“Thirty years ago the university got 40 percent of its budget from the state,” Meyers said. “Now it gets 12 percent. The funding rate for federal grants has declined significantly as well. As these sources of funding have declined, there’s been a push to diversify the sources of funding for research. So as scientists, you have to find a way to support your lab and support your graduate students. I’m a basic research scientist. Industry comes to me, and they don’t give me money for science because they think I’m a great guy. They say, ‘We don’t know how to measure small RNAs, and we need some help.’ My academic group has expertise that can help them to accomplish their goals, and academics can also learn from projects with our industry colleagues.”
This dynamic—the drying up of publicly funded research, and its replacement by research paid for by industry—naturally results in an agricultural system dictated by industry, critics say. But the larger issue has to do with the way this thinking—manipulating genetics to serve industrial purposes—has changed the way scientists see the world. Cells are not really like machines, as Meyers suggests, and tinkering with genes is not really like tinkering with a car engine, Craig Holdrege, a scientist and philosopher who runs the Nature Institute in New York, told me. Like organisms out in the world, genes operate in dynamic systems, and both context and timing are far more complex than most scientists allow.
“In a way we’re treating organisms as if they were made up of independent parts, and you can put things in or exchange them, and come up with a result that you (as a human being) like,” Holdrege said. “You think you have that degree of control, and you can manipulate that organism to do what you want it to do. But if you read in the literature of genetics and epigenetics, it’s completely clear that context matters, that timing matters, and you cannot say that there is a very particular ‘this’ that always causes a particular ‘that.’ That’s what we’ve all been indoctrinated to think. Even though the literature is screaming that at us, the habit of thought about causal mechanisms is very deeply entrenched and not easy to overcome, or to move beyond, or to see its limitations. We need to take more seriously the fluidity, the plasticity, and the interconnectedness of all structures and processes.”
How you feel about GMOs, whether you are a consumer or a biologist, may have less to do with your grasp of complex science or tangled agricultural history and more to do with how you view your place in the world. Yale University’s Dan Kahan recently asked more than 1,500 Americans to rate the threat of climate change on a scale of 0 to 10, then correlated their responses with their scientific literacy. He found that higher literacy was associated with stronger views at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy, in other words, promoted polarization, not consensus. People use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.
Similar passions have polarized the country on GMOs, in part because so many of the issues are the same as they are with climate change: big corporations, big government, big fears.
Americans fall into two basic camps, Kahan says. Those who think of themselves as “egalitarian” or “communitarian” are generally suspicious of industry, which they would like overseen by regulators. In contrast, people who see themselves as “hierarchical” or “individualistic” respect leaders of industry and dislike government interference, which they presume would lead to taxes or regulations. Take a barber in a rural town in South Carolina, Kahan writes. If his customers were skeptical about climate change, would it be smart for the barber to urge them to petition Congress to limit industrial emissions? If he did, Kahan writes, he would find himself “out of a job.”
When we argue about GMOs, or climate change, in other words, we are also arguing about who we are and what our crowd believes. “It’s fascinating, almost mesmerizing, how personally involved we get in these things,” Richard Manshardt, the Hawaiian papaya researcher, told me. “We don’t want to be manipulated. We want to control our destiny, and sometimes that means doing absolutely stupid and irrational things. People think, ‘GMOs are bad because the group I’m with doesn’t like them,’ and it ends up being all about my standing within my group. Your own logic, your own sense of what’s right, gets challenged, and most of us are not comfortable with changing that. We are not open to new kinds of challenges.”
Of course, this works both ways. It’s not just members of the “unscientific public” who fear being seen as outliers in their own social group. It is scientists too. Indeed, in its intensity—as well as the size of the stakes—the scientific debate over GMOs has become almost theological, Brian Snyder, the head of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, told me. “We’re not just talking about data, we’re talking about which worldview to fit data into,” Snyder said. “It’s not just this side and that side. People use the same science and reach different conclusions. At the very least, scientists are making subjective decisions about what to study, and often their results will follow from this subjectivity.
“It’s fascinating to me that so much of the technology is being developed in order to address problems caused by the previous technology,” Snyder said. “So when you boil that down you realize there’s sort of an undying faith that answers are always going to come out of the laboratory, that we’re just one discovery away from solving it all.”
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle suggests that a scientist’s worldview has a great deal to say about what he will get from his data, Snyder said. “We really are right down to pointing out world issues, paradigm issues. We have no effective way of carrying on a conversation about conflicting worldviews. We used to chop the heads off people who said the earth revolves around the sun.”
