Talk given to Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells Fabian Society on 15 January, 1999

1. I am speaking as a scientist extremely concerned with the extent to which science has evolved more and more away from its Promethean ideal of knowledge for the good of humanity to being the partner of corporate capitalism which has been responsible for some of the most socially and environmentally destructive policies in the world.

2. Genetic engineering biotechnology is just the latest offering from the alliance between reductionist science and big business which has already brought our planet to the edge of extinction in climate change, ozone depletion, massive loss of species and intolerable levels of toxic and radioactive pollution in our life-support system. After having extracted and ruined all of the planet's resources, reductionist science and big business are targeting life itself, which is our last remaining hope of regenerating and saving the planet.

3. Mary Shelley predicted the present scenario of human cloning and genetic manipulations in her classic novel, Frankenstein, which is about the scientist obsessed with science as a means to control and improve on nature. He created a monster, thinking he could create the perfect human being. Can we afford to let this Frankenstein science take over the world for the sake of profit? What's at stake is life, our life-support and our value system as human beings, which are all under attack, which are all being placed under unaccountable corporate monopoly.

4. The alliance is bolstered by mainstream academic theories stemming from the same roots in Victorian English high society. We have neo-liberal economic theory supporting and validating laissez-faire corporate capitalism, while neo-Darwinian genetic determinism drives the technology and sells it to the public.

5. What makes the alliance so powerful is that they are united by a shared vision of the world as so many isolated bits and pieces that can be manipulated with impunity one at a time.

   They see selfish genes and selfish individuals jostling and competing against one another, in the struggle of survival of the fittest and the biggest. They set no limit to exploitation and short-term profit in the war of one against all and all against nature.

   But nature does not conform to our illusion that things are separate, and on how the world should be run. She is organically interconnected and finite, and the effects of decades of wanton destruction and exploitation not only spread far and wide, but are rebounding back on us.

6. That's why the global ecology and global economy are collapsing together. This should come as no surprise, as a sound economy is absolutely dependent on a sound ecological base. Enlightened economists such as Hazel Henderson, Herman Daly and James Cobb and ecologists such as Edward Goldsmith and Jerry Mander have been drawing attention to that since the 1970s. The academic theories have failed the reality test in the real world. Genetic determinism has also failed by the criteria of science. It has been thoroughly discredited by scientific findings over the past 20 years. That is why it is a dangerous diversion that not only obstructs the implementation of real solutions to our problems, but also poses unprecedented risks to health and biodiversity.

7. But our Governments have been taken in.

   They have handed over ownership of life to the corporations by voting for patents on organisms and genes including human genes.

   They will allow corporations unrestricted exploitation of their citizens and natural resources in the financial treaties of the WTO and the MAI. Environmental standards, food safety standards and even basic human rights will be sacrificed to corporate financial imperatives.

   Meanwhile, corporate scientists sit on committees at all levels, pronouncing everything safe, in total disregard of scientific evidence.

8. For a quick summary of genetic determinism, I have taken the following description from a booklet produced by the Food and Drink Association and endorsed by Government scientists:

   "Research scientists can now precisely identify the individual gene that governs a desired trait, extract it, copy it and insert the copy into another organism. That organism (and its offspring) will then have the desired trait."

   This description, typical of literature supposedly "promoting public understanding", neatly encapsulates the bad science of genetic determinism. It gives the highly misleading impression of a precise technology, implying that,
   Genes determine characters in linear causal chains, one gene giving rise to one character;
   Gene are not subject to influence from the environment; Genes remain stable and constant;
   Genes remain in organisms and stay where they are put.
   So, by manipulating genes, all the problems of the world can be solved, as simple as that!

9. What is the new genetics of the present day really like?

   No gene ever works in isolation, but in an extremely complicated genetic network, the function of each gene depends ultimately on all the other genes in the genome. So, the same gene will not have the same effects in different individuals, because the other genes are different. There is so much genetic diversity within the human population that each individual is genetically unique (except for identical twins at the beginning of their development). And if the gene is transferred to the genome of a different species by genetic engineering, it is most likely to have new and unpredictable effects.

   The genetic network, in turn, is subject to layers of feedback regulation from the physiology of the organism and its relationship to the external environment. So, if the environment changes, a gene may cease to work. These layers of feedback regulation not only change the function of genes but can rearrange them, multiply copies of them, mutate them to order, or make them move around. Some of the mutations that occur in response to certain environments are so repeatable that they are referred to as "directed mutations".

   And, genes can even travel outside the original organism to infect another. This is called horizontal gene transfer, the very process exploited for genetic engineering. I shall come back to that later.

