Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Genetic Engineering and Food  Tom Zinnen  9/11/2013 UP917  cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, and it's your opportunity to help share in the discovery as part of the public land-grant research university here at UW Madison. Tonight, it's my great pleasure to introduce myself. [LAUGHTER] The humility lessons are paying off. [LAUGHTER] Every now and then, I get to give a talk to remind me of how hard it is to stand up here and actually give a talk. [LAUGHTER] And so tonight, in part because of two very interesting articles in the New York Times back at the end of July, I'm here to talk with you about citrus greening and golden rice, shifting colors in the spectrum of biotech and food. I work for UW Madison. 

I also work for UW Extension, and I have a job because of biotechnology in food, in particular this little thing called bovine growth hormone that some of you remember from 1990 and 1991. And so this is something I've been working on for a while. It's not a major focus of what I do anymore, but I think this is going to be an interesting year to see if the logjam in biotech and food loosens up a bit.  One of the great things about working in biotech and food is that it's such a profound issue because it affects so many things about our lives, about our bodies and our families, the environment, and our view of what's right and what's wrong. One of the ways I convey that is to use these little DNA tubes. You may remember the person on the left. That's former Governor Tommy Thompson giving the State of the State speech in the year 2000, and he was holding up one of these little tubes. And what's interesting about these little tubes is there's some white fuzzy stuff in here, and it's DNA. This is a paradox because most people have learned what about the visibility of DNA? It's too small to be seen. And then I hand them one of these tubes, and there's this white fuzzy stuff in there and a label on it that says, a sample of DNA. 

That's a contradiction. That's a paradox. So this is a parable for how we go about testing ideas in science and what the strengths and weaknesses are of science as a way of figuring out nature, of figuring out stuff that nobody's ever known, and especially of dealing with uncertainty. One of my favorite questions to ask people when they come here for field trips or workshops is to ask, what is science and how is science different from other ways of knowing? Because if we're going to use science in public policy and personal choices in public policy, it's nice to have an idea of what is science? What does it mean to you? What does it mean to other people? So here's some other ways of knowing: reason, logic, math, intuition, instinct, tradition, authority. Some more ways: empiricism, which includes a good chunk of science, experimentation, inference, appeals to history and literature, revelation, prophecy, mysticism. These are all ways that people around the world come to know stuff. And those are things that we're competing with as scientists. There's also mythology, experience, superstition, imagination, and naïve theories. And I think the list can go on. [LAUGHTER] So think about that in terms of all the different things that are floating around there as to how people come to know stuff and how they change what they think they know. 

So here's another question: what is food? And, luckily, Twinkies are back. [LAUGHTER] Can you name three foods that come from stuff that's never been alive? Okay, I gave you one. It's pretty hard. As a matter of fact, I don't think you can because we are what are called obligate chemoheterotrophs. In other words, we eat other stuff that's been alive. So that means nearly all our food comes from other living things, and those are called plants, animals, and microbes, and since we've developed agriculture about 13,000 years ago or so, humans select and develop crops, livestock, and cultures. And we select those crops, livestock, and cultures on a whole bunch of characteristics, including taste, color, ease of preparation, yield, vigor, nutrition, did I mention taste? In the food industry there's a cute little phrase, they say, taste is a dirty little secret. And that's why we have Rich Hartel come here about every year to talk about chocolate. [LAUGHTER] Traits are combinations of interactions between genes and the environment. We can manipulate genes to make crops, livestock, and cultures work better for us. 

We can manipulate the environment. We can do both. And that's a big question about how we're going to do farming. What combination of manipulating of genes and which ways of manipulating the environment are we going to use to feed ourselves? I am not a plant breeder, but I think the people in this room who are I hope will agree with this. You need sources of genetic variation. It's a really nice thing to have a gene pool. A whole bunch of genes that you can work with with whatever crop, livestock, or microbe that you're working with. And it's a nice thing to be able to find those genes, remove them, and then select for the desirable traits. Paul Williams, who's a plant breeder here at UW Madison, when I was a grad student here, had a little saying. He said, plant breeders are cool because they get what they select for. 

