(no subject)
google scholar led me to this great paper on ethics and genetics.
"Navdanya (1993) wrote: "The view that diversity is a disease that
must be cured is becoming a social and ecological threat in our times... "
http://zobell.biol.tsukuba.ac.jp/~macer/chgp/chgp85.html
pp. 85-92 in Ethical Challenges as we approach the end of the Human Genome Project
Editor: Darryl R. J. Macer, Ph.D.
Eubios Ethics Institute
Copyright 2000, Eubios Ethics Institute All commercial rights reserved. This publication may be reproduced for limited educational or academic use, however please enquire with the author.
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Great leaps forward? The Human Genome Project and sustainable agriculture
Brewster Kneen
S-6, C-27, RR.1
Sorrento, B.C. V0E 2W0, Canada
alias "The Ram's Horn"
www.ramshorn.bc.ca
Email: ramshorn@ramshorn.bc.ca
Although I have thought a lot about both the Human Genome Project and Sustainable Agriculture, true to the reductionist culture of North America I had not considered the two in relation to one another until I was approached to write this chapter. As it happened, at about the same time I received Monsanto Company's 1996 Annual Report, which fused the two. The report explains that: "When Monsanto scientists tear back the husks of ears of corn, they see beyond the rows of kernels to the essence of plants - their genes. In those genes are the foundation of a new life sciences industry... Through a massive, publicly funded effort called the Human Genome Project, the location and purpose of every human gene is being pinpointed. At the same time, the mysteries of plant and bacterial genomes are being unravelled."
This led me to recall an article I had read not long ago by Garland Allen (1996), who attributes the notion of "better breeding", a concept that is key to current biotechnology, to U.S. eugenicist Charles Davenport. According to Allen, both Davenport and his mentor, Francis Galton, regarded eugenics as "the human counterpart of modern scientific animal and plant husbandry. In fact, says Allen, "it seemed ironic to eugenicists that people paid so much attention to the pedigrees of their farm and domestic stock while they ignored the pedigrees of their children."
The more I have pondered their relationship, the more convinced I have become that the HGP (and related research and commercialization) and sustainable agriculture are founded on antagonistic paradigms. The two projects make such radically different demands on society and its social and economic policies that they are fundamentally incompatible. This may not be true in theory, but in current practice I think it is. If we considered our financial resources unlimited, and really practiced empirical science, then we might be able to explore both the Human Genome Project and sustainable -- or what I would prefer to call ecological or diversity -- agriculture. But we would still be left with the structural issue of social and economic power and who does, or does not, have it.
Not only are resources limited, however, requiring that choices be made among worthy research projects, but the culture that drives the human genome project and, apparently, virtually all activity in the arena of modern biotechnology, demands a dominant if not exclusive recognition. A practical reason for this is its need to appeal to the capital market for ever more investment in order to keep afloat. The ratio between successful commercial products and investment continues to be too low to finance the corporate research and development process.
The exclusivity generated by a financial either/or is buttressed ideologically and socially by the neo- Darwinist doctrine of the survival of the fittest, currently phrased as 'competitiveness'. This ideology of genetic determinism finds its social counterpart in technological determinism; combined, they serve to exclude the public from the structures of decision making.
At the same time, the West recognizes only one 'science' and only one epistemology, or way of knowing. This neatly excludes ecological agriculture from consideration as a viable (let alone essential) alternative to industrial forms of agriculture and commodity production. Integrated pest management (IPM) and "environmental farms plans" may be improvements on sheer chemical dependency, and may usefully confuse the public, but in my opinion they do not alter the fundamental reality of industrial monoculture agriculture and its drive for domination and control. Just as the West demanded, and got, 'victory' over 'communism', so the culture of individualism, reductionist science, and corporate domination demands victory over all other cultures and epistemologies and their submission to the dominant monoculture.
The HGP and ecological agriculture are based on, in current jargon, 'incompatible paradigms' -- incompatible because one is closed and the other open, one is reductionist, the other holistic. One seeks to define problems (or diseases) according to the cure available, the other seeks to identify and understand what are experienced as problems, and then change behaviour and, if necessary, structures and power relations, in order to move beyond the apparent problem.
The HGP is an expression of the culture characterized by industrial agriculture and western medicine. It is profoundly interventionist (and violent), regarding the organism as a collection of pieces of information that can be taken apart and put together in a variety of configurations without regard for the organism as a whole. It can be summed up in the motto: 'Map, manage & control'.
Ecological agriculture, on the other hand -- the forms of agricultural practice that are genuinely sustainable -- sees the whole as prior to, and more than the sum of, the parts. Its motto might be characterized as 'observe, respect, and cooperate'. The whole organism and the whole society or ecology -- whole seeds, not bits of genetic information -- are the building blocks of ecological agriculture.
THE EYE OF THE SHEPHERD FATTENS THE FLOCK
"Precision agriculture", the latest hightech fad to hit industrial agriculture, might well be considered the agricultural analogue to the HGP. 'Precision' agriculture, is, of course, no such thing, unless you consider the data supplied via satellite imaging, high altitude infrared photography and computer technology to be superior to and more accurate than the age-old practice of farmers walking their land. Dealing with five acre, or maybe two and a half acre, plots (which is a larger area than the majority of farms in the world), it cannot provide a worm count or information on the diversity and health of microorganisms in the soil.
With GIS (Geographic Information System) and its related hard- and soft-ware, the farmer no longer even has to get out of his tractor cab to observe the land and the crops; he simply has watch the video monitor and manipulate a keyboard to get all the 'information' he requires to adjust his seeding or herbicide application rate. It's all done by remote sensing, infrared photography and global positioning satellites.
If fact, when the system is fully installed, the farmer no longer even has to get on his tractor in the first place. All he needs is a computer and a satellite dish to control the tractor and its operations from his desk or the cab of his truck. The land, and the farming, are reduced to a matter of reading digital codes, much like reading a bar code on a bar of soap or a map of genetic sequences. The farmer is reduced to the role of purchasing agent and technical assistant for those who write the software, supply the 'crop inputs' and buy the 'product'.
Based on my experience I consider this neither a sustainable nor ecological system. The information is used as the basis for a solution to be imposed on the land to achieve the industrial requirements of monoculture agriculture. The point of the exercise is control, as Gina Maranto (1996) points out in her discussion of a related area. In a fine historical approach to the social and ethical issues of human reproductive technology, she comments that, "Inarguably, control is the sine qua non of science... The whole point of the assisted-reproduction enterprise ... is to exert mastery over procreation, to remove chance from a natural biological process."(p.24) She concludes that, "Modern science and medicine positions itself as the champion of human values, arguing that to fail to act to eliminate the vagaries of nature is to be inhumane." (p. 269).
As if to corroborate this, a recent issue of Tomorrow, a magazine of "Global Environment Business" (Stockholm, March-April 1997, p.11), brings together the culture of Western science and the drive of the biotech industry: "Corporate gurus see a shift away from chemical to biological technologies, which represents a shift in the way humanity's ongoing project of control over nature will work: instead of brute physical suppression of natural processes, a kinder process of control, through rewriting of 'nature's software' is envisaged."
SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE: ASSUMPTIONS AND PROMISES
Barlett (1995) wrote: "Sustainable agriculture cannot merely be a technical exercise in input substitution and appropriate technology; sustainable agriculture must be part of a social movement that spans the entire economic and social relations of society from credit to the health of the soil, from the seeds and inputs needed to the producers and their families, from those who distribute the food and the distance it travels, to the demands and health of the consumers."
Implied in the biotech industry's constant repetition of words such as "moving forward", "benefits" and "improvement" is an assumption of linear progress and a certainty about what qualifies as 'improved', 'good', or 'better'. These assumptions power what can best be described as a teleological approach to life. 'Management by objectives', 'goal-oriented', 'product rather than process' are all expressions of the same teleological approach: Ends justify means. In agricultural biotechnology, the seed will be constructed (forced) to produce the desired product.
