April 19, 1999
Plant Sterility Research Inflames Debate on Biotechnology's Role in Farming
Forum
Join a Discussion on Science in the News
By BARNABY J. FEDER
UBBOCK, Texas -- Seven years ago, Melvin Oliver had one of those
middle-of-the-night "aha!" inspirations that normally occur only
in researchers' fantasies and campy movies. Suddenly, he could
visualize how to grow generation after generation of plants and
then, whenever he desired, insure that the next generation would be
the last -- because all its seed would be sterile.
| 
Joe Don Buckner for The New York Times |
Melvin Oliver, at his laboratory near Lubbock, Tex., changed the course of the discussion about the role of biotechnology in agriculture with his idea for creating seeds that could render plants sterile.
|
Oliver, a 48-year-old government scientist at the Department of
Agriculture's research station here whose main focus is drought
resistance, never dreamed he would change the course of the
increasingly bitter debate over biotechnology's role in the food
chain.
That is what has happened, though, since a joint patent covering
his inspiration was issued just over a year ago to the federal
government and Delta and Pine Land Co., a cotton seed producer that
co-sponsored the research. They saw it as a potentially useful tool
for preventing farmers from growing valuable genetically engineered
crops without paying annually for the seed.
Critics, led by Hope Shand, director of research for the Rural
Advancement Foundation International, a farm advocacy organization
in Canada, saw it as a threat to farmers' security, especially in
developing nations, and immediately dubbed it "Terminator" after
the robotic killer of movie fame. The protests have ranged from
angry letters to torched research crops. The fact that Oliver and
his research team have yet to prove the concept works in field
crops has become an almost irrelevant footnote.
"Seed sterility has become a surrogate for the entire debate on
biotech," said Philip S. Angell, a spokesman for Monsanto Co., the
pioneering agricultural biotech giant.
Angell said that Monsanto, which has a pending agreement to buy
Delta, has become so alarmed by the anti-biotech feelings stirred
by the sterility technology that it wants a thorough, clearly
independent international review of the costs and benefits of the
technology and related inventions.
Monsanto wants the review open to a wide range of public
interest groups and is preparing a pledge not to try to
commercialize any such technology until such a review is completed
and the company has responded to all the concerns raised, Angell
said.
Critics say seed sterility is a particular threat to farmers in
the developing world, where nearly all subsistence farmers are too
poor to buy new seed and thus dependent on saving seed or trading
with neighbors. Those unlucky enough to live near a farmer using
the new technology could have part of their crop sterilized by
drifting pollen and never know it until the next year's planting,
they add.
Because the new technology is switched on by spraying with
chemicals just before the seed is planted, biotech critics also
warn that it is confirmation of their charges that multinational
chemical companies, which have been buying up seed companies, are
moving rapidly toward dominance over agriculture.
As things stand now, farmers buy new seed for hybrid crops,
especially corn, each year because the next generation of such
plants does not resemble the parent. But for most self-pollinating
plants, including soy beans, rice, wheat and cotton, farmers can
save seeds to replant confident that the offspring will resemble
the parent. In the developed world, especially in the United
States, farmers often buy seed each year as well to take advantage
of the latest genetic improvements and to avoid the cost of
cleaning and storage.
Seed companies say the higher profits they might gain from
engineering sterility would spur even more investment in improved
crops. Sterile seed could also reduce fears that new traits
engineered into crops, like the ability to tolerate herbicides,
might jump to weeds. In theory, the jumping traits would also carry
the genetic instructions to prevent the weeds from reproducing.
"We are recognizing now though that there is something
psychologically offensive about sterile seed in every culture,"
Angell said.
Biotech critics had not thought much about seed sterility until
Delta and the Agriculture Department announced their patent.
Delta's acquisition by Monsanto, a deal held up by a Justice
Department antitrust review, fueled their alarm because Monsanto,
the St. Louis agrichemicals and drugmaker, has been by far the most
successful company in genetically engineering new crops. The
critics were even more concerned when they discovered that a number
of large agribusinesses -- including Monsanto -- had already obtained
patents for sterility processes other than Oliver's.
Finally, several months after the patent became public, critics
began to see that all the sterility work relied on a powerful new
wave of biotech research that had gone largely unnoticed: the use
of chemicals as switches to turn specific genes in plants on or off
at a particular time. The new engineering, they concluded, would
inevitably make farmers ever more reliant on chemical companies.
Many of the potential applications are more alluring for farmers
than seed sterility. Some researchers see gene controls as a way
farmers could raise the level of a nutrient in a growing crop --
say, a specific oil -- if that output becomes more valuable after
the crop has been planted.
Others see the new technology being used to control exactly when
a plant generates defenses against insects or viruses. They
envision, for example, spraying an innocuous chemical that would
signal engineered genes to quickly activate a crop's normal
defenses at the first sign of fungal invasion, reducing reliance on
the harsh pesticides normally used to stop the disease.
Similarly, instead of engineering plants to produce a toxin that
kills specific insects throughout the crop's growth cycle as the
already widely used genetically modified corn and cotton do, the
new technology could keep plants from making the toxin unless the
crop actually was threatened with serious damage. Less exposure
should make it much harder for insects to adapt.
"This is the next big breakthrough after discovering how to
move genes into plants," said Roger N. Beachy, director of the
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. "You're talking
about exquisite control of how plants respond."
Beachy and other biotech backers say the new wave of
biotechnology is vital to feeding the growing world population and
preserving the environment. It may actually reduce reliance on the
most dangerous agrichemicals. If farmers do not see it as
beneficial, they will not use it, they say.
