Win–Win Policies for GMOs

 

 

Table of Contents

Genetically Modified Organisms: What and Why?

Background:

What Is Genetic Engineering Then?

If God Had Intended Us to Fly...

Genetic Engineering in our Past and Future

Well then...

How We Got Here

Progress, Service, Competition?

User Versus Consumer Concerns

Ecology, Competition, Cooperation

Yet Another Initialism: the ESS

How Could We Improve Matters?

Wages of Hubris and other Virtues

The Parade of Horribles

 

Genetically Modified Organisms:
What and Why?

When the only tool you have is a hammer,
every problem looks like a nail.
Abraham Maslow

Background:

Once you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them
is to use a larger can
                                                Anonymous

A decade or two ago I wrote an essay on the topic of Genetic Research, Genetic Engineering, and Genetic Modification in general, their social and economic implications, and what should, or could, be done about them.

That essay however, succumbed to bit-rot, probably when one of my disk drives died and a lot of data died with it. Like most compulsive software types, I am morbidly repelled by having to repeat done work, but it now seems to me that the associated genetic engineering issues not only have not lapsed, but have intensified in urgency and importance; so I here attempt, not so much to recreate what I wrote before, as to cover the same ground in more nearly current contexts.

First, though I also detest repeatedly explaining my attitude to genetic research and its consequent implications for genetic engineering, it would be misleading not to explain at least once more here: my views are diametrically opposed to politically correct maunderings of non-biologists and non-realists.

At the same time I intensely disapprove of irresponsible application of genetic modification tools without competent anticipation of unintended consequences, so, if anything that I say offends your sense of what should be regarded as illegal, immoral or fattening, or if you think that I seem to be advocating exactly what you yourself think, please try to make sure of exactly what I say or mean before attributing any views to me, favourable or otherwise.

In short: in essence I see genetic engineering as a field of technology; neither good nor bad in itself, but in how, where, and when and why it is applied. And the responsibility for any resulting harm includes that of neglecting to apply its beneficial aspects.

I shall repeatedly point out what should be obvious in decision theory, but often is overlooked and misunderstood in practice: doing something mindlessly, rather than doing nothing, commonly is likelier to do more harm than good, but doing nothing is also an option, a choice of action; sometimes it is the best option for a while, but like any other option, it generally is disastrous when applied ignorantly or indefinitely in sloth, greed, malice, or cowardice.

Mystical objections to genetic engineering, such as that there is something special, something “unnatural” about changing a genome, whether human or other, because any such action flies in the face of the Creator or entails unspecified or unimaginable consequences, or something similar, I dismiss with contempt. In much the same way, decades ago, I dismissed attempts to vilify organ transplantation on analogous grounds.

Note that nowadays it is hard to convey the fuss that the very mention of organ transplants once caused. Since those days, routine transplants have saved or transformed the lives of millions; as abominations they now are about as newsworthy as so many broken collarbones.

What I do emphasise however, is that, like every other technology, genetic engineering can be abused, and that accordingly, much as in physics, chemistry, medicine and similar fields, researchers and practitioners should be held responsible for waste and woe arising from their work, or neglect of their work, as well as praise or reward for successful exercises. It is not acceptable for every undergraduate who would like to see whether he can construct a new strain of E. coli that can survive standard water treatments, and express botulin toxin in city water supplies, to proceed with such attempts, on the grounds that it looks like an interesting project. We would try to prevent anything along those lines, no matter incompetent or intelligent he might be.

To get the idea, read the short story by H. G. Wells: “The Stolen Bacillus”.

But biological hazards are neither more nor less to be respected or feared, than physical or social hazards; it equally is not for any undergraduate similarly to release polonium into city water supplies to see what happens.

I shall try to offer some perspectives on such considerations, but the topic is not a major aspect of the field of genetic engineering as I discuss it here.

What Is Genetic Engineering Then?

Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.
                                    Francis Bacon

I now descend into technical terms and concepts, and since this is just an essay, not a book, I do not explain much; I assume that either the reader is familiar with most of the relevant concepts and terminology, or has access to Wikipedia, other wikis, and sundry sound material available online: material that deals with genetics, ecology, and evolution, plus many reasonably sound textbooks.

Without prejudice, two that are nicely up to date as I write are:

Walter E. Hill:  Genetic Engineering: A Primer. ISBN 978-0415300070 

and, more comprehensive:

Tomas Cannon: Genetics and Genetic Engineering ISBN 978-1-83947-270-1

Just beware of the books that preach against the discipline; I hesitate to recommend any textbook in particular, because the field moves so fast, and there is a great deal of material online. Furthermore, there is no need to study the matter in depth unless you badly want to go into technical detail, but if you do, then some serious textbook work is in order.

For anyone new to the subject matter and unable to meet or master those requirements, I recommend skipping the explanations and moving on to the practical proposals; better take time out for study and come back later, than fulminate over what seems to make no sense at first sight.

None of this is the topic of the following discussion, so do not waste energy on discussing the merits or demerits of genetic engineering in general; rather take such concerns elsewhere. For my part, a major assumption underlying this essay is that genetic engineering is one of the greatest fields of progress in human history and prehistory. It ranks with mastery of fire, speech, tools, writing, mathematics, science, and more. Its development and application are part of the infrastructure of our environmental conservation, of food production and of wide ranges of raw materials.

That hardly dents the list, but it covers most of the topics of the present discussion.

First: the basis of one of the most fundamental concepts in biology, central to the concept of evolution in the ecology and history of living things, is that of natural selection as applied to populations defined by their genomes. In that process the genomes change according to how the selection is applied. The primary changes to the genome are rearrangement of genetic material, plus changes to the content of the genetic material; that is to say mutation of many kinds, resulting from many possible causes.

Other changes include horizontal adoption or exchange of genetic material: that is to say genetic material from unrelated organisms; possibly by sexual reproduction, but commonly by more or less accidental non-sexual adoption of genetic material.

A closely related process is association with other species whether in parasitism or mutualism, which can achieve amazing and beautiful effects, even in having organisms from different kingdoms fusing into what in effect amounts to a single species; our own mitochondria are an intimate and advanced example.

Such things happen by accident, parasitism, or other activities or conditions more or less rare in natural environments, and commonly more or less unpredictable in nature.

Another class of spontaneous change is associated, not so much with genetic change, as with control of the reading and interpretation of genetic information in the workings of the body. Such things are of various types, but I shall refer to them loosely as epigenetic changes, and they commonly are more routine, more reversible, and less drastic, than fundamental genetic changes. Still, in practice all changes may turn out to be important in various ways, and in this discussion I shall not distinguish sharply between genetic and epigenetic effects.

As a vague analogy, the non-specialist might find it helpful to think of the genome as a text written in nucleic acids (familiarly known as DNA and RNA); then the genetic changes are something like editing the meaning by changing or moving letters or strings of text. The epigenetic changes are more like changing the effect of the text by meddling with the punctuation, the typesetting, the illustrations, or the colour of the ink.

In nature all such changes are largely haphazard at first, and commonly the processes are said to be “random”, or to occur “randomly”, though such loose terminology is so sloppy as to be misleading. Still, whether random, spontaneous, accidental, incidental, short term or long term, those processes are important both in the biology and the husbandry of living creatures and populations.

What is more important, as I shall point out, is not whether a genetic or epigenetic change is random, but whether it is stochastic, meaning that changes are not based on whatever function the code performed before, or which mechanism now is important, but that the direction of change is hit-or-miss; progress by stochastic change is never-ending, but it is worse than Bruce’s spider — the spider at least kept trying the same thing over and over for a given function, whereas stochastic changes need not be consistent, in fact usually are neither consistent, nor planned on the basis of existing conditions, nor with any particular improvement in view.

Stochastic change is the main form of genetic change in nature, and natural selection works on the products of such changes; the whole process is astonishingly naïve, but also astonishingly powerful; the products of evolution by means of natural selection often turn out to be amazingly novel and amazingly effective, looking like deliberate design.

Human interference in stochastic change can take two major forms, and both of them tend not to be stochastic, but heuristic, which means: hunting, goal-directed. In its simplest form it relies on consistently choosing, and breeding from, the combinations of the organisms that are closest to what one wants: the biggest cattle, the strongest horses, the sweetest berries, and so on.

That is artificial selection, or breeding, and it has a lot of disadvantages, but it is many times faster than natural selection and, what is very important, artificial selection can force a genetic line in directions that would not have been possible in natural selection at all, and certainly not in less than many million years; in fact it often goes directly against natural selection. This is important when the target of the breeding project is something that in the wild, would be strongly selected against.

For example, think how long lapdogs, pit bulls, cauliflowers, show flowers, or dairy cows would last in the wild.

And in such artificial breeding projects one looks for short cuts, trying to see what one can do by cross breeding or other tricks. It does not to any great extent change the way that things commonly happen in the wild; it mainly steers the processes.