You get what you select for. Which means you have to be careful about what you're selecting for because sometimes what the plant thinks you're selecting for and what you think you're selecting for are different. Now, genes don't just hang out. They flow and recombine in nature. They can do that within species, between species. They can do this through transformation, transduction, conjugation, cell fusion, and viral infection. Right across the street is a little laboratory where Joshua Lederberg on this campus in the '50s did work in transformation and transduction and for that work and other work won the Nobel Prize in 1958 in medicine or physiology. DNA is the carrier of these genes, or at least it's the genetic recipe card for almost all our genes. That's kind of interesting that there are other things that do it. And, in particular for tonight, there's this bacterium called Agrobacterium tumefaciens. 

It's a bacterium that causes a disease of plants called crown gall, but it's also a pioneering tool in biotech. And the reason for that is it's basically a genetic engineer. It has a little circle of DNA in it, a plasmid that it can inject into plant cells, that DNA gets incorporated into the DNA of the plant cell, the plant cells start making extra cells, and that becomes a gall. I first heard about this in 1979 when I was a grad student at the University of Illinois, and that was pretty amazing. And the professor went on to say if they can figure out how to take some of the bad genes out and stuff interesting genes in there, we now have a way to deliver genes to plants. 1979. This was built on work that people like Paul Berg at Stanford, pictured here, did. It was announced in 1972. Cohen and Boyer in '73 with cutting and splicing genes. And, basically, what this means is the gene pool has become a gene ocean. 

If you're a corn breeder in 1970, what's your gene pool if you want to deal with southern corn leaf blight? Corn and its close relatives. In 1980, what's your potential gene pool? Anything that's got DNA in it. That's pretty amazing. That means any organism on Earth is a source for genes by use by breeders. And then this is where I diverge from a lot of folks in biotechnology, especially in biotechnology outreach. I think recombinant DNA technology is one of the most powerful tools ever invented. I don't think it's particularly dangerous, but I think it's one of the most amazing things, one of the most amazing tools ever invented. And to present it as any other way, I think, diminishes the power of the tool and the implications for humanity. So here's some milestones in biotech and food. In 1983, the first transgenic plants were developed using crown gall bacterium. 

Three different groups did that. That was three groups won the World Food Prize early this year in June in Des Moines. The first field test of transgenic plants was done in 1986 in France and in a little place called Middleton, Wisconsin. In 1990, chymosin cheese-making enzyme from recombinant microbes went on the market to almost no fanfare. 1993, there was a little bit more fanfare for bovine growth hormone. Both genes were from cattle. The technology was almost the same. Find the gene, make a copy of the gene, put it in the bacteria, let the bacteria grow up, let them make lots of a protein. But one was an enzyme that you add to a vat of milk to make cheese, and the other was a hormone that you inject into cows to help them make more milk. It's the first really good example of sometimes the technology doesn't matter as much as the words and the implications do, especially when it comes to biotech and food. 

1994, the FDA approves Calgene's Flavr Savr tomato. It was on the market for about four years. It was labeled. It was a whole food. It was successful at first and then got to be too expensive to produce. I wouldn't want to be Flavr Savr tomato on the first of September in Madison, Wisconsin, because this year that's when the tomato tsunami hit. This is one of the difficulties of having a high price, premium price product when you can grow some of your own. '95, transgenic field crops were approved and first planted in '96. In '99, this is the year we'll be spending a lot of time on, transgenic papaya were introduced in Hawaii, transgenic potatoes were boycotted, and golden rice was announced. So you've already heard me talk a little bit about there's a difference between a growth hormone and a cheese enzyme even though the technology is very similar. 

When we talk about science, it's interesting to hear are people making statements about nature or are they making statements about our best understanding of nature? I think a good chunk of my time in graduate school was getting to hear the difference. That's the great thing about being a slow learner. [LAUGHTER] That's why they call it gradual school. [LAUGHTER] Of course, one of the biggest words out there that has a lot of spin on it is natural because natural is a virtue. Unless you're Thomas Hobbes, then you like to talk about nature, red in tooth and claw. And, of course, artificial is bad as is it an evil except when your kid's in the Boundary Waters with you and it's 11:05 at night and he wakes up with a screeching earache, and it's really nice to have some Tylenol along with you. Even within bovine growth hormone, or bovine somatotropin, there's spin. If you were against this technology, you tended to use the word bovine growth hormone because what word is in there? The H word. And if you were for it, you called it BST because that's the technical term, and whoever got really worked up about a somatotropin anyway? [LAUGHTER] One of my favorite ones is this choice because some people love to talk about vitamin D. And, gee, particularly at a university in the Midwest that I can think of. 