Critics say the problem is that market forces make it inevitable
that a handful of large businesses will use such breakthroughs in
ways that maximize their profits, leaving farmers totally dependent
on chemicals they manufacture. With more and more farmers planting
fewer varieties of high-performance crops, the risks increase that
disease or insect infestations could severely damage food
production and suddenly produce widespread crop failure, they
argue.
"It's not the technology itself, it's who will control it and
benefit from it that matters," said Ms. Shand, of the Rural
Advancement Foundation.
The global protest campaign has already led to incidents in
which experimental plots of the kind of genetically engineered
crops Monsanto has sold widely in the United States were burned in
India under the mistaken belief they contained the new sterile seed
technology. A number of companies with patents that cover sterility
applications have rushed to say that they have no intention of
developing and marketing such crops.
In December, the Consultative Group for International
Agricultural Research, a Washington consortium of research and
international development bodies, voted to oppose any use of the
sterility technology in the developing world. The Department of
Agriculture attracted withering criticism and thousands of angry
letters for its role as a co-sponsor with Delta of the research led
by Oliver.
"The public won't pay for a USDA that is just a farm team for
industry," said Margaret Mellon, a biotechnology expert at the
Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
Agriculture officials say the criticism has led it to revise its
review policy on research financing to allow more input from
biotechnology critics. But they are also anxious that leading-edge
biotechnology work not be left solely to the private sector, not
least because that makes it harder for policymakers to anticipate
where agriculture may be headed.
Others, like Geoffrey Hawtin, director general of the
International Plant Genetics Resources Institute in Rome, add that
work with the private sector may be necessary because
multinationals control crucial patents. Genetic engineering, they
say, may be the only hope for rapidly improving crops, like
bananas, that are vital to subsistence farmers and are being
ravaged by disease.
"It's a technology that can be used safely," said Gary
Toenniessen, deputy director for agricultural sciences at the
Rockefeller Foundation. "If the targets are right it could benefit
poor as well as rich farmers."
The policy debate has raced ahead of the science. Oliver's team
is hoping results due this week from tissue samples taken from a
batch of tobacco plants will finally confirm that their theory
works in a real plant. Tobacco is widely used in research because
it is easy to manipulate genetically, but a success with it does
not guarantee that the same methods would work on important food
and fiber crops. Each crop could require its own specific cocktail
of genetic changes.
Still, biotech critics and supporters alike are convinced that
"chemical gene switch" projects will abound -- and some succeed --
even if Oliver's sterility project runs into a dead end.
The novelty is not in the genetic engineering techniques --
Oliver, for instance, uses standard methods to get foreign genes
into plant tissue cultures and, eventually, to grow whole plants
from them. But chemical switch systems involve uniquely complicated
relationships among the genes being inserted.
Oliver's first building block is a gene and control system, or
promoter, that is capable of generating a toxin that cripples the
seed's germination apparatus but leaves the seed and the rest of
the plant normal in every other respect.
As a safeguard, however, the gene cannot make this toxin until
an enzyme breaks down a DNA wall the research team puts between the
toxin code and the promoter. As a further safeguard, this enzyme
comes from a second foreign gene that Oliver has inserted. Finally,
there is a third inserted gene that serves as the on-off switch for
the whole system.
The third gene makes proteins that block production of the
second gene's enzyme. But those so-called repressor proteins are
designed to have an affinity for a specific chemical, in this case
the antibiotic tetracycline. When Oliver -- or whoever produces the
seeds -- sprays them, the proteins bind to the tetracycline instead
of the enzyme production sites. When these seeds are planted,
unlike their unsprayed predecessors, the DNA-cutting enzymes are
made and the gene that makes the sterilizing toxins is primed to
kick in months later when the plant matures.
"It's quite an elegant solution," said David Culley, a
molecular biologist at Washington State University.
Oliver figures it could have been done much better -- and done
more quickly -- if he and his colleagues had the kind of budget and
access to crucial patents available to many corporate biotech
researchers.
"If Monsanto had done this, they would be in the field by
now," he said. Perhaps. But even though researchers have been
looking at a wide variety of chemical-gene switch combinations,
industry sources say no one is close to field tests on switches in
crops for anything other than internal breeding programs.
"There is always something wrong," said Stephen Evola,
co-president of the biotech research arm of Novartis, the Swiss
agribusiness and pharmaceutical company, noting that the chemical
switch had to be safe and inexpensive and its interaction with the
plant very specific. Achieving reliable control is especially
challenging because the behavior of gene promoters, which control
the timing, level and location of gene activity, is far from being
fully understood.
"We are at the very beginning of a long learning curve," said
David Lawrence, a scientist at Zeneca Group PLC of Britain.
Some chemicals that are extremely useful in the current research
phase, like steroids, are seen as obvious nonstarters for
commercial applications because they have strong impacts on
animals. Systems based on lactose solutions, which are already used
as switches for turning on genetic activity in bacteria, have also
been tested in plants. So have copper and ethanol.
Companies are also exploring gene switches tailored to chemicals
farmers use anyway, like fertilizer. Other researchers are studying
nonchemical switches like light, moisture and viruses. They suspect
though that plants encounter such things so frequently and in so
many ways that it may be impossible to use them outside of a
carefully controlled laboratory.
Oliver, for his part, is fatalistic about where his contribution
will end up. His office is, with impish defiance, decorated by a
large poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the original Terminator. But
he repeatedly describes seed sterility as an underfinanced
diversion from his studies of drought-resistant moss.
"I'm very confident the science will pan out," he said. "But
this technology will flourish or die for reasons I have no control
over."
