The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  Except for the journalists, two lawyers, and a historian of science, everyone at Asilomar was a molecular biologist. Not invited were people with expertise in ethics, public health, the human sciences, or even other branches of biology, like ecology or agricultural science. Politicians and civic groups were not present, nor were any members of the public. In an opening address, the conference co-chair, David Baltimore of MIT, ruled out “topics peripheral to the meeting.” Among these, he said, were “the complicated question of what’s right and what’s wrong” and “complicated questions of political motivation.” From the scientists’ point of view, the absence of these subjects had no effect on the outcome. Under the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, research continued almost without restriction; more than 250 biotech firms were founded, many of them by scientists, to take advantage of the new findings. Prizes were awarded for this work—Baltimore won a Nobel in 1975. In all this activity, scientists pointed out, genetic engineering didn’t hurt a soul. Hardly anyone even seemed to lift an eyebrow.

  An activist named Jeremy Rifkin, along with three environmental groups, sued to stop the ice-minus test in November 1983. Because the Asilomar conference—and the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee it spawned—consisted almost exclusively of biologists, he said, it didn’t have the “interdisciplinary capability” to judge environmental hazards. Nor could it evaluate the ethics of imposing risks on the public. The experiment should be stopped—now.

  It was easy to mock Rifkin. A social activist since the Vietnam War, he liked to attack “the Boys”—Isaac Newton, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Charles Darwin, among others—who had, to Rifkin’s way of thinking, created a worldview that valued efficiency rather than empathy and the spirit. By “reducing all life from matter to energy to information,” he told a reporter at the time, disciples of the Boys were seeking to “create the perfectly efficient living utility, be it a microbe, a plant, an animal species, or perhaps even human beings.” Without scientific expertise himself, Rifkin was notorious for stoking alarms that researchers found absurd. In his ice-minus complaint, for example, he claimed that because “the naturally occurring ice-nucleating bacteria blown by the wind into the upper atmosphere may play a role in the global climate,” the “recombinant DNA mutant bacteria” could alter weather patterns across the world. This was nonsense—P. syringae can’t live in the air, isn’t blown into the upper atmosphere, and doesn’t affect the climate.

  Nonetheless, Rifkin was on to something. For ice-minus, the court “emphatically” agreed with Rifkin: the expert panel hadn’t considered “the possibility of various environmental effects.” The company went back and performed an environmental assessment, measuring wind-dispersal patterns during spraying; the Environmental Protection Agency conducted its own review. At Berkeley, researchers examined the effects of ice-minus on sixty-seven local plants, including every important crop grown in the proposed test region. Four years after its initial approval, the experiment was again allowed to proceed. (It was successful, but the product was never marketed.)

  None of the evaluations persuaded Rifkin that ice-minus was safe—he fought it until the end. Rifkin didn’t think that any product of gene-splicing could be adequately tested or should be released in the wild. Much of the public was equally unmoved. Local officials and environmental groups in Brentwood joined Rifkin in protesting ice-minus. Vandals tried to destroy the strawberry plants and, later, the potato plants in another test. In effect, all were saying: We don’t trust you white-coats—there have been too many examples of unintended consequences. National and international organizations have followed Rifkin’s lead. Genetically modified crops have been banned in parts of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

  To counter the perception of risk, scientific groups have repeatedly issued statements supporting the safety of genetically modified foods. The tally of pro-gene-splicers is like a Who’s Who of global research: the American Association for the Advancement of Science board of directors (2012); the World Health Organization (2005); the German Academy of Sciences (2006); the European Union (2010); the American Medical Association (2012); the British government (2003); the Australian and New Zealand governments (2005); three British molecular biologists (2008); three U.S. agronomists (2013); the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2016). And so on.