Because vitamin D is really good for you. It's a vitamin. It helps grow bones and calcium and phosphorus, metabolism. And if you ask people, is it a good thing to put vitamin D into milk, they will say? >> Yes. >> Yes. On the other hand, if you ask them, do you think it's a good thing to put a steroid hormone into your milk? They would get, may I say it, pissed. [LAUGHTER] And yet, vitamin D is a steroid prohormone. And you should see what happens when I tell people this is one in the same. Spin matters. It matters whether you're a batter in baseball and you want to know whether the guy's throwing you a knuckleball, curveball, screwball, fastball, and it matters in how people are throwing words at you. 

Frankenfood is a great spin word, terminator is a great spin word, and golden rice is a great spin word. The first two are from the opponents; the third one is from the proponents. Either way you look at it, be very careful with the spin. So what are some methods that humans use to genetically modify organisms? In 1987, when this phrase first came out, it meant what it said. Any organism that was modified genetically. That would be you and me. It's been turned 180 degrees. Instead of being the broadest possible term, now it's the narrowest possible term. Now it means only organisms that are modified genetically using recombinant DNA technology. How did that come to happen? I don't know. 

But it did. On your left is a person not holding a micropipette in their left hand, but that's a person like me in 1972 yanking the male reproductive organ off of corn. Yes. Nine hours of empathy. [LAUGHTER] So if you want to make hybrid corn in the Midwest in 1972, you hire a bunch of 14-year-olds who have social security numbers, and you walk them through the fields and they go like this because what are you yanking off? The tassels. And on the right is another person with something in his hand, and that's a micropipette, and that's a great symbol for the kinds of manipulations that we do with recombinant DNA technology. I'd also like to point out that the adjustable micropipette in that person's hand was invented across the street. For plants, here are some ways that plant breeders can modify genes. Excuse me. I went through that too fast. 

So there's tissue cultures, somaclonal variation, embryogenesis, anther culture, cell fusion and transposons, viral infections. Do you have to know much about these? No. Is it a good idea to keep in mind that when you go to open the plant breeders toolbox, there's a lot tools in there. That's really important in the argument over what is safe enough. There's also a spectrum of values about food. The three words I like to use are wholesome, holistic, and holy. [LAUGHTER] Wholesome asks, is this food safe and nutritious for me and my family? Holistic asks, I want to know if it's wholesome, but where was it grown, by whom, and what environmental cost or social cost? And the third one is, holy, is this kosher or halal? Is it brisket on Friday in Lent? Or other aspects of holiness. Wholesome is different than loathsome. A wholesome food can be loathsome based on tradition, habit, taste, or religion. Here we are in Wisconsin, which was the epicenter, if an epicenter can last for a century, of the argument over oleomargarine. 

So I use the oleo controversy as a cautionary tale for me and for others because it reminds me that some things take a long, long time to resolve. And oleo, if you go back and read the 1898 Hoard's Dairyman or the Breeder's Gazette, they'd admit right up front we're not saying oleo isn't wholesome. It's wholesome, it's just not good. [LAUGHTER] All right. Clearly, Hoard's Dairyman didn't have a whole lot of soybean farmers as its subscribers. Now, there's also ethics and squeemics. Ethics is from this word ethos meaning character or custom. How do we behave. And we need to be able to distinguish between that which is unacceptable behavior and that which merely makes us uncomfortable. Thank you, France, because that is not just an automobile. 

