Biotech in Agriculture: Blessing or Curse?

For personal reasons, I pay more attention than I might otherwise to doings in Omaha, Nebraska (a niece of mine lives there).  As I write this, they're enduring a blizzard with up to 50-MPH winds, temperatures near zero, and up to a foot of snow coming down.  Most of them, that is.  The governor, on the other hand, a Republican named Pete Ricketts, is at the Agricultural Outlook Forum outside Washington, DC participating in a panel discussion of biotechnology in farming. 

In a brief interview that appeared in the Omaha World-Herald, Ricketts painted a glowing future of apples that don't turn brown, salmon that grow faster, and other developments that will feed an increasing population.  Almost in the same breath, he admitted that the public's view of genetic engineering is skeptical, and environmental groups criticize large-scale farming for the effect it has on climate change.  The panel that Ricketts was scheduled to participate in at the forum is called "The Evolving Regulatory Landscape and Adoption of Precision Agriculture." 

Biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, are specialized topics that most people know a little bit about, but only a few people know a lot about.  In such cases, the few who know a lot have both the privilege and responsibility to use their knowledge wisely.  But wisdom in one person's view may be folly to another.

The tension that Gov. Ricketts pointed out in his interview with the Omaha World-Herald involves two camps or lines of thought.  For simplicity, we'll call them biotech optimists and biotech pessimists.  The optimists, which evidently include the Governor and his fellow panelists at the forum (a biotech scientist and two biotech-firm executives), believe that biotech will improve agriculture and make good-quality food more available.  We should bear in mind that increasingly, farming these days is big farming:  large corporations operating huge spreads with highly mechanized processes that employ fewer people all the time per unit of product made.  That's just the definition of increased productivity, and it's a driving force behind biotech and most other production-oriented businesses these days. 

The biotech pessimists are a more varied group.  They are no doubt responsible for a good bit of the regulatory landscape mentioned in the forum's title.  Some of the reasons for regulation are protection of endangered species, abatement of water and air pollution (have you ever driven within a few hundred yards of an old-style pig farm?—you'd remember it if you did), and prevention of unlikely but devastating disasters that might happen from genetic engineering experiments gone wrong.  The positions of such pessimists range from mild (horse-trading adjustments to regulations in cooperation with biotech industries) to extreme (abolishing all genetic engineering from the planet), but they are united in their opposition to simply letting biotech optimists do whatever they want, with no restrictions whatsoever.

In a well-running democracy, these opposing interest groups make their opinions and facts known and reach a compromise in cooperation with legislative bodies—a compromise that both allows useful advances in biotechnology and avoids the worst harms that can result from it.  Whether this democracy of ours is running that well is a question for another time.

A factor that has to be added to this mix in recent years is the increasingly international nature of all trade, including trade in farm commodities.  One hard fact that Gov. Ricketts mentioned is that Nebraska's farm income for 2018 is expected to be the lowest since 2002, and one factor in that decline is the downward pressure on prices due to international free trade in farm products.  Adam Smith's invisible hand is at work here, making sure that in an ideal world of free trade, the price for each commodity is established by the most efficient producer worldwide, leading to an overall maximum efficiency.  Mathematically, the principle is irrefutable, but mathematics takes no cognizance of nations, cultures, customs, or traditions.

The biotech optimists tend to be on Adam Smith's side, if for no other reason than if we don't take the next step in biotech improvements, somebody else will and they'll undercut us productivity-wise.  In other words, if we don't beat them at their own game, we lose.  The pessimists would step in and question the propriety of the whole game. 

Without farming, we wouldn't have civilization at all—no universities, no cities, no modern conveniences, no science, and no people—well, almost no people, by comparison to what the globe supports now.  Any nation with a considerable land mass suitable for farming is going to have to deal with the question of how that farming is conducted:  whether it is protected from adverse influences such as foreign competition and excessive regulation that would threaten its existence, or whether it is left to fend for itself, which in a democracy gets increasingly difficult as the number of people directly and indirectly supported by farming dwindle.  If you read agrarians such as Wendell Berry, you will conclude that in the U. S., we have largely taken the latter course, treating farming increasingly like we treat the military:  as the sole preoccupation of a few specialists we need pay no attention to, as long as they do for us what we want. 

