GM debate grumbles on
I feel ambiguous about genetic engineering – indeed, I’ve made a film about some aspects of genetic engineering and cotton.
But I do think our government-owned scientific apparatus is increasingly compromised on the matter. CSIRO [ the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, for the benefit of overseas readers] is confronted with dilemmas based ultimately on superstitious governments, both Liberal and Labor, who have assumed that the organisation is some sort of ivory tower, driven by maddies who want to follow their own arcane impulses.
Anyone who has worked there knows this is rubbish. And knows that CSIRO has been kicked about by trendy management theories. Where it has been forced to “co-operate” with peak industry bodies, small bands of scientists have had to outwit their simple-minded big picture conservatism. In wool research, the division has been driven to clandestine experiments. In wheat, CSIRO support for subtly different varieties that appeal to niche markets cuts across the broad-brush thinking of the wise heads at the Australian Wheat Board. These are just obvious examples.
Successive governments have pushed CSIRO into the marketplace as a form of economic engineering. Responding to artificial income targets, stung by commentary which mocks scientists (and Australian entrepeneurs) when patents go offshore, the organisation has become increasingly commercial. It takes out patents, launches companies, backs its own winners.
The film industry can point to the dangers of government agencies that function like private enterprise, competing with outside companies rather than growing the whole marketplace. The area is fraught with contradictions and temptations.
So it is with CSIRO. It has to defend the Australian taxpayer – the ultimate stakeholder – against private enterprise mining our national discoveries and shutting them away. At the same time, it is supposed to run by the open-source ethics of real science. A theoretical pig’s breakfast, justified and glossed over if it works.
CSIRO is never going to be a source of impartial advice on genetic engineering, because scientists run a priesthood which deals in arcana the rest of us can’t understand. It resents stupidity and superstition, and there has been a lot of it about in this area. In the early nineties, I was dismayed by the speed with which the environmental movement lined up against GM, and the quality of the arguments. Such confidence that scientists could be dangerous!
The trouble is, these are not yes/no binary questions. DNA is not some sacred bundle of code perfected by evolution, but a messy clump of instructions containing repetitions, redundancies, breaks, accidents and contingent connections. The limits on transfer are posed only by the organic facts of procreation. Tomatoes don’t fuck ducks, so tomato-stuff doesn’t become duck-stuff.
At the same time, we as citizens are entitled to insist that change should be measured, not driven by a hurly-burly tumble to out-compete. We also know that the morality of the big players is terrifying. The gulf between research to improve the human condition and to harvest profit is a slime pit full of monsters. I accept that capitalism provides huge general benefits, but capitalist enterprises can be dreadful beyond belief.
Enter Dr Jim Peacock. A hugely respected stalwart of CSIRO, Chief of Plant Industry for 26 years, a willing exponent of structural change, and a pioneer in genetic engineering. Now also our Chief Scientist, providing advice to government from a tiny intellectual (heh) gene pool. Vibrating in an echo chamber of ideas. The man who has taken out many patents and started several companies, all in his position as an agent of CSIRO.
Speaking at a session on biotechnology and food at the recent Future Summit, he is quoted by The Age:
“AUSTRALIA’S chief scientist has criticised opponents of genetic modification, describing them as “unprincipled minorities” that were spreading false facts and hype.
Speaking at a conference in Melbourne, Jim Peacock said those circulating misinformation about GM were largely “self-serving organic farmers and ill-informed environmental activists”.
Not a tactful remark. From his position, I would never, ever, use the phrase “self-serving”. He went on to say that “this new knowledge should be put to the best possible use”. Quite. Some of us are a bit more suspicious than Dr Peacock of those who claim to be the best possible users – like Monsanto.
Professor Gus Nossal, the medical scientist and immunologist who also runs a private consulting company, said something much more temperate:
“The fear I think is gradually and slowly receding,” Sir Gustav said after the session. “But I also think this is something that doesn’t need to be rushed.”… [and elsewhere]
… Sir Gustav said the technology’s most valuable contribution was “how it helps us to learn”. “Even if we never deploy a genetically-modified food organism anywhere in the world, the amount of learning that we are doing through genetic modification in the laboratory is of the most profound importance,” he said.”
See the difference?
More on this from a pissed-off Kath Wilson at Leftwrites.
(On an entirely different matter, David Suzuki is not a completely fabulous influence on filmmaking, where he has been a persistent pundit wheeled in for all occasions to front other people’s documentaries).
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:36 pm
What to do?
I am now working in an area where GM has a profound effect on the quality and cost of what we sell.
The products are derivatives of GM organisms and contain no traces of genetic material, yet these products are effectively banned from use in food and beverages.
Stupid beyond belief, there is absolutely no threat from these products and they would be of great use in reducing many problems faced by industry. Everything has been tarred by the same brush.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 am
[...] In wheat, CSIRO support for subtly different varieties that appeal to niche markets cuts across the broad-brush thinking of the wise heads at the Australian Wheat Board. These are just obvious examples. … …Read More [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I wonder what odium was heaped on the ancient who first crossed a donkey with a horse to create an animal capable of working in harsher conditions – the mule. Presumably there was much tut-tutting at the production of a sterile animal with 63 chromosomes from parents who had 62 and 64 chromosomes respectively.