That's an escargot. Some criticisms of recombinant DNA technology, and this is going to echo some of those things when we were talking about holistic and holy. We shouldn't do this because it's a perversion of nature or nature's god. It could be a poison. It could ruin food or the environment. The genes can spread. The plants that get those genes can become weeds and become superweeds and spread. The pollen from the transgenic crops could go into related crops that, say, are organic and ruin the value for the organic grower. Profit. This is basically saying food is for people not for profit. 

I think we may have heard that once or twice in Madison over the last few years. However, if you're a farmer, unless you're working for Joseph Stalin in 1925, what do you want to make? A profit because profit is another word for income, and that's how you send your kids to school. And then power. Who's going to control the means of production? How much can, say, farmers save their seeds? Who's going to regulate these crops? Who's going to insure the labeling is accurate? And other aspects. And the one that I like to add is proof because this gets at the issue of how are we going to resolve some of these conflicts? What is the nature of proof and persuasion? And how do you go to do this when, as we started at the beginning, science isn't the only way that people know stuff? There's a whole lot of ways out there competing. One of my favorite word plays is spelling profiteering two different ways because when opponents say and companies or universities are merely profiteering about this, one can also turn around and say some of the NGOs are also profiteering. And they're profiteering like this. This is my favorite John Steuart Curry painting. It's in the statehouse in Topeka, Kansas. He's got a bible in his left hand and a rifle in his right. 

Now, I'm not saying John Brown had an opinion on this one way or the other, but I think this captures some of the fervor that biotech and food engenders on many sides. One of the big questions, is biotechnology safe? Or should the question be, is biotechnology as safe as other methods of genetically modifying organisms? That's a big question. That's a big shift. One is yes/no; the other is a spectrum. Just getting to that shift is a big idea. So let's look at the genetic modifications. I went through those too fast last time. So there's selection, breeding, cloning, grafting, hybridization, mutagenesis, tissue culture, somaclonal variation, embryogenesis, cell fusion, transposons, viral infections, and recombinant DNA technology. Which of these are natural? Which of these occur in nature in the absence of the hand of humanity? Does it matter as a point of risk? I don't know. I don't personally think so, but a lot of people will use the argument that this isn't natural and therefore it's risky. 

I think you have to be very careful of that one. In 1993, I got to go to a conference in Ireland, and one of the German professor participants there said you have to be aware of the difference between English law and continental law. In English law, unless something is prohibited, it is permitted. Under the continental system, unless something is permitted, it is prohibited. Since that time, I've heard other people challenge this nugget but I heard it. I heard it from a German professor, and I don't know if it's accurate or not but it's a very intriguing idea to ask which of these is the way it's going to be. Another big question during the early and mid-'90s was, should regulations be based on the process used or the product arrived at? And in general, when you're thinking about law and regulations, one of the big spectrums is what should be compulsory, what should be permitted, what should be prohibited and on what grounds. In biotech and food, different countries have come down very differently on how they're going to address these questions. And here's the one that I think is one of the most influential. Because it's a conundrum. 

If we have all these different types of plant breeding tools and we're going to have a set of standards for biotech that's way up here and a set of standards for the other ones way down here, that's called having two standards. What's another name for that? Double standards. And that's problematic because then that asks if we're going to have two sets of standards, what are the opportunity costs of having high standards for one and lower standards for the other if it's not based on risk? So, this question was a big idea that's still being debated, but as far back as 1987, the US National Academy of Sciences said, nope, it's basically not on the process, it's on the product at the end. And in 1989, a similar report said that crops in specific are not expect, recombinant DNA crops are not expected to pose any different risks than those developed by classical methods for similar traits. So this is where we get at. It's nice to have all the data and everything, but we've still got to draw the line. How fast are you going to go? And if the biotech crops have to be safer than the regular crops, how much safer? And how are you going to measure that? And how long do you have to test those? We're into this 30 years now. How long is long enough? And what are the opportunity costs and lost having two standards? So let's go back to 1999. Potatoes in the US. The new potatoes by Monsanto have been out for three or four years. 