Now, where Genetic Engineering comes into the matter, is: in recent decades humans have learnt enough, and have developed enough technology, to enable us to adjust some of those processes to achieve effects in ways that differ from what almost always happens in the wild. So for example, we can take genetic material from a species and delete or modify it so that say, a plant species can no longer poison us or our livestock, so that the new strain becomes valuable as food. One examples of where that has yielded valuable results, are Canola and Cassava, but there are others.

Or, instead of subtraction or inactivation of genetic material, we might copy some from another species, and insert it into a crop plant so as to add desirable features to the new generation. For example, after such treatment, a plant species might produce flowers or fruit of a new colour — say a blue rose or purple tomato.

Or golden rice.

Or a domesticated animal or plant might be made resistant to drought or disease to which the wild animal had no resistance before being selected for resistance.

 

If God Had Intended Us to Fly...

Personally, I agree with the old lady who said: “If God had intended us to fly,
He would never have given us the railways!”
Michael Flanders

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom.
Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box.
But it is quite another thing to open the box.
                        T.H.Huxley

Things like golden rice sound straightforward certainly, but equally certainly, they are far from being as simple as they sound. By way of analogy, think of flying. What could be simpler? For tens of millions of years, birds without engineering qualifications have flown, and for tens of millennia humans have noted and envied the ability of birds to fly; actual proposals for human flight were made thousands of years ago, if not earlier.

And yet, unlike the easy flight of ignorant birds, all attempts by brainy humans remained futile — it was not till recently, almost in living memory, that the first heavier-than-air, powered flight was achieved.

Even then, that first powered flight was so pathetic that hardly anyone who heard of it realised its limitations. And in fact, such as it was at the time, flying was feeble, dangerous, expensive, required skilled control. It also was frightening: people feared that aircraft might get used in warfare, and all that.

And yet, in any affluent society now, mere decades later, only exceptional adults have never flown, and we fly with little more fuss than travelling by road, rail, or sea. (Wheels and ships of course, in contrast to flying, are natural, whereas human flight is unnatural yes?)

In analogous terms, I mentioned golden rice, which certain bodies have attacked with passionate malice, dishonesty, or stupidity, often all three together, and they have done so for decades. Their arguments are much the same as their intellectual and moral forebears directed against aircraft, against railways, against vaccination, and against every advance of humanity since Eve tried the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; arguably the first recorded instance of anything resembling scientific research, and please notice, performed by a woman; Adam amounted to little better than a peer reviewer.

For those who need an introduction to the topic of golden rice, there is a good summary in Wikipedia. Briefly: rice is a traditional staple food, food in particular for the poor in their hundreds of millions. However in its “natural” state (actually highly unnatural for many centuries now, but let that pass) the grain, as eaten, is deficient in many vital nutrients, and in particular, contains too little vitamin A in a diet that includes inadequate alternative sources of that vitamin.

Note that the “natural”, wild-type rice plant actually does make vitamin A, but does not put any significant quantity into the grain.

A few decades ago, some genetic engineers saw that it would be compassionate and sensible to engineer into rice, the ability to produce grains rich in the vitamin A that is harmfully deficient in the diets of millions of people. The logical form of the vitamin for the application would be carotene, which is an orange pigment that is plentiful in most yellow and green vegetables and leaves.

Biological illiterates said it couldn’t be done, shouldn’t be done, and damwell must not be done because only people too stupid to eat a balanced (usually raw vegan) diet would be short of carotene, and it all was a plot to enrich Big Pharma, and you could not prove that it wouldn’t poison people and destroy ecologies and upset economies and... and...

Well, in spite of actual physical sabotage and politics and conspiracy theories and abuse, especially abuse, it then was done anyway, and we got golden rice. And no one got poisoned or turned yellow etc.

However, that was the good news...

The new rice produced too little carotene to be of much benefit, and the unnatural rice plants produced poor yields...

AaaHAH!!! Told you so, didn’t we?

Yes. After a fashion...

But as with flight, and fusion power, and metal steamships, instant perfection isn’t how such things work; it never has been. In the example of rice, the first thing we needed was not a staple crop ready to feed millions, but just fertile rice plants that could produce carotene in their seed.

Once we had that, it was like the thin edge of the wedge, like having got one miserably inadequate Kittihawk aircraft to fly at all. We then were in a position to stop arguing about whether heavier-than-air flight, or carotene-rich rice, was possible at all.

It inarguably, visibly, was possible. See for yourself if you didn’t believe the science or engineeriing behind it.

Having disposed of such quibbles, we could concentrate on improving aircraft in all their thousands of relevant variables. And that process of improvement worked so well that, less than two decades later, aircraft were killing soldiers in their tens of thousands. And in another two decades, they were even better...

And even then, flying properly wasn’t easy. Ask any rocket scientist. Humanity struggled for yet another three decades even to get humans onto the moon, where they could collect a few kilogrammes of rock.

And was all that worth it even then? Or easy at all?

The only ones to doubt that it still is hard, and yet is worth it, are the ones who lack sound knowledge of the field. And the least literate are the shrillest and smuggest. They don’t need the knowledge, you see; they can fly in airliners and order air deliveries any time they like, all the while explaining why technology is evil, though trivial.

Fundamentalism and conspiracy theory are armed against science and sense.

And progress with golden rice is much like that. Any — absolutely any —  plant breeder with a scrap of realism could have predicted similar stages in overcoming the difficulties of practical production; for comparison, anyone interested might find it instructive to consider the development of triticale. Triticale as a viable crop languished for decades, but lo: after a few generations of breeding, triticale is now a major crop with its own special merits and continuing improvements; internationally its production expands every year.

Similarly, in golden rice the colour and the vitamin content have intensified, and the yields have improved, and the varieties multiplied, and strains of golden rice now are gaining commercial acceptance.

And still with indefinitely beneficial prospects for further improvement. What next? Any ideas about golden rice with a high lysine content?

Disgusting, isn’t it? All that brilliant denial and vituperation wasted...? Wasted! People shouldn’t be allowed to disrespect doomsayers and conspiracy theories!

True, such progress still struggles in the face of the yapping social parasites, but within another decade most of the human population will have forgotten that there ever was an issue. After all, golden rice would be natural by then, wouldn’t it — just as natural as blue roses and blue tomatoes?

It reminds me of the fundamentalist who insisted that: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for me!”

But, I hear the uninformed cry: isn’t it unnatural?

Well let’s ignore for the moment, the red herring of whether natural as such is a  good thing as such; that assertion is far from established: rabies, and plague, and smallpox, and arsenic, and bone cancer, and starvation, and drought, and flood, and stupidity, and malice, all are natural, unlike cooking, clothing, wheels, printing, or agriculture; but good?  The bible saw plagues as good, but at best that goodness is open to discussion and qualification.

I suggest that it is conceivable that some things might in some senses be natural, and yet, at the same time, harmful or unsatisfactory from most points of view, particularly human points of view — vitamin-deficient rice is a case in point.

In contrast, some other things, variously good and bad, are unnatural only in the limited and artificial sense that they would not happen much without human intervention. And I assume that my readers and I are human, and have the benefit of humanity at heart. Anyone who denies this should rather read some other screed, say the writings of  Rifkin or von Däniken. 

For one thing, think about apples, and pumpkins, and wheat and all the fruit and vegetables and meat we eat now, and have eaten for centuries; think of the paper we use and fabrics we wear... in general all those are about as “natural” as airliners and computers and clothing and the WWW...

Let anyone who argues the benefits of “natural” life, show us the way. They could start by appearing naked, diseased, and starving among us poor victims of unnatural products and protections, and then proceed to flourish in their inarguable states of nature and to help others to join them in their blessed prosperity. I for one would refuse to follow their example, and that would serve me right, but their campaign would at least show the commitment, the good sense and honesty, of their attempts to protect unnatural consumers from such unnatural evils as golden rice.

And every similar advance in genetic engineering and engineering in general, depends on the principle of taking what occurs in nature, and setting it to work on natural things in natural ways,  though commonly not ways that would occur in nature without teleological intervention, intervention that we might call deliberate “tweaking”.

Such tweaking implies conscious foresight and intention: deliberate action with a definite objective in the future. That is the meaning of “teleology”. In particular, it takes teleological action to achieve an objective when at times one must work with no positive progress, or even lose ground, sacrificing some benefits deliberately for the sake of greater benefits in the future. So, for example, we might refuse to eat our best seed corn, even if it meant going hungry, because we knew we should need that seed corn in future. We might refuse to slaughter our best meat animals, those we want to breed from, and so on. That is one example of teleological selection — accepting short-term sacrifices for the sake of long-term gains.

And teleology is alien to any strong natural selection; in the wild, weak stock would be weeded out even if in principle that stock could be ancestral to future fit descendants. Think of the golden rice, that started with a few miserable plants bearing pale cream grain: natural selection would give them short shrift.

