At seventy, Gonsalves is physically robust, ebullient, and remarkably charismatic. In the world of genetic engineering, he has long been considered something of a superstar: a university scientist who saved an industry, and who did it without buckets of government or corporate money. Gonsalves, many people say, is the very model of the way science should be done: with the public good, not corporate profits, at heart.
As he parks his pickup, Gonsalves calls out to the plantation’s owner. “Hey, Alberto!” Gonsalves shouts as we leave the truck.
Alberto Belmes climbs down from a forklift and comes over to shake hands. Belmes came to Hawaii from the Philippines in 1981 and started planting papaya a year later. Within ten years, his fortunes, and the fortunes of the trees he was planting, were in danger of complete collapse. A pathogen known as ringspot virus was burning through the trees on the Big Island, and neither farmer nor spray gun had any way to stop it. Ringspot had destroyed the papaya crop on Oahu in the 1950s, prompting the entire industry to move to Puna, on the Big Island, where the virus, up until then, had not yet manifested.
By the early 1990s, ringspot was moving across the Big Island like a wildfire. State agriculture workers did their best to destroy infected trees, but nothing could stop the burn.
Like Belmes, 80 percent of the island’s papaya farmers were first-generation immigrants from the Philippines, and few of them spoke English. They were poor, they had few political connections, and they were dependent on their plantation work to feed their families. The ringspot virus was not just killing trees, it was threatening to ruin a fragile human population as well.
At first, Belmes tried to outsmart the pathogen by planting his trees close to the ocean, where salt air and wind kept many of the aphids spreading the virus at bay. Early on, as other farmers’ crops crashed, Belmes’s trees were still producing fruit, and he was able to charge a premium: he sold papaya for a dollar a pound, three times what the fruit would command twenty years later.
Flush with cash, and keeping his fingers crossed, Belmes took a risk. He planted another seventy acres and began moving his crop back inland. Maybe the virus had moved on. Maybe he’d get lucky again.
His plan failed. His newly planted trees were devastated. That year Belmes didn’t harvest a single fruit. He lost everything.
“People forget how bad it was,” Dennis Gonsalves told me, casting his eyes across the volcanic landscape. “It was like a war zone here. All the trees were dead.”
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THE PAPAYA is a remarkable plant: a giant herb, really, not a tree. From the moment a seed is planted, it takes just six months for the plant to grow several feet tall and begin flowering, and just six more months to begin producing fruit. After three years, a papaya tree can be eighteen feet tall, producing scores of fruit at a time.
Dennis Gonsalves is a remarkable man. He was raised on a Big Island sugar plantation, where his father worked mowing grass. Times were tough: he remembers his family and the rest of the workers eating a lot of Spam. “The bosses were white people and the workers were locals,” he said. “I grew up with that mentality.”
Gonsalves left the island to get his PhD in plant pathology at UC-Davis, then taught at the University of Florida for six years. Bored of spending all his time studying citrus, he moved to Cornell, in New York, where he would spend the next twenty-five years working alongside some of the smartest plant pathologists in the business. As a plant virologist who knew how bad ringspot had been on Oahu, Gonsalves started experimenting on papaya in 1978. He traveled all over the world trying to figure out how to protect the crop from viral pests. This was before genetic engineering was developed, so Gonsalves and his research team tried to protect plants by “immunizing” them to protect against serious infection.
Initially, Gonsalves tried a kind of vaccination called cross-protection: he and his team mutated a mild strain of the ringspot virus and used it to inoculate millions of trees. Plants do not have active immune systems, and thus can’t produce antibodies to protect themselves against diseases. Plant biologists had long known, though, that when they are exposed to a weak virus, plants can develop some resistance.
Cross-protection had drawbacks, however. There was always the chance that the mild virus injected into the trees might mutate into a far more damaging form. Or the virus protecting the papaya could jump species and cause serious infections in another important agricultural crop.
By 1983, it was clear that cross-protection was working, “but not that well,” Gonsalves told me. So, mid-career, the veteran scientist started teaching himself some new tricks.
