Microcosm_ E. Coli and the New Science of Life - Carl Zimmer [103]
Drugs made through genetic engineering have also turned out to be just as vulnerable to market forces as conventional ones. Drug companies have been trying to increase their sales by expanding our definition of what it means to be sick. Genetically engineered drugs have been promoted this way as well. Genentech originally got approval from the Food and Drug Administration to sell its E. coli–produced growth hormone to treat children whose bodies couldn’t make it themselves. But in 1999 the company had to pay $50 million to settle charges that its drug was being marketed to children who were merely shorter than average.
E. coli’s thirty-year history of genetic engineering is worth considering when we judge the new biotechnology that has come in its wake. We must resist empty fear and empty hype. We must instead be realistic, always remembering how both nature and society actually work.
One of the great dreams of biotechnology has been to end famine, for example. Julian Huxley speculated as far back as 1923 that scientists would create a limitless supply of food (along with purple oceans). The dream lived on in the 1960s with promises of oil-fed yeast. When scientists successfully inserted foreign genes in E. coli, advocates for genetic engineering promised more food for a starving world. In the 1970s, the Green Revolution—the result of breeding new varieties of crops and using plenty of fertilizer—had dramatically increased farm productivity. But the world’s population, and thus its hunger, were still growing. Scientists began trying to engineer bacteria to make fertilizer by capturing nitrogen from the air. Most recently, scientists have turned their attention to engineering plants themselves. Transgenic crops are being promoted not as a way to make bigger profits but as a way to fight hunger and malnutrition. Crops that can resist viruses and insects will increase harvests. Crops that can resist herbicides will allow farmers to fight weeds more effectively, increasing the yield even more. Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Green Revolution, claimed that genetically modified crops would pick up where his own work had left off, feeding the world for another century.
Anyone who questioned this prediction, Borlaug suggested, was dooming the world’s poor to famine. “The affluent nations can afford to adopt elitist positions and pay more for food produced by the so-called natural methods; the 1 billion chronically poor and hungry people of this world cannot,” he wrote in 2000. “New technology will be their salvation, freeing them from obsolete, low-yielding, and more costly production technology.”
One of the promising crops Borlaug—as well as many other advocates—pointed to was Golden Rice, a strain of rice engineered to make vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency affects roughly 200 million people worldwide. Up to half a million children become blind each year, half of whom will die within a year of losing their sight. In the late 1990s, Swiss scientists began inserting genes from daffodils and bacteria into the rice genome to produce vitamin A. They formed a partnership with the corporation Syngenta to develop the rice and distribute it free to farmers who make less than $10,000 a year. Ingo Potrykus, one of the inventors, appeared on the cover of Time in 2000, alongside the headline “THIS RICE COULD SAVE A MILLION KIDS A YEAR,” which was followed in small print by “…but protesters believe such genetically modified foods are bad for us and our planet. Here’s why.”
Potrykus had little patience for those protesters. “In fighting against ‘Golden Rice’ reaching the poor in developing countries,” he declared in 2001, “GMO opposition has to be held responsible for the foreseeable unnecessary death and blindness of millions of poor every year.”
Strong words, particularly given how embryonic the research on Golden Rice was when Potrykus uttered them. He and his colleagues had published their first results only the previous year. They had managed to produce only small amounts of vitamin A in the rice’s tissues,