Furthermore, though exceptionally as yet, genetic engineering offers scope to design things completely new and introduce them into otherwise “natural” organisms.

This is not to deny that genetic engineering ever could have disappointing or harmful results; if such results were impossible in principle, then in biology there would be no such thing as famine, pain, parasitism, plague, poison or predation. But unharnessed nature produces all those and more, and has done so indifferently and unrepentantly for billions of years on this planet alone.

But that point is academic; such things are “naturally” commonplace, and yet they increasingly yield to our “unnatural” interference, in which we use such chemical, physical, and biological tools as “nature” provides, ranging from spades to atomic force microscopes — when our research discovers and renders them available for us to apply.

So, plainly, our genetic engineering progress is natural, as natural as anything on our planet.

People who object that progress is costly in terms of blunders, suffering, and abuse, are quite correct; all those are as natural as anything can be. However, “costly” need not imply that the progress is “unprofitable” to humanity, nor that shirking the attempts to progress does better or costs less. After more than a hundred centuries of being dragged through progress willy nilly, we survivors are in a position to look back and see in contrast, how costly failure to progress has been and still is.

Equally clearly, to panic because we now can produce effects that we could not produce before, is insane. Ultimately, everything that happens in nature works according to the same fundamental principles. The relevant question is not whether a tool can be abused, but how it can be used for benefit in a world full of woe and waste.

And where it has potential for good, that potential should be developed as far as may be.

This applies to natural selection as well as genetic engineering. Sickle cell anaemia is a classic example, arising from natural selection for resistance to malaria, but in its homozygous form it gives rise to serious health problems.

Surprise!

And more surprise! Genetic manipulation now seems to be succeeding in the treatment of sickle cell anaemia!

As another example, it now seems that some genes in the human immune system, genes that were associated with strong resistance to plague, were naturally-selected for during the great black plague epidemics in the late middle ages. Hardly surprising, surely?

And completely natural.

Except that some of those same completely natural genes now are associated with some serious auto-immune conditions. genetic engineering in contrast, would have stood a good chance of importing the resistance without the auto-immunity.

It is too early to be sure of it all.

Perspective, perspective. Which was better then, and which should be improved now?

The fact that your hammer can hurt your thumb does not mean that having hammers is as bad as having to do without hammers when you need them.

And the same goes for other engineering tools; genetic or otherwise.

The thing to be wary of is not new engineering, but bad engineering, and there is nothing new about that.

Doing nothing is always an engineering option, sometimes a good one, but not always good, and often not even sensible.

One point that should be amusing, but is far from anything of the type, is the mixing up of genetically modified products with “organic” foods. For one thing, the concepts of the “organic”  bigots have absolutely nothing to do with the concept of anything organic. Most of them I have encountered do not even know what the word means. And I mean that literally. Secondly, everything involved in genetic engineering is strictly organic anyway in the first place. The substances and processes are organid, and applied to organic entities, and develop organic products.

But tell that to the proponents, and you will see some startling illustrations of the definition of “fanatic” as: “someone who can’t change his mind, and won’t change the subject”.

Trust me: it makes the refutation of such puerile nonsense very wearisome.

 

Genetic Engineering in our Past and Future

We can never do merely one thing.
Any intrusion into nature has numerous effects,
many of which are unpredictable.
                                                Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology

 

As humanity, we unknowingly began our journey into genetic engineering when we started to select crops and livestock (and arguably, our mates as well) for desirable attributes, probably some 10000Y to 20000Y BCE (meaning “before common era”) and only in the last century or so is our genetic engineering developing into something more like comprehension of what we are dealing with in our groping after the mechanics of genomes and other media of inheritance and physiology.

Humanity is the first species in the entire existence of this planet so far, that bids fair to transcend Natural Selection by introducing teleology into evolution.  About other planets, I cannot usefully speculate. Teleological selection, like natural selection, works by affecting the selection pressures on target populations in general, but please note that in several ways it differs drastically in practice. In that respect it is no different, nor more unnatural, than natural selection. I suppose one could debate the selection of such activities as ants’ cultivation of fungi or aphids, but their teleology, if real at all, really isn’t conscious. The point is academic at best.

However, it is easy to underestimate the importance of the effect of selection with specific intent, looking ahead and planning to bring about particular genetic changes. Not only is the speed and intensity of the process orders of magnitude greater than most instances of natural selection, but we can bring about changes that are at best rare in natural selection, if possible at all.

Such as blue tomatoes and golden rice.

And such as driving the process of the evolution of a population through phases so unfit in the absence of human support, that they would never have survived natural selection at all. This is important almost beyond description; for one example, in producing strains that, with proper husbandry, have valuable characteristics such as live vaccines. Or think of plants such as some strains of cotton that cannot reproduce in the wild because their fibres are too long to permit their seeds to disperse naturally; think of strains of sheep, such as modern merinos that cannot survive in the wild without shearing.

But with proper husbandry both such cotton and such sheep can produce invaluable fibre indefinitely.

Clearly, we can produce perfectly viable strains from non-viable intermediate ancestors that would never survive in the wild themselves, but can be developed into strains that can survive very well indeed, thank you, once they have been developed beyond the vulnerable initial generations.

Consider more examples: both the first triticale and golden rice began as genetic engineering products neither fit for survival in the wild, nor viable as crop plants. Natural selection would have eliminated each in a single generation, but within a few or a few dozen generations of teleological selection, they developed into successful crop plants, and with prospects of still better to come.

The implication of teleological design and teleological selection and engineering is: we humans can deliberately plan to change the nature of the evolution of life, including that of our own species.

Both the promise and the responsibility, either of proceeding or of shirking, are on a scale so large as to be hard to comprehend.

And incidentally, whatever we do, we had better do responsibly, properly, and promptly, because if we permit the destruction of ourselves and other complex forms of life on this planet, microbial life might have to start over again after billions of years of first stochastic, then heuristic, fumbling forward into sentient complexity.

Which would not necessarily eventuate at all.

And no matter how you disapprove of humanity as a species, that of the alternative — blundering from one insensate form to another as we hitherto have done — does not seem to be in any way preferable to teleological genetic engineering.

That is a long-term view, and we are not yet properly coming to terms with it. As things stand, the likes of Rifkin and Proxmire have established in the minds of their dupes among the public, an unthinking dread of genetic modification and other forms of technology. A popular view, uncomprehending and mystic, is that genetic engineering is unnatural, and therefore uniquely hazardous, fundamentally evil, and generally futile anyway.

For my part, from what I already have said, it should be clear that that I do not imply or accept that everything that the genetic engineer (or anyone else) does is bound to be hazard-free, beneficial, worth while, and successful.

But so what? The same applies to every other activity, ranging from agriculture through zymurgy and back to aeronautics. However, even if genetic engineering did tick all those boxes, it would be the first such human activity to do so — ever. Every choice we make entails its own difficulties, dangers, and disadvantages.

And that includes choosing to do nothing, or trying not to do anything. Shades of Buddhist monks who refuse to swat mosquitoes, and who sweep the paths they tread for fear of crushing living things underfoot — and all in vain... They could have done so much more good by investing their effort into active creation of benefit rather than futile attempts to avoid what they see as evil.

Whatever we choose to do, it is common sense and our ethical duty, continually to assess the probable consequences, costs, risks, and rewards of our choice of objectives, means, and actions, and continually to reassess the value judgements on which we base our ethics and objectives.

It is a cliché, commonly an unthinking cliché, that ends do not justify means; and, like many unthinking clichés, that one is jejune: in a world such as ours, in which our only options are to choose means to favour our perceived ends, our means effectively amount to part of our ends, or, what amounts to the same thing, must be reckoned in with our primary objectives, commonly as part of the costs of those objectives, though preferably part of the profits as well.

And accordingly we cannot justify avoiding a given choice of action simply because it entails repugnant means: we have to evaluate the means–plus–ends of whatever course we choose, against alternative choices. And often the most desirable benefits demand undesirable means. When that happens we have to weigh the costs against the benefits, and might be forced to choose less satisfactory benefits if we are to make do with less disastrous means.

But whatever we do, we cannot avoid the fundamental principle that:

Entropy is not mocked:
for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

And similarly,

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched
to everything else in the universe.
                                         John Muir

And those related principles hold whether we are contemplating genetic engineering or any other activity. And we cannot avoid sowing the bad, the penalties of our choices, whether to do something or nothing, along with the good. It always is the sower’s responsibility to do what he can to maximise the good and minimise the bad.

And wherever we can: we should try to eliminate the least acceptable in favour of the more acceptable.

So what else is new under the sun?

Well, for one thing: Genetic Modification as a technology is new.

And because it is new, it must be mastered and assessed before we jump to conclusions. We already know it is a powerful tool, and like all other tools, the more powerful, the more competently it must be used.