Sustainable agriculture does not share such notions of linearity and progress. Nor does it accept the violence of "rewriting nature's software" to achieve the commercial goal of an 'improved' seed. Instead, it values and encourages diversity and recognizes that what might be a 'bad' crop in a dry year might be a 'good' crop in a wet year. An 'improved' variety of greater yield may be less desirable than a lower yielding variety that is naturally resistant to a recurring pest.
Ecological agriculture is philosophically existential, or ontological, rather than teleological; pragmatic rather than compulsive. It asks, What will work?, not How can we make this work? It seeks to work with and live in Creation, rather than dominating and controlling that which lies both inside and outside of our selves. It seeks understanding and wisdom, not information and answers; it seeks co-operation, not control.
Perhaps the most radical exemplar of 'natural' farming - cooperating with nature rather than trying to 'improve' upon nature by conquest - has been Masanobu Fukuoka, whose One-Straw Revolution was first published in 1975, when Fukuoka was 65 years old. Trained as a micro-biologist, at the age of 25 Fukuoka left his urban work as an agricultural customs inspector to return to his native village in northern Japan. He has spent the rest of his life quietly farming and introducing visitors to his "do nothing'" agricultural method.
Fukuoka's approach has little in common with conventional Western reductionist, interventionist science and agriculture, but it is not inappropriate to compare his attitudes with those driving the Human Genome Project, since both projects are about how we, as humans, are to live in the world. This may not be the way that technicians working on the HGP understand their daily occupation, but they are, nevertheless, participating in an active way in the shaping of a particular consciousness and culture.
The usual way to go about developing a method, Fukuoka wrote, is to try this and that, bringing together one technique upon another. His way, he says, was the opposite: "How about not doing this? How about not doing that? -- that was my line of thinking. The reason that man's improved techniques seem to be necessary is that the natural balance has been so badly upset beforehand by those same techniques that the land has become dependent upon them. This line of reasoning not only applies to agriculture, but to other aspects of human society as well. Doctors and medicine have become necessary when people create a sickly environment."
Fukuoka says that "the ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings." While this would seem to align him with the current practices of genome research and the search for technological fixes for genetic 'defects', his vision contradicts the fundamentals of reductionist science. "An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing", he says. "A problem cannot be solved by people who are concerned with only one or another of its parts."
Natural - ecological - organic... the words do not describe or prescribe a set of uniform standards or practices, even though there are codes established for the legal certification of organic agriculture. But these words do convey an attitude that of necessity includes sustainability, not as a goal but as a culture. In keeping with the attitude expressed by Fukuoka, and in contrast to the culture of industrial agriculture and the genetic engineering of life, the valuative words 'good' and 'bad' are seldom encountered in ecological agriculture. Instead, one finds words like 'appropriate'. Ecological agriculture is not a search for the 'best', or for uniformity, but rather a way of living that seeks accommodation of what, at the moment, may be deemed the 'bad' along with what is considered 'good'. The objective is the nurture and maintenance of diversity. What is bad? is like What is a weed? -- something that is not where we want it, or when we want it, or we might say, something that we consider anti-social at the moment. The HGP, however, is not a search for diversity per se, not a search for wisdom, not a search for a socially just and ecologically sound food system, but a search for useful genes with commercial potential that can be exploited by the existing structures of control.
SEEDS AND GENES
Navdanya (1993) wrote: "The view that diversity is a disease that must be cured is becoming a social and ecological threat in our times... Diversity is the characteristic of nature and the basis of ecological stability. Diverse ecosystems give rise to diverse life forms and to diverse cultures, and this provides the basis for sustainability." (p.3-4)
"Improvement of a selected characteristic in a plant is also a selection against other characteristics which are useful to nature, or for local consumption. Improvement is not a class or gender neutral concept. Improvement of partitioning efficiency is based on 'enhancement of the yield of desired product'. What is 'desired' is, however, not the same for rich people and poor people, or rich countries and poor countries, nor is efficiency... [The] parts of a farming system or of a plant that may be treated as 'unwanted' by the better-off may be the wanted part for the poor... In the Indian context, plants that have been displaced by plant improvement in the Green Revolution have been those which have traditionally been the main providers of nutrition: pulses and oilseeds. The Amaranth and the Bathua, two varieties of green leafy vegetables that were an integral part of traditional diets have been named weeds and are being exterminated." (p.33)
The Seed Savers' Handbook (Fanton 1993) cites the case of Azolla, "a fern-like algae that floats on the surface of the paddies and traditionally grown in many Asian countries in association with rice. It transformed nitrogen from the air into a plant nutrient, suppressed weeds and gave up to three tonnes of green manure to the acre when the paddies were drained. Green Revolution use of chemicals has eliminated this plant on the paddies."
In July, 1997, the International Congress of Nutrition was held in Toronto. Among the subjects discussed was the widespread deficiency of micronutrients, such as iodine and iron. "Fortification wouldn't be necessary if everyone had access to balanced diets", said one speaker. The sad irony is that it is plants like Amaranth and Bathua that used to provide such essential nutrients, and other organisms such as Azolla that used to enrich the land and the crops grown on it. Agrotoxins and synthetic fertilizers are designed for monocultures, and are based on the kind of extreme biological simplification that seems to characterize biotechnology, overlooking and excluding subtleties and diversities such as micronutrients and diets balanced by diversity.
There are obvious and direct parallels between agriculture and human health. Yet the connection is seldom made between industrial food production and ill health. Now we have genetic engineering billed as the answer to hunger, as if there were nothing to be learned from the experience of the Green Revolution.
In this regard, it is notable that organizations like Seed Savers' Exchange of Decorah, Iowa, and the Seed Savers' Network in Australia, can be found around the world leading the efforts not only to conserve traditional varieties of seeds, but also to educate people in the importance of conserving open pollinated seeds and growing them rather than hybrids. It has to do with control. None of these organizations are calling on biotechnology to help conserve traditional varieties or to 'improve' them. Instead they call on gardeners and farmers around the world to save, grow and exchange traditional varieties and to do their own breeding. Sustainable plant breeding and conservation is far too complex to be left to the dictates of corporate interests and the simple techniques of genetic engineering.
"The human genome is common heritage of humanity," stated the draft Article One of the UNESCO Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights. The final version read gThe human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity. In a symbolic sense, it is the heritage of humanity.h While purporting to seek protection of the rights and dignity of persons, the preamble of the Declaration states that "research on the human genome and the resulting applications open up vast prospects for progress in improving the health of individuals and of humankind as a whole." Article 15, however, says that "States should take appropriate steps to provide the framework for the free exercise of research on the human genome with due regard for the principles set out in this Declaration, in order to safeguard respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and human dignity and to protect public health."
"The free exercise of research" may at first sound ethical and democratic, but "the free exercise of research" is exactly what the transnational drug and chemical companies desire: unimpeded access to the "genetic resources" of the created world, including human genetics. One has, therefore, to consider carefully how northern commercial interests -- be they academic or corporate -- interpret "common heritage". In the case of plant and animal 'genetic resources', 'common heritage', has meant, gHelp yourself, it's freeh. There is no reason to think that their attitude toward human genetic 'resources' would be any different.
But are my genes, or those of a resident of Tristan da Cunha, or the seeds of the Neem tree, for that matter, really free for the sampling - or taking? "Common heritage of humanity" is simply taken to mean that the human genome is a globally usable resource, no longer connected to or resident in a concrete and specific person. Human genetics become a natural resource available for 'discovery', patenting and exploitation, just as plant and animal genetics have done. Codes of ethics are then limited to issues of individual informed consent and even compensation, not issues of the integrity of persons or of collective or communal rights. Human genetic information is transformed into yet another commodity to be owned, patented, traded, and generally exploited in the name of "progress", "science", or "competitiveness". In effect, the Declaration may be nothing more than a prospecting license.
Such an attitude has no place in ecological agriculture. Genetics -- human or otherwise -- are not resources to be exploited. The understanding on which ecological agriculture builds is not of genetic sequences and their purported functioning, but on the dynamic interrelationships of organisms in specific, and differing, environments. Even if one knows the sequence for a gene performing a highly valued function when found in a particular location in a particular organism in a particular environment, there is little reason to think that the genetic sequence responsible will perform similarly under different circumstances. More to the point, for ecological agriculture, is to look at whole organism interactions and their consequences.