But such neglect is a recipe for long-term disaster.  Taking any group of people for granted—farmers, soldiers, engineers, even politicians—is to treat them as means, and not ends in themselves:  human beings like us who deserve attention, justice, and mercy.  I do not have all the answers, or even a few of them, regarding how much biotechnology is enough.  But farmers perform an increasingly neglected service to us all, whether here or abroad.  And I hope that we don't sacrifice farming communities for the sake of free trade, or freedom from genetically-modified crops, or any other ideal shibboleth that looks good on paper, but would wreak havoc among people we may never meet, but upon whom we depend for every bite we put in our mouths. 

Sources:  The Omaha World-Herald carried the article "Ricketts joins panel on farming biotechnology during D. C. visit, calls for productivity, innovation" on Feb. 22, 2019 at https://www.omaha.com/news/nation/morton/ricketts-joins-panel-on-farming-biotechnology-during-d-c-visit/article_d6e45688-f4f4-545b-b624-b8dafcddad9f.html.  The Agricultural Outlook Forum's website is at https://www.usda.gov/oce/forum/. 

The Rights and Wrongs of the Human Genome Project—Write

The highly prestigious journal Science carried an unusual article on June 2.  Most scientific papers are about new discoveries—we figured out this theory or we measured thus-and-so in that experiment.  Well, this paper was neither of those things.  In "The Human Genome Project—Write," the twenty-five co-authors announced their intention to synthesize a human genome from scratch.  In layman's terms, they are saying that they are going to design a human being. 

The way they plan to do this is through an organization calling itself the Center of Excellence for Engineering Biology.  They plan to raise $100 million this year pretty much any way they can:  donations, private sources, government funding, you name it.  So far, one of the biggest contributors reportedly is Autodesk, maker of Autocad, the computer-aided design software familiar to mechanical engineers, architects, and lots of other people who make things.  Autodesk has chipped in a quarter million, and so the researchers are at least 0.25% closer to their goal.

I am dwelling on the mechanics of the plan because there is a question here of whether we are looking at science pure and simple, or a scheme that would look more at home in the hands of venture capitalists.  Now there's nothing wrong with doing science (pure or impure), and there's nothing wrong with making money, either.  But one can at least question whether a proposal that looks more like a business plan in some respects deserves to appear in the pages of a journal that usually carries things like Nobel-Prize-winning research that's already been done. 

What exactly are the authors proposing to do?  Well, you may remember the original Human Genome Project.  Its goal was to read a human genome, all 3-some-billion DNA base pairs of the chromosomes of a human being.  In computer-science terms, every base pair encodes one bit of information, and so your chromosomal description can in principle be contained in three billion bits or so, which can easily fit on a flash drive these days.  The Human Genome Project was finished around 2003 at a cost of about $3 billion, according to Wikipedia—about a dollar a base pair, it turns out. 

Reading the genome is one thing, but writing it and trying to use it is quite another.  If you go and synthesize this human genome, how will you know if it works unless you try to make a baby?  And that gets us into really deep ethical waters.

To their credit, the authors of the Science paper address this problem early on, referring to it as "ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI)."  They call for a lot of discussion of ELSI, and maybe devoting a fixed fraction of their funds to looking at the issues, but they don't say how they would test their creation.  Short of implanting the DNA in a human egg cell and seeing if it will develop normally into a baby, I'm not sure how they would test it. 