The mid-1980s was an exciting time in the field of molecular biology, and Gonsalves didn’t have to look far for an example of a promising experiment. Washington University’s Roger Beachy had recently managed to take a strand of DNA from the tobacco mosaic virus—a common pest that damages a plant’s leaves and can stunt its growth—and insert it into the tobacco plant itself. The strand of virus DNA they used triggered the creation of “coat proteins,” which—in the virus—served as a kind of shield against outside infection. When Beachy inserted this viral DNA into the tobacco’s DNA, it did the same thing: it protected the tobacco plant from infection—in this case from the very virus that had contributed its DNA to the plant. Though the process remained somewhat mysterious, one thing was clear: the transformed plants were resistant to infection from the tobacco mosaic virus.
Following Beachy’s lead, Gonsalves and a colleague, Richard Manshardt, wanted to see if they could pull off the same trick using ringspot virus and Hawaiian papaya. They knew how ringspot worked: it hijacked the papaya cell’s protein-making machinery. They started experimenting with gene sequences that might cause RNA interference; they wanted to get their papaya to produce a small stretch of genetic code that could, in turn, spur a biochemical process that would seek out and “silence” infecting strands of viral RNA. Once attacked, they hoped, the viral RNA would be rendered “mute.”
Meanwhile, a Gonsalves colleague at Cornell, John Sanford, was developing the “gene gun,” with which he learned to shoot DNA-coated tungsten balls into plant cells. It was an imprecise method, to say the least; only a tiny fraction of the target cells would absorb and incorporate the new DNA. But some DNA did make it into the target cells, and the possibilities for genetic manipulations suddenly opened up.
The mystery of cell biology—combined with the prospect of real crops facing real disaster—made Dennis Gonsalves’s genetic work both intellectually exciting and economically urgent. Given the pending collapse of the papaya industry, there just wasn’t time to plod through years of traditional breeding experiments.
For the papaya plantations on the Big Island, these experiments could not have come at a more critical time. In 1992, a dean at the University of Hawaii at Manoa called Gonsalves to break the news that the ringspot virus—once absent from the Big Island—had popped up in Hilo, just twenty miles north of Puna, where virtually all of Hawaii’s commercial papaya crop was being grown. Gonsalves had discovered his professional calling. “It is rather rare that a potential solution is coincidental with a potential disaster,” Gonsalves wrote at the time, with considerable scientific understatement.
“I was new at Cornell, but 95 percent of Hawaii’s papaya industry was here on the Big Island,” he told me later. “I started to realize that good science could change things at home.”
At first, Gonsalves’s research did not attract much attention—or money. His initial grant application was rejected by both the USDA and the NSF; small grants came thanks to the reach of Hawaii’s U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, who knew the state’s economy would take a significant hit if the papaya industry collapsed again. In what has become something of a legend among the world’s plant geneticists, there was no corporate money involved.
“The first grant we got was for $20,000,” Gonsalves said. “This was a poor man’s biotech project. We
were just scientists doing research.”
Not all of the hurdles were scientific. Gonsalves also had to seek approval from the entire range of the federal bureaucracy: the USDA, the EPA, and the FDA. The research team conducted numerous toxicity tests and protein studies, some of which would never have been required of plants grown in a traditional breeding program. In this, as in its status as one of the earliest GMO experiments, Gonsalves’s papaya became a harbinger of future battles.
“When the Rainbow papaya was first engineered, its developers had to test several kilos of dried papaya leaves to see if the alkaloid content was any different from traditionally bred fruit. It wasn’t,” Richard Manshardt told me. “That sort of thing would never be looked at in a conventional breeding project.
“The big difference between traditional breeding and GMO, people think that what we eat now is ‘natural’ and has been around for centuries. Their experience is okay, and therefore the government isn’t under any pressure to impose further testing. But with GMOs, it’s a new process. The government requires researchers to do the testing, and the public sees the whole system as suspicious and untrustworthy. Why? Because it’s new, there’s potential for a Wall Street distortion of reality, where money is more important than the product. So it’s a trust issue, I think. From a research standpoint, the regulatory process is important because we don’t know everything, and we know we don’t know everything.”