And that demands study, not abuse, and not hysterical, futile, proscription.

 

Well then...

The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.
                        Edmund Burke

Well indeed then... what is our situation on which we are to base our decisions?

How We Got Here

Virtues have their place; and out of their place they hardly deserve the name. They pass into
the neighbouring vice. The patience of fortitude, and the endurance of pusillanimity,
are things very different, as in their principle, so in their effects.
                        Edmund Burke

Traditionally our husbandry, competently practised, aimed at producing our domestic plants and animals as best we could; and wherever we noticed particularly desirable specimens, we bred from them.

Actually, that may represent such progress in too rosy a light; all the way to modern times in many communities, there has been a tendency to consume the best specimens instead of the worst. This abuse has been surprisingly widespread; I read recently that European agricultural consultants in parts of Africa commonly had great trouble conveying the concept to the locals, that they should consume the least promising part of their crop, and keep the best for propagation, not the other way round.

By way of illustration that this was not a peculiarly African, or local, blunder, I quote a passage from a book by the late John Crompton: “The Hive”.

Man became an even more dangerous enemy when the bright idea struck him, in the dim and distant past, of hanging up hollow logs of wood or suitable earthenware receptacles to entice swarms and save himself the trouble of looking for wild nests. Thus emerged the first beekeeper, and for thousands of years, until very recent times, his methods hardly changed. What change there was, was for the worse. The primitive barbarian with his hollow logs of wood did less damage to the bees than our grandparents with their straw skeps. The barbarian destroyed all his stocks each year; our fathers and grandfathers destroyed only the heavy skeps and the light ones. They argued that it was advisable not to destroy all the stocks, but to keep a certain amount over to make honey and new colonies the next season. In this they were quite right, but they went a foolish way about it : they kept only those skeps which were too light to yield a large amount of honey, but heavy enough (with luck) to survive until the next spring. So at night —  a fitting time for so dark a deed  —  the heavy skeps, those containing the strong stocks, the good stocks, the best and keenest workers, the cold-weather foragers, and the finest queens, were taken to a pit and suffocated over fires of burning sulphur; sacrificed, in fact, at the altar of man’s greed. It was another version of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. The practice continued for hundreds of years, preserving the feeble and lazy and destroying the strong. (Oh, for some of those queens now that perished in the sulphur pits of long ago!)

A race of indifferent honey gatherers was the inevitable result, but what was worse, there emerged a race lacking in stamina, and any stocks that showed signs of recovering were killed off. In fact, man added another unjust edict: Nature told the bee that if she fought she died, man told her that she also died if she worked. Poor honey gatherers are invariably the weaker and more feeble. Nature has her methods with such. Unlike man, she has no use for them. So while man was still busy destroying the fit, Nature decided to destroy the unfit, and sent diseases to do it. Some of these diseases had been present before, but not in the virulent form they assumed. They attacked bees with a vigor that thoroughly startled beekeepers. They still do, and keep the research stations very busy. And the way for all this trouble was carefully paved by our forefathers.

Got the picture? It might help to note that the familiar European honeybee stems largely from Africa in the last millennium or two, and that the practices that Crompton described had not significantly occurred in Africa, and that for decades, while various plagues and diseases have been afflicting European beekeepers and American beekeepers, South African beekeepers have repeatedly gotten off lightly.

You see, America did not have indigenous honeybees; apiarists and fruit farmers had to import honeybees, and they naturally got their stocks from professional apiarists in Europe, so the sins of the Europeans were visited on the American beekeepers that inherited their strains. Subject to correction, I have the impression that the same applies to Australian bees, though perhaps less so, because, for decades, Australia has had draconian regulations against any form of honey or honeybee importation; accordingly, fewer global plagues have reached that island.

In contrast, South Africa has at least two indigenous subspecies of honeybee: Apis mellifera capensis, the Cape Honeybee; and Apis mellifera scutellata, the East African lowland honey bee, also known in some countries as the “killer bees”. Both are good producers,  and neither has undergone that misbegotten selection process to any great extent.

So, though that does not prove anything, maybe Crompton had a point; an illustrative point at least.

More relevantly to our topic, the results of increasingly advanced selection of various crops and livestock, were rapid and sometimes gratifying improvement, especially since the early 20^th century. And in the light of emerging concepts of common sense in genetics, this was not surprising.

Certainly, for some centuries now, the rate of improvement was rapid by the standards of natural selection; so rapid that one could decry the process as being unnatural.

Even more unnatural, have been the results of messing around with hybrids, polyploids, and similar anomalies, both artificial and adventitious. Their implications justify a gravely cynical view of the meaningfulness of terms such as “natural”, because many of the items that I refer to as “adventitious” actually occurred spontaneously, with human intervention not being involved till after the key events — or “natural miracles”. 

Among those adventitious examples, count banana, citrus, maize, peanut, potato, raspberries, vanilla, wheat, and many other fruits and grains, some of them as the result of a single accident, some emerging from multiple successive events down the centuries. Some such emergent events have been so drastic that it took decades and a lot of controversy to trace the ancestry of some crops; in other cases we still are working at the problems. Many of their strains were at first infertile, and so would simply have died out immediately, except that occasionally there were double accidents: typically, after the first accident had led to hybridisation, one or more accidents followed, that led to viable polyploidy.

This is not a simple matter, and it depended on a third type of event: artificial selection, in which someone noticed the remarkable organism and propagated it. For example, the fact that the new line was desirable did not imply that it would have been viable without domestication; even fully fertile, productive maize and most other modern grain cultivars would generally die out in a generation or so, because the genetic attributes that make them efficient to harvest, also make them practically unable to propagate without human assistance.

Similarly, a modern dairy cow would die agonisingly if she were not milked regularly; no calf could drink enough to empty her udder twice daily.

 

Progress, Service, Competition?

Bairns and fools should not see half done work
                        Scottish proverb

So, what are the objections to genetic engineering so far? For millennia people have selected and propagated lusus naturae that ranged from particularly fine, but otherwise normal, specimens, to outright freaks that would never have survived in nature. No one made a fuss about such things; in fact they commonly celebrated the cultivars and breeds, and often named them according to their origins or originators: "Packham's Triumph" pears, “Granny Smith” apples, and "Papa Meilland" roses, for example.

In nature, and commonly also in cultivation, all these changes came about by alteration of genetic material, or by rearranging genetic material, by introducing foreign genetic material, by eliminating genetic material, by duplicating genetic material, by grafting foreign somatic material, or by doing all those things, and more, to epigenetic material.

Nor have such transactions been limited to any one species at a time; horizontal transfer of genetic material has happened not only between close relatives, but between actually different kingdoms of life: between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, between animals, plants and fungi.

And such activities began about as soon as anything like distinct life forms existed on this planet, and they have never stopped.

So, let us leave the uninformed hysteria to the uninformed or malicious, such as Rifkin. As Edmund Burke pointed out long ago, the nature of things is a sturdy adversary, and that remains true today. And such classes of genetic changes have been in the nature of things for thousands of millions of years before genetic engineering was a twinkle in the eye of any biologist this side of Eden.

Accordingly, to claim that genetic engineering flies in the face of nature, is exactly contrary to practicality or sense. To what extent it may be valuable, pernicious, or  incompetent, is a separate question, but if every branch of engineering had to queue up cap-in-hand for the approval of every self-approved incompetent ignoramus, humanity still would be biting ticks in the mountains, never mind struggling to build wattle-and-daub huts.

It is notable that every major setback to advances in technology and engineering since history first began to emerge, has stemmed from political factors, from greed, vanity, and other vested or perceived interests; many a village smith living in a mud hut has developed advances that could have contributed to new, successful communities that could develop into nations, countries, and thence to civilisations — except that rivals destroyed him, or the village bullies did not take him seriously, or disapproved of the perceived threats to their power or influence.

And those intermittent exceptions, where advances in technology combined to support communities in their advances into nationhood and greatness, have been partial exceptions; their insights and discoveries gave us the likes of the early middle-east civilisations, the classic Mediterranean, the Chinese, some central American peoples, and more.

In each case organised technology progressed until the politics of greed, envy, and domination took over at a new level. As Henry Ford said: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".

Look about you and see whether that has changed at any time in recent centuries...

And in the anti-genetic-modification hysteria of recent decades; the tub-thumpers generally are not competent either in the technology, its applications, its implications, and therefore, ironically, not in any of the intelligent reservations on its potentially adverse effects.

And least of all in their ability to steer its development and control.

By way of analogy, if the wainwright and buggy-whip businesses, and established supporters of draft-animal power, had been in control of the development of engine-powered transport, are we to imagine that things would have gone any better than they did? Or that their sober, mature foresight and planning would have produced anything more practical than the admittedly chaotic development of the social and technological infrastructure that support the field today?

I invite anyone who thinks so, to study some of the early attempts to control the industry and its applications in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But before sneering, compare them to our attempts to legislate genetic modification development and application today.

