Far from the laboratories, placard-waving demonstrators and vandalized research fields, more than 125 people gathered last week for a thoughtful discussion on the benefits and risks of genetic engineering in agriculture.
The presentation, featuring James Cook, a Washington State University researcher, and ecologist Rebecca Goldburg of Environmental Defense, launched the campus's Biotechnology, Policy and Society Lecture Series. The group of eight lectures, to be held on selected Thursday nights from now until early March, is coordinated by the Center for History, Society and Culture.
Cook, an authority on wheat diseases and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, compared the tumultuous advent of agricultural biotechnology to Thomas Edison's introduction of the incandescent light bulb.
He noted that the new technologies that now allow scientists to insert genes into crop plants are part of a historical movement in the United States to refine agriculture and mitigate its environmental impacts.
Cook said 19th-century American agriculture was "extremely disruptive," causing forests to be cleared and prairies to be plowed up.
"Our first wakeup call that we needed to move to a less disruptive agriculture came with the Dust Bowl," he said. "That set America on a course that is still being played out today."
The Dust Bowl's massive loss of productive land due to destructive farming practices launched a nationwide movement to better conserve soil and other resources, Cook said. Agriculturists began looking for methods that would least disturb the soil and thus began the movement toward "no-till" farming. To minimize plowing the soil, chemical herbicides were then adopted to kill weeds rather than digging them out with a tractor-drawn cultivator.
Agriculture's second "wakeup call" came in 1962 with publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, according to Cook.
"This book, more than any other, swept the world in moving us away from agricultural pesticides," he said.
Genetic engineering gives farmers intent on minimizing chemical applications and plowing another alternative, he said. Genes can now be inserted into plants that will make the crops resistant to insect attacks. Other genes will make crops like corn, soybeans and sugarbeets tolerant of certain herbicides, allowing farmers to spray an entire field and kill only the weeds.
These new molecular techniques come with risks as well as benefits, Cook said.
"No technology is completely risk-free, and that would have to be said of this technology," he said.
A look at food safey
Goldburg, who holds a doctorate in ecology and has long been an environmental advocate, stressed concerns about the environmental and food-safety issues related to genetic engineering. While biotechnology supporters suggest that the genetic engineering is just a logical extension of selective breeding techniques that have been developed over thousands of years, she maintained that both the power and the risk of genetic modification is in the fact that it can do what traditional breeding cannot do.
"What is different about biotechnology is that scientists can, in theory, take genes from any organism and put them in any other organism," she said.
She also cited concerns that pollen from plants genetically engineered to produce the pest-killing bacterial toxin "Btu" might prove dangerous to non-pest insects, as suggested by research on monarch butterfly larvae.
"Genetically modified crops can affect non-target organisms in the same way as traditional pesticides," she said, noting that Bt has been registered as a pesticide for years, albeit as a more environmentally friendly form of pest control.
Perhaps the "thorniest problem" in terms of ecological risk of genetic engineering arises when the technology is applied to fish, she suggested. Researchers are now genetically engineering salmon with a growth hormone that will produce larger fish for use in fish farming.
"The real difficulty is that fish are relatively undomesticated," she said. Fish that escape from fish farms will readily breed with their wild counterparts, spreading the introduced gene throughout the wild population.
Focus on allergies
The main food-safety concern related to genetically modified crops is that proteins introduced into the crop may turn out to cause food allergies in some people, she said, noting that between 2.4 million and 5 million people in the United States have food allergies.
"What's particularly difficult with genetically modified foods is that we don't know how to identify whether a given protein will be a food allergen," Goldburg said.
Although one protein introduced from a Brazil nut into a soybean plant was identified as a potential allergen and kept off the market, Goldburg said that the current regulatory system is inadequate to protect the safety of the U.S. food supply. She noted that a genetically engineered corn variety, approved for animal feed but not for human consumption, recently appeared in several brands of taco shells, causing the manufacturers to recall them. Although that protein is not expected to have major adverse health effects, the incident points out a failure in the regulatory system, she said.
"One of my concerns is that the federal regulatory framework has never been finished," she said.
Both Cook and Goldburg said they would favor "raising the bar" to better scrutinize the safety of food products produced from traditionally bred and genetically modified crops.
Marketing issues
Looking to the future, Cook said that it was possible that a two-tier marketing system would develop, offering both genetically modified and traditionally bred crops.
"But I find it quite frightening that we could go that way," he said, noting that he would be concerned about the ability of researchers and the seed industry to continue to develop the new varieties needed by both types of producers.
He stressed that agricultural production will intensify as crops are looked to as an alternative to fossil fuels.
"That mean's more intensive farming," he said, predicted that there will be room for a variety of agricultural systems. "But the ones that will succeed will be those that are most profitable."
Goldburg, however, does not envision genetic engineering as the wave of the future.
""My perspective is that the solution for agriculture comes in the form of pollution reduction," she said. "Transgenic technology may be part of that, but I don't see it playing a central role."
She predicted that consumer demands for labeling of genetically modified food products would increase.
"I suggest that if we face a future where all food is genetically modified we will all want to know what is in the food we eat," she said."