Biotechnology

Biotechnology is a science which seeks to manipulate aspects of living things to the advantage of humanity using technology. Although humans have manipulated plants and animals for millennia through breeding of livestock, brewing of beer and wine, and baking of bread, biotechnology tends to refer to the development of organisms with combinations of traits not attainable in nature.

History

Humans have always found it necessary to tamper with plants and animals. Early humans selected the seeds of the best crop to be planted the following year. They saved their best cows to be bred to the best bull in the neighbourhood. Now, scientists can cross a sheep with a goat to create a "geep." This is done by genetic engineering or the manipulation of the genetic material in a fetus.

Concerns

The potential danger in genetic engineering is far greater than the danger posed by chemical use in agriculture. This is because genetically-altered life forms are self-replicating. That is, if an organism has been manipulated such that it will pose a threat to humans it will be almost uncontainable and self-sustaining. There are countless examples of mistakes made with allowing foreign life forms to breed indiscriminately once they are transported into new environments. The introduction of rabbits to Australia wiped out much of that country's agriculture for decades. Gypsy moths introduced to North America from Europe have had an equally damaging effect. Most recently, the introduction of zebra mussels to North America and Japan in the bilge of visiting ships from Europe is wrecking havoc with industries which use water.

Business

As of 1990, there were over 100 companies involved in biotechnology research on food in the U.S. They will be ready to market many new foods in the next few years. Recombinant DNA techniques offer tremendous opportunities to understand and control the genetic composition of food.

Traditional gene modification in plant breeding has already added a lot to the productivity of our food system, by altering the growing season requirements, and improving disease and insect pest resistance. Many agri-chemical companies of the world are now the leading companies in biotechnology. This enables them to produce crops which are resistant to their own herbicides. For example plant breeding has removed or reduced the levels of naturally occurring toxic substances like cyanide in lima beans and cassava, gossypol in cotton seed and solanine in potatoes.

New Foods

Human's first new food (versus nature's food) is likely to be Quorn, a food which has recently been created from the fungus Fusarium graminearum which is a microscopic plant growing in the soil and a distant relative of the mushroom. The microfilaments of this fungus are identical in size to meat fibrils (compared to soya protein which have large fibrils). To grow this protein, the fungus ferments for up to 6 weeks under aerobic conditions. Glucose, nitrogen, calcium, copper, cobalt, magnesium, iron phosphate, zinc, manganese and biotin are provided to the fungal broth which is maintained at 30 degrees Celcius When harvesting of the protein takes place, the broth is heated to 64 degrees Celcius to halt the activity of the RNA (Gout and stones in the urinary tract of humans result when the acceptable level of RNA in our diet is exceeded.). Once the liquid has been removed, Quorn looks like sheets of pastry. It is then mixed with egg albumen and natural flavouring. The fibers are aligned if the protein is to resemble chicken and randomly aligned if it is to resemble beef. The texture is set by steaming, the product cut to the appropriate sizes and frozen until required by a processor of food. Quorn contains only 3% fat, has a low saturated fat content of 0.6% and is cholesterol free. It is also low in calories at 80 per 100g. Unusually high in fiber for a protein, it can be compared to peas and lentils. Its protein content compares to cottage cheese, eggs and quality to milk protein. Quorn also provides a useful level of B vitamins and a variety of minerals. This new source of food may provide a useful alternative for beef and poultry.

Hows and Whys

Biotechnology seems less scary when we understand the hows and whys of its use in food production. Transgenics is the process by which genes are transferred across species and even kingdom lines. The first, and one of the most useful examples of this process was the production of human insulin, necessary to keep diabetics healthy, in the intestinal bacterium called Escherichia coli as a result of the insertion of human genes into the bacteria's DNA. Another example is more closely connected with our food supply. Cheese-making normally requires the presence of the milk curdling enzyme rennin which is taken from calves' stomachs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently announced approval of a product produced from bacteria which will do the same thing.

Livestock

The manipulation of cattle using biotechnology is often quite sophisticated. Embryo transfer in cattle is a process in genetic manipulation which involves producing "litters of calves" from usually single-calf-producing cows. A superior cow is treated with a hormone to stimulate the release of several eggs at one ovulation, and is inseminated with semen from a superior bull. At the same time, several other cows are given prostaglandins to synchronize their estrous cycles with the donor. Embryos are then flushed from the donor cow, checked for viability, and in some cases sex, and either implanted in the surrogate cows or frozen for later use. Specialists in embryo transfer are also able to split the eggs at the 16-cell stage to produce clones, and produce chimeras by fusion of cells from two different genomes.

More Concerns

One of the problems of biotechnology is that a successful product tends to dominate the market, sometimes causing a permanent loss of genetic diversity. Artificial insemination, embryo transfer and cloning has not only produced cattle within Canada which are the best in the world, but has drastically reduced the gene pool within the cattle breeds. Ninety percent of cattle milked in Canada are Holstein Friesians, and 80% of these cows are bred artificially with the semen from only 12 bulls. This situation exists for crops as well. Only a few companies in the world produce all of the seed for field corn (grown for livestock feed and corn by-products). They now produce seed corn with little genetic diversity. It is feared that a disease strain to which the corn has little resistance could wipe out the entire North American crop in a single growing season.