They were resistant to insects with a gene from the -- and they were sold by Monsanto to farmers, farmers who would then sell their potato crops to, in many cases, large buyers who were buying for the companies with big brand names, like McDonald's, Procter & Gamble, Frito Lay, Gerber, Heinz. The opponents called these companies the Frankenfoods 15. They pressed a boycott against them, and you can see who some of the participants were. And that's their website where they talk about it. Potatoes were primarily a crop for human consumption. This is in contrast to corn and beans in the United States. It was genetically engineered to resist pest, and thereby to cut costs and risks of pesticides. Agronomic traits. Really directly beneficial to farmers. Indirectly beneficial to consumers. 

The pests in question with potatoes were a chronic problem rather than a threat to the livelihood of the farmer or to the supply to the consumer. If they didn't figure this out, there would still be a potato crop. Might be smaller, might not be as high quality, might be more expensive, but we'd still have a potato crop because farmers could switch to other methods or they could live with higher but not devastating losses. What did face devastation in 1999 from this boycott is brands. The other thing besides taste is the dirty little secret is, in the food industry? What do you protect above all else? Your brand name. And the opponents got pretty smart about this because they used to try to boycott things like Monsanto. Monsanto we're going to boycott you. And that doesn't give them any leverage. But what gives the leverage? Going after the brand names. Here's a different case study, also from 1999: papaya in Hawaii. 

Dennis Gonsalves grew up in Hawaii. He was a professor at Cornell. And there's this problem with papaya called papaya ringspot virus. On Oahu, it devastated production. What did they do? The great thing about Hawaii, it's a bunch of islands. I think Wisconsin should try that approach. [LAUGHTER] So they moved, over the years, production to the big island of Hawaii because that avoided the insects and the virus that spread them. The other way around. Avoids the virus and the insect that spreads them. But there were still no effective controls, so as soon as the vector of the virus caught up and headed over to the big island, they had a big problem. 

Why use the genetic engineering approach? Because it was one of the few that was left to try that might work. What did they do? They took a gene from a virus, made a copy of it, gave it to the papaya plant, and that made the plant resistant to the viral disease. Sound familiar? It's not at all like vaccination. [LAUGHTER] It isn't. But it's very similar in the sense that you, the irony is if you want to make something resistant to it, you actually either infect it with a mild strain or you give it a gene of that virus. Plants don't have an immune system that I know of. Is that still correct? [LAUGHTER] Okay. So here's a papaya growing. Here's a papaya with ringspot. This is quite a technical feat because you had to find the gene, get it in the cells of the gene gun literally shooting particles coated with DNA, confirm that it's there, grow plants, test them, cross them. 

The original variety is called SunUp, they crossed it with another variety to get the Rainbow variety, and still keep all the desirable traits and characteristics. And Dennis Gonsalves pretty single-handedly had to get EPA, USDA, and FDA okay. And to negotiate with growers of organic papaya because what could the pollen do from the transgenics? Go over to the organics. Does that mean that those papayas are not organic? No. Not under USDA national organic standards. Does that mean that organic customers are willing to pay extra for them? They're not happy. They still might be certified as organic, but if it's got genes in it from drift, the organic buyers are much less likely to pay extra money for it. After 10 years of negotiating, in 2009 they got okay to ship these papayas to Japan, which were huge international destination for Hawaiian papayas. In this case, papaya was a very distinctive crop. It's a fruit crop that humans eat. 

It's facing devastation following the failure of all other approaches. We're up against the wall. In this case, the research wasn't driven by companies. It was driven by public land-grant universities, by farmers for whom the devastation is clear and present. And the researchers were able to find their way through the patents and other intellectual property so that they were able to get freedom to operate. Which I don't think is easy, and in the next case we'll talk about was really hard, but this is a big deal. There wasn't any brand to protect. And as far as I know, there were no new environmental issues from this approach to papaya resistance. This is a picture of Dennis Gonsalves from about that era. And now we're going to talk about another person who was active at that era also. 

This is Ingo Potrykus, and he's a guy that helped lead the group that developed golden rice. On the 31st of March, 1999, he retired, and they threw a big symposium for him. And at this symposium, golden rice was introduced to the public. That was 1999. He started this work in 1972 in plant molecular biology, and he started on grasses in 1973. He first started working on petunias, but then he shifted over to grains. He started with barley, and since I'm from Wisconsin, I want to laud him for an excellent choice. [LAUGHTER] Then he went to wheat, corn, and rye. He had to figure out how to grow these plants as individual cells or protoplasts and then to grow them in tissue culture. He had to figure out how to move DNA into plant cells without using the crown gall bacterium because crown gall doesn't work very well on grasses. 