The exercise is sobering.

 

User Versus Consumer Concerns

The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool
or he is getting ready to skin you.
                        Kin Hubbard

For centuries there has been a certain tension between plant breeders who have produced valued cultivars whose propagules, once the user has bought them, he could plant year after year without extra payment; in fact, last season’s purchaser may now have become a competitor. Some varieties were either infertile however, or would not breed true, but as a rule they still could be somatically propagated from slips, grafts and so on.

Complaints about the unfairness were generally dismissed as greed or bad sportsmanship; after all, the breeder had been paid, hadn’t he? If I bought your sow, you couldn’t expect me to pay you again for every piglet she farrowed, could you? It was simply an example of just how sturdy an adversary the nature of things could be, and there was no point to whining about it.

All the same, for centuries that adversarial conflict of interest intrinsically tended to damp the rate of improvement of agricultural stock, whether animal or plant; there simply was no strong incentive to seek for improvement One did what one could with what one grew, and appreciated whatever windfalls nature offered, but there was seldom much incentive to go into superior stock breeding as a specialised business. For a fee, a prize bull or horse could cover the neighbours’ stock for general improvement, but that was about as good as it got.

Then along came Schleiden and Schwann with the first formulations of cell theory and cytology, and later, Mendel, and in his train, the likes of de Vries, Correns, and von Tschermak, bringing breakthroughs in genetics and the beginnings of comprehension of some of the most fundamental principles of biology. The scale of the resulting explosion was not comprehended by many people, even those whose forefathers had farmed for generations, but within a few decades farming was transformed. Professional breeder companies emerged, for whom farming for crops or animal products were hardly the point; their core business was to sell seeds, eggs for hatching, chicks, semen and so on.

For them continual improvement, or at least apparent improvement, not only was more than an unplanned luxury, not only was the profit on their investment of resources, but was a matter of simple survival; get that wrong, and you went out of business — quickly.

By the early 1960s the newness of things under the sun was becoming hard to ignore. One of the first really obtrusive items, really something new under the sun, was the ability to produce strains of superior crops, especially of grains, but strains whose seed either was sterile, or gave inferior harvests; this enabled the farmer to buy the necessary seed, and saved him the trouble and cost of producing his own, and gave him superior crops, but left him with no option but to buy new seed every season or limit himself to less profitable crops.

Looked at dispassionately, however much one might resent large profits for the large-scale companies that specialised in producing seed, one could make a very good case for gratitude to the seed breeders for their fine seed (and it had to be very fine indeed, or no sane farmer would buy, and seed producers would go out of business in one season). After all, the magic seed had not fallen from heaven, but had demanded huge, long, expensive investment, plus enormous research effort that consumed the careers and lives of generations of geneticists. And it was costly for farmers to produce their own seed and harvest it, even if it wasn’t as good as the commercial seed.

And yet, there indeed was wide resentment from many quarters. Funnily enough, the resentment tended to be mild on the part of most farmers, who after all had to be businessmen if they wanted to survive; and had to understand that to profit, one must invest, and who could tell which investments were promising. But the loudest accusations came from amateur experts who knew nothing of business practicalities, and not much about farming, but insisted on noisily explaining to anyone who had to listen, that it was unethical to sell seed that would be no good after one season.

The farmers, on their part, mainly resented the seed companies for charging whatever the market would bear, but again, there are not many industries that work on any system other than maximised profit.

However, not every crop or breed lent itself to such treatment, and gene assets had a habit of leaking out of given lines into rival lines, or into lines that the farmer could propagate for himself if it suited him. Often large-scale farmers preferred to go on buying seed; producing seed on a large scale is a nightmarish, unrelenting, and costly problem. Furthermore, practical circumstances often meant that new breeds rapidly developed problems, such as susceptibility to pests, and lost their attractiveness for breeding. It accordingly paid better to leave such headaches to the specialists and to go on buying expensive seed.

Such considerations led to competition between seed producers, and in turn to unprecedentedly rapid advances in the quality of the commercial strains.

But between World War II and the end of the century, molecular biology in the hands of hundreds of thousands of research workers, made strides inconceivable to previous generations.

Nothing new under the sun? Think again!

Even just heuristic, teleological selection instead of stochastic natural selection was new, new, new. Not to mention deliberate tinkering with cytology to achieve events that simply could not have been expected before.

Nothing like it had existed in the previous 4 billion years or so.

But soon there was more and newer. By 1980 we had begun to read genome information and tinker with it directly. In the following decades it became possible, not merely to tailor existing genomes, but to insert new content. Just decades earlier, it not only had been known that one could not breed blue roses or tomatoes, but it had been demonstrated why one could not.

Now it became possible to make the impossible possible by adding the missing necessary equipment to the cells.

It was not at all as easy as that sounds, but it could be made to work, and to do so economically and beneficially; and for the most part, if the seed producer wanted to prevent the user from reserving part of the crop for propagation, that had to be engineered into the genome, and often that part of the engineering was no easier than producing the improved crop itself. 

And there was the problem that soon after a new crop came onto the market, rival firms could help themselves to the new material, much as the farmers could.

Such factors led to more than just new strains of products, but something far more problematic: patent problems.

It might seem strange to introduce such a mundane concept to biology, and it raised semantic and philosophical difficulties even to discuss the idea of patenting something that existed in nature, but in practice the problem really was serious. The need for new breeds and production was urgent and growing. And the problem was not going away.

Between the twin poisons of the public misinformants and rabble-rousers on the one hand, and the conflicts of interest between the producers and the genetic engineering companies, and between the competing research and marketing companies, we have a situation fraught with threats to our long-term agricultural world-wide viability.

 

Ecology, Competition, Cooperation

Compromise: Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary
the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have,
and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.
Ambrose Bierce             The Devil’s Dictionary

 

It is easier to whimper about how corrupt and sad and boring and wasteful and unfair such things as ecology, competition, and cooperation are, than to do anything about it, but is there anything we really can do about it, or replace them with?

To begin with, let’s identify the major players. They are not clearly demarcated, but the following roughly defined roles are convenient.

There are, in no definitive order, and without trying to untangle their mutual dependencies and motivations:

·       The genetic engineers; the relevant participants in the genetic engineering and propagule industry. Call them: the (Big) Commercial Companies (“CCs”); for most purposes, in many contexts, we may include the research workers in the genetic engineering category.

·       The people responsible for the husbandry and for making a living out of their husbandry. Let us call them: the farmers.

·       The “consumers”, the client population who depend on the effective role of the farmers and genetic engineering for their produce and services.

·       The State, the controllers who depend on, and notionally commit to, the welfare of the country, and all its population, whether CCs or not. The state includes the “civil service” and the elected functionaries (and dysfunctionaries) such as agricultural extension offices and state-supervised cooperatives and marketing bodies.

·       Janet and John Citizen, JJC: the public, the politician-fodder, the consumers who support or resist or make demands of all the foregoing parties, for the most part without the slightest idea of what is going on, or where, why, or how. They might not know what they need, nor why, nor what they want, or think they want, nor what they would do about it if, disastrously, they got what they demanded. But they want it anyway, so they will have a lot of fun making mob-noises. They don't generally know what they mean, but we can assume that most of them mean to mean well, and it is the duty of the state to take as much care of them as is reasonably possible. As the state is comprised in fact of just those people, it is a question of which sheep are to herd those self-same sheep?

All these parties have their roles and their interests; cut any one of them out of the relationship, and all the wheels come off.

This should be obvious — if you doubt it, try the thought experiment of removing any one of them from the relationship, and imagining how the rest would survive. 

Consequently it should be obvious and natural that all the parties would do their reasonable best for all the others, whether altruistically or out of pure self-interest, yes?

Well, no harm hoping, but to achieve anything of the kind we need a lot of education for a lot of mutually distrustful, self-interested people, who like to play the game for everything they can get out of it, whether destructively or not. That might reasonably mean money, but for some people, power is itself an incentive that sometimes accompanies money, and is in any case preferable.

I am no good at such things as human relationships, so I simply assume that all players will play fair. If they do not, and no one forces them to play fair, then they and what Ambrose Bierce called their “pickpocket civilization”, will be quenched, and I see no point to fashing myself or boring readers with the details.

 

Yet Another Initialism: the ESS

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
                        Will Rogers

Bierce in his day was not aware that he was groping in the direction of the more recent concept that we call an ESS: an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. There is a good online discussion in Wikipedia, and such an important concept is more than I can describe here fully, but the essence is that an ESS is a “strategy” in a population, a code of behaviour, not necessarily conscious, such that no new, rival strategy can displace it.

Meanwhile, down to brass tacks...

The population in which we wish to establish our ESS comprises several sub-populations, that I consider in no particular sequence:

·       First think of the farmers. Their choice is: "buy or grow your own to make a profit, or go under; and if you do decide to grow your own, then make sure, not only that you really can do it, but also that you can do so at a greater profit than from buying all your materials".