The problem is not restricted to North America. Pure vanilla is presently extracted from vanilla orchids grown by 70 000 farmers in Madagascar. If scientists took the gene that codes for vanilla production and transferred it to a crop commonly grown in North America, we could destroy the economy of an already poor country.

Legal Concerns

Biotechnology companies are not only high-tech, but also high risk and high cost. Patenting their intellectual products is the only way they can continue to do research. In 1980, the US Supreme court ruled that a bacterium, genetically engineered to digest oil spills, could be patented. This opened up discussion about whether life forms could be patented, and requests for patenting genes and molecular structures, as well as genetic engineering processes followed. The difficulty lay in deciding how different a gene had to be from one found in nature to be able to be patented.

Multinationals

The large food processing and marketing companies may be able to dictate, through ownership or funding, to the biotechnology companies what seeds will be produced. How does a farmer wishing to sell potatoes for local consumption buy seed potatoes if most of the companies have patented varieties which are only suitable for the French Fry trade? This situation echoes the readily visible threat that the multinationals in the food industry hold for traditional farming and food production.

New Potatoes

However, it is clear that biotechnology has produced some valuable results in the area of food production. The Colorado Potato Beetle (CPB), for example, is an insect which potato farmers have traditionally had to spray for. That is, until the development of a transgenic strain of the potato plant which is resistant to the insect. To produce this, researchers took a gene from the naturally occurring soil bacteria Bacillum thuringiensis which produces an insecticidal protein, and studied it until they could create a synthetic strain suitable for the potato. They then inserted it into the genes for leaf development. The insecticide which is now produced by the leaves of these potatoes is harmful only to the CPB. Humans, animals and other insects are unharmed by this protein it now produces.

Some vegetable growers in the US plant their crops knowing they will harvest as little as 20% of what they should, because of loss to viruses. Plants which are virus-resistant will not only mean greater yields, but also mean that there will be less soil degradation due to less irrigation and cultivation as well as less chemical and fuel use.

It is true that vegetables can be genetically engineered so that they have better flavour and keep longer, however there is serious concern about the impact of this manipulation on the human body. When we increase one aspect of a plant or animal species, what is lost in the balance. Nature rarely allows for a win-win situation.

New Cows

BST, or Bovine Somato- trophin is a recombinant DNA product which mimics the natural growth hormone which reduces nitrogen excretion and improves the efficiency of milk or meat synthesis. Research stations in Ontario have been prevented from shipping milk produced by the cows BST was being used on, when the public became alarmed that residues might be found in the milk. No detectable levels of hormones in the milk were found, even after extensive testing, however science has proved in the past that its power to create toxins is greater than its power to detect them or determine whether they have an impact on humans.

The Consumer

Consumers should be able to easily determine if the food they are buying is the result of bio-engineering. Free-range eggs and freeze-dried coffee are both labels which explain their production process, so it would not cause a problem to identify bio-engineered foods. Would "genetically altered" or "genetically engineered" be catch-phrases which would sell produce?

Extinction is Forever

Companies involved with genetics throughout the world are mainly profit dependent and have accordingly selected chiefly for those plants or those animals which increase yield and are resistant to degrading forces. In this race for profit the very genes which may one day be needed are being left behind as various breeds of plants and animals become extinct. Those animals which are on the "watch list," (the list of breeds which have shown a steady decline over a 25 year period, or have fewer than 2000 breed registrations per year) include the Guernsey and Scottish Highland cattle, and Dorset Horn Sheep.

The most specialized of all livestock breeding programs has been that of poultry breeding. Canada used to have 800 distinct commercial poultry breeds. In 1979 there were only 11 and in 1988 only 6. The world supply of breeding stock is now controlled by nine "primary breeders" who supply the chicken replacement stock. If anything happens to those companies, or if they choose to raise prices, we are all powerless to stop them.

Specialization in genetics means narrowing the gene pool to a point where the entire population may be wiped out by disease. In 1985 a salmonella outbreak swept through the American poultry industry. Some states were required to shut their borders and slaughter all of their chickens. Because of the uniformity of their genetics, illness in one bird meant illness in all birds.

The British geneticist I.L. Mason is quoted as saying in The Evolution of Domesticated Animals that, "it is sobering to learn that had France and Italy decided to use machinery for traction earlier than they did, their draught breeds would probably have become extinct, and we would not have the large beef breeds, such as the Charolais, the Limousin, the Marchigiana and the Romagnola, which are so much in demand today for terminal crossing in beef-breeding programmes."

No one knows what consumers may want in 20 or 30 years, let alone what we may desperately need. We also don't know what the climate may be like. If the gene pool has been narrowed to the point where only the intolerant stock remains, biotechnologists will have no where to turn for different genes. If our plant and animal breeding programs are to survive they must store diverse genetic material in gene banks before extinction, because, "Extinction is forever."