Geneticists set out to identify the genetic basis of this change in behaviour. They compared the genomes of two breeds of chicken with widely differing levels of maternal instinct: White Leghorns, well known for being prodigious egg-layers and lacking incubation behaviour, and Silkies, who like to sit on their eggs. They found two particular regions in the genome which were substantially different between the two breeds, one on chromosome 5 and another on chromosome 8. Both of these areas were involved – once again – with the thyroid hormone system; and the one on chromosome 5 contains the TSH receptor gene itself. Some changes to this gene were spreading through chicken flocks a thousand years ago – and are now found both in chickens bred for egg-laying, and in broilers, bred for the pot (or more commonly now, the oven). But other changes to the TSH receptor gene may have arisen more recently, explaining differences in egg production and maternal behaviour in modern breeds like the White Leghorn and the Silkie. It seems that tinkering with the thyroid hormone system in chickens may have killed two birds with one stone; or rather, caused two phenotypic changes with one genetic stroke. Once again, we’re seeing how selection for one particular trait may influence another – this single gene seems to affect both plumpness and egg-laying in chickens.
These relatively recent changes to genes, bodies and behaviour remind us that domestication is not in fact a single, discrete event, but an ongoing process. And the arrival of gene editing means that useful changes can now be brought about even more swiftly than could be achieved in the tenth century, by papal decree.
7
RICE
Oryza sativa
He heaves his hoe in the rice-field, under the noonday sun,
Onto the soil of the rice-field, his streaming sweat beads run.
Do you or don’t you know it? That bowl of rice we eat:
Each seed, each grain, the fruit of his labour done.
Li Shen, ‘Pity the Peasants’
Feeding the world
Travel to Longsheng in the Guangxi Province of south-west China today, and you see a landscape transformed by agriculture, where people are still practising a centuries-old way of life. Steep hills rise up from a snaking river valley – and every slope is grooved with terraces. The tortuous, stepped paddy fields create the impression of something alive: a great, sleeping serpent. The Longsheng mountain range practically writhes, and the terraces are like the scales on its flanks. Longsheng means Dragon’s Back.
I visited the rice terraces some years ago, and met a farmer, Liao Jongpu, whose family had cultivated rice there for generations. It was early summer, and we went up on the hillside with baskets of rice seedlings, to plant out the new crop on freshly ploughed terraces. Below us, more terraces were being prepared. Ploughing these narrow, winding strips defied an industrial, mechanised solution, but a single ox, pulling a plough, could navigate them easily.
Liao showed me what to do – taking three or four seedlings at a time, and pushing them down into the wet, yielding mud under the water. The seedlings looked just like grass – and of course that’s what they are. Like wheat, rice belongs to the grass family, the Poaceae, and it looks similarly unpromising as a food – yet it’s become one of the most important cereals feeding our huge global population. Rice contributes around a fifth of the calories and around an eighth of the total protein consumed worldwide. Some 740 million tons of rice are produced each year, and it’s grown on every continent except Antarctica, and although it’s also becoming an increasingly important staple in both sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, around 90 per cent of the world’s rice is grown and eaten in Asia. More than 3.5 billion people across the globe depend on rice as a staple, and it’s the most important food crop in low- and lower-middle-income countries. For the poorest 20 per cent of the tropical population around the world, rice provides more protein per person than beans, meat or milk.
Across many low-income countries, the spectre of malnutrition stalks populations. Around the world, a billion people are starving and a further 2 billion suffer from ‘hidden hunger’, lacking essential micronutrients, including vitamins and minerals. The three most prevalent micronutrient disorders involve iodine, iron and retinol – or vitamin A.