In describing the transformation in the mentality of post-Mendelian plant breeding that produced first traditional hybrids and then modern inbred hybrids with their uniformity and inability to breed true, Jack Harlan (1972) said, "A pure line mentality, convinced that variation was bad, uniformity was good, and off-types in the field somehow immoral, developed."
An aging population requires more drugs and the Human Genome Project will be of great assistance to the pharmaceutical industry, explains Jurgen Drews (1996), president of global research for Hoffmann-LaRoche, in a commentary in Nature Biotechnology. Drews offered no explanation as to why an aging population requires more drugs, but he does explain why the drug companies need more drugs: "A careful analysis of the Human Genome Project's potential suggests that 3000-10,000 interesting new molecular sites for intervention - 'drug targets' in the pharmaceutical vernacular - may emerge from it over the course of the next six years. This is fortunate for the industry because the top 50 pharmaceutical companies will, as a group, need to produce new chemical entities (NCE) at a rate of 42 per year in order to achieve a desirable growth rate of 10%, according to Drews. "Developing new drugs for new targets is mandatory."
The logic of Drews' argument is highly revealing of the industry's valuation of the HGP: "If you systematically list the diseases that really matter in today's world, the number of diseases for which treatment or improved treatment is needed is no more than 100 (or at most 150). Most of these are, at least in part, caused by genetic factors... So if one is conservative and estimates that there are 100 important multi-factoral diseases, with approximately 5-10 genes contributing to each of them, this would give a total of 500-1000 disease-related genes... If each gene product interacts with 3-10 other proteins in the signalling pathways, these pathways would also yield important opportunities for disease intervention. This leads to a total of perhaps 3000-10,000 interesting drug targets."
In other words, thanks to the Human Genome Project the for-profit drug companies will be busy, and profitable, for many years. And for just as many years will diseases continue to be identified and 'treated' as there are drugs available to treat them. The problems, in other words, will be defined according to the solutions available, or, for stock market purposes, 'in the pipeline'.
The ambiguities of the pursuit of genetic sequences, however, are well expressed by Robert Weinberg (1991): "Thousands of investigators have found that the organisms created by gene splicing pose no threat to human health or the ecosystem around us [and] recently gained abilities to analyze complex genetic information, including our own, will soon allow us to predict human traits from simple DNA tests."
Yet a few paragraphs later Weinberg acknowledges that, "Our bodies function as complex networks of interacting components that are often influenced by our variable environment. By enumerating and studying individual components - genes in this case - we will only begin to scratch the surface of our complexity." Weinberg then puts his finger on the social problem created by the attitude he has first expressed: "As this decade progresses, a growing proportion of the lay public will come to accept genes as the all-powerful determinants of the human condition."
This should hardly be surprising. The public is bound to be influenced, in the absence of genuine critical public discussion, by the industry generated hype intended to induce investors to bet their money on the latest biotech fad and the lobbying designed to minimize regulatory restraint on their activities and patented cure-alls.
Let's look, for example, at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, which published a lavish and graphic 4-page broadsheet insert in the Toronto Globe & Mail, June 23, 1995. The cover x-ray photo of a foetus apparently holding a strand of DNA is accompanied by the line "Is Genetics Destiny?" This is followed by: "A cure for cancer. A cure for Heart Disease. An end to... [and in smaller type] asthma, diabetes, and a dozen other major illnesses that have plagued humanity since the dawn of time."
The text is ambiguous - or rather contradictory - from beginning to end; the result, it would appear, of the tract being both a fundraising appeal and a statement of faith to the public concerning the unmitigated good to result from the pursuit of biotechnology. Reductionist determinism and the promise of choice accompanying free will jostle each other paragraph by paragraph, and a statement such as "The 100,000 genes which we inherit from our parents... define almost everything about us, from the fact that we are humans to the colour of our hair to whether or not we will get cancer at a given age..." is followed by, "Genes may not determine destiny, but..." Public confusion is seemingly deliberately fostered by language such as "genes that predispose people to asthma" being followed by "genes that cause asthma."
The broadsheet highlights the tale of a Mount Sinai respirologist who "travelled to Tristan da Cunha in 1993 to collect ... DNA samples from the island's residents"; but there is no mention of the ethics of such genetic sampling, or of the subsequent dispute that arose over the lack of 'informed consent' and the practice of what many call 'biopiracy'. The attitude expressed in this language is crucial not only in connection with the HGP and related research, but also, and much more extensively, in connection with the search for new drugs and 'novel' agricultural genetic material. Genetic material is genetic material, whatever its source. Robbery is robbery, and so is 'collecting' plant, animal, bacterial or human blood specimens for the potential benefits hidden in their DNA. The ethical, moral and political issues are the same for both.
The most revealing segment of the Lunenfeld broadsheet is its discussion of Type II diabetes which, it says, "is caused by obesity and low levels of physical fitness." The Institute's researchers, apparently having already decided that the cause is genetic, are studying the "Native Canadians" in the northern Ontario community of Sandy Lake to determine the genetic causes of the very high rates of diabetes, according to the broadsheet.
"The ancestors of the Sandy Lake community survived as hunters and gatherers using tremendous amounts of energy walking and canoeing. In a feast or famine environment, people with a thrifty gene that allowed them to store and utilize energy more effectively would have a major survival advantage... Now, however, members of the community, like the rest of us, live in an environment of nutrient excess and little physical activity... As a result, the ability to store food efficiently has become a liability."
So the Lunenfeld Institute is searching for the "thrifty gene" that could become the key to a gene therapy that would enable the people of Sandy Lake to live like the rest of us -- without diabetes, presumably.
Unfortunately, this stunning example of cultural gbigotryh and scientific ignorance seems to mark much of the work that contributes to the Human Genome Project while also destroying the cultural foundations of sustainable agriculture. There is not even a hint here that the prevalence of diabetes might be the consequence of the severe dietary changes forced upon the Natives of the north as a result of the white man's cultural and economic imperialism. Perhaps even more appalling is the absence of any expressed doubt about the inevitability or value of a life of nutrient excess and little physical activity.
Even this brief scenario poses the real choice: between a meaningful and rewarding subsistence food economy, including sustainable agriculture and plenty of exercise, and the very expensive and elitist search for a genetic cure for a 'disease' of 'civilization'. Unfortunately, if one accepts the inevitability of civilization, "discovery of genes that cause asthma and Type II diabetes still lies ahead," as the broadsheet states. Which is, of course, the whole point of the broadsheet. Our financial contributions to the noble work of the Institute will enable it to work toward a cure without ever having to address the question of why the Native peoples of the north are plagued with diabetes.
This is also a magnificent example of the professional transformation of a social-cultural-environmental problem into a personal-individual problem. If the Institute is looking for a genetic cure, they are looking for a prescription medicine to 'treat' people one at a time according to their medical diagnosis. This could be characterized as a white man's individual solution to a social problem created by white men.
One must, at this point, wonder what the annual budget of the Lunenfeld Institute could accomplish if applied to research in sustainable food systems (including agriculture) for distinct cultures.
The same question, of course, must be applied to the Human Genome Project itself.
Howard Strohman recently wrote in Nature Biotechnology that, "As we now recognize, the consensus around genetic determinism is extremely well developed and powerful. As a paradigm, it promises molecular diagnosis and therapy for everything from premature birth to death and, mostly because of such inflated claims, it commands the major share of our funded research in the life sciences." However, Strohman says, "Normal science is conservative throughout and is the approach least likely to reveal the real secrets of life. Normal science is an approach that reveals genetic maps related to biological function, but the directions for reading the maps are not included in the package. And the real secrets of life are obviously in those missing directions... These rules are more than likely embedded in the organization of life rather than in the catalogue of the organization's agents."
