Arts & Culture
Facts and friction
Published 01 November 1999
Monsanto has done a U-turn on its "terminator" seeds and it's thanks to the Internet. Ziauddin Sardar heralds the beginning of a revolution in democracy
Most scientists assume that the ignorant public needs to be enlightened by the official experts about the wonders of science. The idea that the public might actually learn something for itself about the intricacies of a specific scientific issue, stand up on its hind legs and tell the experts to get lost is just not in their scheme of things. Yet this is going to be the wave of the future. It is a response to the arrogance of the big corporations and the failure of the scientific establishment to show itself as protector of the public interest. And it also owes a lot to the Internet.
Along with all the infotainment, there is a lot of scientific material on the web just waiting to be digested. Indeed, people with specific problems often use the Internet to find out the state of research in a particular field and, in some cases, know as much as the so-called experts. For example, doctors are discovering that they know far less than many of their patients, who are more up to date on the latest research into their particular illnesses. A similar situation can be seen in the case of GM foods, where the public knows just about as much as the scientists themselves.
It is the pressure from an increasingly scientifically literate public, aware of the latest issues in the field, that has forced Monsanto, the giant US biotech corporation, to make a U-turn on GM food. It has now agreed to discontinue its terminator seeds. Their nasty name was well suited to their purpose: crops grown from these seeds would produce sterile seeds and cannot be replanted. In this way, any vestige of independence that farmers anywhere in the world might have of Monsanto and its friends would be "terminated" or, in plain English, murdered.
In a string of cases, the opinion of GM experts has been revealed to be little short of daft. For example, they suggested that GM pollen could spread only a few hundred metres. So it was safe to plant GM crops 50 metres from conventional and 200 metres from organic crops. As most farmers know, and as has now been confirmed by research, GM pollen can be spread up to three miles from GM trial plots by wind and bees. The danger of contamination to crops planted so close to GM plots is thus very real. It seems that the experts do not even know the difference between organic and other crops. A few weeks ago, the US Department of Agriculture suggested as a matter of formality that just about anything can be labelled "organic". Not so, said the public. The Department of Agriculture was inundated with protests and the scheme had to be dropped.
The public knows that it has taken thousands of years of selective breeding to produce the range of safe crops we use today. There is no way we can be totally sure that instant gene-splicing will be safe. The unpredictable nature of the exercise means it will take decades before we can know the real risks of GM food to human and environmental health. Allergenic reactions to genetic changes, the spread of herbicide-resistant "superweeds" and possible ecological disturbance are only a few of the potential hazards. Clearly the corporate scientists who think that they can simply engineer genetic weedkillers and solve the problems of agriculture for ever have never heard of Charles Darwin, let alone Rachel Carson. It is now the farmers and the public who are teaching the basics of science to industry experts and Monsanto.
Indeed, the public has now realised that the very assumption that a GM food is exactly equivalent to its natural counterpart is deeply flawed. The idea is based on the notion of "substantial equivalence", which is invoked when official approval for the introduction of GM foods is granted. But, as a recent article in Nature from Sussex University's Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) suggests, "substantial equivalence is a pseudo-scientific concept" based on "a commercial and political judgement masquerading as if it were scientific". The mere knowledge of chemical composition, the SPRU researchers argue, cannot lead to reliable prediction of biochemical and toxicological effects of GM foods.
The GM foods have to be treated as though they were pharmaceuticals, pesticides and food additives. This means they would have to be tested, over a long period, for toxicological effects. Indeed, that would have been the normal course of events had Monsanto, and other biotechnology companies, not pulled an interesting con-trick. They managed to convince the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation and the World Health Organisation that GM foods were sufficiently novel to be patented but not novel enough to introduce new risks to public or environmental health which would hence need regulation. The success that Monsanto has enjoyed up to now was based on this deceit.
The public's insistence that GM foods must be assumed guilty until lengthy tests have proved otherwise makes sound scientific sense. And there are examples that support this stance. The most notable one is the Showa Denko disaster of 1989. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid that can be taken as a dietary supplement. It is normally produced in micro-breweries using suitable microbial cultures. Showa Denko KK, a biotechnology company, artificially inserted genes into a bacterial species to increase its production of tryptophan. The result: thousands of North Americans who had taken the company's L-tryptophan supplement developed a novel illness called EMS (eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome). Within months, dozens died and thousands were maimed. Showa Denko's poison was noticed early because of the unusual nature of the illness. Had it caused a more common illness, such as asthma, or produced delayed harm, such as cancer ten or 20 years later, or senile dementia in mothers who had taken it in early pregnancy, there would be no way to attribute the harm to the cause.
