Panicology

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Yet health may be the least of it. In many instances, no GM substance would even enter the body. Sugar might be made from GM beet, for example, but the process of refining the crop into the pure and simple chemical substance we know as sugar eliminates all biological material. In any case, our stomachs are no strangers to modified foods. Agricultural produce has been ‘modified’ by selective breeding for thousands of years and by the deliberate creation of hybrids for nearly 200 years. A poll quoted in the ever-vigilant Daily Mail suggested that nearly three-quarters of people in Europe remain ‘extremely wary’ of GM food and prefer ‘natural crops’. In fact, if they were given ‘natural crops’ to eat, they would quickly become both unhappy and possibly unwell.

  According to the Mail, people’s main fear is ‘the lack of data proving that the “Frankenstein foods” are safe to eat’ – something that can’t, of course, be proven in the way that the paper seems to demand. One death from eating GM food would suggest (but not prove) that it is unsafe, but even the continued survival of 300 million human guinea pigs routinely eating the stuff in North America does not prove conclusively that GM food is safe. Nevertheless, it is the clearest evidence available that GM foods are safe in terms of human health.

  Where the GM revolution is opposed in America, it is opposed less on health grounds than on environmental grounds. In 1999, a laboratory experiment at Cornell University showed that caterpillars of the monarch butterfly were damaged by consuming the pollen of corn genetically modified for insect resistance. The monarch butterfly is brightly coloured and migrates in huge flocks, making it something of an American icon. The research therefore excited unusual public alarm much as Rachel Carson’s singling out of the symbolic bald eagle as a species at risk of ‘collateral damage’ from DDT had done in Silent Spring thirty-six years earlier. However, subsequent field experiments showed that the caterpillars mostly did not eat the GM pollen anyway. The danger to such species is in any case surely dwarfed by that from the conventional pesticides that GM crops would help to banish.

  The monarch butterfly notwithstanding, the American farming environment is different from that of Europe, occupying vast tracts of land with inevitably depleted biodiversity. Europeans have developed a fondness for their cosier mixed countryside, which may lead them to forget that agriculture always has a detrimental effect on the natural ecology – that, in a sense, is its purpose. There remain unresolved issues to do with the invasiveness and persistence of GM varieties and their effect on other species, but GM crops may turn out to be no worse than conventional ones and, if planted appropriately, could be of comparative benefit to the environment.

  The ethics of GM technology are harder to resolve – like the ethics of any commercial transaction between unequal actors. America complains that Europe is restricting free trade not only by refusing to import its GM foods directly, but also by banning produce that may have become contaminated with altered stocks, including from developing countries. As a result, those countries feel driven to refuse to take American GM seed even to feed their own people, as happened in Zambia. Critics say this argument is self-serving, that food is anyway in surplus, and that hunger can be better alleviated by addressing distribution. Light is seldom shed when a technical matter is raised to a ‘moral’ issue, a process eagerly assisted by both the biotechnology industry and the anti-GM lobby with their opposing messages of ‘feed the world’ and ‘keep nature pure’.

  The company at the forefront of the GM revolution, Monsanto, furthermore acted with what in hindsight seems extraordinary carelessness, completely misjudging the European market and failing to advocate a precautionary approach to matters such as the mixing of GM and non-GM soybeans, which would later make it impossible to introduce food labelling and consequently difficult for American farmers to export their crops. While the anti-GM lobby undoubtedly crusades with ‘overtones of moral fanaticism’, the pro-GM industry is not exactly short of self-righteousness.1 The perception of corporate arrogance in turn allows environmental campaigners to present themselves as ‘people’s champions tackling giant American Goliaths’ despite their sometimes illegal and destructive actions.2

  In the developed world, even the basic utilitarian argument for GM food is weak. A report to the British government in 2003 could find no discernible advantage for consumers and ‘limited’ economic benefit.3 This lack of benefit – admitted on occasion even by pro-GM interests – suggests that GM food may simply be a solution in search of a problem. It is an innovation that has come about because the technology exists, not because the market demands it.

