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“MarcheJeanTalon Potatoes” by snowpea&bokchoi is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Dr. Caius Rommens was for decades the very model of a modern mutation manager. [Tip of the top hat to Rogers and Hammerstein, no I meant Gilbert and Sullivan.] After a career as a genetic engineer with the Dark Side — Monsanto — he joined a company called Simplot and began a 13-year quest. His objective — a better potato. He succeeded. Simplot’s new and improved potato, advertised as resistant to bruising and late blight, and yielding less carcinogenic French fries, are today being sold by 4,000 American supermarkets.
Dr. Rommens should be taking a victory lap and accepting whatever awards and rewards successful genetic mutilators get. Instead, he’s running around with his hair on fire yelling at us to not under any circumstances eat those potatoes. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but not any more than Simplot is, in its campaign to discredit him.
Dr. Rommens, you see, is a genetic-engineering apostate.
In the five years since he left Simplot he has been reviewing his successful development of the Innate potato, as it’s called, and with hindsight has been identifying and researching unintended consequences. And there are quite a number:
- When genetic engineers want to cancel a gene’s effect, they “silence” it, but “Silencing is not gene-specific, says Dr. Rommens. “Any gene with a similar structure to the silencing construct may be silenced as well,” with unknown and unintended effects. Moreover, it turns out that the silencing may also operate on the genes of whatever eats the engineered food.
- Silencing the gene that causes a bruised potato to turn brown also, it turns out, dramatically increases the production of alpha-aminoadipate, a potentially deadly neurotoxin. The effect is known, but has not been measured in the Innate potato.
- Although the engineered potato does not turn brown where it is bruised, the bruise is still there, accumulating toxins, letting pathogens in and water out. But it’s invisible.
- Implanting a gene that imparts resistance to blight will be effective, says Dr. Rommens, for only a short while as the pathogen adapts. No one knows how long.
- Moreover, it seems that the genetic modifications themselves are unstable. “Studying the company’s own data [on the Innate potato],” says Dr. Rommens, “I must conclude that two traits no longer work, that there is evidence for reversion of a third trait, and that a fourth trait appears to be declining in efficiency.
- As for those less-carcinogenic French fries, Dr. Rommens has searched the literature and finds no evidence that natural French fries are carcinogenic.
In addition to warning people against consuming his GM potato. Dr. Rommens now expresses a jaundiced view of his former profession and colleagues. “It is my experience that genetic engineers are biased and narrow-minded,” he says. “They may not be able to critically assess their own creations.”
As to the profession, he says “the absence of unintentional effects can never be guaranteed. It may take dozens of years before these effects reveal themselves, and we should be extremely cautious applying the technology.”
Is he really saying that we should be sure we know what we’re doing, and that we are not doing harm, before we unleash the advertising department and sell our genetically mutilated product to a gullible world?
How quaint.
It was Gilbert and Sullivan, not Rogers & Hammerstein, who wrote “I am the very model of the modern major general” in their operetta Pirates of Penzance. Nice reference!
Oops. Thanks, see the fix.
If food “manufacturers” followed the precautionary principle, they would not put anything on the market until it was clear that the item was safe. This principle is pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
My Dad ate potatoes in one form or another pretty much every day for his entire life. He loved em.
Growing up, my family always had 2 or 3 bags of potatoes in a cool, dark place in the hall. I remember I would look in on them from time to time, just to see how they were doing. What struck me most as a child, in those blissful moments of potato reverie, is the bags always had the word Idaho on them.
So one day I asked my Dad, “Dad, do all potatoes come from Idaho?” And he replied, “Yes son, they do indeed. All potatoes come from Idaho.”
So image my dismay, at my advanced age, to learn that this is no longer the case, that potatoes are coming from a new place, called Innate.
Truly, this is very troubling. Where is this place? Is Innate even in the Midwest? I need to look this up.
Hmm…where is my Google machine, it was here just a minute ago. Oh dear.
As to the profession, he says “the absence of unintentional effects can never be guaranteed. It may take dozens of years before these effects reveal themselves, and we should be extremely cautious applying the technology.”
Really? It is likely this occurred to the good doctor long before he joined Simplot. It is good that circumstances revealed the information basic to the science of his chosen field. We probably would never be so fortunate to hear this from him unless there had been some power struggle between himself and management at Simplot.
I never have been able to understand why anyone would volunteer to be a guinea pig for franken foods.
Genetic modification began some ten thousand years ago with the development of agriculture. This process required the segregation of certain grasses (notably barley and wheat) and a form of forced evolution which we call ‘breeding’. The result was the creation of various sub-species (strains) that were selected for reproduction, due to their high yield, and perhaps their resistance to disease and weather damage. What was sacrificed in the bargain – perhaps unknowingly – was nutritional quality.
Without going into detail, I will simply report that the early farmers lost much of the meat-based protein that their hunter-gatherer predecessors had routinely enjoyed…’Slaying the fatted calf’ became a ritual reserved for special occasions – even among the Bronze Age well-to-do.