It is this catalogue, of course, which is the object of the Human Genome Project. While sustainable agriculture seeks to follow the directions as they are revealed, generation by generation, industry is busy trying to insert its own directions into the package, all the while trying to 'educate' us with the doctrine that they are actually there in the genes. Strohman, commenting on the difficulty of departing from the path of genetic determinism so favoured by industry, simply says it is "because a holistic biology is seen to be counterproductive to the needs of technology." I would add, 'and its corporate owners and beneficiaries'.
CULTURAL ARTEFACT
Biotechnology, and more specifically genetic engineering, is clearly the artefact of a unique culture Monsanto Company, the most aggressive and globalized of the agricultural biotechnology companies, exposes in its annual report the attitudes and assumptions that are expressed in the social construct of genetic engineering. Speaking of "the essence of plants - their genes", Monsanto promises that
"As we identify plant and human genomes, we can begin to understand how human health is affected by the choices people make about how they live and what they eat... If we can learn more about genomes and gene expression, we can become more precise about the way we manage our health..."
These assumptions are again expressed by the Swiss giant of the drug/biotechnology industry, Novartis (created by the merger of Basel drug giants Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz), which ran a series of three ads in early 1997 with the common theme "new skills in the science of life". One ad highlights organ transplants, another highlights new drugs, the third focuses on "new ways to protect crops for tomorrow's food needs". Novartis describes itself as "The World's Leading Life Sciences company", and the message suggests life can be reduced to a matter of science. What it means to be alive will be best decided by the drug companies who will provide the tools for good management. While this is both presumptuous and offensive, it does reflect the culture of reductionism that drives the commercial field of biotechnology in agriculture and health care.
The Monsanto voice assumes that we can know, and are entitled to know, by violence if necessary, the "essence" of plants. This hubris is as dangerous as it is outrageous, and is utterly alien to ecological agriculture.
The silly and misleading oversimplifications represented in the Monsanto text are clearly aspects not of a scientific agenda, but of a political agenda, an agenda of control and exploitation. This is harsh, but the reduction of life to a matter of 'technology' to be 'managed' is harsh, and a deliberate attempt to induce a sense of powerlessness in the average citizen while also calling forth a sense of gratitude toward the corporations that can save us from the perils of hunger, failing bodies and even death itself.
The deliberate construction of the foundations of modern biotechnology to serve certain interests and not others included, as Philip Regal (1996) reminds us, the financial and ideological backing of the Rockefeller Foundation "to promote the idea that society should wait for scientific inventions to solve its problems, and that tampering with the economic and political systems would not be necessary." The effect of this, as Regal points out, was to nurture resignation to genetic fatalism while at the same time raising "calming expectations: science and technology would bring grace". It was the same Rockefeller Foundation that defined and financed the 'Green Revolution'.
But will it be the transnational corporations, the agbiotech industry, and the corporate-funded university research that "bring grace" and feed the world? There is no reason to believe so. The business of corporations may be commodity production for the wealthy (absolutely and relatively), but their goal is increased corporate profit, as any reading of the business press makes clear. Sustainable, ecological food production is not on their agenda, nor should we expect it to be, because ecological agriculture is about local food systems feeding the local population by means of a diverse agriculture free of dependency on external 'inputs' be they fertilizer, agrotoxins, cash, credit, or engineered seeds or animals. There is no place in these local systems for large corporations and the industrial monoculture that they require.
HAVEN'T WE BEEN HERE BEFORE?
There is a profoundly disturbing parallel between the development of chemical- dependent industrial agriculture after World War II and the current development of biotechnology. In Living Downstream, Sandra Steingraber (1997) points out that while World War II is mentioned throughout Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the references "seem designed to remind already aware readers that the technologies developed for wartime purposes had changed chemistry and physics forever... The multitude of new synthetic products made available after the war altered how food was grown and packaged, homes constructed and furnished, bathrooms disinfected, children deloused, and pets de-flea'd. Carson described this transformation almost offhandedly, as though the connection between lawn-care practices and warfare was perfectly obvious." Carson, according to Steingraber, also pointed out that many of the new chemicals were developed under emergency conditions and within the secretive atmosphere of wartime, with the result that they had not been fully tested for safety. Nevertheless, private markets were quickly developed for these products after the war although their long-term effects on humans and the environment were not known. Perhaps of even greater relevance to current discussions of biotechnology, Carson pointed out that wartime attitudes accompanied these products onto the market", transferring the goals of "conquest and annihilation", in Steingraber's words, "from the battlefield to our kitchens, gardens, forests, and farm fields." "The Seek, Strike, and Destroy maxim of my father's antitank unit", she writes, "was brought home and turned against the natural world. This attitude, Carson believed, would be our undoing. All life was caught in the crossfire."
"Seek, Strike and Destroy" is a long, long way from the definition of sustainable agriculture suggested by Fred Kirschenmann, a North Dakota organic farmer: "a food system that builds healthy soil and healthy human communities within health ecological neighbourhoods."
What kind of agriculture can best mirror and maintain the evolutionary stability of the various ecological neighbourhoods in which we humans live? asks Kirschenmann. His answer is "ecological farming", which, in contrast to industrial agriculture, "tries to produce food solely through human industry". Ecological agriculture, or organic agriculture, seeks to cooperate with nature, rather than to control nature, and seeks to maintain and enhance the natural ecological balances and attend to the health of the whole soil system. Worms, 'weeds' and livestock are essential participants in this process, as well as farmers, farm families, and communities -- not as genetic sequences or resources, but as living organisms and populations.
Native (Anishnabe) elder Art Solomon (1990) wrote:
Grandmother, Great Spirit, We thank You that You gave us life and that You keep it going for us each day.
We thank you for our Mother Earth and that she is still following your original instructions and that she is still providing us food and medicine.
We thank You for our elder brother the Sun that he is still doing the work that You gave him. And we thank our Grandmother Moon that she is still following your original instructions for her.
At last, we call on you, the spirits of the four directions to help us because we understand that now we must claim our inheritance. We must renew out ways of thinking and doing. We must restore our humanity and go back to the true ways of living. We need your help and guidance because we know there are only two roads to walk on and there is great confusion around us.
REFERENCES
Allen, G. "Science Misapplied - the Eugenics Age Revisited", Technology Review (Aug-Sept, 1996), 23-31.
Bartlett, Andrew Kang. Oregon, Oct 1995, courtesy Ineke Booy, Triangle Farm, Ontario, 1997
Drews, Jurgen, Nature Biotechnology, 14 (1996), 1516-1518.
Fanton, Michel & Jude, Seed Saverfs Handbook, Byron Bay, Australia, 1993, p.19
Fukuoka, Masanobu. The One-Straw Revolution, Bantam New Age edition, 1985.
Harlan, J.R. "Genetics of Disaster", Journal of Environmental Quality, 1 (3, 1972b), p.213 - quoted by Fowler and Mooney in Shattering, Arizona 1990
Kirschenmann, from talks given at the Organic Conference, Guelph, Ontario, 25/1/97, & the Organic Trade Association, 14/9/95 (photocopy).
Maranto, Gina. The Quest for Perfection, Scribner, 1996.
Navdanya, Cultivating Diversity, Dehra Dun, India, 1993. See also Ross Welch, Gerald Combs Jr. and John Duxbury, "Toward a 'Greener' Revolution", Issues in Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, Univ. of Texas, (Fall, 1997), 50-58.
Regal, Philip. "Metaphysics in Genetic Engineering: Cryptic Philosophy and Ideology in the 'Science' of Risk Assessment" in Ad van Dommelen, ed., Coping with Deliberate Release - The Limits of Risk Assessment, International Centre for Human and Public Affairs, Tilburg, Netherlands, 1996, p.18.
Solomon, Art. From the poem "Grandfather, Great Spirit" by Art Solomon, in SONGS FOR THE PEOPLE: Teachings on the Natural Way, NC Press, Toronto, 1990. The Anishnabe people live in central Ontario.
Steingraber, Sandra. Living Downstream, Addison Wesley Longmans, 1997 - quoted in "Global Pesticide Campaigner, June 1997 (electronic).
