD) deaths are still to come.
Over the past few years distrust of the scientific community has been inflamed by scare stories - most of them from overseas - which made their way to New Zealand in nanoseconds on the Internet and through Greenpeace and the media.
Late last year came the discovery that toxins produced in the roots of Bt corn (15 million hectares were grown in the United States in 1998) were leaking into the soil and killing larvae. Although the toxin was bound to the soil, it was shown to be highly toxic.
This is the same corn whose pollen had been shown in the lab to kill monarch butterfly caterpillars. This experiment had been debunked by scientists, who said that the quantities of pollen-smothered milkweed which killed the caterpillars would not exist in the field.
But this time scientists were astonished. Professor Geunther Stozky of the University of New York, who led the research, said: "The fact that the toxin was released was 'unexpected.' The Bt toxin was a large protein molecule which scientists had considered too large to pass through the root membrane.
Then there was the antibiotic marker gene scare, when doctors suggested that people and animals could become immune to antibiotics. Antibiotic markers were quickly banned for commercial crops and animal work.
Another scandal related to bovine somatotrophin (BST), a Monsanto GE product designed to boost milk production by 25 per cent by making cows stay in milk longer.
This practice, which has been widely criticised by animal welfare organisations, has been linked to increased mastitis in cows, leading to more penicillin in milk and antibiotic resistance. Although BST is widely used in America it has not been approved by the New Zealand Ministry of Health.
The most serious argument relates to the work of Arpad Pusztai, a scientist working at the highly regarded Rowett Institute in Britain.
Pusztai said that his experiment with potatoes, GEed with a poisonous lectin gene lifted from the DNA of the snowdrop, caused gut damage in laboratory rats.
Pusztai said the problem was more to do with the viral promoter used to transport the gene into the potatoes than with the lectin gene.
His point was that the GM process itself might have had unforeseen effects.
Despite the British Royal Society saying that Pusztai's experiment was "flawed in many aspects of design, execution and analysis and no conclusions should be drawn from it ... and it would be unjustifiable to draw from them general conclusions about whether GM foods are harmful to human beings," the damage was done.
A Guardian/ICM poll in Britain last year revealed that only 16 per cent of people believed scientists' opinions on GE food and 13 per cent believed what they said about cloning.
Green activists, headed by former Labour minister Lord Melchett, ripped out GE crops. Others, dressed as tomatoes, protested outside biotech company Astro Zeneca's London headquarters. Prince Charles joined the anti-GM lobby. And the British Soil Association ruled that even 1 per cent of GM content was unacceptable in organic food, which has serious repercussions for New Zealand exporters.
Here in New Zealand - unlike Australia, which was more accepting of GE - we quickly followed suit. The Wild Greens rooted out a field of potatoes being tested to see if the genetic engineering could prevent bacterial soft rot, and Soil and Health magazine joined the group, Revolt Against Genetic Engineering (Rage), to keep GE crops out of New Zealand.
Early this year the Montreal bio-safety protocol gave anti-GE crusaders their biggest victory, allowing member countries to refuse crops, foods and products containing GE ingredients under a "precautionary principle" based on justifiable fear of the unknown.
Though Australia opposed the Montreal pact, the New Zealand Government, with strong backing from its Green MPs, intends ratifying it.
The Australia and New Zealand Food Authority keeps promising the introduction of labelling for all food with GE components.
Given the complications, even setting parameters takes time. Guidelines for the $4 million, 12-month Royal Commission of Inquiry into Genetic Engineering, set up by Environment Minister Marian Hobbs, are still being fought over in Parliament.
Until they are decided there will be much uncertainty, if not outright fear - not just in our scientific community but for families like the Jones', sitting around the dinner table trying to decide not only what is safe to eat, but what is safe to think.
Explore this issue further in:
GE DEBATE - A Herald series