As a result, early civilized populations were perennially undernourished. Paleoanthropologists observe that true pre-agrarian Cro-Magnons were markedly taller, more robust and generally healthier than their civilized descendants. They consumed more meat protein, and natural, more nourishing vegies, fruits, nuts and roots.
Ancient myths that tell of abundant ‘gardens’ and ‘giants in the land – old men, men of renown’ are plaintive, albeit idealized, remembrances of a different time…a better people.
Our technology is new and scary as hell, but genetic modification is old hat. It is, in fact, foundational to civilization itself.
No, sir. Selective breeding of plants in the field is not the same thing as genetic engineering in the laboratory. The risks of unintended consequences and contamination of the natural world are orders of magnitude greater when you tinker blindly with the codes of creation. Nature knows what it’s doing, humans do not.
Cross pollinating two varieties of, say, wheat, to obtain a new variety is far different than inserting fish gene into a tomato.
I understand that this time it’s different. Hell, I eat organic whenever possible. But aren’t we talking about technique rather than substance? If breeding, as opposed to natural selection, isn’t the very essence of artifice, then the thousand-pound pumpkin would be as ubiquitous as the acorn, and the teacup chihuahua could be released safely into the wild, there to romp and hunt with is sibling, the grey wolf…I tell you, these are bio-toys created by humans – no more products of Mother Nature than Frankenstein’s monster!
We’ve been tinkering with the codes of creation for a long time now. I don’t see an end to it. This is what we do. There will be unpleasantness, I’m sure.
As I see it, we can tinker with the codes of creation all we want, and it will all be perfectly fine with Nature (or God or whatever). After all, She (or He or It, whichever you prefer) has Herself been tinkering with them throughout eternity, and if She never intended potatoes for example to have invisible bruises, why would She have ever allowed them to come into existence at all in the first place?
The problem is that, while tinkering with the codes of creation poses no problem for Nature, it may well pose a problem for us humans. We are the ones who are going to suffer the consequences if our tinkering screws up the prospects for our own continued tenure on Earth. But Nature will just continue happily, with or without us. George Carlin made the same point in one of his talks.
As for us humans having tinkered with the codes of creation throughout history, what I’d say is that in pre-industrial times such acts on our part were moderated by a worldview which saw all creation as in some sense sacred (so that you could not do whatever you liked with what Nature created). Today this kind of thinking is regarded as obsolete by the ‘mainstream’, and the profit motive alone drives our tinkering with the said codes. This makes a whole lot of difference.
My two cents.
Tea Cup Chihuahuas and giant pumpkins would obviously go extinct without human support and the genes from which they were bred would remain benignly in the canine and squash pools should they ever be needed again. Tomatoes with fish genes and the like have already been found to introduce such genes to the wider population of plants. That is not just a difference of technique, it is a crucial difference of results and risks.
“Nature knows what it’s doing, humans do not.”
Yeah, but only because Mother Nature has a 3.8 billion year head start on us.
We need to cheat to catch up, is basically what’s going on here. I’m gonna ask my Dad what he thinks about it.
“Dad, do cheaters ever win?”
“No son, they do not. They always lose in the end.”
Also agree that domestication is not the same as genetic modification. The former is quite crude compared to the latter.
Perhaps you (y’all?) are aware of Bill Joy’s infamous article in Wired Magazine from 2000 entitled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Cautions us against nanotech, GMOs, and robotics, not that we’ve heeded any part of his warning.
https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
Thank you, sincerely, for that link, Brutus. Considering that article is nearly 20 yrs old someone might consider Joy’s words semi-prescient. I’ll guess that most of the people who saw that essay (a very tiny percentage of all the people that could have seen it, which would, itself, be an insignificant fraction of all “humans”) said, “Meh, TL;DR.” Evidenced, perhaps, in the fact that there are only 2 (two) comments and they’re both from just a year ago!! While Joy expresses many valid concerns, he also makes more than a few “mistakes” in his perception of “human nature” (i.e., individual desire for self-preservation) as well as his continuing and facilitating role in “[us] being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes.” As a species, we are in the process of validating The Fermi Paradox.
Great link, Brutus. But, no, Kurzweil won’t live to be 200 with a cyborg body of silicone. The machines won’t sustain such nonsense! Why would they? I see no ‘nightmare’ in the transition to a purely mechanical-electronic format for the continuation of our species. Cyborgism will be a temporary expedient at best.
The only way to shed ourselves of all the blood, gore and drama associated with a million years of tooth and claw evolution, is to shed our biological format entirely. Christ, haven’t we done enough damage…A 200 year old cyborg Kurzweil – indeed!
It’s unclear to me whether your comment supports, advocates, or mocks Transhumanism. Ultimately, I doubt it matters because collapse will take us long before the so-called Singularity occurs.
Biological humans are obsolete – probably have been for some time. Transing into a non-bio form seems to make sense, though the variables involved in such a change would be numerous and daunting. Still, I agree with you,
we are in the to-little-to-late stage already.
How revealing.