The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

by Deborah Blum

  But some of his researchers worried that the popular association between GMOs and Monsanto—and in turn between Monsanto and the criticisms of modern agriculture—could turn consumers against Southern Gardens’ transgenic oranges.

  “The article doesn’t say ‘Monsanto’ anywhere, but the comments are all about Monsanto,” Mirkov said.

  It had not helped win hearts and minds for GMOs, Kress knew, that the first such crop widely adopted by farmers was the soybean engineered by Monsanto with a bacteria gene—to tolerate a weed killer Monsanto also made.

  Starting in the mid-1990s, soybean farmers in the United States overwhelmingly adopted that variety of the crop, which made it easier for them to control weeds. But the subsequent broader use of the chemical—along with a distaste for Monsanto’s aggressive business tactics and a growing suspicion of a food system driven by corporate profits—combined to forge a consumer backlash. Environmental activists vandalized dozens of field trials and protested brands that used Monsanto’s soybeans or corn, introduced soon after, which was engineered to prevent pests from attacking it.

  In response, companies including McDonald’s, Frito-Lay, and Heinz pledged not to use GMO ingredients in certain products, and some European countries prohibited their cultivation.

  Some of Kress’s scientists were still fuming about what they saw as the lost potential for social good hijacked by both the activists who opposed genetic engineering and the corporations that failed to convince consumers of its benefits. In many developing countries, concerns about safety and ownership of seeds led governments to delay or prohibit cultivation of needed crops: Zambia, for instance, declined shipments of GMO corn even during a 2002 famine.

  “It’s easy for someone who can go down to the grocery store and buy anything they need to be against GMOs,” said Jaynes, who faced such barriers with a high-protein sweet potato he had engineered with a synthetic gene.

  To Kress in early 2011, any comparison to Monsanto—whose large blocks of patents he had to work around and whose thousands of employees worldwide dwarfed the 750 he employed in Florida at peak harvest times—seemed far-fetched. If it was successful, Southern Gardens would hope to recoup its investment by charging a royalty for its trees. But its business strategy was aimed at saving the orange crop, whose total acreage was a tiny fraction of the crops the major biotechnology companies had pursued.

  He urged his worried researchers to look at the early success of Flavr Savr tomatoes. Introduced in 1994 and engineered to stay fresh longer than traditional varieties, they proved popular enough that some stores rationed them, before business missteps by their developer ended their production.

  And he was no longer alone in the pursuit of a genetically modified orange. Citrus growers were collectively financing research into a greening-resistant tree, and the Agriculture Department had also assigned a team of scientists to it. Any solution would have satisfied Kress. Almost daily, he could smell the burning of infected trees, which mingled with orange-blossom sweetness in the grove just beyond Southern Gardens’ headquarters.

  A Growing Urgency

  In an infection-filled greenhouse where every nontransgenic tree had showed symptoms of disease, Mirkov’s trees with the spinach gene had survived unscathed for more than a year. Kress would soon have three hundred of them planted in a field trial. But in the spring of 2012, he asked the Environmental Protection Agency, the first of three federal agencies that would evaluate his trees, for guidance. The next step was safety testing. And he felt that it could not be started fast enough.

  Mirkov assured him that the agency’s requirements for animal tests to assess the safety of the protein produced by his gene, which bore no resemblance to anything on the list of known allergens and toxins, would be minimal.

  “It’s spinach,” he insisted. “It’s been eaten for centuries.”

  Other concerns weighed on Kress that spring: growers in Florida did not like to talk about it, but the industry’s tripling of pesticide applications to kill the bacteria-carrying psyllid was, while within legal limits, becoming expensive and worrisome. One widely used pesticide had stopped working as the psyllid evolved resistance, and Florida’s citrus growers’ association was petitioning one company to lift the twice-a-season restrictions on spraying young trees—increasingly its only hope for an uninfected harvest.

  Others in the industry who knew of Kress’s project were turning to him. He agreed to speak at the fall meeting of citrus growers in California, where the greening disease had just been detected. “We need to hear about the transgenic solution,” said Ted Batkin, the association’s director. But Kress worried that he had nothing to calm their fears.

  And an increasingly vocal movement to require any food with genetically engineered ingredients to carry a “GMO” label had made him uneasy.

  Supporters of one hotly contested California ballot initiative argued for labeling as a matter of consumer rights and transparency—but their advertisements often implied that the crops were a hazard: one pictured a child about to take a joyful bite of a pest-resistant cob of corn, on which was emblazoned a question mark and the caption “Corn, engineered to grow its own pesticide.”

  Yet the gene that makes corn insect-resistant, he knew, came from the same soil bacterium long used by organic food growers as a natural insecticide.

  Arguing that the Food and Drug Administration should require labels on food containing GMOs, one leader of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group, cited “pink slime, deadly melons, tainted turkeys and BPA in our soup.”

  Kress attributed the labeling campaigns to the kind of tactic any industry might use to gain a competitive edge: they were financed largely by companies that sell organic products, which stood to gain if packaging implying a hazard drove customers to their own non-GMO alternatives. He did not aim to hide anything from consumers, but he would want them to understand how and why his oranges were genetically engineered. What bothered him was that a label seemed to lump all GMOs into one stigmatized category.