The Séralini Affair
If ever there was a moment when scientists were ready to chop off some heads, it came after a journal article claimed to prove that GMOs—and the common herbicide glyphosate—caused cancer and premature death in rats. The study, by Gilles-Éric Séralini of the University of Caen in Normandy, France, monitored two hundred rats for two years. The rats were divided into ten groups, each with ten males and ten females. Some groups were fed different amounts of a strain of Monsanto corn (called NK603) that had been engineered to resist glyphosate. Some corn had been sprayed with glyphosate, some had not. Other groups were fed glyphosate in their drinking water. There was also a control group, which was fed non-engineered corn and plain water.
Séralini found that female rats that ate both the engineered corn and the glyphosate tended to develop mammary tumors and compromised sex hormones—and tended to die earlier—than the rats in the control group. Male rats showed four times as many large, palpable tumors and “very significant” kidney deficiencies.
The study, which passed the traditional peer-review process, was published in 2012 in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, one of the leading publications in the field.
It went off, in the words of France’s environment minister, like “a bomb.”
Jean-Marc Ayrault, France’s prime minister, said that if its results were confirmed, then his government would press for a continental ban on NK603 corn. Russia suspended imports of the crop. Kenya banned all GM crops. The article appeared two months before a referendum in California that would require the labeling of all GM foods.
In other words, a single article threatened to tip the global conversation about GMOs, and not in the food industry’s favor.
Almost instantly, the journal was deluged with letters savaging its conclusions. Critics complained that the experiment used too few animals; that the rats used in the experiment were prone to cancer anyway; that the experimental protocol used could not distinguish tumors caused by GM food from those that would have occurred anyway. It was “clear from even a superficial reading that this paper was not fit for publication,” a professor at the University of Cambridge wrote. “The study appeared to sweep aside all known benchmarks of scientific good practice and,
more importantly, to ignore the minimal standards of scientific and ethical conduct in particular concerning the humane treatment of experimental animals,” a group of prominent scientists concluded.
Citing such “major flaws,” industry officials and pro-GMO scientists alike called for the article to be retracted. In an extraordinary and highly unusual move, the journal’s editor complied.
“Unequivocally,” the editor wrote, there was “no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data.” Nonetheless, there was “legitimate cause for concern regarding both the number of animals in each study group and the particular strain selected.”
A more in-depth look at the raw data “revealed that no definitive conclusions can be reached with this small sample size regarding the role of either NK603 or glyphosate in regards to overall mortality or tumor incidence,” the editor wrote. “Ultimately, the results presented (while not incorrect) are inconclusive, and therefore do not reach the threshold of publication for Food and Chemical Toxicology.”
The decision to retract caused a second firestorm that was at least as powerful as the first. More than a hundred scientists signed a petition calling the decision “arbitrary” and “groundless.” Retracting a published, thoroughly peer-reviewed paper “is without precedent in the history of scientific publishing, and raises grave concerns over the integrity and impartiality of science.”
Among other things, critics noted, was the fact that Séralini had used the same strain of rats Monsanto had used eight years earlier in its own study, which persuaded European regulators to approve the use of GM corn in the first place. That study—done over ninety days, compared with Séralini’s two years—had been published in the same journal that was now retracting the new study.
“The retraction is erasing from the public record results that are potentially of very great importance for public health,” the petition said. “It is censorship of scientific research, knowledge, and understanding, an abuse of science striking at the very heart of science and democracy, and science for the public good.”
The decision was based “not on the grounds of fraud, malpractice or data misrepresentation, but simply (as far as I can see) because Monsanto and its legion of followers did not like the results of the research and have given you a hard time,” wrote the British environmental scientist Brian John.
“The campaign of synthetic outrage orchestrated by the GM industry against the paper and against Séralini personally was something that the scientific community should be thoroughly ashamed of, since it was characterised not just by a lack of respect for the research team and its findings, but by personal vilification the like of which I have not seen for a long time,” John wrote. “‘Inconclusiveness’ is not a ground for retraction—every scientific paper published is inconclusive in the sense that it might show probability and might point the way for future research. That is exactly what the Séralini paper does, in a perfectly responsible way. If you press ahead with this, you will also confirm what many people have been increasingly concerned about—corporate control not only of the biotechnology industry but also of the means of publication. That is both scientifically reprehensible and sinister.”
Not long after the retraction, the journal further infuriated critics by installing Richard Goodman, a former Monsanto scientist, as its new associate editor for biotechnology. Goodman’s “fast-tracked appointment directly onto the upper editorial board raises urgent questions,” an article in Independent Science News reported. “Does Monsanto now effectively decide which papers on biotechnology are published in FCT? And is this part of an attempt by Monsanto and the life science industry to seize control of science?”
Brian John offered a sharp answer for this as well. “Only a fool would assume that there is no connection between his arrival and this decision to retract the Séralini paper,” John wrote. “And from where I stand this is yet more evidence of the increasing corporate control exerted by the GM industry in the area of biotechnology publications. You clearly do not now have true independence in editorial matters, and the manner in which you have buckled under pressure from this orchestrated anti-Séralini campaign is both despicable and deeply depressing.”