Weinberg, Robert "The Dark Side of the Genome", Technology Review (April, 1991), 45-51
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"Navdanya (1993) wrote: "The view that diversity is a disease that
must be cured is becoming a social and ecological threat in our times... "
http://zobell.biol.tsukuba.ac.jp/~macer/chgp/chgp85.html
pp. 85-92 in Ethical Challenges as we approach the end of the Human Genome Project
Editor: Darryl R. J. Macer, Ph.D.
Eubios Ethics Institute
Copyright 2000, Eubios Ethics Institute All commercial rights reserved. This publication may be reproduced for limited educational or academic use, however please enquire with the author.
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Great leaps forward? The Human Genome Project and sustainable agriculture
Brewster Kneen
S-6, C-27, RR.1
Sorrento, B.C. V0E 2W0, Canada
alias "The Ram's Horn"
www.ramshorn.bc.ca
Email: ramshorn@ramshorn.bc.ca
Although I have thought a lot about both the Human Genome Project and Sustainable Agriculture, true to the reductionist culture of North America I had not considered the two in relation to one another until I was approached to write this chapter. As it happened, at about the same time I received Monsanto Company's 1996 Annual Report, which fused the two. The report explains that: "When Monsanto scientists tear back the husks of ears of corn, they see beyond the rows of kernels to the essence of plants - their genes. In those genes are the foundation of a new life sciences industry... Through a massive, publicly funded effort called the Human Genome Project, the location and purpose of every human gene is being pinpointed. At the same time, the mysteries of plant and bacterial genomes are being unravelled."
This led me to recall an article I had read not long ago by Garland Allen (1996), who attributes the notion of "better breeding", a concept that is key to current biotechnology, to U.S. eugenicist Charles Davenport. According to Allen, both Davenport and his mentor, Francis Galton, regarded eugenics as "the human counterpart of modern scientific animal and plant husbandry. In fact, says Allen, "it seemed ironic to eugenicists that people paid so much attention to the pedigrees of their farm and domestic stock while they ignored the pedigrees of their children."
The more I have pondered their relationship, the more convinced I have become that the HGP (and related research and commercialization) and sustainable agriculture are founded on antagonistic paradigms. The two projects make such radically different demands on society and its social and economic policies that they are fundamentally incompatible. This may not be true in theory, but in current practice I think it is. If we considered our financial resources unlimited, and really practiced empirical science, then we might be able to explore both the Human Genome Project and sustainable -- or what I would prefer to call ecological or diversity -- agriculture. But we would still be left with the structural issue of social and economic power and who does, or does not, have it.
Not only are resources limited, however, requiring that choices be made among worthy research projects, but the culture that drives the human genome project and, apparently, virtually all activity in the arena of modern biotechnology, demands a dominant if not exclusive recognition. A practical reason for this is its need to appeal to the capital market for ever more investment in order to keep afloat. The ratio between successful commercial products and investment continues to be too low to finance the corporate research and development process.
The exclusivity generated by a financial either/or is buttressed ideologically and socially by the neo- Darwinist doctrine of the survival of the fittest, currently phrased as 'competitiveness'. This ideology of genetic determinism finds its social counterpart in technological determinism; combined, they serve to exclude the public from the structures of decision making.
At the same time, the West recognizes only one 'science' and only one epistemology, or way of knowing. This neatly excludes ecological agriculture from consideration as a viable (let alone essential) alternative to industrial forms of agriculture and commodity production. Integrated pest management (IPM) and "environmental farms plans" may be improvements on sheer chemical dependency, and may usefully confuse the public, but in my opinion they do not alter the fundamental reality of industrial monoculture agriculture and its drive for domination and control. Just as the West demanded, and got, 'victory' over 'communism', so the culture of individualism, reductionist science, and corporate domination demands victory over all other cultures and epistemologies and their submission to the dominant monoculture.
The HGP and ecological agriculture are based on, in current jargon, 'incompatible paradigms' -- incompatible because one is closed and the other open, one is reductionist, the other holistic. One seeks to define problems (or diseases) according to the cure available, the other seeks to identify and understand what are experienced as problems, and then change behaviour and, if necessary, structures and power relations, in order to move beyond the apparent problem.
The HGP is an expression of the culture characterized by industrial agriculture and western medicine. It is profoundly interventionist (and violent), regarding the organism as a collection of pieces of information that can be taken apart and put together in a variety of configurations without regard for the organism as a whole. It can be summed up in the motto: 'Map, manage & control'.
Ecological agriculture, on the other hand -- the forms of agricultural practice that are genuinely sustainable -- sees the whole as prior to, and more than the sum of, the parts. Its motto might be characterized as 'observe, respect, and cooperate'. The whole organism and the whole society or ecology -- whole seeds, not bits of genetic information -- are the building blocks of ecological agriculture.
THE EYE OF THE SHEPHERD FATTENS THE FLOCK
"Precision agriculture", the latest hightech fad to hit industrial agriculture, might well be considered the agricultural analogue to the HGP. 'Precision' agriculture, is, of course, no such thing, unless you consider the data supplied via satellite imaging, high altitude infrared photography and computer technology to be superior to and more accurate than the age-old practice of farmers walking their land. Dealing with five acre, or maybe two and a half acre, plots (which is a larger area than the majority of farms in the world), it cannot provide a worm count or information on the diversity and health of microorganisms in the soil.
With GIS (Geographic Information System) and its related hard- and soft-ware, the farmer no longer even has to get out of his tractor cab to observe the land and the crops; he simply has watch the video monitor and manipulate a keyboard to get all the 'information' he requires to adjust his seeding or herbicide application rate. It's all done by remote sensing, infrared photography and global positioning satellites.
If fact, when the system is fully installed, the farmer no longer even has to get on his tractor in the first place. All he needs is a computer and a satellite dish to control the tractor and its operations from his desk or the cab of his truck. The land, and the farming, are reduced to a matter of reading digital codes, much like reading a bar code on a bar of soap or a map of genetic sequences. The farmer is reduced to the role of purchasing agent and technical assistant for those who write the software, supply the 'crop inputs' and buy the 'product'.
Based on my experience I consider this neither a sustainable nor ecological system. The information is used as the basis for a solution to be imposed on the land to achieve the industrial requirements of monoculture agriculture. The point of the exercise is control, as Gina Maranto (1996) points out in her discussion of a related area. In a fine historical approach to the social and ethical issues of human reproductive technology, she comments that, "Inarguably, control is the sine qua non of science... The whole point of the assisted-reproduction enterprise ... is to exert mastery over procreation, to remove chance from a natural biological process."(p.24) She concludes that, "Modern science and medicine positions itself as the champion of human values, arguing that to fail to act to eliminate the vagaries of nature is to be inhumane." (p. 269).
As if to corroborate this, a recent issue of Tomorrow, a magazine of "Global Environment Business" (Stockholm, March-April 1997, p.11), brings together the culture of Western science and the drive of the biotech industry: "Corporate gurus see a shift away from chemical to biological technologies, which represents a shift in the way humanity's ongoing project of control over nature will work: instead of brute physical suppression of natural processes, a kinder process of control, through rewriting of 'nature's software' is envisaged."
SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE: ASSUMPTIONS AND PROMISES
Barlett (1995) wrote: "Sustainable agriculture cannot merely be a technical exercise in input substitution and appropriate technology; sustainable agriculture must be part of a social movement that spans the entire economic and social relations of society from credit to the health of the soil, from the seeds and inputs needed to the producers and their families, from those who distribute the food and the distance it travels, to the demands and health of the consumers."
Implied in the biotech industry's constant repetition of words such as "moving forward", "benefits" and "improvement" is an assumption of linear progress and a certainty about what qualifies as 'improved', 'good', or 'better'. These assumptions power what can best be described as a teleological approach to life. 'Management by objectives', 'goal-oriented', 'product rather than process' are all expressions of the same teleological approach: Ends justify means. In agricultural biotechnology, the seed will be constructed (forced) to produce the desired product.