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I don’t like the way this issue has been framed by the agribusiness lobbyists as an anit-GM issue. It’s not. Many people support GM in pharmaceuticals and medical research, but don’t support the technology being applied to our food supply, and particularly not by padlocking our food chain in patents. A very different thing.
Geneticists know that the process of GM can create novel proteins and toxins in food, which is why, cyberslacker, CSIRO abandoned its GM field pea, which cost a big wad of public money, but had to be abandoned when ANU studies found that the pea caused adverse reactions in rats. There are countless other examples.
When we have new technologies that supersede GM (such as MAS, genomics and protonomics) and don’t present the inherent problems of horizontal gene transfer, antibiotic marker transfer, and novel proteins and allergens, why do we continue flogging a dead horse?
(That’s rhetorical. Follow the money, and you’ll learn why.)
BigBob: in answer I can only quote Dr Michael Antoniou, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Pathology, Guy’s Hospital, London:
“A product derived from a GE organism can be devoid of genetic material, but can still unexpectedly contain potentially harmful alterations to a GE product, a novel toxin or elevated levels of a known hazardous substance.”
May 24th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Nope, sorry Kath, not what we deal with. It simply isn’t possible. Yet they are caught under that same catch all umbrella. Anti GM is anti GM, and it is almost religous in it’s application, and not based on good science.
I have great reservations about GM products in open environments and think that patenting existing pieces of DNA is outright piracy. We do have to be very careful that we don’t overreact.
May 24th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Problem is our food labelling is piss poor, so we can’t make informed decidions on what to buy, or what to eat. I won’t buy American sourced foods for that reason, and I don’t like my tomatoes with feathers. However, I do like a bit of Chenobyl in my Lingonsylt care of IKEA. Made is Sweden from Lingon berries picked in the forests, how dodgy is that when we know there is still an excess of deaths in Sweden from cancer caused by radiation from the Chenobyl plume which fell on Sweden.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
[...] Barista has a great essay on CSIRO and GM food – refreshingly free of fear- and scandal- mongering, even if you disagree with his conclusions. Enter your email address to receive Missing Link in your email inbox: [...]
May 25th, 2007 at 6:45 am
“it is almost religous in it’s application, and not based on good science”
The weird thing is of course the Mayans modified the genes of maize and the earliest drovers cattle and farmers wheat and even heaven forfend humans to each other through the filtering maze of social architecture etc etc and yet that somehow means or gets reformatted to mean that every myopic would-be Dr. Frankenstein with a research grant gets free rein to mutilate everything and anything he can get into the lab and up on the table – just to see what happens. And then patent what works and make the world pay through the nose just to live because hey everything’s gonna have a patent once they get through with it.
Have you noticed BigBob there’s a problem associated with the automobile? Of beyond epic proportion? Might it help some to go back to the early days of that exhaust-belching invention and see and hear the objections to it then?
Religious in their application, superstitious, irrational, unscientific – why you might almost call them instinctive.
And how scientific is that bucko?
KathW thanks for an articulate and emotionally coherent comment.
May 25th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Exactly what I meant Roy, your comment is emotional and not based on any other principle except Ludditism.
Yes, motor vehicles and the modern world have delivered many, many problems, but you are telling me that you would prefer to live in the middle ages when we had none of these advances but the world was pure? Seriously?
This is what I mean about extreme reactions, I put forward the view that just because something may have had some level of GE involved somewhere in it’s production, it is automatically considered to be bad.
It just isn’t so, nothing in the world is as black and white as that.
Where have I argued that I believe in open slather GE? In fact, I firmly believe in a measured approach to the subject and that many companies have behaved in an unethical manner. I certainly am not a supporter of patenting existing genome.
That being said, there are valid applications of GE that have NO risk attached that are being attacked.
In the same manner that all environmentalists are smeared by gross generalisations by their opponents, GE has been reduced to arguments that have no basis in fact.
An open mind is a wonderful thing.
June 4th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
“This is what I mean about extreme reactions, I put forward the view that just because something may have had some level of GE involved somewhere in it’s production, it is automatically considered to be bad.”
You’re quite wrong. In this country, it’s automatically considered to be good. Our gene technology regulator has said so. As Australian epidemiologist Judy Carman said: “Many scientifically valid concerns are raised by independent scientists worldwide about the safety of these foods. GM foods were initially approved as safe as a result of a political directive which overrode the warnings of the US Food and Drug Administration’s own experts.”
Of course there might be valid applications of GE technology (experimental medical research comes to mind), just as there are valid applications of any technology (then again, are there really valid applications of WMDs?). In my opinion, food is not a valid application of the technology, particularly as the overwhelming majority of farmers and markets actively oppose it. All polls to date tell us this. And not because they’re stupid or ignorant. A biotech Australia survey revealed that the more informed the public is about genetics, the more likely they are to oppose GE in our food supply.