  And when the EPA informed him in June 2012 that it would need to see test results for how large quantities of spinach protein affected honeybees and mice, he gladly wrote out the $300,000 check to have the protein made.

  It was the largest single expense yet in a project that had so far cost more than $5 million. If these tests raised no red flags, he would need to test the protein as it appears in the pollen of transgenic orange blossoms. Then the agency would want to test the juice.

  “Seems excessive,” Mirkov said.

  But Kress and Irey shared a sense of celebration. The path ahead was starting to clear.

  Rather than wait for Mirkov’s three hundred trees to flower, which could take several years, they agreed to try to graft his spinach-gene shoots to mature trees to hasten the production of pollen—and, finally, their first fruit—for testing.

  Wall of Opposition

  Early one morning a year ago, Kress checked the Agriculture Department’s web site from home. The agency had opened its sixty-day public comment period on the trees modified to produce “Arctic apples” that did not brown.

  His own application, he imagined, would take a similar form.

  He skimmed through the company’s 163-page petition, showing how the apples are equivalent in nutritional content to normal apples, how remote was the likelihood of cross-pollination with other apple varieties, and the potentially bigger market for a healthful fruit.

  Then he turned to the comments. There were hundreds. And they were almost universally negative. Some were from parents, voicing concerns that the nonbrowning trait would disguise a rotten apple—though transgenic apples rotten from infection would still turn brown. Many wrote as part of a petition drive by the Center for Food Safety, a group that opposes biotechnology.

  “Apples are supposed to be a natural, healthy snack,” it warned. “Genetically engineered apples are neither.”

  Others voiced a general distrust of scientists’ guarant
ees: “Too many things were presented to us as innocuous and years later we discovered it was untrue,” wrote one woman. “After two cancers I don’t feel like taking any more unnecessary risks.”

  Many insisted that should the fruit be approved, it ought to be labeled.

  That morning Kress drove to work late. He should not be surprised by the hostility, he told himself.

  Irey tried to console him with good news: the data on the honeybees and mice had come back. The highest dose of the protein the EPA wanted tested had produced no ill effect.

  But the magnitude of the opposition had never hit Kress so hard. “Will they believe us?” he asked himself for the first time. “Will they believe we’re doing this to eliminate chemicals and we’re making sure it’s safe? Or will they look at us and say, ‘That’s what they all say’?”

  The major brands were rumored to be looking beyond Florida for their orange juice—perhaps to Brazil, where growers had taken to abandoning infected groves to plant elsewhere. Other experiments that Kress viewed as similar to his own had foundered. Pigs engineered to produce less-polluting waste had been euthanized after their developer at a Canadian university had failed to find investors. A salmon modified to grow faster was still awaiting FDA approval. A study pointing to health risks from GMOs had been discredited by scientists but was contributing to a sense among some consumers that the technology is dangerous.

  And while the California labeling measure had been defeated, it had spawned a ballot initiative in Washington State and legislative proposals in Connecticut, Missouri, New Mexico, Vermont, and many other states.

  In the heat of last summer, Kress gardened more savagely than his wife had ever seen.

  Driving through the Central Valley of California last October to speak at the California Citrus Growers meeting, Kress considered how to answer critics. Maybe even a blanket “GMO” label would be OK, he thought, if it would help consumers understand that he had nothing to hide. He could never prove that there were no risks to genetically modifying a crop. But he could try to explain the risks of not doing so.

  Southern Gardens had lost 700,000 trees trying to control the disease, more than a quarter of its total. The forecast for the coming spring harvest was dismal. The approval to use more pesticide on young trees had come through that day. At his hotel that night, he slipped a new slide into his standard talk.

  On the podium the next morning, he talked about the growing use of pesticides: “We’re using a lot of chemicals, pure and simple,” he said. “We’re using more than we’ve ever used before.”

  Then he stopped at the new slide. Unadorned, it read “Consumer Acceptance.” He looked out at the audience.

  What these growers wanted most, he knew, was reassurance that he could help them should the disease spread. But he had to warn them: “If we don’t have consumer confidence, it doesn’t matter what we come up with.”

  Planting

  One recent sunny morning, Kress drove to a fenced field, some distance from his office and far from any other citrus tree. He unlocked the gate and signed in, as required by Agriculture Department regulations for a field trial of a genetically modified crop.

  Just in the previous few months, Whole Foods had said that because of customer demand it would avoid stocking most GMO foods and require labels on them by 2018. Hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world had joined in a “March Against Monsanto”—and the Agriculture Department had issued its final report for this year’s orange harvest showing a 9 percent decline from last year, attributable to citrus greening.

  But visiting the field gave him some peace. In some rows were the trees with no new gene in them, sick with greening. In others were the three hundred juvenile trees with spinach genes, all healthy. In the middle were the trees that carried his immediate hopes: fifteen mature Hamlins and Valencias, 7 feet tall, onto which had been grafted shoots of Mirkov’s spinach-gene trees.

