Dialogue: Knowledge has calmed the biotech nightmares

By JOHN ROUGHAN

When I first read of genetic engineering, as it was called in that Rolling Stone article almost 30 years ago, I remember I was chilled to the core. Humans in their remorseless curiosity had discovered they could slice DNA and graft genes of different species together.

What science could do, it surely would. The haphazard business of breeding and evolution could be short-circuited. More than that, creatures that nature would never allow to mate could be mingled, or mangled, in a Petri dish.

By 1984 we might exceed George Orwell's imagination. Men and women in white coats would be able to pick the characteristics from different organisms to design their desired mutants.

We were messing with the elements of life, the delicate chemistry of our being. We could self-destruct.

Scientists then seemed to agree. In the United States they called a moratorium on DNA experiments until the risks were better known. Not much more was heard about genetic engineering, at least in public, for another 20 years. When the subject returned a few years ago I was surprised to find that, for me anyway, the nightmare did not. The science seemed responsible, the risks manageable and the possibilities irresistible.

Maybe it was the age. The 1990s brought the marvels of the microprocessor into popular use. Technology was no longer rocket science and nuclear radiation, it was e-mail, eftpos, the internet. Biotechnology could be equally benign.

Or maybe it was the lapse of time. During the moratorium the science had developed bacteria, the vehicles of gene transfer, that could not survive outside laboratories. They had regulated themselves and gradually developed genetically improved seeds, medicines and cereals.

By the time most of us heard the news we had probably eaten a good deal of GM corn, soy and other concoctions and felt none the worse for it. The only fierce objection seemed to be that companies such as Monsanto, which invested in genetic research, were making money out of it.

Nevertheless, it was a good idea to appoint a royal commission. Some of the concerns of the 1970s still called for a human verdict even if the commission, when it was named, looked a mite too human. The chairman, Sir Thomas Eichelbaum, had been a quiet judge and the Rt Rev Richard Randerson had been far from Rt in his previous political contributions.

Their brief could hardly have been broader. They were to hear not only the health and environmental objections to genetic modification but social, cultural and ethical concerns.

The commissioners stretched their remit further to add "spiritual" issues. Their report, when it arrived in July, was a strange document.

British genetic scientist, television presenter and Labour parliamentarian Lord Robert Winston was here for the Knowledge Wave conference a few weeks later. Asked what he thought of the royal commission's report, he said he had read enough to realise he needed to read our Treaty of Waitangi.

It is not a report that will make much sense to other countries grappling with genetic modification. The opening chapters bear the stamp of the nominated ethicist, Bishop Randerson.

They stress the "uniqueness" of New Zealand, though in this dilemma we are not unique, and they attempt to draw some common national values from four sources: Maori culture, religious belief, other cultures and beliefs, and something called "eco-spirituality".

The last is the worry. As explained to the commission, it objects to the idea that humans are masters of nature and can do with it what they like.

"Ecological thinking," says the report, "seeks ways to extend the moral boundaries to give a new or different moral value to animals and to the environment."

In other words, it will not be enough to satisfy eco-spiritualists that genetically modified organisms can be safe for humans and for the environment - they object to tampering with nature in principle.

Presumably (the commission does not say) their objection does not extend to selective breeding, grafting of grape vines or farming and gardening generally, though it is hard to see how and where they draw the line. That is the problem.

There is no way to reason with an argument from values, as the West Coast found when it tried to convince the Labour Party that native logging could be sustainable. In the end, Michael Cullen told them it was "a values call". I fear our genetic researchers are about to hear the same. They are up against ideology, not science.

I vividly remember the day biology became ecology. It was 1969, my final year of school. The biology teacher's eyes glinted in a way we had not seen before.

As she outlined the rudiments of the new thinking her voice was caught with excitement.

This was no longer dry factual science, this was postulating connections between all living things. There were implications for the way we live. This was relevant.

The following year ecology became the environment and made the cover of Time magazine. As a science it does not seem to have advanced much. The royal commission quotes Dr Peter Wills, an Auckland University professor of physics and a "theoretical biologist", urging the need to understand what he termed the "strange interconnectness" of ecosystems.

The royal commission has reviewed all the concerns of Maori and environmental groups with obvious care and unfailing respect. It has taken the same attitude to the scientists.

The report is a bit light on the reasoning for many of the conclusions but nobody who reads it can be in any doubt this was a panel of largely inexpert but dispassionate and fair-minded people who made a conscientious inquiry.

They were not persuaded to arrest the development of genetic science in this country by forbidding field trials or commercial release, suggesting instead how those should be monitored.

There is no reason for the Government not to go along with its conclusions. No reason except the ideology of a few who asked for the inquiry and received, to their dismay, an honest, objective result.

nzherald.co.nz/ge

Report of the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification

GE lessons from Britain

GE links

GE glossary