The enemies of biotechnology want you to think that they’re fighting against Frankenstein’s monster--something so horrible and unnatural that it shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
It doesn’t matter to them that farmers have been growing genetically modified crops with great success for a decade, and that billions of people have eaten these products without complaint or worry. The fearmongers ignore such vital facts and hurl insults at the stuff, calling it “Frankenfood” and the like.
They refuse to realize that genetic change is an ordinary part of life. We’re all examples of it. We come from parents who are different from us, and whose genes fused together to create the people we are today. If we didn’t have this kind of genetic change, we’d all be clones--and what would be more unnatural than that?
Farmers know more about genetic change than most people. In fact, we were the world’s first genetic engineers. Long before the folks in white lab jackets discovered DNA, our farming forefathers were breeding all kinds of crops to grow more food, better food, and healthier food. To them, this was a matter of simple common sense. Today, however, we recognize that they were actually manipulating genes.
Everybody loves eating big and juicy tomatoes. Farmers have grown them for years, of course, but they’ve also changed them over time, through tireless experimentation. The tomatoes we buy in grocery stores originally derive from a wild species that produces little red berries. They’re nothing like the tomatoes we enjoy, which are the genetic creation of farmers.
A similar story might be told for just about every other crop. As the scholar C.S. Prakash has pointed out, cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli all derive from the same wild plant. Their variation comes from farmers trying to breed a better plant. Kiwis are delicious fruits from New Zealand, though they ultimately hail from the Chinese gooseberry, which is not edible. Then there’s corn, whose genetic diversification gives us everything from sweet corn to flour corn--again, thanks to farmers and their willingness to innovate.
Anthony Trewavas of the University of Edinburgh has pointed out that these modern crops would survive in the wild “no longer than a domesticated chihuahua would last in the company of wolves.” Yet none of us would consider the act of eating seedless grapes “unnatural.”
Here’s the bottom line: If farmers had clung to some pristine notion of genetic purity, our food choices would be much poorer. Many of the foods we know and relish simply wouldn’t exist. We should therefore appreciate biotechnology as the continuation of a historic process to improve crops through better breeding.
Consider one of the most popular biotech crop varieties: Bt corn, so named because it uses a gene from a common soil bacterium known by the scientific name of Bacillus thuringiensis. These microscopic critters happen to produce a natural toxin that’s harmless to just about every form of life--except for the corn borer, a terrible pest that can ravage acres upon acres of corn. For many farmers, there’s nothing worse than a plague of corn borers invading their fields, and there’s nothing better than being able to prevent this catastrophe by growing Bt corn. Other benefits include farmers having to rely less and less on the pesticide sprays that unsettle many consumers.
When environmentalists talk about protecting endangered species, they often claim that preserving biodiversity is in our self-interest. Imagine (they say) the cure to cancer lying within the genetic code of an Amazonian frog species currently unknown to science.
Perhaps they’re right, and one day we’ll benefit from this gift. In the meantime, we’ve already identified hundreds of species whose genes can help us in more modest ways--but only if we’re willing to take advantage of them through the latest advances in biotechnology.
A few outspoken radical activists may call this “unnatural”--though I think it’s unnatural not to want to use the tools of biotechnology to help us feed the world.
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