Growing your own is not as easy as it sounds, especially in the long term: even if you can manage it at competitive rates, can you maintain it without skipping a dud season? Will the market favour your produce as much as they favour the standard product? Will yours be at the right time of the year or meet export standards? Or will you constitute a niche market? Niche markets are notoriously short-lived!

And so on. Each phase of production is a speciality in its own right, and it is no accident that the CCs specialising and competing in seed production can afford to shave their costs, year after year. And even if you still prefer your independence, how much will the effort split your attention and the allocation of your resources to profitable productivity?

The CCs naturally prefer big customers, but generally like to keep a base of small customers as well; It lends them resilience and a good public image; besides, you never know when a small customer will grow into a big customer. Responsible CCs even should like to have some independent-minded farmers who support landraces and traditional cultivars, or even wild stock, because those are the reservoirs of a lot of precious genetic material of possible future value.

Accordingly, as long as they are not too much skinned by bullying vendors, small farmers commonly should be satisfied to buy their seed and chicks from ethical and competent CCs.

Large farmers, with much more than say, 400 hectares of wheat or 300 hectares of maize, are very likely not to bother their heads about buying superior seed every year. After all, one does not get one's own seed free; harvesting it and allocating land and other resources to grow and manage it, constitute a costly effort, so saving that money is a consideration in its own right, and the larger the farm, the greater the economy. The resources freed by buying from the CCs more than pay for the seed purchase.

Well, they would have to of course, or all of them would grow their own.

All the same, there are always some conflicts of interest, and potential sources of discomfort. If the seed supplier goes out of business, say because of political pressure from the New Agers, leaving the customers in the lurch, either entirely without seed, or forced to buy at higher prices from elsewhere, that could be disastrous. Or monopolist seed companies might screw up the prices too tightly for the well-being of the farmers.

Such fears might be unrealistic in some countries, but the loss of independence might trouble some people, even in well-conducted countries.

 

·       Next think of the CCs, not that everyone does think well of them of course; in recent decades big pharma, big agricultural suppliers, and big corporations in general, have sunk horribly in public estimation, and not always without cause. Still, the same people who sling mud at a company for making what they claim to be excessive profits or unfair practices, would throw conniption fits if they themselves had to take the same monetary risks of developing vaccines for epidemics that fail to materialise, or seeds for crops that turn out to be unwanted that year, or any such product that may get superseded by advances made by rivals or by natural events such as climate change or famines or new pests and diseases.

Such considerations are no joke, and yet, for CCs dealing with the like, those sorts of things are part of the routine cost of doing business. Some companies live with the perpetual threat of billion-dollar losses in years where the gambles go sour. When that happens, the same critics who were noisiest suddenly change their tune when their own investment or retirement portfolios suffer.

Nor are they comforted if the company fails to produce products that the farmers and consumers rely on every year.

Note that I do not write this as a lament for the sorrow of the CCs, but a hint at the problems they must allow for in performing their functions; if they fail to badly or too often, they go under. And everyone else suffers in consequence, except possibly more fortunate or more competent rivals, if we are lucky.

And yet, instead of standing together, CCs commonly tend to concentrate so obsessively on competition, as to deny each other the right to combine their respective advances into winning products. There are many similar examples in pesticides and drugs, in which companies try harder to exclude their rivals from a market share, than to license winning synergistic combinations in cooperation with rivals. Such exclusive practice amounts to using patents as weapons rather than tools; it is hard to be sure of when the harm to the community is worse than doing without the tools.

That is one of the penalties of obsession with the competitive aspects of the market place, and for pricing products according to what the market will bear, rather than according to their true value, both to the producers and the community.

Loosely speaking, the practice of commercial genetic modification, especially of plants, involves selection of particular genes and complexes of genetic material, and inserting them into (or sometimes deleting them from) a commercially valuable strain. Then propagate the strain and sell the material.

That is simple of course — or of course not: to begin with, just getting the DNA into a reproductive cell is one thing; getting it established is another, more difficult thing; but getting it effectively expressed in a commercially productive crop often is a yet slower, more costly, altogether more challenging difficulty. Think again of of the golden rice: years to produce; more like decades to breed it to establish effective productivity.

But as it turns out, even those problems may be simpler than trying to start make money out of the resulting strain. And to keep on making money out of it is still harder, especially if it is possible for farmers or rival CCs to grow their own seed after the first year or two.

For taking the trouble to propagate the new crop for a couple of years, the competitors could reap the benefit of decades of investment by the original developer. Too much of that sort of thing could drive victimised companies out of business.

There are all sorts of ways of dealing with such problems: seed that expresses the necessary genes, but produces sterile offspring or offspring that yields poorly; legal measures that forbid using the genes without paying royalties (the genes themselves being labelled with DNA sequences that identify the patent owner); or straightforward payment of royalties.

Practically all such measures however, are negative; in themselves they add no value to the product and increase the costs of developing it and maintaining it; the aim is for each company to sell their own seeds as long as possible and as plentifully as possible while excluding competition. Even selling genes for royalties from rival companies that combine them with their own strains is not a dominant practice.

What is wanted is a system to overcome such objections in a constructively cooperative way; something that will suit the CCs, both individually and collectively, and also suit the farmers and the consumers. The difficulty is in finding a pattern of behaviour such as I have mentioned: an evolutionarily stable strategy, an ESS, in which no player would be advantaged in the long term by disrupting the system, especially not for selfish short-term competitive gain.

·       Think too, of the interests of any of us as consumers: we do not like to find prices shooting up, or supplies of necessary staples, or indeed, of luxuries, suddenly failing or falling in quality, or vaccines being unavailable in epidemics. Nor is it good for our taxes or our disposable incomes when such shortages materialise — materialise in particular, incredibly and unpredictably. When that happens, it is partly the fault of the consumers as a body, for not supporting or demanding a more rational system.

·       And let us not forget the role of the state. We certainly have a lot to complain of in governments, both the elected representatives, and the professional civil service elements, and even the de facto policies of businesses and law: red tape, taxes, infrastructure, inequitable and untrustworthy practices of business and industry, insecurity, ill health... There are thousands and thousands of items that Janet and John Citizen never think about until they run into another brick wall when the system fails, but those are items, all the same, that the civil service and service companies must support or answer for.

In any sane and effective society, (however rare or fictional such a creature might be) the state must at the same time support, balance, and rely on, service providers of all types. Also, producers of foods and industrial products must be controlled, but also encouraged and supported; the companies that supply those products and services similarly, and the middlemen too — brokers or suppliers of logistics and specifiers of standards — need as much of such protection and control as any, if we are to rely on quality, availability, and economy.

And the state? A healthy state requires a healthy economy which in turn depends on healthy producers and healthy consumers. 

Exactly how this is to be done is not in general as simple or obvious as it sounds; in any community there will be those who complain about too much control or too little, or simply about blundering red tape — and often those are the same complainants who complained about the opposite problem the previous day. Over-constraint is as bad as, or commonly worse than, insufficient constraint. Government is in general more difficult than it seems to the layman. But a proper balance does not seem to be impossible as long as we remember that the price of a healthy community is eternal vigilance.

Are all those objectives attainable? Maybe not, but it is too early for us to despair of finding a viable ESS; let us think whether it is practicable to combine our social structures more rationally.

 

How Could We Improve Matters?

If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together
                        African proverb (attributed)

Let us first speculate on fantasy.

What we want is an ESS in which CCs, farmers, and the consumers, all cooperate without harmful friction and to mutual benefit, and in which seeking to betray the relationships, bringing the whole house of cards tumbling down, would not in the long term benefit the violators.

And in which genetic engineering can continually bring about improvements in sustainable productivity, profits, welfare and planetary ecology.

That is a big ask. I suspect that in a relationship limited to CCs, farmers, and consumers, no ESS is theoretically possible in the long term, especially as long as human nature must be taken into account. That would be somewhat like a game of monopoly in which no monopolist could emerge. It is however equally hard to imagine how a universal monopoly could benefit a successful monopolist. As they say: one cannot make money from paupers, especially discontented paupers.

However, if we broaden the relationship to include the state, no doubt in the manifestation of a reasonably enlightened civil service, plus legal powers to protect and control cooperatives, then certain means of stabilisation do suggest themselves.

Consider which items are in whose interest, and which resources are available to provide them most profitably. The speculations that follow may be too much like wishful thinking, but if various powers that be could think equally wishfully, who can say what might come of it?

Systems run best when designed to run downhill.
                        John Gall

Firstly, the largest-scale, most important things that we would seek in our genetic engineering organisms, whether plant or animal, would be that they should be productive and prolific, yield products of quality and value, resist pests and diseases, and be suitable for sustainable cultivation and husbandry: all the commonsense, down-to-earth things.