Sustainable agriculture does not share such notions of linearity and progress. Nor does it accept the violence of "rewriting nature's software" to achieve the commercial goal of an 'improved' seed. Instead, it values and encourages diversity and recognizes that what might be a 'bad' crop in a dry year might be a 'good' crop in a wet year. An 'improved' variety of greater yield may be less desirable than a lower yielding variety that is naturally resistant to a recurring pest.
Ecological agriculture is philosophically existential, or ontological, rather than teleological; pragmatic rather than compulsive. It asks, What will work?, not How can we make this work? It seeks to work with and live in Creation, rather than dominating and controlling that which lies both inside and outside of our selves. It seeks understanding and wisdom, not information and answers; it seeks co-operation, not control.
Perhaps the most radical exemplar of 'natural' farming - cooperating with nature rather than trying to 'improve' upon nature by conquest - has been Masanobu Fukuoka, whose One-Straw Revolution was first published in 1975, when Fukuoka was 65 years old. Trained as a micro-biologist, at the age of 25 Fukuoka left his urban work as an agricultural customs inspector to return to his native village in northern Japan. He has spent the rest of his life quietly farming and introducing visitors to his "do nothing'" agricultural method.
Fukuoka's approach has little in common with conventional Western reductionist, interventionist science and agriculture, but it is not inappropriate to compare his attitudes with those driving the Human Genome Project, since both projects are about how we, as humans, are to live in the world. This may not be the way that technicians working on the HGP understand their daily occupation, but they are, nevertheless, participating in an active way in the shaping of a particular consciousness and culture.
The usual way to go about developing a method, Fukuoka wrote, is to try this and that, bringing together one technique upon another. His way, he says, was the opposite: "How about not doing this? How about not doing that? -- that was my line of thinking. The reason that man's improved techniques seem to be necessary is that the natural balance has been so badly upset beforehand by those same techniques that the land has become dependent upon them. This line of reasoning not only applies to agriculture, but to other aspects of human society as well. Doctors and medicine have become necessary when people create a sickly environment."
Fukuoka says that "the ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings." While this would seem to align him with the current practices of genome research and the search for technological fixes for genetic 'defects', his vision contradicts the fundamentals of reductionist science. "An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing", he says. "A problem cannot be solved by people who are concerned with only one or another of its parts."
Natural - ecological - organic... the words do not describe or prescribe a set of uniform standards or practices, even though there are codes established for the legal certification of organic agriculture. But these words do convey an attitude that of necessity includes sustainability, not as a goal but as a culture. In keeping with the attitude expressed by Fukuoka, and in contrast to the culture of industrial agriculture and the genetic engineering of life, the valuative words 'good' and 'bad' are seldom encountered in ecological agriculture. Instead, one finds words like 'appropriate'. Ecological agriculture is not a search for the 'best', or for uniformity, but rather a way of living that seeks accommodation of what, at the moment, may be deemed the 'bad' along with what is considered 'good'. The objective is the nurture and maintenance of diversity. What is bad? is like What is a weed? -- something that is not where we want it, or when we want it, or we might say, something that we consider anti-social at the moment. The HGP, however, is not a search for diversity per se, not a search for wisdom, not a search for a socially just and ecologically sound food system, but a search for useful genes with commercial potential that can be exploited by the existing structures of control.
SEEDS AND GENES
Navdanya (1993) wrote: "The view that diversity is a disease that must be cured is becoming a social and ecological threat in our times... Diversity is the characteristic of nature and the basis of ecological stability. Diverse ecosystems give rise to diverse life forms and to diverse cultures, and this provides the basis for sustainability." (p.3-4)
"Improvement of a selected characteristic in a plant is also a selection against other characteristics which are useful to nature, or for local consumption. Improvement is not a class or gender neutral concept. Improvement of partitioning efficiency is based on 'enhancement of the yield of desired product'. What is 'desired' is, however, not the same for rich people and poor people, or rich countries and poor countries, nor is efficiency... [The] parts of a farming system or of a plant that may be treated as 'unwanted' by the better-off may be the wanted part for the poor... In the Indian context, plants that have been displaced by plant improvement in the Green Revolution have been those which have traditionally been the main providers of nutrition: pulses and oilseeds. The Amaranth and the Bathua, two varieties of green leafy vegetables that were an integral part of traditional diets have been named weeds and are being exterminated." (p.33)
The Seed Savers' Handbook (Fanton 1993) cites the case of Azolla, "a fern-like algae that floats on the surface of the paddies and traditionally grown in many Asian countries in association with rice. It transformed nitrogen from the air into a plant nutrient, suppressed weeds and gave up to three tonnes of green manure to the acre when the paddies were drained. Green Revolution use of chemicals has eliminated this plant on the paddies."
In July, 1997, the International Congress of Nutrition was held in Toronto. Among the subjects discussed was the widespread deficiency of micronutrients, such as iodine and iron. "Fortification wouldn't be necessary if everyone had access to balanced diets", said one speaker. The sad irony is that it is plants like Amaranth and Bathua that used to provide such essential nutrients, and other organisms such as Azolla that used to enrich the land and the crops grown on it. Agrotoxins and synthetic fertilizers are designed for monocultures, and are based on the kind of extreme biological simplification that seems to characterize biotechnology, overlooking and excluding subtleties and diversities such as micronutrients and diets balanced by diversity.
There are obvious and direct parallels between agriculture and human health. Yet the connection is seldom made between industrial food production and ill health. Now we have genetic engineering billed as the answer to hunger, as if there were nothing to be learned from the experience of the Green Revolution.
In this regard, it is notable that organizations like Seed Savers' Exchange of Decorah, Iowa, and the Seed Savers' Network in Australia, can be found around the world leading the efforts not only to conserve traditional varieties of seeds, but also to educate people in the importance of conserving open pollinated seeds and growing them rather than hybrids. It has to do with control. None of these organizations are calling on biotechnology to help conserve traditional varieties or to 'improve' them. Instead they call on gardeners and farmers around the world to save, grow and exchange traditional varieties and to do their own breeding. Sustainable plant breeding and conservation is far too complex to be left to the dictates of corporate interests and the simple techniques of genetic engineering.
"The human genome is common heritage of humanity," stated the draft Article One of the UNESCO Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights. The final version read gThe human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity. In a symbolic sense, it is the heritage of humanity.h While purporting to seek protection of the rights and dignity of persons, the preamble of the Declaration states that "research on the human genome and the resulting applications open up vast prospects for progress in improving the health of individuals and of humankind as a whole." Article 15, however, says that "States should take appropriate steps to provide the framework for the free exercise of research on the human genome with due regard for the principles set out in this Declaration, in order to safeguard respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and human dignity and to protect public health."
"The free exercise of research" may at first sound ethical and democratic, but "the free exercise of research" is exactly what the transnational drug and chemical companies desire: unimpeded access to the "genetic resources" of the created world, including human genetics. One has, therefore, to consider carefully how northern commercial interests -- be they academic or corporate -- interpret "common heritage". In the case of plant and animal 'genetic resources', 'common heritage', has meant, gHelp yourself, it's freeh. There is no reason to think that their attitude toward human genetic 'resources' would be any different.
But are my genes, or those of a resident of Tristan da Cunha, or the seeds of the Neem tree, for that matter, really free for the sampling - or taking? "Common heritage of humanity" is simply taken to mean that the human genome is a globally usable resource, no longer connected to or resident in a concrete and specific person. Human genetics become a natural resource available for 'discovery', patenting and exploitation, just as plant and animal genetics have done. Codes of ethics are then limited to issues of individual informed consent and even compensation, not issues of the integrity of persons or of collective or communal rights. Human genetic information is transformed into yet another commodity to be owned, patented, traded, and generally exploited in the name of "progress", "science", or "competitiveness". In effect, the Declaration may be nothing more than a prospecting license.
Such an attitude has no place in ecological agriculture. Genetics -- human or otherwise -- are not resources to be exploited. The understanding on which ecological agriculture builds is not of genetic sequences and their purported functioning, but on the dynamic interrelationships of organisms in specific, and differing, environments. Even if one knows the sequence for a gene performing a highly valued function when found in a particular location in a particular organism in a particular environment, there is little reason to think that the genetic sequence responsible will perform similarly under different circumstances. More to the point, for ecological agriculture, is to look at whole organism interactions and their consequences.