10. Those findings have completely invalidated genetic determinism. Yet the orthodox mainstream remains firmly wedded to the discredited paradigm. The new genetics is diametrically opposite to the old static, reductionist view. Genes and genomes can change so much that molecular geneticists themselves have invented the descriptive term, "the fluid genome", more than ten years ago. It is more accurate, however, to see the gene as having a very complicated ecology consisting of the interconnected levels of the genome, the physiology of the organism and its external environment. Putting a new gene into an organism will create disturbance that may propagate out to the external environment. Conversely, changes in the environment will be transmitted inwards and may well alter the genes themselves. The most important lesson is that the stability of genes and genomes, as much as all the other characteristics of the organisms, depends on a balanced ecology. Genetic engineering profoundly disturbs the ecology of genes at all levels, and that is where the problems and dangers arise.

11. We are told genetic engineering is just like conventional breeding, only faster, cleaner and more precise. Not true. It is a new departure, and introduces new dangers. Genetic engineering bypasses reproduction altogether. It uses artificial virus-like vectors to transfer genes horizontally. So genes can be transferred between species that would never interbreed in nature. Let's deal first with food and agriculture.

12. New genes are engineered into our food, many from bacteria and viruses and non-food species whose long term impacts on health and biodiversity are completely unknown.

13. The foreign genes are bound to interact with host genes to give unintended effects including toxins and allergens.

14. The technology is hit or miss and not at all clean and precise. The vector carrying foreign genes inserts at random into the genome of the organism, giving rise to random genetic effects, including cancer in mammalian cells. For the same reasons, transgenic lines are often unstable, and do not perform consistently.

15. Most of all, the artificial vectors used to transfer genes are made by recombining the most infectious viruses and other genetic parasites and may contribute to creating new viruses and bacteria that cause diseases. That was why the pioneers of genetic engineering called for a moratorium in the 1970s; though commercial pressures cut it short.

    Since then, drug and antibiotic resistant infectious diseases have come back with a vengeance. Strains of at least 4 dangerous bacteria including the one causing tuberculosis are already resistant to all antibiotics and hence untreatable.

16. There is now overwhelming evidence that horizontal gene transfer is responsible for spreading antibiotic resistance and creating new viral and bacterial pathogens.

17. Other scientific findings suggest that

    Transgenes and antibiotic resistance genes may spread horizontally from transgenic plants to soil bacteria and fungi, and to gut bacteria. Transgenic DNA may be 30 times more likely to escape than the plant's own DNA.

    Viral genes in transgenic plants may recombine with other viruses to generate new, super infectious viruses.

    Viral DNA, which is in practically all transgenic organisms, resist digestion in the gut of mice, pass into the bloodstream and then into a variety of cells to integrate into the cells' genome. When viral DNA was fed to pregnant mice, the DNA was found in the cells of the foetus.

18. Genetic engineering agriculture is an extremely dangerous diversion. Far from feeding the world, it intensifies corporate control on food which created poverty and hunger in the first place.

    It obstructs implementation of sustainable agriculture and erodes agricultural biodiversity, which are precisely what we need to guarantee long term food security.

19. Farming communities in the Third World have been actively regenerating and revitalising degraded agricultural land with many forms of sustainable, organic agriculture, and recovering agricultural biodiversity. Since the early 1990s, a number of non-government organisations have joined forces to form the Latin American Consortium on Agroecology and Development to promote agroecological techniques which are sensitive to the complexities of local farming methods. Yields have tripled or quadrupled within a year. Large scale implementation of bio-dynamic farming and sustainable agriculture is succeeding in the Philippines. Successive studies have highlighted the productivity and sustainability of traditional peasant farming in the third World as well as in the North. In 20 Third World countries, more than 2 million families are farming sustainably on 4-5 million hectares, with tripled or doubled yields, fully matching if not surpassing intensive agrochemical agriculture. And this has happened only within the past 5-10 years. Contracting in to corporate food-production schemes now will set them back once again down the road to escalating debt and poverty, not to mention the devastation of agricultural land and the environment.

20. The recent experience of Cuba is instructive. US economic blockade since the 1960s caused a shortage of agrochemicals, making it necessary for Cuba to go organic on a grand scale. They maintained one-third of the 11 million hectares of agricultural land on agrochemicals, turned another third fully organic, and kept the rest "transitional" as half agrochemical and half organic. The yields per hectare of the fully organic are equal to the fully agrochemical, while the yields of transitional fields are only half as much. This is the clearest evidence that organic agriculture can work on a large scale, with energetically efficient low inputs and minimal impacts on the environment.