Yet by the fall of 1997, with a speed that surprised everyone in the field, Dennis Gonsalves had the approval he needed. GM papayas were officially deemed safe for human consumption, and for the environment, by the American government.
Roger Beachy’s technology, which Gonsalves was building on, had already been licensed to Monsanto, and Hawaiian papaya growers were deeply skeptical of the biotech giant, figuring the company would charge millions of dollars for them to use company property. But given Roger Beachy’s influence—and his strong desire to see his technology work in the field—Monsanto issued the licenses for almost nothing.
On May 1, 1998, after the patent licenses came through, the Rainbow papaya seeds were ready for distribution, and Gonsalves handed them out to island farmers for free.
Alberto Belmes was one of the first five farmers to try them. He planted seven acres. “We didn’t know if it would survive, or if people would like it,” Belmes told me.
Gonsalves smiled. “We scientists—we were confident,” he said.
One year later, Dennis Gonsalves’s seeds had turned into Alberto Belmes’s trees, and they were bearing fruit. Enormous quantities of fruit. Conventionally grown trees, stunted with yellowed, infected leaves, average just 5,000 pounds per acre per year. The GM Rainbow papaya trees provided 125,000 pounds. From a low of 26 million pounds in 1998, the papaya crop grew to 40 million pounds just three years later. Rainbow papaya seeds are currently controlled by a nonprofit industry group called the Papaya Administrative Committee; seeds are distributed to local farmers at cost.
In 2002, Gonsalves and his research team were awarded the Humboldt Prize for the most significant contribution to U.S. agriculture in the previous five years. Gonsalves is “a tireless innovator,” said Pamela Ronald, a plant geneticist at UC-Davis who has done groundbreaking research into genetically engineered rice. “Not only did he return to his home to help the farmers in his area, he moved beyond basic science to getting his invention out in the field. His work is widely viewed as brilliant.”
Gonsalves’s work “is a model for what should have happened [everywhere],” said Roger Beachy, whose work on the tobacco mosaic virus helped inspire Gonsalves’s own work. “He just plain stuck to it because the farming industry needed it.”
At seventy, Gonsalves remains undaunted. He is currently trying to open the gates to GM papaya in China, one of the world’s biggest markets. He has submitted the scientific paperwork and notified the embassies. Chinese scientists have visited Hawaii’s plantations; they’ve done health data tests and rat-feeding experiments. Gonsalves has received permission to send seeds.
“The Chinese have 40 million people in Beijing and Shanghai alone,” he said, “and they love Hawaiian papaya. That’s what hard work does.”
Yet ask Gonsalves what makes him most proud, and he will point to working farmers like Alberto Belmes, the papaya farmer who migrated from the Philippines to Hawaii. Were it not for Gonsalves’s discoveries in the laboratory and the field, Belmes and many others like him would not have survived these last thirty-five years. Today, Belmes has twelve employees and close to 100 acres of highly productive papaya trees. He has one son who graduated from New York University (and now works in a bank) and another son in college in Hawaii.
These days, Belmes spends a lot of time touring foreign scientists around his farm, showing them the benefits of genetic engineering. Recently, a group from Japan arrived and—convinced that Belmes must be suffering because of all the anti-GMO rhetoric floating around the world—asked if he had had any second thoughts about his trees.
What about organic? they asked. Hadn’t the global interest in organic farming made GMOs a risky investment?
“I said, ‘Ever since the Rainbow came out, it has been very good,’” Belmes told me, chuckling. “We couldn’t even supply the market. They thought I wouldn’t be happy. They thought GMOs were dangerous!”
Belmes’s plantation is now one of the biggest on the Big Island. The day Gonsalves and I visited, a half-dozen pickers—equipped with long bamboo poles and canvas bags—were knocking ripe fruit out of trees.