  This impression was heightened by scientists accustomed to their role as heroes of the so-called ‘green revolution’ that had seen agricultural productivity raised enormously during the twentieth century through improvements in chemical fertilizers, plant and animal breeding, and sowing and harvesting technology. In genetic modification, they thought they were simply continuing in this tradition, using the latest science to make these processes more exact and efficient. The public, on the other hand, perceived a fundamental step change. Scientists thought they were aiding the supply of food worldwide; consumers suspected a corporate profit motive. Scientists saw no other way forward; consumers saw organic produce as a viable alternative.4

  Scientists accordingly took the benefits of GM technology as self-evident and focused almost entirely on the objection to it which they were best prepared to deal with – namely the possible risk to health. Statements such as that by Peter Lachmann, who produced the Royal Society’s 1998 report on GM food, that ‘the public furore about health hazards of genetically modified foods rests on no reliable evidence base and falls little short of mass hysteria’ thus miss the point (possibly deliberately) for a public whose view of the issue was always more complicated, involving attitudes towards America, corporate monopolies, the countryside and so on.5

  For the crux of British consumers’ fears so adroitly exploited by the Daily Mail was never health or the environment or ethics. It was instead to do with perceived coercion. In 2004, it became apparent that the newspaper’s campaigning had not succeeded after all, as a European Union moratorium expired and plans for new GM trials were announced. ‘So we’re going to be force-fed GM’, the paper announced. A month later, it was: ‘Frankenstein food? You’ll be made to like it’, a strange headline for a report that was actually about GM animal feed – perhaps the paper’s readers were more bovine than anybody had thought.

  Today, we are faced with a situation where GM technology exists, works for some and is unlikely to go away. In February 2006, the World Trade Organization found for the United States, Canada and Argentina and against the European Union on the conduct of review procedures for GM crops. It ruled that there could be no more unreasonable European moratoriums. The Wall Street Journal welcomed the outbreak of ‘Frankensense’.

  Undeterred, the Daily Mail now warned that ‘U.S. biotech firms’ were going to ‘blitz’ Ireland with ‘GM grapes, apples, bananas, vegetables and cereals’. Surprisingly, the article did not describe the Americans’ secret plan to drop this provender from over-flying B-52s. A group of Irish chefs had banded together to resist the invasion. Now, you wouldn’t necessarily ask a scientist to cook you a gourmet dinner, and nor would you generally ask a chef to spell out the dangers of scientific innovation. But again this did not stop the Mail, which quoted one of the restaurateurs making the nonsensical claim that soon ‘it will be impossible to cultivate indigenous crops as GM seed is used in farms across the country’.

  ‘The U.S. government last night claimed victory in a battle to force genetically modified food on to the dinner tables of Britain and the world,’ was how the Mail’s story began. In Ireland, as elsewhere in the EU, foods with GM ingredients must be labelled, but the Mail immediately raised a new fear that ‘the U.S. administration is considering bringing a second legal case to the WTO to get this abolished’.

  Where will it end? The companies have learned from Monsanto’s mista
kes and now threaten to use GM organisms cunningly disguised in products that people might actually want. One recent innovation is a low-fat ice-cream made using a protein derived from a species of fish. As a perverse way of dealing with the problem of obesity, this concoction might seem to exemplify GM’s predicament as a solution looking for a problem, but the market appeal of such an idea cannot be ignored. Anti-GM campaigners sense that, as The Times put it, ‘manufacturers may be trying to introduce GM processes by stealth in the hope of making GM foods acceptable to consumers’. Once they’re acceptable to consumers, of course, the game’s up. No wonder the environmentalists are worried.

  It seems certain that the future on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere, must be one where GM, conventional and organic foods all have a share of the market. Then nobody can complain, neither the North American companies, which currently claim to be ‘losing’ sales worth $500 million essentially because they have been unable to persuade Europeans to accept their wares, nor the crop-slashing Greenpeace and its allies, who will be seen as irrational zealots if the rest of the consumer population can calmly exercise its option to reject GM in the shops.