In describing the transformation in the mentality of post-Mendelian plant breeding that produced first traditional hybrids and then modern inbred hybrids with their uniformity and inability to breed true, Jack Harlan (1972) said, "A pure line mentality, convinced that variation was bad, uniformity was good, and off-types in the field somehow immoral, developed."
An aging population requires more drugs and the Human Genome Project will be of great assistance to the pharmaceutical industry, explains Jurgen Drews (1996), president of global research for Hoffmann-LaRoche, in a commentary in Nature Biotechnology. Drews offered no explanation as to why an aging population requires more drugs, but he does explain why the drug companies need more drugs: "A careful analysis of the Human Genome Project's potential suggests that 3000-10,000 interesting new molecular sites for intervention - 'drug targets' in the pharmaceutical vernacular - may emerge from it over the course of the next six years. This is fortunate for the industry because the top 50 pharmaceutical companies will, as a group, need to produce new chemical entities (NCE) at a rate of 42 per year in order to achieve a desirable growth rate of 10%, according to Drews. "Developing new drugs for new targets is mandatory."
The logic of Drews' argument is highly revealing of the industry's valuation of the HGP: "If you systematically list the diseases that really matter in today's world, the number of diseases for which treatment or improved treatment is needed is no more than 100 (or at most 150). Most of these are, at least in part, caused by genetic factors... So if one is conservative and estimates that there are 100 important multi-factoral diseases, with approximately 5-10 genes contributing to each of them, this would give a total of 500-1000 disease-related genes... If each gene product interacts with 3-10 other proteins in the signalling pathways, these pathways would also yield important opportunities for disease intervention. This leads to a total of perhaps 3000-10,000 interesting drug targets."
In other words, thanks to the Human Genome Project the for-profit drug companies will be busy, and profitable, for many years. And for just as many years will diseases continue to be identified and 'treated' as there are drugs available to treat them. The problems, in other words, will be defined according to the solutions available, or, for stock market purposes, 'in the pipeline'.
The ambiguities of the pursuit of genetic sequences, however, are well expressed by Robert Weinberg (1991): "Thousands of investigators have found that the organisms created by gene splicing pose no threat to human health or the ecosystem around us [and] recently gained abilities to analyze complex genetic information, including our own, will soon allow us to predict human traits from simple DNA tests."
Yet a few paragraphs later Weinberg acknowledges that, "Our bodies function as complex networks of interacting components that are often influenced by our variable environment. By enumerating and studying individual components - genes in this case - we will only begin to scratch the surface of our complexity." Weinberg then puts his finger on the social problem created by the attitude he has first expressed: "As this decade progresses, a growing proportion of the lay public will come to accept genes as the all-powerful determinants of the human condition."
This should hardly be surprising. The public is bound to be influenced, in the absence of genuine critical public discussion, by the industry generated hype intended to induce investors to bet their money on the latest biotech fad and the lobbying designed to minimize regulatory restraint on their activities and patented cure-alls.
Let's look, for example, at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, which published a lavish and graphic 4-page broadsheet insert in the Toronto Globe & Mail, June 23, 1995. The cover x-ray photo of a foetus apparently holding a strand of DNA is accompanied by the line "Is Genetics Destiny?" This is followed by: "A cure for cancer. A cure for Heart Disease. An end to... [and in smaller type] asthma, diabetes, and a dozen other major illnesses that have plagued humanity since the dawn of time."
The text is ambiguous - or rather contradictory - from beginning to end; the result, it would appear, of the tract being both a fundraising appeal and a statement of faith to the public concerning the unmitigated good to result from the pursuit of biotechnology. Reductionist determinism and the promise of choice accompanying free will jostle each other paragraph by paragraph, and a statement such as "The 100,000 genes which we inherit from our parents... define almost everything about us, from the fact that we are humans to the colour of our hair to whether or not we will get cancer at a given age..." is followed by, "Genes may not determine destiny, but..." Public confusion is seemingly deliberately fostered by language such as "genes that predispose people to asthma" being followed by "genes that cause asthma."
The broadsheet highlights the tale of a Mount Sinai respirologist who "travelled to Tristan da Cunha in 1993 to collect ... DNA samples from the island's residents"; but there is no mention of the ethics of such genetic sampling, or of the subsequent dispute that arose over the lack of 'informed consent' and the practice of what many call 'biopiracy'. The attitude expressed in this language is crucial not only in connection with the HGP and related research, but also, and much more extensively, in connection with the search for new drugs and 'novel' agricultural genetic material. Genetic material is genetic material, whatever its source. Robbery is robbery, and so is 'collecting' plant, animal, bacterial or human blood specimens for the potential benefits hidden in their DNA. The ethical, moral and political issues are the same for both.
The most revealing segment of the Lunenfeld broadsheet is its discussion of Type II diabetes which, it says, "is caused by obesity and low levels of physical fitness." The Institute's researchers, apparently having already decided that the cause is genetic, are studying the "Native Canadians" in the northern Ontario community of Sandy Lake to determine the genetic causes of the very high rates of diabetes, according to the broadsheet.
"The ancestors of the Sandy Lake community survived as hunters and gatherers using tremendous amounts of energy walking and canoeing. In a feast or famine environment, people with a thrifty gene that allowed them to store and utilize energy more effectively would have a major survival advantage... Now, however, members of the community, like the rest of us, live in an environment of nutrient excess and little physical activity... As a result, the ability to store food efficiently has become a liability."
So the Lunenfeld Institute is searching for the "thrifty gene" that could become the key to a gene therapy that would enable the people of Sandy Lake to live like the rest of us -- without diabetes, presumably.
Unfortunately, this stunning example of cultural gbigotryh and scientific ignorance seems to mark much of the work that contributes to the Human Genome Project while also destroying the cultural foundations of sustainable agriculture. There is not even a hint here that the prevalence of diabetes might be the consequence of the severe dietary changes forced upon the Natives of the north as a result of the white man's cultural and economic imperialism. Perhaps even more appalling is the absence of any expressed doubt about the inevitability or value of a life of nutrient excess and little physical activity.
Even this brief scenario poses the real choice: between a meaningful and rewarding subsistence food economy, including sustainable agriculture and plenty of exercise, and the very expensive and elitist search for a genetic cure for a 'disease' of 'civilization'. Unfortunately, if one accepts the inevitability of civilization, "discovery of genes that cause asthma and Type II diabetes still lies ahead," as the broadsheet states. Which is, of course, the whole point of the broadsheet. Our financial contributions to the noble work of the Institute will enable it to work toward a cure without ever having to address the question of why the Native peoples of the north are plagued with diabetes.
This is also a magnificent example of the professional transformation of a social-cultural-environmental problem into a personal-individual problem. If the Institute is looking for a genetic cure, they are looking for a prescription medicine to 'treat' people one at a time according to their medical diagnosis. This could be characterized as a white man's individual solution to a social problem created by white men.
One must, at this point, wonder what the annual budget of the Lunenfeld Institute could accomplish if applied to research in sustainable food systems (including agriculture) for distinct cultures.
The same question, of course, must be applied to the Human Genome Project itself.
Howard Strohman recently wrote in Nature Biotechnology that, "As we now recognize, the consensus around genetic determinism is extremely well developed and powerful. As a paradigm, it promises molecular diagnosis and therapy for everything from premature birth to death and, mostly because of such inflated claims, it commands the major share of our funded research in the life sciences." However, Strohman says, "Normal science is conservative throughout and is the approach least likely to reveal the real secrets of life. Normal science is an approach that reveals genetic maps related to biological function, but the directions for reading the maps are not included in the package. And the real secrets of life are obviously in those missing directions... These rules are more than likely embedded in the organization of life rather than in the catalogue of the organization's agents."