“Isn’t this incredible?” Gonsalves told me, waving his hand across a landscape of thickly planted, highly productive papaya trees.
“I used to come here and cry.”
—
FOR DENNIS GONSALVES, all the noise over GMOs—the politics, and the corporate money, and the anti-technology activism—has proven a long and bitter irony. After retiring from Cornell, Gonsalves was lured back to Hawaii to work in the USDA’s Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center, where he spent ten years continuing to do science in support of local growers.
“I decided to come back and do the highest levels of science, but also to work for local issues, with respect for all the local culture,” he told me. “This really transformed the center into a place that could relate to people. We saw that we could really help the farmers. If you do good science and help people, things will fall into place.”
But his return home, where local activists were beginning to launch a campaign to ban genetically engineered crops, also reminded Gonsalves of his own decades of squabbling over GMOs. Back in 1986, when he was still doing research on cross-protection, a crisis emerged in the papaya crop in Thailand. Cross-protection had been moderately successful, but as the years passed, the country’s papaya crop faced collapse. Desperate, an undersecretary of agriculture approached Gonsalves, pleading with him to experiment with a GM plant.
Gonsalves asked for a scientist and $15,000 for supplies. By 1997, his team took tissue samples and plants to Thailand. They navigated all the bureaucratic quarantine procedures. They conducted “beautiful” field trials and rabbit studies, and were ready to plant. Their scientific work was solid. What they didn’t count on was the intensity of global food politics. Corporate GMOs had earned such a toxic reputation that even Gonsalves’s nonprofit plant research stirred up a storm.
Activists from Greenpeace, dressed in gas masks and white hazard suits and carrying signs that read “Stop GMOs!” destroyed the Thai field trials. Greenpeace was making a larger point: papaya wasn’t the only GM plant scientists were experimenting with in Thailand. Monsanto was also in the country, trying to get permission to plant GM corn and cotton. As evidence of GMO contamination of traditional crops began to emerge, the Thai government began taking a harder line on experimental crops. The government eventually placed a moratorium on biotech crops, and Gonsalves’s plants “never saw the light of day.”
“Who suffered from that? The farmers,” Gonsalves told me. “Greenpeace said, ‘This isn’t about papaya. It’s about opening the door to big companies. What happens if that gate gets opened?’”
Ironically for Gonsalves, this argument soon began bubbling up in Hawaii. Despite Gonsalves’s status as an international agricultural star, and despite his GM papaya having become one of the most famous fruits on earth, the GMO debate is far from settled even on Gonsalves’s home island. Anti-GMO activists point out that the Rainbow papaya has been shut out of a number of global markets because of local resistance to GMOs. In Jamaica, an experimental crop was shelved because consumers in Britain—the primary market for Jamaican fruit—would not touch it. Japan initially refused to allow GM papaya into its lucrative market, a decision that forced some Big Island growers into bankruptcy. In 2011, after Hawaii spent thirteen years (and $13 million of taxpayer money) lobbying to get the GM papaya into Japan, that country’s Ministry of Agriculture finally agreed to let GM papaya in—but only if they are labeled “GMO.”
There have also been problems closer to home. By 2004, contamination—by GM papaya trees of non-GM trees—was found to be ubiquitous on the island, forcing even non-GMO farmers to test their trees and fruit before they were allowed to ship their fruit to Japan. Organic farmers lost markets, seed lines, certifications, and chopped down their trees in order to keep their organic integrity, writes Melanie Bondera, an organic farmer in Kona and a cofounder of several anti-GMO groups in Hawaii.
In 2002, the year Gonsalves won the Humboldt Award, some anti-GMO activists approached him and—somewhat incredibly—asked him to reevaluate his life’s work.
“They said, ‘Come out against GMO papaya and you’ll be considered a savior,’” Gonsalves told me. “But when they said it was unsafe, I said, ‘Show me the data.’ You say it’s bad for the environment, I say, ‘Show me the data.’”
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