  Little Wonder

  ‘Fears grow that tiny particles may pose major health risks’ Seattle Times

  Who would be afraid of a technology that promises so much? Cars that don’t need washing, lighter, stronger tennis racquets and golf clubs, bouncier balls, fridges and washing machines that eliminate bacteria, stay-sharp razors, perpetual air fresheners, stain-resistant clothes and self-cleaning socks. And that’s just in consumer goods. In cosmetics there will be more effective anti-ageing creams and invisible sun lotions, in medicine, tiny diagnostic sensors that circulate in the bloodstream on the lookout for trouble, and drugs against cancer that go straight to the source of the problem. Improved foods will include milk that tells you when it’s about to go off, cholesterol-blocking cooking oil and animal-free meat.

  These wonders – and many, many others according to its enthusiasts – are the bounty of nanotechnology, a catchall term for a set of emerging techniques that may allow us to arrange atoms and molecules on the tiniest scale to make substances and objects that can do jobs that it is presently difficult or impossible to do by conventional means.

  But Prince Charles for one is worried. ‘Charles: “Grey goo” threat to the world’, reported the Mail on Sunday in 2003, as news emerged that the prince had convened a private meeting to debate the new technology. The stimulus for the royal fears seems to have been the publication a few months earlier of Prey, the latest thriller by Michael Crichton, in which genetically modified bacteria breed a horde of nano-sized robots which consume all in their path, turning it into the mysterious grey goo that headline-writers found so helpful.

  Prince Charles had already made a reputation for himself campaigning against genetically modified crops. By 2002, it seemed that he and his environmentalist advisers had GM crops on the run, as European consumers rejected the very idea. The Daily Mail had led the media campaign. In nanotechnology, they had all found a new dragon to slay.

  Certainly, this is how the whiggish element of the British press read the situation. ‘Spare us all from royal nanoangst’, wrote the science editor of the Daily Telegraph. ‘The only grey goo that really worries me is the stuff between the Prince’s ears.’ Under the headline ‘The real goo’, The Times fretted: ‘Once a shining banner signifying progress, science has become a tattered flag… Grey goo is the purest Luddism.’ The article bemoaned how we now worry over the ‘defects real and imagined’ of any new technology rather than hailing its benefits and regard everything as ‘potentially dangerous and worthy of social control’.

  Nanotechnology first reached the public consciousness with the 1986 book Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler, although it was the physicist Richard Feynman who first considered the possibilities in a 1959 lecture entitled ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom’.1 Drexler rhapsodized in more detail on the boundless possibilities of the ‘next revolution’ in technology, as well as colourfully describing some of its pitfalls – coming the ‘grey goo’ label as he did so.

  Nanotechnology is simply the technology of doing things at the bottom of the scale – typically less than 100 nanometres (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre), or the distance spanned by about a thousand atoms. Many materials start to behave in different ways at this scale because their surface area is greatly increased. For example, a millimetre crystal of salt could be broken into a trillion nanoparticles with sides of 100 nanometres. These particles would have a total surface 10,000 times that of the original crystal and, if placed on the tongue, would release flavour faster.

  Sun lotions work because grains of white zinc oxide reflect the sunlight and prevent it from being absorbed by the skin. Ordinary lotions use relatively large grains of oxide, which is why they appear white. But lotions recently introduced on to the market use nanoparticles. These still reflect ultraviolet, but not the visible light, so appearing transparent. Elsewhere, too, arranging familiar materials in more precise ways will allow their potentially attractive properties to be maximized. A nanometre-smooth surface would not allow dirt or water to stick, for example. It is not hard to imagine the applications that could follow from such extensions of material properties.