Vitamin A deficiency leads to an increased susceptibility to infections. Malnutrition and infectious diseases often coexist – and each exacerbates the other. A vicious circle starts to spin as malnourished bodies fall prey to infection; infectious diseases suppress appetite and affect absorption of nutrients from the gut; the body’s defences fall away. As well as this sinister synergy with infection, a lack of vitamin A is also one of the most important causes of preventable childhood blindness, responsible for around half a million cases every year. Half of these children die within a year of losing their sight. Vitamin A is found in animal products such as meat, milk and eggs. Where these foods are rarely eaten, vitamin A deficiency is likely to be more prevalent. Beta-carotene, a precursor of the vitamin, is found in some plant foods, including green vegetables, and orange fruits and vegetables – but conversion into vitamin A in the human body is fairly inefficient. So you need to eat a lot of those types of plant food to get enough of the vitamin, and for many people in poor countries that’s just not an option.
Public-health strategies for reducing the burden of vitamin A deficiency have included schemes to encourage people to change their dietary habits, to grow their own carotenoid-rich foods – like leafy vegetables, mangoes and papaya – and to provide vitamin A supplements to children and breastfeeding mothers. Another way of boosting vitamin A intake is to fortify foods which are widely consumed, but naturally low in the vitamin. Breakfast cereals and margarine are often fortified with vitamin A in high-income countries. But in lower-income countries, this isn’t a viable strategy as the poorest people are unlikely to have access to such processed foods.
There is yet another way of injecting more vitamin A into a dietary staple, not by processing it, but by inducing plants to add vitamin A, or at least, a precursor, to themselves. Genetic modification provides the opportunity to do just that – and rice, as such a globally important crop, presented itself as the perfect vehicle.
After eight years of work, the creation of a genetically modified form of rice that could produce its own beta-carotene was announced in the journal Science in 2000. Field trials started four years later in the US, followed by others in the Philippines and Bangladesh. Meanwhile, studies looking at the effects of consuming the rice concluded that it was safe to eat, and that just a small cup could provide half of the daily requirement of the vitamin A precursor.
But right from the start, Golden Rice attracted controversy. Greenpeace led the opposition, with concerns about Golden Rice being used as a public-relations exercise for genetic engineering – a superficially humanitarian initiative which would open the door for more profitable GM organisms. They said that Golden Rice was ‘simply the wrong approach, and a risky distraction away from real solutions’, whilst posing unpredictable environmental and food-safety risks.
In 2005, the project manager for Golden Rice, Jorge E. Mayer, met the criticisms from Greenpeace with a robust rebuttal. He was dismayed that a new version of Golden Rice, producing more than twenty-three times the level of beta-carotene contained in the prototype, continued to elicit opposition and disdain from environmentalists. He accused Greenpeace of disregarding evidence and sticking to an ‘anti-biotechnology’ agenda. To Mayer, Greenpeace and their allies were clearly the new Luddites, fighting back against a new, agro-industrial revolution. He wrote:
Nobody has been able to come up with a scenario whereby the provitamin A-enriched grains of Golden Rice could pose a menace to the environment or to human health. What’s left in the opponents’ camp is a perceived risk of the technology as such, rooted in unfathomable, yet-to-be-articulated dangers. Meanwhile, real threat does exist: it is the threat of widespread micronutrient deficiencies killing millions of children and adults all over the world.
Critics of Gold
en Rice had suggested that existing fortification and supplementation programmes could be derailed by a less successful venture. Mayer argued that this criticism failed to acknowledge the potential of GM rice to be a sustainable, and cost-effective, solution to vitamin A deficiency. Neither did it recognise the failure of existing programmes to reach remote, rural areas – where the need was most pressing. Mayer raised his own ethical objections in return – how could it be morally defensible to oppose something which could clearly have such a positive impact on human health, in some of the poorest communities on earth? He questioned how governments – and in particular, the European Union – could act on what he saw as such fragile evidence, meeting this potentially beneficial advance with regulatory knots so restricting, they threatened to strangle it.