  These efforts have been entirely unsuccessful. A Gallup poll in 1999 found that a little more than a quarter of U.S. citizens thought that food from genetically modified organisms (GMOs, to activists) was unsafe. Sixteen years and a dozen scientific reports later, the Pew Research Center found that the fears had actually increased: 57 percent of the U.S. public now thought that GMOs were dangerous; 67 percent believed that scientists didn’t understand the health risks. Levels of distrust are even higher in Europe. “The most ironic aspect of this long-running and unfinished controversy is that the brilliant minds that figured out this world-transforming technology in the first place have yet to figure out a way to ease public fears about it,” remarked the journalist Stephen S. Hall at the time of the ice-minus fight.

  Researchers find this infuriating. Why don’t people care that the people who best understand the technology believe it to be useful and safe? After all, scientists eat the food, too. But they are looking at the question as if it were one of risk, whereas men and women on the street also think in terms of fairness—equity, to use the two-dollar word. In the laboratory, scientists ask: Is it feasible? In the world outside the laboratory, people ask: Is it right?

  Contrast the behavior of the European and North American consumers who fear putting GMOs into their bodies as food with that of the European and North American patients who willingly put GMOs into their bodies as medicine. Genetically modified E. coli creates synthetic insulin for diabetics; genetically modified baker’s yeast produces hepatitis B vaccine; genetically modified mammal cells make blood factor VIII for hemophiliacs and tissue plasminogen activator for heart-attack victims. Although activists have occasionally campaigned against these drugs, their efforts have not caught fire. The divergent reactions are not because people are foolish but because the two circumstances have different ethical benefit-cost calculations. In both cases scientists assure non-scientists that the likelihood of negative side effects is small. But the diabetics who use synthetic insulin personally benefit from it, compensating for any risk. The same is true for the hemophiliacs and cardiac patients. Meanwhile, the Californians who lived around the strawberry and potato patches would receive no benefit whatsoever from the ice-minus test. From their point of view, they were being asked to expose themselves to an unknown peril for the benefit of some rich venture capitalists in a city hundreds of miles way. Imposing any risk, however tiny, would make them worse off. They were being used purely as a means to somebody else’s end—something that philosophers have regarded as unethical since the days of Kant.

  As a rule, GMOs have made life easier and cheaper for large-scale farmers in developed nations by reducing the costs of chemicals, labor, or storage. But they have provided few tangible gains for the middle-class folk in those nations who buy the farmers’ products in supermarkets. The food doesn’t look or smell or taste better; it doesn’t seem less expensive. Why should they accept any risk, no matter how small the white-coats claim them to be?

  Matters are more complex in poor places, where consumers are more likely to be farmers, too. Reducing costs for farmers there means reducing costs to consumers. Assume for the moment that C4 rice becomes everything that scientists like Langdale hope—productive, resilient, efficient, tasty. It could directly benefit, say, a village of Cambodian subsistence farmers, especially if (a big if) every villager can obtain the necessary water, fertilizer, and credit. In those circumstances, C4 rice could be a potent weapon against hunger and malnutrition. In affluent California, though, its virtues seem less evident. Farmers in the Central Valley would have bigger harvests, but would likely export the surplus.
Local food prices would be little changed. The biggest benefit to Californians would be increased income-tax revenue—nothing to scoff at, but also nothing that has ever motivated large numbers of people to action.

  The conundrum is that poor nations are less likely to accept an innovation if it is rejected by their richer neighbors—it can become stigmatized. The stigma turns into outright economic harm if the rich nations ban the innovation; if C4 rice cannot be exported, farmers seeking extra cash are less likely to grow it. The action by which middle-class people refuse to take risks on behalf of rich companies becomes a way of blocking aspirations of the distant poor. Weighing the relative pluses and minuses is an exercise in morality that is outside the realm of science.