Note that in the following text, whenever I speak of “seed”, that does not imply that the topics are vegetable only; the intent is just avoidance of wasting effort on continual qualification. The same principles would apply to any reproductive material, whether animal, plant, fungus, or other.

In any system of management or legislation a vital principle, grossly ignored, is:

Put the responsibility, the incentive, and the power in the same place.

In assessing the following, please read that principle into the intention.

In any viable ESS, we would be trying to exclude, eliminate, or at least moderate, sources of friction, inefficiency, or conflict. In that list I do not include competition, which, given the nature of humans and human institutions, seems to be inescapably necessary for stimulation of the highest rates of progress: by all means let every supplier strive continuously towards development of novel advantages and efficiency; let them incorporate the genetic material of rival companies into their own lines, whether of the same species or not; let the civil service work on elimination of delay and effort wasted on red tape and superfluous regulation; let the farmer buy what he wants to and grow what he wants to; and let the public know which genetic material is incorporated into his choices of purchases.

This sounds insane, yes? Pigs in flight?

Maybe that is true, but consider some arrangements that the state could manage cooperatively and the various parties could willingly support. The following are not intended as prescriptive, but as suggestions in principle.

·       Whenever a genetic engineering company incorporates a functional nucleotide sequence or other genetic material (DNA as a rule, but not necessarily) whether a gene or not, into a commercial strain, and wishes to maintain rights over its use, that company should register the sequence publicly, plus any other relevant information for which it wishes to be credited. To be valid, this should be done before or together with putting any product on the market. Together with that feature the notification should include and specify material that identifies the improvement and how it can be detected efficiently in samples from the market or from farmers’ fields. If it is not practical to incorporate such an ID sequence into the functional material, then a coded, non-functional, tag should be appended, that identifies the presence of the strain in a commercial product.

·       The company may market their seed or stock as usual, but must register every sale together with the identity of the purchaser. The farmer must submit a report of the source and volume of the seed, whether purchased or self-grown, plus the delivered volume of output. The authorities should as far as practical store and notarize a nominal sample of the material, for inspection of the DNA and other relevant parameters. This might sound like a huge burden, but actually need be no worse than VAT or other long-established principles, especially as it all would be in the interests of the seed marketer.

·       As a matter of practicality, plants marketed informally in local neighbourhoods rather than in mass quantities need not go through the formalities, but mass production of say, food plants, fibre, pharmaceuticals, eggs, dairy, meat, and other materials that are subjected to genetic engineering technology, especially if they are marketed through cooperatives or similar channels, must be registered and recorded, with due consideration for the efficiency and convenience of the producers and the industry.

·       It should be legal for breeders and vendors of genetic engineering products improve their own lines with any other company’s genetic material whenever they wish, subject to including the identification component, and paying a fee according to some nominal rate, relative to the volume of the crop’s subsequent production in the market. Incorporation of genetic material produced by a rival company must be published to the control bodies as well as other relevantly interested parties. Tampering with, or removal of, the tags or similar identification aids, should be a serious criminal offence and not in the interests of any participant to the general scheme.

·       Any attempts on the part of the CCs, to compel the producer to buy new new generations of reproductive material from the same supplier by means of reduction of fecundity, and to do so without publishing the fact and the objective of the CC’s activity, should be a serious criminal offence.

·       On some basis of timing, such as at the end of each crop and marketing cycle, the state control body assesses the occurrence of each item of incorporated genetic material in the national output, according to its expected influence on the national crop values. The company that registered each relevant nucleotide sequence could then claim a standard pro rata bonus for the benefit that it is assessed as having conferred on the output. This would be independent of whether it had produced the reproductive material itself, or whether the final product had been sold by a rival company or a farmer who had undertaken his own reproduction or breeding. In short, the company with a winning product would continue to derive advantage from its development or its part in the development, either for some fixed period, or indefinitely for as long as it appeared in the crop, depending on the legislation, whether the genetic ID appeared in propagules sold by by itself, or grown by other companies or farmers. Similar arrangements would apply too, whether to seed or to crops propagated by somatic reproduction, such as potatoes.

·       Analogous principles would apply to genetic attacks on pest organisms, such as for the eradication of vectors of various diseases. Sterile male or parasitic DNA extermination of insects or mice would be one example. However, such items would be for the state and contracting companies to work out. Possibly the principles could resemble current negotiations on the production of vaccines.

At appropriate intervals, such as after the post-market payouts, there should be multi-party conferences on desired improvements or disappointments that need attention. I imagine scenes along these lines:

“Congratulations on the success of your salt tolerant wheat and rice; as a cash cow, those should keep growing for decades. It is a pity that the same approach in maize has been so disappointing, but that is early days yet; I am sure you will keep plugging at it. Do you suppose that you could combine your material with promoters from your rival’s teosinte? Let us know as soon as you see any prospects there.

“We had great hopes for your perennial wheat with the root nodules, but the yields still look disappointing. Let’s hope that selection will improve matters in a year or two. On the other hand, you really seem to have fallen behind on your contract for high-amylose agave for the past year... Now look — tell you what we’ll do...”

And so on.

Wages of Hubris and other Virtues

And he gave it for his opinion, that
whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow
upon a spot of ground where only one grew before,
would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country
than the whole race of politicians put together.
                        Jonathan Swift

If there is one thing that opponents of genetic engineering implicitly miss, it is that genetic engineering represents opportunity. That sounds very nice of course, but few things are more demanding than opportunity; this fact has occurred to a lot of occasionally perceptive people.; consider a few of their remarks:

Excuses will always be there for you.
Opportunity won’t.
            Anonymous

Opportunity implies pressures. Opportunity is fleeting. Opportunity may be frightening.

 

Most people miss Opportunity because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
                        Thomas A. Edison

Opportunity requires commitment of resources and commitment to success. Edison, I understand, was as much an innovative, exploitative businessman as an inventor; and not a very likeable person, but no-one that I know of denied his commitment, his energy, his willingness to invest, and above all, the success that these attributes brought. There is no doubt that he would have loved the idea of genetic engineering. In fact he successfully supported artificial selection of plants for rubber production before the study of genetic principles had achieved mid-twentieth century sophistication, and before the role of nucleic acids in genetics was discovered.

His major success was with the cultivation of goldenrod (Solidago) for rubber; about a century before the time of my writing this, Edison’s staff bred it to the point that it was almost competitive with rubber from Hevea braziliensis; it is pretty certain that if we began to breed it now with the current techniques of genetic engineering we could beat Hevea rubber within a couple of decades, always assuming that we did not simultaneously improve natural rubber at the same time. Of course, Hevea rubber will be improving at the same time (I read of an exciting improvement in processing it just recently) but these things advance together; the more we understand, the better we do at yet more things.

And what was the basis of Edison’s repeated successes? Partly it was the principle of grasping at opportunity whenever it appeared, in working clothes and all, and, though he possibly may never have read Francis Bacon’s work, he worked by application of the principle that Bacon expressed:

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

                         Francis Bacon

That is it: do not rely on finding your opportunity; by all means grasp it if you see it, but be prepared to make it if it doesn’t present itself spontaneously. Will Rogers expanded the idea:

Even if you’re on the right track,
you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
                        Will Rogers

 

 

The Parade of Horribles

You may polish up commonsense, you may contradict it in detail, you may surprise it.
But ultimately your whole task is to satisfy it.
Alfred North Whitehead: The Organisation of Thought

 

I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
                        Jean-Paul Sartre

 

The great opposition to genetic engineering has been superstitious and sheeplike, and largely driven by conspiracy theories. As soon as the idea of genetic engineering was first published, three forms of resistance emerged: fear of consequences, fear of success, and simple malice.

In 1980, the United States Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger delivered a judgement that included the passage quoted below. Like many pivotal decisions, its most important influence was not obviously to do with the ostensible point of the case, but with secondary implications.

The case was to decide whether a patent should be granted to the plaintiff for certain bacteria equipped with artificially introduced genes: recombinant genetic material. The defendant had refused to grant the patent because US law did not permit the patenting of natural living organisms. The plaintiff protested that the genome thus created did not exist in nature, and was artificially created for its useful functions (in this case to help clear up oil spills) so that there was no rational basis to refuse the patent.

The defendant’s supporters were not much interested in the patent as such, but opposed it because of their fear that it amounted to blasphemous creation of new life forms, and that there was no seeing the end to such processes that amounted to devils’ work, and, more practically, that such genetic material might escape and spread out among surrounding organisms, including weeds, pests, diseases, and humanity.

Accordingly, they wanted the patent refused, not because it was illegal, but because they thought it should be illegal for the sake of the safety of humans and their planet.

