The First GMO Field Tests disinfo/2014/05/first-gmo-field-tests/ Brooke Borel explains what we fight about when we fight about GMOs at Modern Farmer: In the spring of 1987 in Tulelake, a tiny California farming town four miles from the Oregon border, a small band of scientists wearing yellow Tyvek suits and respirators paced across a field spraying potato plants from handheld dispensers. Representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency perched on ladders above and checked air monitors to make sure the contents of the dispensers weren’t spreading beyond the field’s boundaries. Dressed in billowy white safety jumpers and peaked caps, the EPA agents looked like apocalyptic bakers. Nearby, journalists eagerly took notes and snapped photos of this eerie scene, which would become national news — this was the world’s first field experiment of a controversial new technology: genetically modified organisms. Benign Beginnings The organism in the Tulelake test was a modified version of the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae, or ice-minus. In its natural state, P. syringae is a common pathogen to many plants. In the mid-seventies a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin named Steven Lindow discovered that the bacteria caused plants to freeze at higher temperatures than normal. A few years later, Lindow moved to the University of California, Berkeley, and he and his new team began to peer inside the bacteria for the gene that promoted frost in plants – something that cost farmers $1.5 billion a year in crop damage. They found and deleted that gene, creating modified bacteria that didn’t encourage frost. If the modified bacteria were released in a field, the reasoning went, they might outcompete native bacteria and keep crops from freezing in a cold snap. By 1982, the scientists were busy planning field tests to see if their genetically engineered bacteria could help crops fight frost. In preparation for Tulelake, Lindow’s team conducted dozens of safety experiments, first for the National Institutes of Health, which regulated all genetic engineering at the time, and later for the EPA. These tests examined, for example, how ice-minus might affect local flora and whether the wind could carry it into the environment. In Smithsonian, science journalist Stephen S. Hall wrote at the time: “No test or data suggested the bacteria were capable of causing disease in people, animals or plants beyond its well-established host range.” The Fight Begins Despite the good intentions and low risks, environmentalists were wary of ice-minus and blocked the field tests through four years of protest and litigation, prompting congressional hearings and more safety tests. The lawsuits were spearheaded by the most prominent genetic-engineering skeptic of the era, the political activist Jeremy Rifkin. Lindow’s experiments were thorough, but no test could rule out all potential problems. Rifkin didn’t see the point in accepting even a sliver of uncertainty… [continues at Modern Farmer]
Posted on: Wed, 21 May 2014 14:01:18 +0000
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