  Nanotechnology offers several instructive points of comparison with the GM controversy. The simple Luddite view is that we are once again meddling with nature in a fundamentally new way. ‘If you think GM is scary’, burbled one Daily Mail headline: ‘Chicken that tastes of anything you want. Drinks that change colour at the flick of a switch. Everlasting chocolate. This is the new generation of Frankenfoods being created by scientists. The consequences could be terrifying.’ But the argument is more subtle than this. The GM debate pitched a Europe where several countries had new left-of-centre governments and heightened consumer expectations for the environment against a technologically progressive America, but nanotechnology has mobilized sceptics on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Fears grow that tiny particles may pose major health risks’, warned the Seattle Times in December 2005. The American media took the broad view that development of the technology ought to proceed, but only with regulatory safeguards. ‘Stricter nanotechnology laws are urged; report warns of risk to public’, headlined the Washington Post in January 2006. The article added: ‘current U.S. laws and regulations cannot adequately protect the public against the risks’.

  In April, the Food and Drug Administration weighed in after learning that dozens of people had suffered from breathing problems in Germany after using an aerosol cleaning product called Magic Nano. The product was quickly withdrawn from sale. The following month, the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, released a list of 231 products whose manufacturers advertised using nanomaterials or nanotechnology, sparking further alarm.2 The British Daily Mail picked up the story. “‘Hidden danger” in anti-ageing cream’, it shrieked. Nanoparticles in products such as L’Oréal’s Revitalift, Lancôme’s Renergie and Boots’ Soltan sun lotion could cause ‘untold damage to human health’, it warned, listing chest complaints, heart attacks and cancer among the problems that might arise.

  By the end of the year, the US Environmental Protection Agency was in on the action too, with plans to regulate the silver nanoparticles used for their bactericidal properties in domestic appliances and food containers. The Seattle Times noted these would be the ‘First federal restrictions on new, growing technology’.

  Even the technologically gung-ho Bay Area grew fearful. The San Francisco Chronicle hailed Berkeley’s aim to impose ‘the world’s first local regulation of nanomaterials’. This would be aimed at the city’s famous university and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at start-up firms that might spin off to commercialize their innovations. Researchers responded by pointing out that their laboratory nanomaterials were made in quantities too tiny to test.

  In another notable difference from the GM story, scientists have joined the
call for greater regulation, desperate to avoid having what they see as another potentially exciting and lucrative technology disappear down the plughole of ill-informed public fears. ‘The spectre of possible harm – whether real or imagined – is threatening to slow the development of nanotechnology unless sound, independent and authoritative information is developed on what the risks are, and how to avoid them,’ fourteen scientists wrote in the journal Nature.3 Countries with large hi-tech sectors such as the United States and Switzerland have sponsored pre-emptive programmes of public dialogue. ‘The development of nanotechnologies has become an ideal testing ground for the application of public engagement processes to science and technology,’ proclaimed Britain’s Nanotechnology Engagement Group, steeling itself for the battle ahead.

  Less clear was what should actually be regulated – the technological processes, which are not exposed to the public, or the materials, many of which are already regulated at the macroscopic scale. The obvious answer emerges if we look at nanotechnology not as Drexler’s ‘coming era’ of miraculous novelty, but for what it is.

  Now, what follows may allay your fears about nanotechnology, or it may simply confirm them: think of nanotechnology not as a fundamental novelty but as chemistry rebranded. Nanoparticles are simply chemicals, and, as such, to be feared or exploited according to their properties. When a government scientist warns that ‘it’s been shown that free nanoparticles inhaled can go straight to the brain’, he’s omitting to say that thousands of ‘ordinary’ chemicals do this too.4 Prince Charles spoke of ‘technologies which work at the level of the basic building blocks of life itself’, as if these were entirely new – and sinister.5 But nanomaterials are not new, nor are they inherently sinister, or for that matter especially wondrous. Ordinary chemicals work at this level already. The banality of the products on the Wilson Center’s list attests to that. In short, the hazards of nanomaterials may be treated by and large like other chemical hazards.