  Coupled with debate about what is right is a second about what is good. Wizards, Borlaug loudly among them, have repeatedly claimed that GMOs are essential to feeding tomorrow’s world, which they identify with large-scale industrial agriculture. Prophets, who believe that large-scale industrial agriculture endangers tomorrow’s world, naturally resist any innovation that is said to be central to perpetuating it. In this way GMOs became a focus for a larger disquiet, a synecdoche for a larger anxiety about being an insignificant part of a vast economic complex that did not have the citizen’s best interests at heart. Prophets saw giant farms, almost empty but for huge machines, producing endless streams of protein and carbohydrates that were sent to factories for processing—and they recoiled at the image of life this conjured. They didn’t want something as intimate as breakfast to be out of any possibility of control. To be so far removed from any identifiable human touch. To be (as some thought) under the thumb of corporate capitalism. All the scientific reports in the world wouldn’t address the source of the foreboding. The fundamental disquiet would still be there.

  Trees and Tubers

  For a long time Lloyd Nichols worked in ramp services at O’Hare Airport, outside Chicago. He worked for one airline that got bought by another and then that airline merged with a third. His co-workers were constantly being laid off. It seemed clear that his future in the airline industry was limited. In retrospect, he told me, this might have had something to do with how much attention he paid to his garden.

  Nichols had always liked taking care of plants and animals. As time passed, the gardens got bigger. He was hoeing in the morning a couple of hours before going to the airport and weeding until dark after he came home. When he heard about a new variety or a new crop, he stuck it in the ground to see what happened. Wanting more space, Lloyd dragged his wife, Doreen, and their kids from the suburbs in 1977 to a ten-acre parcel in Marengo, in northwest Illinois. Four acres went for the garden. He was thirty-three.

  For a couple years he commuted, an hour back and forth five times a week. All the while he thought about quitting his job and being self-sufficient. Going into the garden, picking up lettuce or zucchini or tomatoes, having them fresh on the dinner table an hour later. Lloyd and Doreen planted a little orchard, apples and apricots. Soon he was producing more than his family could eat, so he loaded up the surplus on the back of a truck and sold it at one of the new farmers’ markets that were opening around Chicago. He bought neighboring parcels of land and planted them. Before long some of his customers were chefs at fancy restaurants in the city. When the tumult in the airline industry claimed his job, he thought, well, maybe I can make a go of this.

  The family split up on weekends to take produce to different farmers’ markets. As sales rose, Lloyd ran out of family and had to hire people to help. Then he had to hire more people to help the help. When I visited, Nichols Farm had expanded to 527 acres and eight outbuildings with refrigerators powered by solar panels and a wind turbine. It had eleven full-time, year-round workers and thirty or more seasonal employees. They grew a thousand different crop varieties, give or take. On one wall were handwritten charts that listed them all, together with current growing notes—a spreadsheet in non-digital form.

  Nichols drove me around the operation on a kind of golf cart. It was evident that he was one of those people born with a limitless store of energy and enthusiasm. He spoke rapidly as I tried to take notes in the jouncing vehicle. He said he had known about J. I. Rodale and Albert Howard from back when he was a kid reading his father’s Prevention magazines and more or less farmed according to their ideas because he liked the idea of having his crops spring up from the richest possible soil. But he refused to call his farm organic or be certified as an organic grower because he didn’t relish some standards committee telling him what to do. “If I need to use some chemical that is not on their list, I’m going to do it if it’s best for my plants.”

  Spread over the gently undulating contours of his land was a tribute to the breeder’s art: eleven types of cauliflower, twelve types of broccoli, thirteen types of lettuce, fourteen types of melon. A mosaic of salad greens, lustrous in the sun. Pumpkins the size of a mastiff. Calendula, canna, and carrot; celosia, coleus, and collard. For a while, Nichols told me, he hadn’t grown potatoes, because he thought people bought them in anonymous, fifty-pound bags. Now he planted twenty-three varieties. Pride of place went to his apple orchard: more than three hundred varieties. He said he really liked apples. “Even the spitters.”

  I was seduced. Nichols and his farm were a pleasure to be around. So were the similar people and places that I had visited in California, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and North Carolina—and the farms like them, most of them newly established, that I had come across in India, Thailand, and Brazil. The enthusiasm of their owners was palpable and infectious.

