Our turn: Science meets morals in the next great leap

Biotechnology is the world's third major technological revolution, but is New Zealand being left behind?
SIMON COLLINS and photographer PAUL ESTCOURT looked at how other countries are encouraging progress.

In the interests of science, mice in a Taiwan university business incubator are being bred to be diabetic and obese.

They eat until they are 1 1/2 times larger than normal mice. Then they are fed a new kind of milk powder, which the scientists hope will prove to be an effective cure for human diabetics.

"We formed this company and made the product and got a very good response from diabetics," says Frank Chiahung Mao, a professor at the National Chung Hsing University, who is also chief executive of the new Maxluck Biotechnology Corporation.

The company has taken out patents around the world for its Glucose Tolerance Factor (GTF) milk powder. It is a classic case of potentially huge commercial spinoff from what began as a state-funded investment in university biotechnology research.

It is not alone. In Taiwan, Singapore, Europe, Israel, the United States and Australia, biotechnology - genetic engineering - is the darling of government research funders and private investors.

Everywhere outside New Zealand, it is seen as the next big technological opportunity to improve people's lives and the environment.

Singapore alone has launched a $S1 billion ($1.35 billion) fund to invest in new biotech businesses. United States biotech companies spent $US11 billion ($27 billion) on research and development last year, earned $US47 billion and employed 150,000 people. Genetically engineered crops covered 24 million hectares in 1998.

European biotech firms spent $4 billion on research and development in 1998, earned revenue of $6 billion and employed 39,000 people.

In Israel, biotech companies have raised more than $US200 million on Nasdaq and other capital markets to develop medicines and software for genetic research.

The Israeli Government has put tens of millions into two cooperative research programmes: a group of 11 companies and agencies developing medicines, and a group of seed and agricultural companies researching the genetics of plants.

And in Australia, biotechnology was one of the two sectors (the other was information technology) for which Prime Minister John Howard revealed plans for world-class centres of excellence with his Innovation Statement in January. The Federal Government will put $A176 million ($221 million) into the centres during the next five years.

Funding for medical research was doubled, funding for cooperative research centres was expanded and the Biotechnology Innovation Fund, providing pre-commercial grants to new businesses, was doubled to $A40 million.

The Government pays medicine companies $A300 million for research and development over five years, partly to compensate them for the low prices it, as the dominant buyer, pays for medicines.

Federal and state governments and Queensland University are also putting $A105 million into the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the university, which will employ 700 scientists working on drugs for cancer, diabetes, Aids and other conditions when it opens next year.

Institute co-director John Mattick said the changes that would flow from understanding the genetic basis of life would be the third technological revolution, after the steam engine and the computer.

"Scientifically, we are in one of the golden ages," he said. "We are exploring the genetic basis of life and its diversity. We are actually reading the genetic programming, the blueprint.

"As a species, we are looking at the very nature of our inheritance, our biology."

He said 50 per cent of the world economy was biologically based, and biotech would not only transform existing industries, but create whole new industries that no one could yet imagine.

While the computer-based industries were already maturing, biotech was just beginning. "A strategically placed government investment at this point in the development cycle can have a multiple value," Professor Mattick said.

An example is the Israeli company Compugen, a global leader in the new field of bioinformatics - using computer models to understand genetic structures. The company was started by a group of scientists in one of the 24 business incubators set up with Government subsidies a decade ago.

It developed a special-purpose computer and found its first customer, pharmaceutical giant Merck, at a trade show in the United States. This enabled it to graduate from the incubator in 1994.

In 1996-97, the company was invited to join a cooperative Magnet research programme for drug discovery, providing the bioinformatics for the other 10 members. The Government provided a $2 subsidy for every $1 committed by the member companies and universities.

"The aim was to encourage collaboration to generate generic technologies - that is, things which everyone needs - while retaining competition on the final products," said Compugen vice-president Lior Matan.

Compugen then did commercial deals with another pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, and a leading American biotech company to jointly develop its genetic research tools.

It raised $US15 million from a venture capital consortium led by Clal Biotechnology.

Clal's chief executive, David Haselkorn, whom Mr Matan described as "Mr Biotech in Israel," visited New Zealand in March with a local venture capital company run by property developer Andrew Krukziener.

With Clal's backing, Compugen floated on New York's Nasdaq sharemarket early last year, raising $US90 million just before the Nasdaq slump.

But in New Zealand, much of the biotech industry is on hold while the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification deliberates. Work at AgResearch's Ruakura research centre on multiple sclerosis was stopped in May by a High Court ruling against inserting "human genes" into cows, although regulatory authorities have since given their approval to start again.