  There was good reason to believe that the trees would pass the EPA’s tests when they bloom next spring. And he was gathering the data the Agriculture Department would need to ensure that the trees posed no risk to other plants. When he had fruit, the Food and Drug Administration would compare its safety and nutritional content to conventional oranges.

  In his office is a list of groups to contact when the first GMO fruit in Florida is ready to pick: environmental organizations, consumer advocates, and others. Exactly what he would say when he finally contacted them, he did not know. Whether anyone would drink the juice from his genetically modified oranges, he did not know.

  But he had decided to move ahead.

  Late this summer he will plant several hundred more young trees with the spinach gene, in a new greenhouse. In two years, if he wins regulatory approval, they will be ready to go into the ground. The trees could be the first to produce juice for sale in five years or so.

  Whether it is his transgenic tree or someone else’s, he believed, Florida growers will soon have trees that could produce juice without fear of its being sour or in short supply.

  For a moment, alone in the field, he let his mind wander.

  “Maybe we can use the technology to improve orange juice,” he could not help thinking. “Maybe we can find a way to have oranges grow year-round, or get two for every one we get now on a tree.”

  Then he reined in those thoughts.

  He took the clipboard down, signed out, and locked the gate.

  ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

  A Life-or-Death Situation

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  IF MARGARET PABST BATTIN hadn’t had a cold that day, she would have joined her husband, Brooke Hopkins, on his bike ride. Instead Peggy (as just about everyone calls her) went to two lectures at the University of Utah, where she teaches philosophy and writes about end-of-life bioethics. Which is why she wasn’t with Brooke the moment everything changed.

  Brooke was cycling down a hill in City Creek Canyon in Salt Lake City when he collided with an oncoming bicycle around a blind curve, catapulting him onto the mountain path. His helmet cracked just above the left temple, meaning that Brooke fell directly on his head, and his body followed in a grotesque somersault that broke his neck at the top of the spine. He stopped breathing, turned purple, and might have died if a flight-rescue nurse hadn’t happened to jog by. The jogger resuscitated and stabilized him, and someone raced to the bottom of the canyon to call 911.

  If Peggy had been there and known the extent of Brooke’s injury, she might have urged the rescuers not to revive him. Brooke had updated a living will the previous year, specifying that should he suffer a grievous illness or injury leading to a terminal condition or vegetative state, he wanted no procedures done that “would serve only to unnaturally prolong the moment of my death and to unnaturally postpone or prolong the dying process.” But Peggy wasn’t there, and Brooke, who had recently retired as an English professor at the University of Utah, was kept breathing with a hand-pumped air bag during the ambulance ride to University Hospital, 3 miles away. As soon as he got there, he was attached to a ventilator.

  By the time Peggy arrived and saw her husband ensnared in the life-sustaining machinery he had hoped to avoid, decisions about intervention already had been made. It was November 14, 2008, late afternoon. She didn’t know yet that Brooke would end up a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the shoulders down.

  Suffering, suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death—these were subjects she had thought and written about for years, and now, suddenly, they turned unbearably personal. Alongside her physically ravaged husband, she would watch lofty ideas be trumped by reality—and would discover just how messy, raw, and muddled the end of life can be.

  In the weeks after the accident, Peggy found herself thinking about the title character in Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, who wondered, “What if my whole life has been wrong?” Her whole life had involved writing “wheelbarrows full” of books and articles championing self-determination in dying. And now here was her husba
nd, a plugged-in mannequin in the ICU, the very embodiment of a right-to-die case study.

  An international leader in bioethics, Peggy explored the right to a good and easeful death by their own hand, if need be, for people who were terminally ill, as well as for those whose lives had become intolerable because of chronic illness, serious injury, or extreme old age. She didn’t shy away from contentious words like “euthanasia.” Nor did she run from fringe groups like NuTech, which is devoted to finding more efficient methods of what it calls self-deliverance, or SOARS (Society for Old Age Rational Suicide), which defends the right of the “very elderly” to choose death as a way to preempt old-age catastrophes. She also found common purpose with more mainstream groups, like Compassion and Choices, that push for legislation or ballot initiatives to allow doctors to help “hasten death” in the terminally ill (which is now permitted, with restrictions, in Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Vermont). And she testified in trials on behalf of individuals seeking permission to end their lives legally with the help of a doctor or a loved one.

  At the heart of her argument was her belief in autonomy. “The competent patient can, and ought to be accorded the right to, determine what is to be done to him or her, even if . . . it means he or she will die,” she wrote in 1994 in The Least Worst Death, the third of her seven books about how we die.

  Peggy traces her interest in death to her mother’s difficult one, from liver cancer, when Peggy was twenty-one. Only later, when, in order to write fiction, she started in an MFA program at the University of California, Irvine (which she completed while getting her doctorate in philosophy and raising two young children) did she realize how much that event had shaped her thinking. Her short stories “all looked like bioethics problems,” she says, wrestling with topics like aging, mental competence, medical research, suicide—moral quandaries she would be mining for the rest of her life.