Golden Rice has become something of a poster child for the pro-poor credentials and the potential of GM, and the biotech industry is also increasingly keen to cast itself as eco-friendly. But there’s a suspicion in some camps that while GM developers are trying to present themselves as sustainable, progressive and caring – actually, this is all about a mob of fundamentally selfish corporations lining their own pockets. Trust had been broken. And the battle lines had been drawn up decades before Golden Rice arrived on the scene.
The creation of a monster
The largest corporation in the business, Monsanto, has presented confusingly different messages about the role of GM crops in global agriculture. In 1990, Monsanto’s chief scientist, Howard Schneiderman, wrote about GM technology, stressing its many advantages, while cautioning that it would not be a panacea, a one-size-fits-all solution to the world’s agricultural needs – and that it shouldn’t be used to push farmers towards monoculture and cash crops. But at the same time, the Monsanto corporate giant was ploughing its own furrow, deeply and purposefully. It focused intently on a few, standardised weedkiller- and insect-resistant varieties of cotton and maize – that were explicitly designed to function as monocultured cash crops.
Anthropologist Dominic Glover has traced this disconnect between a pioneering scientist’s vision and corporate practice right back to the emergence of Monsanto as a biotech giant. In the 1970s, Monsanto was in petrochemicals – including ones used in agriculture. This had become a risky business. Profits were tightly linked to the price of oil, with slim margins at the best of times. The Green Revolution had taken agriculture to another level, with new varieties of cereals, novel irrigation systems, pesticides and synthetic fertilisers supporting a doubling of production between 1961 and 1985. But after decades of innovation, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find new agrochemicals which would be more effective than the previous batch.
Monsanto had also run into difficulties as some of the chemicals which it had produced – including dioxins and PCBs – had proven to be damaging to both human health and the environment. The lawsuits started to pile up, and the future of the company was in jeopardy. Monsanto’s survival depended increasingly on just one herbicide – their global bestseller, glyphosate, or Roundup. It had been a huge commercial success, but Monsanto couldn’t rest on its laurels – the patent for glyphosate would eventually expire. The company needed to broaden its horizons.
In 1973, Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer had created the first transgenic organism – where DNA is moved between species – by taking a section of genetic code from one bacterium, and introducing it into another. Biotechnology – and specifically genetic modification – was looking like a promising area to explore, and invest in. Monsanto shed its chemicals and plastics divisions and reinvented itself as a biotech pioneer. And its first foray into commercial GM crops emerged in the form of a glyphosate-resistant, ‘Roundup Ready’ soybean – thus shoring up the market for Roundup as well. If you sowed the GM soy and doused your fields with Roundup, all the weeds would die – but the soy would thrive. In 1994, Roundup Ready soy was approved for agricultural use in the US. In 1996, Monsanto attempted to launch the soybean in Europe. And they couldn’t have chosen a worse moment.
Suspicions about industrial agricultural practices and government were running fearfully high. Ten years earlier, an epidemic of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), also known as mad cow disease, had broken out in British cattle. This terrifying, untreatable disease would – after a long incubation of several years – cause a cow to trip and stumble, to become aggressive, and finally to die. The epidemic lasted from 1986 until 1998.
The origin of the disease was eventually traced to calves being fed with protein supplements – meat and bone meal – which were themselves contaminated with the remains of scrapie-infected sheep. Feeding meat and bone meal to cattle was banned, and millions of cattle were culled. But potentially hundreds of thousands of infected cattle had already passed into the human food chain. There was a fear that humans could be affected, through eating contaminated beef, but the British government sought to reassure the worried populace. In 1990, the agriculture minister, John Gummer, went as far as to publicly eat a hamburger, with his four-year-old daughter Cordelia, in order to demonstrate the safety of British beef. But then people started to suffer from something that looked suspiciously like a human form of BSE, causing stumbling and tremors, and ultimately leading to coma and death. The brains of sufferers became porous and spongy – just like those of cows with BSE. Further research proved the link between BSE and the human version, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or vCJD. Although the number of deaths from vCJD was very small compared with other threats, peaking at twenty-eight deaths in a year in 2000, there was something peculiarly harrowing about the way it struck down its victims.