21. And now, let's deal with health. The life industry grossly undermines and distorts health care. Far from improving the health of nations, they serve to divert attention from the overwhelming causes of ill-health, which are environmental, and blaming it on the victims. The same chemical and drug industries that have been major polluters of the environment, that have been causing increasing damages to all the organ systems of our body including our genes, are now set to reap enormous profits from those made ill. Instead of punishing the industrial polluters, the European Union and the US Government are legislating to allow radioactive and toxic wastes to be recycled as building material and consumer goods, and to be spread over our crops. If the present trend continues our health care system will surely collapse as more and more become ill. It will be replaced by a health-market, serving the rich, if at all, at the expense of the poor.

22. Xenotransplantation - using genetic engineered pigs to supply organs for transplanting into human beings, and even human embryo cloning to supply spare organs and cells are both promoted on grounds of health benefits. They are nothing of the sort. These are commercial enterprises motivated by the billions of dollars of international trade in body parts that have already led to poor people selling organs, criminals murdering people for organs and other abuses.

23. Genuine genetic diseases that can be traced to single genes are less than two percent of all diseases, and even these have proved to be much more complicated than previously thought; while at least one percent of such genetic diseases are new mutations, most likely caused by environmental mutagens. In some conditions like muscular dystrophy, fully one-third are new mutations (Graham Bulfield, Melvin Bragg's program, BBC Radio 4, Thursday, 14 Jan.).

24. Meanwhile, the main focus of so-called "preventative" medicine is to identify "predisposing" genes for diseases such as cancers that are strongly linked to occupational and environmental carcinogens. Already, preimplantation diagnosis are being done for gene "predisposing" embryos to cancers they might suffer as adults, so they can be eliminated. We have indeed gone down the slippery slope of genetic discrimination and eugenics.

25. Despite all the promises of gene therapy, there has not been a single documented success in more than 20 years. Yet, it is still being aggressively pursued with dangerous vector techniques that can cause cancer and create new viruses.

26. Another promise - that of personalised medicine based on our genetic makeup - is a pipe-dream. We have between 10,000 to 100,000 genes with hundreds of possible variants in each gene. As I said, each person is genetically unique, except for identical twins at the beginning of their life. The function of each gene depends on the background of all the other genes with which it interacts. That's why even single gene diseases are turning out to be far more complicated. It is impossible to give an accurate prognosis based on knowledge of single genes. Furthermore, up to 95 percent of our genome is called "junk DNA" because no one yet knows what its functions are.

27. Since the 1980s, health care systems all over the world have been seriously undermined by "free-market" imperatives. So-called "structural adjustment programmes", supported by the World Bank, have forced Third World Governments to impose charges on health care for the poor, to cut public spending by reducing services and to promote private health businesses. As a result, undernutrition and infant mortality rates have been increasing in many Third World countries, reversing a long term trend; and infectious diseases have re-emerged with a vengeance in immunologically compromised populations. It is extremely dubious whether genetic engineering biotechnology can improve the health of anyone, least of all, the poor. It may, instead, be contributing to the resurgence of infectious diseases.

28. While reproductive technologies are promoted to treat infertility among white Europeans in the North, women in racial minorities and in the South are being sterilised against their will, with drugs causing crippling side-effects. This will continue with genetically engineered contraceptives. The Third World poor are routinely used as guinea-pigs for vaccines and drugs. A recent case is a cholera vaccine, tested on 85,000 Bangladeshi women and children by a Swedish company beginning in 1985. The vaccine is found to offer only fleeting protection, if at all, and in any case, is so expensive that no Bangladeshi would be able to afford it. Have large vaccine trials like this one contributed to the re-emergence of new variants of the diseases now raging in the Third World? Third World governments should be on their guard against the new vaccines, especially those involving recombinant DNA, as these may have an increased propensity to generate new viruses or to cause other harmful effects.

29. Scientific findings accumulated over the past twenty years have invalidated every assumption of genetic determinism. The new genetics is compelling us to an ecological, holistic perspective, especially where genes are concerned. Our destiny does not lie in the genes. The genes are not constant and unchanging as previously supposed. Instead, genes are found to respond to the physiology of the organism and require a stable, balanced ecology to maintain stability. Organic agriculture is predicated on such a balanced ecology, which depends on a diverse community of healthy organisms free from agrochemicals.

30. In the same way, the key to genetic health is precisely the same as physiological health: unpolluted environment, wholesome organic foods free from agrochemicals, and sanitary, aesthetically and socially satisfying living conditions.

31. Genetic engineering biotechnology, far from addressing the issues of food security and health, actually undermines and endangers both. Our priorities are in curbing toxic and radioactive discharges as well as releases of genetically engineered organisms. Agrochemicals should be phased out and organic agriculture widely introduced. These are the real choices for civil society.

32. We must turn the tide on bad science and big business, and opt for a life sustaining Promethean science that works for the good of humanity and our planet.

    This paper is reproduced by kind permission of the author, Dr. Mae-Wan Ho.

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