Queensland's Professor Mattick said the ethical issues around genetic engineering were "more of an issue in New Zealand than anywhere."

In a submission to the commission, he said biotechnology promised "enormous benefits in terms of improved healthcare, agricultural production systems and environmental protection."

In healthcare, the new methods of engineering medicines were much safer than the old system of extracting substances from plants and animals, such as insulin from pigs - "eliminating the possibility of introducing new viruses."

In farming, genetic engineering could produce plants that combined the nutrients of foods with the health-giving properties of vitamins and vaccines. It could create plants that did not need as much pesticide as traditional varieties, and with natural anti-freeze properties taken from fish.

"The idea that a fish gene might be used in a tomato is often portrayed as an abomination," Professor Mattick said. "In reality, different plant and animal species have much the same set of genes and proteins, and there are very few, if any, genes or proteins that can be considered 'human' or 'fish' or 'pig' or 'tomato,' other than in relation to the particular idiosyncrasies of their sequence.

"We have no trouble consuming this [anti-freeze] protein when we eat fish, and most people would have no trouble with consuming salmon and tomato separately in the same meal, or even the same mouthful, so there is no logical reason to fear, nor to demonise, the concept of eating a tomato that may contain a protein that is also found in salmon."

Ross Clark, a New Zealand scientist who worked for California's Genentech for nine years, said the country could not sensibly allow genetic engineering for medicines but not for food, because there was "no clear distinction between what is considered a drug and what is considered to be a food."

Golden rice, for example, has been genetically modified to produce Vitamin A, which is vital to overcome a vitamin-deficiency form of blindness that affects up to one in four children in the Third World.

However, the commission has also heard arguments from organic farmers and the Green Party against letting genetically modified organisms outside the laboratory, because of the risk that they could spread into our natural species and undermine New Zealand's clean, green image.

This is partly an economic argument. In its submission, the Green Party cited polls showing negative attitudes to genetically modified food among consumers in Europe, Japan and even North America.

"There are huge strategic advantages for New Zealand in declaring itself the first consciously GE-free nation," the party said. "Consumer demand for organic food is growing as fast as is consumer resistance to GM food. New Zealand organic exports grew 77 per cent [to $60 million] last year."

Total organic production is estimated at more than $100 million and expected to grow to $500 million within six years. "World growth in organic markets exceeds 20 per cent per annum," the party said.

"Genetically engineered crops and organic crops cannot co-exist. As organic crops depend on being completely natural, and 100 per cent free of all genetically engineered material, the release of genetically engineered crops and organisms into the New Zealand environment would represent a major and very serious threat to the organics industry."

But for the Greens, it is also a moral issue. Not only do they see it as morally repugnant to be breeding obese, diabetic mice, but they believe it is wrong to use cows or other animals as bioreactors to produce bulk proteins for human medicines.

The Greens also question whether we should be pouring billions into concocting high-tech medicines for wealthy Americans, rather than attacking the causes of ill-health directly. In poor countries, ill-health is caused by poverty and commercialised agricultural monoculture (growing single crops rather than a wide variety), while in rich countries diseases such as diabetes are due to over-rich diets and too little exercise.

Golden rice and other "nutriceuticals" could also infect and wipe out natural species, which have evolved over millions of years.

"Nutriceuticals are a dangerous way to administer medicines which offer no real advantages over current methods," the party said. "Science has become perverted by commerce ... We could take leadership in disease prevention rather than in treating symptoms."

Such arguments seem a long way away from the practical work of scientists such as Professor Mao in Taiwan, whose special milk powder offers hope to millions of real and potential diabetics - such as his company president, Linda Cheng, who runs the magazine China Investment.

"When she was young, she made some money on the stock market," Professor Mao said. "She's 55 and she thinks maybe it's time to do good for people, and she thinks this would do lots for diabetics. She is a little bit fat and says she has high risk for diabetes, and has tried to put a lot of effort into diabetes."

In Brisbane, Professor Mattick hopes that New Zealand's royal commission will find a way to permit this kind of useful work while somehow looking after animals and the environment.

"The exercise of the royal commission is a very valuable one," he said. "I have great confidence that a group of broad-minded, thinking individuals will be able to come up with sensible guidelines."

LESSONS


1. Genetic engineering is the next big technological revolution that could transform the ways we can contribute to the lives of other people and to the world.

2. Every successful country is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into genetic research.

3. However, there are risks, which are being weighed up by New Zealand's Royal Commission on Genetic Modification.


Links


Compugen

Royal Commission on Genetic Modification NZ


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