They mention stem-cell research as a model of how such tests would be done.  Stem-cell research has also been highly controversial ethically, because it can potentially lead to human cloning.  I am not a biologist, but the question seems to be that once you have a fertilized egg cell, how far do you let it develop?  If you just let it divide a few times and then stop it (=kill it, according to some views), you've shown that it can go that far, but you haven't learned much about its normality or whether all the details you put into the genome will show up in the final product, so to speak.  If you go all the way and try implanting it into a womb, you will learn a lot more about how your product performs, but at the risk of causing the woman to give birth to a baby with no parents—just a computer program.  At the same time, the risk of deformities or other abnormalities in the baby thus created will be very great.  So we have many of the moral issues associated with stem-cell research coming up with this project as well, only more so.

I intentionally used the word "product" to refer to the human who would be created through this process, because that is what he or she would be:  a completely engineered product from the start.  We have already gone pretty far down the unsavory road of regarding children as products, with prenatal genetic testing and selective abortions being used in case of a wide variety of problems ranging from Down's syndrome down to the simple issue of the wrong sex.  There are still countries where a fetus can be, and often is, aborted if the parents wanted a boy and it turns out to be a girl.  A lot of people think this is wrong, but it happens.

I salute the authors of the Human Genome Project—Write paper for recognizing that their proposal carries extremely serious ethical implications.  But I think they are trying to have their scientific cake and eat the profits too.  Although some reports about the organization formed to carry out the project say it is a non-profit, that term appears nowhere in the original paper, although the phrase "patent pools" does.  Patent pools are useful when a small number of powerful companies wish to engineer a functional near-monopoly in a new field.  It's not clear whether early investors in this project will be able to stake a claim on the intellectual property it generates, but my guess is they will.  That doesn't look like non-profit to me.

If this project leads to non-controversial things like being able to grow a replacement kidney for someone whose original kidneys have failed, that would be great.  I have a relative right now who has been needing a kidney transplant for several years, and he wishes he could go down to the kidney store and order a custom-made replacement model for his old kidneys.  If this project makes that possible without doing some reverse-Frankenstein-like thing such as first growing a human clone and then killing it for its kidneys, I hope it succeeds.  But the temptation to use new technical abilities for unethical things is always there, and if the ends require unethical means, I say: don't even go there.

Sources:  The New York Times carried a thorough report on the Human Genome Project—Write on June 2 at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/03/science/human-genome-project-write-synthetic-dna.html.  The paper itself, published in Science the same day, can be accessed at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/06/03/science.aaf6850.  I also referred to a NYULangone press release at http://nyulangone.org/press-releases/genome-project-write-to-launch-in-2016 and the Wikipedia articles on non-coding DNA and the Human Genome Project (the original "read" project).

Is The World Ready for Digital DNA?

Sixty-year-olds don't often have children, but we are witnessing the birth of a new field of engineering made possible by the marriage of two discoveries that date from the 1950s:  DNA and the integrated circuit.  In a recent article in the San Jose Mercury News, Emily Leproust, CEO of Twist Bioscience, is quoted as saying that her company can manufacture DNA to order, letter by letter.  They do this by using advanced microstructures and computing power made possible by the semiconductor-chip revolution to synthesize DNA based on concepts drawn from the latest biological discoveries.  According to her claims, the possibilities, as the saying goes, are endless:  everything from tailor-made vaccines targeted at the latest flu-virus strain to weirder ideas like nice-smelling bacteria to grow on your skin as a perpetual perfume.  But is this capability really "designing life from scratch," as the headline claims?  And will it really lead to the kinds of radical advances in manufacturing and materials science that its promoters are talking about, without opening the door to some dire consequences as well?

First, we should get straight what companies like Twist Bioscience are really doing.  Say you're a biologist who wants a particular genetic sequence for some reason or other.  In the past, you'd have to find large chunks of what you want lying around and splice them together, sort of like editing a documentary video out of existing footage.  A lot has already been done in this way under the general name of genetic engineering, leading to things like disease-resistant crops, fluorescent fish in bright artificial colors, and so on.  But what Twist Bioscience and similar firms are doing is more like making an animated film, frame by frame.  Each frame (i. e. letter in the genetic sequence) can be whatever you want, and so you can literally get whatever gene you ask for. 