A couple of guys at Cornell named Sanford and Klein figured out how to actually use a gene gun. In other words, take a 22 cartridge, oh, my god, they're laughing. This is true, Tom, right? Yeah. You take a 22 blank, you put it in, and that's what you use to accelerate little gold particles that you coded with DNA that you want to get into the cell and there's a very loud noise and the leaf that you hit with the gold powder, part of right there in the middle doesn't look too good. But around the outside, amazing. If you want to make a list of the top 10 things that you thought would never work. This is one on my list. [LAUGHTER] And since my wife might be watching, I'll try to avoid the other ones. [LAUGHTER] So he was also interested in not only making more food, more rice, but also realizing, wow, it's not just how much we make, there's also an issue of how nutritious is it. So he moves over to this Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and what he says was really important about this is he got a chance to do long-range research with stable funding and that allowed him to start working on rice. 

Now here's another way to introduce DNA in the plant cells, and that was microinjection, which is a little bit different. And what ended up happening with that is it didn't work so well. But he also started getting funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and that was the germ of the golden rice project. Why work on vitamin A? One hundred years ago, vitamin A was discovered here on this campus. The paper was published in July of 1913. We've had talks were about how that work continues to echo through the decades. It's still an incredibly important piece of work for worldwide health. One of the things that they were working on with rice was iron deficiency anemia which is related to vitamin A deficiency. That gets quite a few people on the planet. Vitamin A deficiency, according to Potrykus, still kills about a million children a year. 

It blinds about another half a million children a year. And about 230 million children are at risk due to vitamin A deficiency. Those are pretty good reasons to study something. And in 1992, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization declared that iron deficiency anemia and vitamin A deficiency should be the first priority in nutrition work globally. In other words, there was a clear need for increasing nutrients in staple crops, including rice. So we began in '91 doing something that nobody had succeeded in doing before, and that was not just to put one or two genes in to do two different things, but to put four genes in to do a pathway. A converts to B, B converts to C, C converts to D, and you've got to get all four of those to work on concert. This is the approach that his group took at first was to put on gene at a time, get four lines of rice, and then combine those by crossing. He tried that for about eight years, he says. Two very bad words: didn't work. 

1998, he had a postdoc. I don't know how Xudong Ye pronounces his name but that's how I'm going to pronounce it. He tried a different approach. He put all four genes in at once, and he used a crown gall bacterium rather than the gene gun because by that time they were able to use crown gall to get things into grasses. At this symposium where Potrykus is retiring, he had to retire because he was aging out, he presented the first work showing that the rice seeds contained useful quantities of vitamin A, or provitamin A, beta carotene Not only that, the seeds were actually kind of yellow. Hence, golden rice. It's the first case of pathway engineering. GMO technology had been used, according to Potrykus, to solve an urgent need and provide a clear benefit. The journal Nature rejected the paper without sending it to a reviewer. Somebody just said, why? That was very nice. 

Thank you for asking. This was one of the more unhappy phrases I've ever come about. From other publications in Nature at the time, we got the impression that Nature was more interested in cases which would rather question instead of support the value of genetic engineering technology. Ouch. Yeah. So, while he was waiting for it to get published, he got to come to the United States and give a talk down in St. Louis. There was a big press release and press conference. The paper was eventually published in the United States by Science on the 14th of January, 2000. He was on the cover of Time in July of 2000, and meanwhile, he was submitting patents and navigating licenses for other patented techniques that he had used in making golden rice. In order to get this kind of collaboration with people who held the patents, one of the big things he had to come to an agreement on is the definition of what a subsistence farmer is and what humanitarian use is. 

Zeneca arrived at $10,000 a year more from golden rice would not be a subsistence farmer. Fair enough. There it is. This total is stunning to me. He had to work around 70 licenses from 32 companies and universities. That makes Daedalus look like a wuss. So here's the Time article. This rice could save a million kids a year, but protesters believe such genetically modified foods are bad for us and the planet. Here's why. Here is another picture of Potrykus and his collaborator, Peter Beyer, from the University of Freiburg. 