  Less clear was their comparative role in the food system, today and tomorrow. Nichols’s concern for maintaining the richness of his soil and the health of the farm ecosystem it supported would have heartened William Vogt. But at the same time (as Nichols was quick to point out), his food was more expensive than supermarket food from industrial farms. Like a custom-furniture maker, he was making beautiful things for a restricted clientele. Nothing wrong with that, Wizards say. But don’t imagine that this kind of operation can play a big role in feeding the world of 10 billion. At a time when we should be thinking about doubling global harvests, it’s a mistake to focus on boutique farms, no matter how charming. That’s the line, anyway.

  “Organic” may be the wrong term for these enterprises—like the Nichols farm, not all of them follow the official rules for certification. More important, it implies that they are somehow “natural,” not constructed landscapes based on scientific information. To run these sorts of farm requires integrating multiple forms of knowledge—botanical, biochemical, pedological, economic, legal, cultural—that are constantly interacting and changing. The results are exotic cosmopolitan objects, as thoroughly driven by contemporary technology as the products of the pharmaceutical plants that they (mostly) abjure.

  Nichols took me to visit his neighbor, Harold Heinberg. Heinberg had a bit more than 1,200 acres in wheat and maize. Good-looking plants, at least to my untrained eye. While I walked down the rows of maize, Nichols and Heinberg stayed in the shade cast by a barn, talking amiably. The two men were friendly neighbors but their farms might as well have been in different countries. The Nichols farm had forty or so workers and a thousand different crop varieties. The Heinberg farm had one and a half workers—Heinberg’s son pitched in when not at his day job as a trucker—and two crop varieties. What did the work was a million-plus dollars’ worth of farm machinery and a stream of chemical treatments, each applied on a precise schedule. Heinberg let me walk about the shed where he kept his tractors, harvesters, threshers, and so on. The intricate machines were a model of the Wizard’s art. Some had tires the size of a tall man. A workbench had a dusty laptop, open to a spreadsheet—a database not all that different in form from the one in Nichols’s barn.

  Which of the two farms is more productive? Wizards and Prophets would disagree about the answer, because they disagree about the question. To Wizards, the question means: Which farm creates more calories—more
usable energy, in Weaver’s terms—per acre? Scores of research teams have tried to appraise the relative contributions of organic and conventional agriculture. These inquiries in turn have been gathered together and assessed, a procedure that is also fraught with difficulty (researchers use different definitions of “organic,” compare different kinds of farms, and include different costs in their analyses). Nonetheless, every attempt to sum up the data that I know of has shown that in side-by-side comparisons, Howard-style farms grow less food per acre overall than Liebig-style farms—sometimes a little bit less, sometimes quite a lot. The implications for the world of 2050 are obvious, Wizards say. If farmers must grow twice as much food to feed the 10 billion, following An Agricultural Testament ties their hands.

  Prophets smite their brows in exasperation at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farming systems wholly in terms of calories produced—in terms of usable energy—is a perfect example of the flaws of reductive thinking. It does not include the costs of overfertilization, habitat loss, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse; it doesn’t account for the destruction of rural communities; it doesn’t consider whether the food is tasty and nutritious. It’s like evaluating automobiles entirely by their gasoline mileage, without taking into account safety, comfort, reliability, emissions, or any of the other factors that people consider when buying cars.

  The difficulty is that both arguments are correct on their own terms. At bottom, the disagreement is about the nature of agriculture—and, with it, the best form of society. To Borlaugians, farming is a species of useful drudgery that should be eased and reduced as much as possible to maximize individual liberty. Borlaug’s life is an example: when his family mechanized their farm by buying a tractor, it freed him to go to school, and from there to change the world. The farm is a springboard, essential as a base, but also a trap. Howard-style farms may mimic natural ecosystems, but they are also ensnarled in them, unable to rise above their limits.