Last edited Sat Nov 10, 2012, 03:54 PM - Edit history (1)
was when I used to accompany the Plant Breeder that I worked for out of grad school to the Venture Capitally funded start-ups playing with genetically engineering plants in the early 80's. They used to call these people the "gene jockeys" and they thought that they were way smarter than the backwater old fashioned plant breeders. Which of course is so ironic as they always make the claim that they are just plant breeders.....But they needed plant breeders to take the poor poor plants that survived their attacks and turn them into something that could be actually grown and yield a crop. This breeder I worked for was a real genius and he loathed these people. But I thought they were pretty cool, actually and after working out in the dust, dirt and mud a nice clean lab sure looks nice. And the time factor...breeders talk about decades of work as trifling ....the lab people were talking as though years were centuries. I was young, this was appealing.
Then I worked as a scientist evaluating Bacillus thuringiensis (B.t.) strains for a biotechnology start up. In the early 80's it was assumed that anything genetically engineered would have to be killed before being let out in the environment. There had been a big meeting where all the molecular biologists agreed to never release into the environment anything engineered that was living. For fear of causing irrevocable environmental contamination. During this time my best friend's mother was on the team that engineered the human insulin gene into a bacteria and this was indeed a wonderful advancement for diabetics. This was Genentech's first product. The pharmaceutical folks were very careful, as was the company that I worked for.
B.t. is a soil bacteria from which over 2500 different strains had been identified at the time. They each produce different toxins. Only three of them at that time had been commercialized and approved for agricultural use by the EPA. The company I was working for had the idea of finding ones with higher activity and new host ranges. They wanted to engineer a toxin into a different bacteria to produce the raw toxin, not the protoxin in a crystal form (as the regular B.t. did) to see if it could last longer in the field among other things. In 1986 at the Entomological Association of America (ESA) the molecular biologists cloning the B.t. genes came and met with some of us. They promised us that although they had cloned and just recently succeeded in infecting a plant to express the toxin from B.t. HD1 (the main commercially produced B.t.) that they would never commercialize this one as if they did this strain of B.t. would become useless in a matter of time as insect resistance would surely develop. The scientists had planned on cloning a gene from a different line....And so the first major red flag was when the business people that these scientists worked for overrode them and decided to use that very first cloned gene from B.t. HD1 so that they could say to the EPA that it as "just the same" as the bacterially fermented and produced B.t. and thus not have to do anything to get it through the EPA. (Just an FYI, it normally takes a few years of testing and a great number of tests to satisfy the EPA's requirements). This caused a major shock to us in the industry. Not only were they using the gene from the main line that was produced and already tested and approved by the EPA, but they were planning on putting out a living genetically engineered organism out in the environment without testing any of it's novel qualities. Namely this toxin in a different form. One that behaved very differently than when it was produced by the B.t. bacteria (which I knew from my own work), but making the claim all the while that it was the same. When it was not. Plus they would force the regular people producing the B.t. to find a new strain to commercialize and have to do years of testing to get it approved- this was an outrage. To put salt in the wound, normal B.t.'s cannot be patented, but these guys patented the actual gene and thus all the while claiming it was the same patented it as unique and owned by them. They took something from the commons into the private sector and were going in a mere few decades to make it useless for all.
By that time I had moved to be closer to my plant breeding project and was working as a fermentation microbiologist and later quality control person at the B.t. production facility in Central California. Everyone was expecting the EPA to say "no way go back and do the testing, or find a different toxin to make useless in what 20 years? as the insects will most surely become resistant". To our shock and horror, this did not happen. Somehow the EPA bought this tale that it was the same at the same time that it was unique enough to patent. Not everyone bought it, though. A number of scientists objected and there were some hearings...I went to a few and testified....but in the end the EPA political people pushed this down the throats of the scientists there...and a number of them resigned over this.
Out in the Land Grant universities in the late 80' all sorts of scientist in the Ag Sciences were being gotten rid of for raising any questions whatsoever about these plants. It is amazing and remarkable that the main entomologist responsible for getting the refugia idea (this is where the people growing the gmo plant with the Bt toxin expressing within it would also have to plant a small percentage of their cropland to non engineered crop so that insects that were not exposed to the toxin could be produced on site to breed and thus dilute any resistance that might be building up in the population feeding on the gmo crop) in and in use was actually tolerated and not gotten rid of. But he was the exception. Everyone else that I knew of had to shut up or leave. The Lundberg's hired a talented plant breeder who had been with UC...but was not pro gmo enough for them.....Anyway this purging of the scientists not in lockstep with this industry was another real red flag. And the sort of violence of it reminded us all of stories from the Soviet Union. In fact we all speculated that gmo's would do to farmers in the US what the Soviets did to the poor farmers in the Ukraine and Russia.... Scientists outside of the US were amazed.
This is just the beginning of the long sad tale. I'll write more over the next few days if you want to hear more. But the main thing to know is that the behavior of these characters was then just the same as what we saw here. Opportunistic, and quick to tell lies. Perfect bullies. Although now millions of people have seen this instead of just a few scientists here and there. Oh and all scientists who were not in lock step suddenly became "activists" we simply lost our professional credentials.......just like that - Woosh!
Sorry, it is late and I am tired and hopefully this makes sense. Let me know if you want more stories....I guess it has been longer than 26 years....but I was not actively fighting them until the early 90's. This post is just about red flags, tight? That is for another time.
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and 32 deafeated 