This is really interesting what he has to say about patents. Because at first he was pretty angry about the patents, and why was all this stuff entangling what I want to do. And then he writes, it's a good thing I hung on for a while because much of the technology I'd been using was publicly known because the inventors could protect their right. What's the alternative to not patenting something? It's still intellectual property. It's called a? Trade secret. What's the recipe for Coca-Cola? Trade secret. So it's perfectly fine intellectual property, but what's the important thing about a patent? It is a public disclosure. So, for a guy who went through an awful long time trying to do good things, it's interesting that this is what he writes now about patenting. It makes far more sense to fight for a sensible use for intellectual properties rather than to fight patenting itself. The opponents, Potrykus thought, ought to be happy with this. 

They weren't. To this day they're not. Just three weeks ago in the Philippines, a test plot of golden rice, a current generation of it, was dug up and destroyed. It's really hard to come up with field data to test whether something is safe and effective when your experimental plots keep getting ripped up.  This is some amazing writing for me because what he is saying is that we have to think very carefully about opposition to a technique that is so powerful and has such capacity to feed people. This opposition could be tolerated in rich countries where people have a luxurious life without the technology. It can hardly be tolerated in poor countries, however. And probably the most damning thing he has to say is GMO opposition has to be held responsible for the foreseeable unnecessary death and blindness of millions of poor every year. That's an argument not a whole lot of people are willing to make. He is. 

And that was nine years ago. Excuse me, 13 years ago. So now let's look at what got us here. These two papers on what I think might, not two papers, these two articles that might change how we look at stuff. The first one is by Amy Harmon in the New York Times in July 27th, and the headline was A Race to Save the Orange by Altering its DNA. That will get your attention. The disease is called greening disease. The Chinese name is a long Chinese name that I can't pronounce, and it's abbreviated HLB. But what you're seeing in the picture is, wow, the orange turns green again and is misshapen. The second paper, excuse me, the second piece in the New York Times was actually on a blog on the NewYorkTimes.com and this is a pretty wonderful turn of a phrase: Can Genetic Engineering Save the Orange, and Vice Versa? And that was Andrew Revkin's response to Amy Harmon's article. 

Andrew Revkin was very supportive of the article. But before these two appeared, there was a third paper, excuse me, I keep calling them papers, a third story that came out in the New York Times on May 9th: Citrus Disease With No Cure Is Ravaging Florida Groves. This is starting to sound a little bit like papaya in Hawaii. So Lizette Alvarez writes that the disease is called citrus greening. It's caused by either of two bacteria. The bacteria are spread by flying and sucking insects called psyllids. Did I pronounce that correctly? Yeah. It spreads with the psyllid or if you spread citrus plants by going and buying citrus plants in one place and going and planting it in your backyard in another place. What do we have in our backyards in Wisconsin? Apple trees. What do people in southern California have in their backyard? Orange, lemon, grapefruit, lime. 

Just think of the gin and tonic opportunities. [LAUGHTER] This is disease is very slow to show symptoms, which means? It spreads without you knowing that it's spreading. It wrecks the fruit. It cuts the yields. It kills the trees. Not good things. It is, in a word, devastating. It originated in China, had spread around the world with the exception of Japan and the Mediterranean, so those of you who are worried about Limoncello out of Italy, and there's not genetic resistance found so far. It attacks not only oranges but all the citrus. That's one picture of what it looks like. 

 Imagine if the dairy industry in Wisconsin were threatened. If we don't find a cure, this disease will eliminate the citrus industry. Stark. Expensive. The citrus industry in Florida is worth $9 billion a year. $9 billion. $2 billion in California. As Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois once said: a billion and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking real money. [LAUGHTER] This disease is now everywhere, and it's just as bad as the doomsayers said it would be. That was said by Adam Putnam who's currently the Florida Agricultural Commissioner. 