That's precisely the point. If a single chemical that met the "substantial equivalence" test can, in a genetically engineered form, produce such consequences, what hidden dangers lie in a GM potato? Those who search the Internet can easily find out.
Scientifically literate consumers, armed with the Internet, have forced Monsanto's U-turn. But the humbling of Monsanto does not mean that the public, or large sections of it, can or should try to slug it out on scientific technicalities with the industry's tame experts. Democracy doesn't need that. What democracy does need is a public awareness of how politics, and by association lies, deception and dirty tricks, are now so intrinsically linked with science.
The bizarre case of Dr Arpad Pusztai is a striking example of the politics of science in action. We all recall that odd TV interview with the elderly man who at the end of it said something about GM potatoes being bad for rats. All hell broke loose, and the director of his institute, having defended him for a couple of days, yielded to the pressure and promptly sacked and gagged him. Then there were some fierce exchanges, with Robert May, the government's chief scientific adviser, and 19 assorted Fellows of the Royal Society, being very harsh indeed about him. This was all somewhat odd, as Pusztai had a distinguished reputation in his field and was engaged on a government-sponsored research project when he made his uncomfortable discoveries. Had he suddenly gone senile? Or was he another whistle- blowing victim, like all those who were done over during the BSE scandal?
Now the case has moved on. No one has tried to repeat his experiments, but at least his work can be assessed. His joint paper has been published by the Lancet. But three independent referees went public with their very negative judgements. For them, the paper is rubbish, the work ill-conceived and incompetent, and they had strongly recommended that it should not be published. So we can conclude that Pusztai's work has been reviewed repeatedly by his peers and every time it has been found sadly wanting.
But this would be the wrong conclusion. We should not be too surprised by the comments of the referees. Every scientific field is controlled by an invisible college, a group of experts which acts as a gatekeeper for publication. Referees for leading journals are almost always chosen from this group. Once this invisible college decides that you are an outsider, nothing can get you published. This has been the experience of people who want to publish research on ME that contradicts the official line - that it's all in the head. So two cheers for the editor of the Lancet, who decided to publish the paper despite the referees' objections.
It is possible that Pusztai committed elementary blunders, as his enemies claim. But every now and then strange things happen at the leading edge of science, where an orthodoxy is affronted and every weakness in an innovative piece of work is pounced on. The most famous recent example is that of the German geologist Dr Alfred Wegener, who noticed how incredibly well the bulge of South America fits into the corner of Africa. He was ridiculed up to his death in 1930 and beyond, until plate tectonics converted his outlandish theory of continental drift into common sense.
The open-mindedness and tolerance of scientific commun-ities is patchy at best. T S Kuhn, the philosopher and hist-orian of science, knew what he was talking about when he said that the history of science is full of efforts to suppress and evade the anomalies that subvert dominant paradigms. We must even wonder whether Sir John Maddox was actually joking every single time he demanded in the editorial pages of Nature that a particular heretical science book be burnt.
So if Pusztai turns out to be a brave whistle-blower whose opponents condemned him, we have a tragedy. But if either he became a crank or his critics were corrupt, or both, then we just have to play it like Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and say: that's life. After all, even Galileo devoted enormous scientific efforts to proving the earth's motions by a theory of tides that was totally confused in its mechanics and wrong in its predictions (a single tide a day). And if he hadn't called the pope a fool, he still might have got away with it.
In such confused circumstances, what is the public to do? The first thing is to learn that in such cases of contested science, there is no place to hide. If the official expertise has been compromised, as it previously was over nuclear power, supersonic transport, BSE and now GM food, then we have to rely on that very imperfect tool, politics. We watch the debate, equip ourselves with as much knowledge as possible, judge the best we can, defer decisions as long as we can, and then make up our collective minds, for better or for worse.
Of course, scientists such as Pusztai can hope for redress, and the campaigns to protect the planet can succeed, only as long as some of us are resolutely off-message. The increasingly scientifically literate public seems to be guided by the maxim "Don't believe it until it's been officially denied". Which means we are, at last, on the way to a vigorous demo-cracy in science and technology policies. Benjamin Franklin once said that the printing press is the great engine of democracy, for it enables any man to publish a leaflet stating his case. Now we have the Internet and, at least for the present, it is beyond the control of both Monsanto and Millbank.
Ziauddin Sardar is the editor of "Futures", the refereed journal of policy, planning and futures studies
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