The British government finally acknowledged that BSE-contaminated beef could represent a risk to human health in 1996, but public trust in industrial agricultural practices, and in government, was in tatters. Enter Monsanto. EU officials approved imports of its GM soybeans in 1996, but British consumers were deeply suspicious. Tabloid newspapers picked up the scent. In 1998, Prince Charles wrote an article, in the Telegraph, titled ‘Seeds of Disaster’, in which he warned that transferring a gene between one species and another ‘takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone’. Greenpeace launched itself into high-profile campaigns. The fear of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, started to ripple out. They were seen as monstrous creations, of science run amok, and labelled ‘Frankenfoods’ by the media. Supermarkets across Europe banned foods with GM ingredients.
Monsanto reacted with its own advertising campaign, pushing the humanitarian potential of GM hard, asserting that ‘worrying about starving future generations won’t feed the world. Food biotechnology will.’ In 1999, Monsanto CEO Bob Shapiro spoke at the fourth annual Greenpeace Business Conference. Shapiro said he wanted dialogue, not debate. He opined that Monsanto were indeed guilty – of believing too passionately in the beneficial impact their technology could have. It sounded too much like a faux apology. He stressed the potential benefits of biotech – in reducing water use, soil erosion and carbon emissions – but to many these sounded liked empty promises when the GMO that Monsanto was keen to introduce to Europe was a weedkiller-resistant soybean. However productive that soy turned out to be, it just looked like a way of Monsanto selling even more of its own, bestselling weedkiller. Even Robb Fraley, one of Monsanto’s top in-house scientists, is said to have lamented, ‘If all we can do is sell more damned herbicide, we shouldn’t be in this business.’ The gap between rhetoric and practice had never seemed so stark.
At the same conference, Peter Melchett, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, declared that ‘[the] public have taken a clear look at what you are offering and have said “no”. People are increasingly mistrustful of big science and big business.’ He went on to predict not only a European, but a global rejection of GM, based on civilised values and respect for the natural world. And he was right. The opposition quickly grew into a worldwide phenomenon. In 1999, Deutsche Bank analysts announced that ‘GMOs are dead’.
; In 2006, following actions brought by the US, Canada and Argentina, the World Trade Organization ruled that the European Communities had acted unlawfully by imposing a de facto moratorium on GM food, and that concerns about risks to public health were not supported by the scientific evidence. But governments weren’t the only ones putting up barriers to trade: consumers and supermarkets continued to resist. BSE had sensitised European consumers to risks – especially any which were linked to big business.
Monsanto’s image, always a little grubby, was transformed into something quite diabolical. Search #monsantoevil on the internet and you’ll get a glimpse of the hatred and distrust directed at this technological giant. And inextricably bound up with this ‘supervillain’ image is the technology itself – genetic modification – and those ‘seeds of disaster’ that mere humans should never be arrogant enough to sow. It seems that an inauspicious launch of a herbicide-resistant soybean, together with entrenched distrust of big science and big business, may have successfully hobbled this technology.
There’s something poignant and ironic in that speech of Shapiro’s at the Greenpeace conference at the tail-end of the last millennium. The Monsanto chief said that the way forward was dialogue, not polarised debate. Perhaps if the corporation had started in that way, right at the very beginning of their biotech research programme – engaging in real two-way communication and partnership with farmers and consumers – then the story would have been very different. Instead, they were so sure of the benefits of GM – with their chief scientist calling it ‘the most significant scientific and technological discovery ever made’ – that they seemed to think all they needed to do was to convince everyone else. Monsanto’s managers apparently assumed that their technologies would be readily adopted by a compliant, global public – they seem to have been taken completely by surprise at the backlash against GM in Europe in the late 1990s.
Tamed Page 24