On September 11th of 2001, Adam Putnam was a representative of Florida in the United States House of Representatives. He was serving on the House Committee on Agriculture where I was, up until August 31st, I was a congressional science fellow. Adam Putnam, at the time, was 26 years old. He had already served in the Florida legislature. He was the youngest member of congress. And on September 11th of 2001, a person by the name of George W Bush was in his district reading to young children. This is a person who has been around the block, and now he's the Florida Agricultural Commissioner and it's going to be a very interesting thing to see what that kind of connection does or does not do for this. The disease is also spreading to Texas and California. Just one tree so far in California, but the psyllid is being found in a lot of places. And yet in this article there was no mention of GMO. 

No mention of DNA. Researchers are working on several tracks. Fair enough because I am guessing that that reporter and Amy Harmon were working hand in hand, and they knew that the story that Amy was going to come out with and that headline, we're going to fix this by altering DNA, was the story that was yet to come. So this is what citrus greening looks like in Florida. Every little plot. It's positive bacterium. Now, here's the article that so impressed me by how it laid things out and why I think this might be, not the article itself, but the disease and the impacts might change how this controversy plays out over the next few years. How do you fight a disease for which no genetic resistance in citrus is found? This article followed a gentleman by the name of Rick Cress. She refers to him as Mr. Cress. He works for Southern Gardens which is owned by US Sugar. 

It's a very large orange grove owner. And he's basically saying we are down to our last possibility, and that's altering the oranges DNA with a gene from another species.  When you convince the orange growers of Florida that people are either going to drink transgenic orange juice or they're going to drink apple juice, I think you have their attention. The big question is, is Mr. Cress right when he says the consumer will support it if it's the only way? And now he's starting to get that feel for, well, that's what I thought two or three or four years ago, but in the last year the heat comes on, how is this going to play out. Devastation has to do with time. It takes five years to grow an orange tree to fruit. [WHISTLES] And you can lose 10%, 20% of your crop in a year. Or the orange in Florida could disappear first. So, the story tells about how they're looking at four or five different approaches. One is a bacterial virus to fight the bacterium. 

Another is a gene from spinach given to the trees to make the protein that fights the bacterium. A third one is a plant virus to move genes into the citrus tree. One gene that worked was from pig. Ah. [LAUGHTER]  There's no safety issue from our standpoint, said an EPA official when he was presented with that idea, but there is a certain creep factor. [LAUGHTER] That's what I call squeemics. Here's the psyllid. I want to make a Miley Cyrus joke here, but I won't. [LAUGHTER] Another approach was to have a synthetic gene made in the lab, but, boy, that would be really hard because once you have a synthetic gene, what have you got to do? Start from ground zero on the risk assessment. It's a lot easier to assess the safety of a gene from spinach which people have been, as the story said, feeding to babies for centuries. 

And then the possibility of an onion gene to discourage psyllids from landing on the citrus. So the orange growers right now, according to that article, are wrestling with Monsanto effect and its patents. Who here loves to hate Monsanto? They're learning from the Flavr Savr experience, they're enlisting a broader circle of partners, and they're going with the spinach gene. And here's the cost that goes with the current situation. They have to triple their insecticide sprays to slow down the psyllid right now. That's expensive. It doesn't say a whole lot for your environmental aspects either. They're also starting to have to deal with GMO opponents, especially after this article comes out. They're generating data that the EPA requested on the safety and environmental impacts of the spinach protein, and they're playing the pesticides card. This is talking, a Florida grower talking to California growers at a meeting of California orange growers. 

We're using more pesticides than we've ever used before. Consumers need to know that. Now, in two years, if he wins regulatory approval for the transgenic oranges, they'll be able to go in the ground, and the first use will be able to be for sale in about five years. But if we don't have consumer confidence, it don't matter.  That article was followed the following day with this posting by Andrew Revkin: Can Genetic Engineering Save the Orange, and Vice Versa? One of the things he did was to quote Amy Harmon in saying it's not where a gene comes from that matters, it's what it does. And I think Ingo Potrykus and Dennis Gonsalves would also add: it matters what we do. So, with that, I'd like to say thank you very much for listening to this, and I'd be happy to respond to your questions and comments. [APPLAUSE]