It is this catalogue, of course, which is the object of the Human Genome Project. While sustainable agriculture seeks to follow the directions as they are revealed, generation by generation, industry is busy trying to insert its own directions into the package, all the while trying to 'educate' us with the doctrine that they are actually there in the genes. Strohman, commenting on the difficulty of departing from the path of genetic determinism so favoured by industry, simply says it is "because a holistic biology is seen to be counterproductive to the needs of technology." I would add, 'and its corporate owners and beneficiaries'.
CULTURAL ARTEFACT
Biotechnology, and more specifically genetic engineering, is clearly the artefact of a unique culture Monsanto Company, the most aggressive and globalized of the agricultural biotechnology companies, exposes in its annual report the attitudes and assumptions that are expressed in the social construct of genetic engineering. Speaking of "the essence of plants - their genes", Monsanto promises that
"As we identify plant and human genomes, we can begin to understand how human health is affected by the choices people make about how they live and what they eat... If we can learn more about genomes and gene expression, we can become more precise about the way we manage our health..."
These assumptions are again expressed by the Swiss giant of the drug/biotechnology industry, Novartis (created by the merger of Basel drug giants Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz), which ran a series of three ads in early 1997 with the common theme "new skills in the science of life". One ad highlights organ transplants, another highlights new drugs, the third focuses on "new ways to protect crops for tomorrow's food needs". Novartis describes itself as "The World's Leading Life Sciences company", and the message suggests life can be reduced to a matter of science. What it means to be alive will be best decided by the drug companies who will provide the tools for good management. While this is both presumptuous and offensive, it does reflect the culture of reductionism that drives the commercial field of biotechnology in agriculture and health care.
The Monsanto voice assumes that we can know, and are entitled to know, by violence if necessary, the "essence" of plants. This hubris is as dangerous as it is outrageous, and is utterly alien to ecological agriculture.
The silly and misleading oversimplifications represented in the Monsanto text are clearly aspects not of a scientific agenda, but of a political agenda, an agenda of control and exploitation. This is harsh, but the reduction of life to a matter of 'technology' to be 'managed' is harsh, and a deliberate attempt to induce a sense of powerlessness in the average citizen while also calling forth a sense of gratitude toward the corporations that can save us from the perils of hunger, failing bodies and even death itself.
The deliberate construction of the foundations of modern biotechnology to serve certain interests and not others included, as Philip Regal (1996) reminds us, the financial and ideological backing of the Rockefeller Foundation "to promote the idea that society should wait for scientific inventions to solve its problems, and that tampering with the economic and political systems would not be necessary." The effect of this, as Regal points out, was to nurture resignation to genetic fatalism while at the same time raising "calming expectations: science and technology would bring grace". It was the same Rockefeller Foundation that defined and financed the 'Green Revolution'.
But will it be the transnational corporations, the agbiotech industry, and the corporate-funded university research that "bring grace" and feed the world? There is no reason to believe so. The business of corporations may be commodity production for the wealthy (absolutely and relatively), but their goal is increased corporate profit, as any reading of the business press makes clear. Sustainable, ecological food production is not on their agenda, nor should we expect it to be, because ecological agriculture is about local food systems feeding the local population by means of a diverse agriculture free of dependency on external 'inputs' be they fertilizer, agrotoxins, cash, credit, or engineered seeds or animals. There is no place in these local systems for large corporations and the industrial monoculture that they require.
HAVEN'T WE BEEN HERE BEFORE?
There is a profoundly disturbing parallel between the development of chemical- dependent industrial agriculture after World War II and the current development of biotechnology. In Living Downstream, Sandra Steingraber (1997) points out that while World War II is mentioned throughout Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the references "seem designed to remind already aware readers that the technologies developed for wartime purposes had changed chemistry and physics forever... The multitude of new synthetic products made available after the war altered how food was grown and packaged, homes constructed and furnished, bathrooms disinfected, children deloused, and pets de-flea'd. Carson described this transformation almost offhandedly, as though the connection between lawn-care practices and warfare was perfectly obvious." Carson, according to Steingraber, also pointed out that many of the new chemicals were developed under emergency conditions and within the secretive atmosphere of wartime, with the result that they had not been fully tested for safety. Nevertheless, private markets were quickly developed for these products after the war although their long-term effects on humans and the environment were not known. Perhaps of even greater relevance to current discussions of biotechnology, Carson pointed out that wartime attitudes accompanied these products onto the market", transferring the goals of "conquest and annihilation", in Steingraber's words, "from the battlefield to our kitchens, gardens, forests, and farm fields." "The Seek, Strike, and Destroy maxim of my father's antitank unit", she writes, "was brought home and turned against the natural world. This attitude, Carson believed, would be our undoing. All life was caught in the crossfire."
"Seek, Strike and Destroy" is a long, long way from the definition of sustainable agriculture suggested by Fred Kirschenmann, a North Dakota organic farmer: "a food system that builds healthy soil and healthy human communities within health ecological neighbourhoods."
What kind of agriculture can best mirror and maintain the evolutionary stability of the various ecological neighbourhoods in which we humans live? asks Kirschenmann. His answer is "ecological farming", which, in contrast to industrial agriculture, "tries to produce food solely through human industry". Ecological agriculture, or organic agriculture, seeks to cooperate with nature, rather than to control nature, and seeks to maintain and enhance the natural ecological balances and attend to the health of the whole soil system. Worms, 'weeds' and livestock are essential participants in this process, as well as farmers, farm families, and communities -- not as genetic sequences or resources, but as living organisms and populations.
Native (Anishnabe) elder Art Solomon (1990) wrote:
Grandmother, Great Spirit, We thank You that You gave us life and that You keep it going for us each day.
We thank you for our Mother Earth and that she is still following your original instructions and that she is still providing us food and medicine.
We thank You for our elder brother the Sun that he is still doing the work that You gave him. And we thank our Grandmother Moon that she is still following your original instructions for her.
At last, we call on you, the spirits of the four directions to help us because we understand that now we must claim our inheritance. We must renew out ways of thinking and doing. We must restore our humanity and go back to the true ways of living. We need your help and guidance because we know there are only two roads to walk on and there is great confusion around us.
REFERENCES
Allen, G. "Science Misapplied - the Eugenics Age Revisited", Technology Review (Aug-Sept, 1996), 23-31.
Bartlett, Andrew Kang. Oregon, Oct 1995, courtesy Ineke Booy, Triangle Farm, Ontario, 1997
Drews, Jurgen, Nature Biotechnology, 14 (1996), 1516-1518.
Fanton, Michel & Jude, Seed Saverfs Handbook, Byron Bay, Australia, 1993, p.19
Fukuoka, Masanobu. The One-Straw Revolution, Bantam New Age edition, 1985.
Harlan, J.R. "Genetics of Disaster", Journal of Environmental Quality, 1 (3, 1972b), p.213 - quoted by Fowler and Mooney in Shattering, Arizona 1990
Kirschenmann, from talks given at the Organic Conference, Guelph, Ontario, 25/1/97, & the Organic Trade Association, 14/9/95 (photocopy).
Maranto, Gina. The Quest for Perfection, Scribner, 1996.
Navdanya, Cultivating Diversity, Dehra Dun, India, 1993. See also Ross Welch, Gerald Combs Jr. and John Duxbury, "Toward a 'Greener' Revolution", Issues in Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, Univ. of Texas, (Fall, 1997), 50-58.
Regal, Philip. "Metaphysics in Genetic Engineering: Cryptic Philosophy and Ideology in the 'Science' of Risk Assessment" in Ad van Dommelen, ed., Coping with Deliberate Release - The Limits of Risk Assessment, International Centre for Human and Public Affairs, Tilburg, Netherlands, 1996, p.18.
Solomon, Art. From the poem "Grandfather, Great Spirit" by Art Solomon, in SONGS FOR THE PEOPLE: Teachings on the Natural Way, NC Press, Toronto, 1990. The Anishnabe people live in central Ontario.
Steingraber, Sandra. Living Downstream, Addison Wesley Longmans, 1997 - quoted in "Global Pesticide Campaigner, June 1997 (electronic).
Weinberg, Robert "The Dark Side of the Genome", Technology Review (April, 1991), 45-51
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