Justice Warren Burger summed up in part:

"To buttress his argument, the petitioner, with the support of amicus, points to grave risks that may be generated by research endeavors such as respondent's. The briefs present a gruesome parade of horribles. Scientists, among them Nobel laureates, are quoted suggesting that genetic research may pose a serious threat to the human race, or, at the very least, that the dangers are far too substantial to permit such research to proceed apace at this time. We are told that genetic research and related technological developments may spread pollution and disease, that it may result in a loss of genetic diversity, and that its practice may tend to depreciate the value of human life. These arguments are forcefully, even passionately, presented; they remind us that, at times, human ingenuity seems unable to control fully the forces it creates - that, with Hamlet, it is sometimes better "to bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. It is argued that this Court should weigh these potential hazards in considering whether respondent's invention is patentable subject matter... We disagree."

It might seem that judge Burger’s point of view, both on this point, and the more immediate reasons he gave for permitting the patent, were crushing, but he was heavily criticised by the lay press and public.

The reason I quoted that passage is not the interest of the case itself, but the nature of the objections raised: the “gruesome parade of horribles”. The expression “parade of horribles” is an informal legal term for a rhetorical trick in court, by which to discourage a given verdict on the grounds that even though nothing in the objections would have anything to do with the argument, the consequences would be horrible. Such a parade is a common tactic, and accordingly is deprecated, as the tone of the expression suggests. I mention it here because the threats recited in this case are so characteristic of the sort of hysterical argument that Luddites routinely put forth against genetic engineering.

It is not that the horribles necessarily are impossible (though commonly they may as well be) but in the case of genetic engineering they usually are unreasonable and might either be ignored, or simply prevented. Consider an analogy: no reasonable person would deny that motor vehicles are dangerous and expensive, nor even that if no controls were applied, no one could guarantee never to be killed, injured, or bankrupted by a motor vehicle.

So far so reasonable.

But it would not be reasonable, let alone realistic, to claim that it follows that:

1.    Since no one is immune, there is an unacceptable risk of motor vehicles depopulating the country if they are not forbidden.

2.    There is no reasonable alternative to total prohibition of motor vehicles.

3.    Even if the vehicles killed just one person, that person might otherwise have been the next Bach, Newton, or Christ, a life too precious to risk by permitting any motor vehicles at all.

4.    People had managed very well for thousands of years without motor vehicles, so motor vehicles should be banned in our day.

5.    Alternatives to motor vehicles do not share any of those penalties.

6.    Making motor vehicles amount to flying in the face of God, because God never made motor vehicles for us.

And on and on...

Now, all that might sound overdone, but it is exactly the form of most of the horribles raised against genetic engineering and related disciplines. There is a very elegant and descriptive expression for such unreasonable quibbling: the hysterical subjunctive; I am uncertain of its origin, but it might have been coined by a certain physicist, one P H Borcherds.

It takes the form of: if this, then nothing less than the hypothetical, inevitable worst can result, and by not permitting this, no harm can result...

It is not a new hysteria, but it none the less is very much at home in smugly uneducated New Age circles.

In the face of such hysterics it does no good to point out that the people who trot out the horribles rarely know what they are talking about; their level of expertise is about as relevant as the little old person who has heard of aircraft that kill people by dropping bombs, insisting that an airliner be forbidden to take off in case it started dropping bombs. That accounts for the hysteria.

The subjunctive is that if a disaster is imaginable, then it also is probable, or more likely inevitable.

There are other sides to those points. Human decisions cannot be predicated on conceivability alone; we need to balance alternative probabilities against alternative consequences. In the claim that “...time and chance happeneth to them all...” Ecclesiastes fails to draw the rational moral that some bad consequences are preventable, that some that materialise can be mended, that some of the alternatives are worse, that some can in fact be turned to good account.

If things were otherwise, we would not be here now.

In fact, what we have achieved so far, especially in the last few centuries, contradict other verses in Ecclesiastes. For example: “Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us”. We have achieved more than the Ecclesiastic could have imagined, and it is new, new, new. Someone has pointed out that there was more difference between the way of life of queen Victoria when she was crowned and when she died, than between Solomon and Victoria when she was crowned.

And the differences were new. To claim that they were not, would reveal ignorance of the differences, and lack of insight into their nature, and their implications. They arose continually, but they began to emerge ever faster from the days of Galileo till say, Humphrey Davey, after which change became explosive. And it has continued to explode.

And one of the dimensions of explosion has been in genetics and biology in general. We have passed through the stage of conversion from stochastic selection to teleological selection (something so new that it was unprecedented in the previous four billion years or so) and are on the brink of synthetic production instead of selection.

And that is where genetic engineering comes in. When our ancestors first began to crack nuts with rocks, their tooth-cracking ancestors no doubt predicted smashed thumbs, and the prospect of a planet of humans doomed to die of smashed thumbs and starvation for lack of nuts to crack when the industrialisation of nut-cracking had exterminated all the nut trees. And yet, all that happened was that we learnt to be cautious and deft when handling rocks, and how to make tools of cracked rocks, and within possibly a million years or so, the merest blink, we were in the Neolithic.

And that is how it bids fair to happen with genetic engineering. There has been some thoughtless lack of control, such as the engineering of crops that produce only a single pesticide, which is a very questionable principle, inviting as it does, the development of pest resistance to that agent. Given the investment in research, such problems have been countered so far by further developments, but it remains a very bad principle to create a problem and treat it afterwards, rather than to anticipate it and prevent or at least delay or reduce it.

But the fact remains that genetic engineering is becoming more pervasive and more varied in its nature than most people realise and yet (surprise!) none of the hysterical subjunctives has materialised. Harmful effects have rarely happened, and where they have happened, have been mild, certainly far milder than the original requirement for toxic chemicals or the harm to productivity or dietary benefits that the genetically engineered crops reduced or prevented.

Essentially, the horribles have not come to the parade and such real horribles as have emerged have been the consequences of delaying or sabotaging genetic engineering designs or projects. 

So much for fear of consequences. What about fear of success?

This is pervasive among the loudest of the enemies of genetic progress, and includes the most hysterical of the subjunctives. I will not go deeply into this because it is not only unrealistic, but distasteful, but superficially I might mention the likes of:

·       Even if it works, improved lines might become weeds.
— It is hard to take this one seriously; most highly domesticated organisms are harder to propagate than wild types, and are easy to eradicate if necessary.

·       Foods from genetically engineered crops might contain new allergens.
— To beat this one for scraping the bottom of the barrel would not be easy. There is no basic reason for GM foods to contain undesirable compounds any more than any other. In fact, genetic engineering, as often as not, involves either including desirable nutrients, or removal of undesirable substances. Even if it were to include something that might cause allergies, that would hardly be likelier than natural foods, nor to override the benefits in general. Consider peanuts for one; it is a dangerous allergy for a small proportion of the population, and the allergy is purely “natural” in the sense that it is in no way connected to genetic engineering. To the contrary, genetic engineering is the second best prospect for eliminating the hazard (the best is by exposing children to the allergens during early critical years of their lives). And, as things stand at present, why is peanut allergy such a concern? Simply because genetically unmodified peanuts are such an invaluable source of food and various other products. And genetically modified peanuts would no doubt be more valuable still, and possibly non-allergenic as well.

·       In a list that I looked up for this purposes, there were about half a dozen similar items, not a solitary one of them more cogent, and some positively perversely fanciful: “concentrations of toxic metals” ... “unknown harms to health”... There is not the slightest reason to connect any such hazards with genetic engineering products in terms of good evidence, or even good sense; in fact, just the contrary.

·       The items dealing with environmental harm are no more convincing and no better established.

·       Another category was whether government regulations would be adequate to deal with the new threats. I admit freely that I am cynically dubious about the merit of government controls in general, but once a genetically modified organism is released on the commercial market, not to mention in the atmosphere of commercial competition reigning in the field, the very process of its development leaves very little scope for serious problems, no matter how idiotically incompetent the nominal authorities might prove to be.

That leave us with malice in my list of diagnoses and attributions. For readers who have not seen evidence of anything of the kind, I can only invite them to read a few of the major pronouncements of the opponents of genetic engineering. They do not put it into so many words, but it is plain that they hate the idea of the evil empire being proven right in providing any human benefit, even more than the possibility that they might cause harm; they would love something on the lines of the thalidomide disaster, just so that they could crow.

I am reminded of a friend who attended a meeting of pacifists, and came out actually shaking at the suppressed rage and violence of the speakers and audience.

All I can say in response is: don’t place your reliance in what I say, but before you swallow any lines or mob bait, do your homework and do it properly. Study the genetics, not just the pretty Mendelian diagrams, and study the case histories of crops and animals that have been produced or are under development, and compare them with those that occur and emerge in nature.

And make sure that your materials are up to date and verified by sources in both sides.

Don’t expect any of them to be unbiassed or philanthropic; maybe they are, but you know very well that they want to make money. That does not mean that they don’t want the best for you —  a satisfied customer is their most precious asset. But at worst, nothing in the last half century has done a thing to vindicate the pronouncements of the New Age brigade.