In an open letter in Independent Science News, a group of scientists wrote that the Séralini affair risked undermining the credibility of science itself:
When those with a vested interest attempt to sow unreasonable doubt around inconvenient results, or when governments exploit political opportunities by picking and choosing from scientific evidence, they jeopardize public confidence in scientific methods and institutions, and also put their own citizenry at risk. Safety testing, science-based regulation, and the scientific process itself, depend crucially on widespread trust in a body of scientists devoted to the public interest and professional integrity. If instead, the starting point of a scientific product assessment is an approval process rigged in favour of the applicant, backed up by systematic suppression of independent scientists working in the public interest, then there can never be an honest, rational or scientific debate.
The issues raised by the Séralini study have not gone away. In a move that may one day generate as much noise as the Séralini affair itself, the Russian National Association for Genetic Safety, a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization based in Moscow, said in 2014 it was raising $25 million to redo Séralini’s experiments. In a theatrical press release (announcing the launch of the study rather than its results), the designers of the so-called Factor study said the GMO controversy was so hot they would not even disclose where the research would take place.
The Factor study will use 6,000 rats, rather than the 200 used by Séralini; last four years instead of two; and examine the health consequences of both GM food and glyphosate as they manifest through multiple generations. It will adhere to or exceed guidelines set by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international research body that works with governments on economic and environmental policy, said Bruce Blumberg, a professor of developmental and cell biology at UC-Irvine, who will serve on the study’s scientific oversight board.
“The study will employ large groups of animals tested throughout their full lifespan, so unless you are Monsanto, the results will not be easily disputable,” Blumberg told me. “The work will be very thorough and very transparent. For sure, companies don’t do that. They never let their data out.”
Such independent science is critical to the GMO debate, Blumberg said, since most of what we know about the safety of glyphosate—the herbicide most commonly sprayed on GM crops—is based on studies Monsanto did back in the 1970s and 1980s.
“We remain reliant for what we know—about a chemical sprayed on hundreds of millions of acres of food crops—on studies performed by the company that produces and sells it,” Blumberg said. “The bottom line is that we know almost nothing about the long-term health effects of this compound and we use it in colossal amounts. If you talk to Monsanto, they will say, ‘If you use our seeds, you will use less Roundup,’ but the twentyfold increase in the use of glyphosate-based herbicides since 1996 disputes this assertion.”
Blumberg’s own work has focused not on genetic engineering but on the effect on human health caused by hormone-disrupting chemicals. He looks at the ways synthetic chemicals contribute to things like cancer and obesity. “Obesogens,” such as those found in certain synthetic plastics and fungicides, for example, can cause a body to make more fat cells, to put more fat into cells, or to change a body’s overall metabolism. Any of these disruptions can cause a rat—or a human—to put on weight, regardless of their diet. Significantly, these chemicals can cause such changes not just in exposed individuals, but in their offspring down at least three generations.
Looking over one of Blumberg’s research grant proposals ten years ago, a reviewer at the National Institutes of Health wrote, “How dare you waste our time with such a ridiculous idea—everyon
e knows obesity is caused by eating too much and exercising too little.” Now, thanks in part to Blumberg’s work, we have come to know much more about the way synthetic chemicals affect our body’s subtle hormonal balance—and how easy it is for them to throw this balance out of whack. National trends—from obesity to early-onset puberty in girls or low sperm counts in boys—have been traced to the chemicals used in an enormous variety of everyday consumer products.
Blumberg, in other words, may not have a horse in the GMO race, but he’s seen similar contests before.
“My job is to make sure the study is designed as well as it can be,” he said. “The goal is to see if we can test the safety of one of the world’s most widely used chemicals. As a human being who inhabits this planet, I’m very interested in seeing this done well. I want to see the results.”
Part Two
4.
The Fruit That Saved an Island
The vast majority of GMOs are hidden in highly processed ingredients in the supermarket’s meat and junk food sections, but there is one modest little GM fruit you can find in the produce aisle. The Rainbow papaya, grown on the Big Island in Hawaii, is a singular retort to the blanket condemnation of genetic engineering. The fruit is nutritious. It nurtures local farmers. And it was created not by a company, but by a professor.
Dennis Gonsalves unlocks the metal gate blocking the entrance to the 80-acre plantation, then returns to the driver’s seat of his beat-up white Ford pickup. We pass field after field of scrawny trees, their feet, here on the Big Island, growing in volcanic rock, their crowns bursting with fruit.
Moments later, we pull up to a large, open-air enclosure lined with plastic crates, filled with freshly picked, genetically modified papaya. Gonsalves has had a long love affair with this fruit. He should—he designed it himself.
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