The problem in this novel situation is knowing what to ask for.  And here's where we have to stand back at the designing-life-from-scratch claim and think twice about it. 

 No engineering design is truly de novo—totally original—if for no other reason than the designer has to remain within the constraints of the physics and mathematics of what is possible to design.  If your bridge design ignores the rated strength of the materials used in its construction, it's likely to fall down.  Making DNA that will do a prescribed task in a living cell is a highly constrained problem—constrained by the existing design of the target cell.  Currently, we have adequate (but probably not exhaustive) knowledge of the functions of only a few types of cells—bacteria, mostly—knowledge that is enough to allow us to manipulate their machinery with custom DNA to do things we want.  But we didn't design the cells that the synthetic DNA is going into. 

Most people not handicapped with a Ph. D. can see that there is a Designer behind the unfathomably complex thing that is biological life on this planet.  No human being can claim to have designed an existing cell from scratch.  Clients of Twist Bioscience ordering their customized DNA molecules are like programmers who have laboriously learned an operating system language and are now ready to program a computer they had no hand in designing.  As every coder knows, one little comma in the wrong place can wreck the whole program, and that is why checking and accuracy are so important to DNA synthesis—cells can be as unforgiving as computers when it comes to mistakes.

Fortunately, most mistakes along these lines simply die, or fail to achieve the goal that the designer aimed at.  But along with all the wonderful promises of fantastic new materials comes the downside question:  when and how will the ability to synthesize DNA be used for evil as well as good?

And some answers to that question might not be as simple as the melodramatic picture of some anarchic radical cooking up a kill-everybody-in-sight germ in his secret laboratory.  Take one of the ostensibly good predictions touted by synthetic DNA's promoters:  the ability to make bacteria that would crank out meat and milk without the tedious inconvenience of raising cows or pigs or chickens.

Suppose synthetic milk that is every bit as good as the real thing becomes something you could do in a chemical plant for one-tenth the cost of the way dairy farms do it.  The dairy farmers would immediately find themselves in the position of slide-rule manufacturers when the first cheap electronic calculators hit the market.  Only there are a lot more dairy farmers around the world than there were slide-rule makers.  To a dairy farmer, this so-called advance that the synthetic DNA promoters call a good thing, looks a lot like an evil thing.  Unless some social or governmental factor intervenes, the dairy farmers would simply be out of luck and would have to find some other way to make a living.

This situation reminds me of one of the best classic Ealing comedies of the 1950s:  the Alec Guinness film "The Man In the White Suit."  It was made at a time when postwar industrial Britain was feeling threatened by technological advances.  The story concerned a nerdy chemist played by Guinness who discovered a way to make a type of cloth that never stained, never tore or wore out, and appeared to be capable of lasting forever.  His escapades with unsympathetic managers, union leaders, and other interested parties lead both to some hilarious scenes, and also to a serious point, encapsulated in an encounter he has toward the end of the film with an old, broken-down woman who ekes out a living taking in washing.  Having heard of his invention, she confronts him and asks, "What about me bit of washin', eh?"  What, indeed.

The film avoided a serious answer to this question (spoiler alert!) by giving the cloth a shelf life of only a month or so, and when all existing samples self-destructed, life went back to normal.  But we may not have such an easy out with the products of synthetic DNA.  Throughout history, ways of life have come and gone in response to technological advances, and at this time, it doesn't seem that synthetic DNA is about to plunge us either into a secular Paradise or Hell on earth.  But as its products prove themselves in the marketplace and begin to disrupt older ways of doing things, we may have to decide where designing ends and meddling begins.

Sources:  The article "Designing life from scratch: A fledgling field is about to take off" by Lisa M. Krieger appeared on Aug. 8, 2015 on the San Jose Mercury News website at http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_28608185/designing-life-from-scratch-fledgling-field-is-about.  I also referred to the Twist Bioscience website at www.twistbioscience.com, the Wikipedia articles on recombinant DNA and artificial gene synthesis, and the Internet Movie Database article on "The Man In the White Suit."