San Diego Reader

Across the boulevard from the fountains of Balboa Park, there’s a splash of color that catches my eye: the 2500-odd flowers of the park’s rose garden. You can find the queen of flowers in all its colors here, from scarlet red to satin white. All colors, that is, except one. There are no blue roses in the garden; roses don’t grow blue in nature. But technology sometimes succeeds where nature has failed. Starting next year, according to one company, some roses will be blue, the latest triumph for the still-young science of genetic engineering. Like most colors of the rose, when given as a gift, blue carries its own meaning: the beautiful fantasy, the impossible dream, heaven here on earth. Perhaps it might now become the symbol of another dream: humankind the master of nature at last. For it is not only flowers that are going to change.

Over the past ten years, we’ve quietly crossed one of the greatest frontiers in science: remaking life itself. All around us, science is finding ways to rewrite, to alter, to disassemble, to make from scratch the genetic code — that same genetic code we carry, the one shared with all life on earth. The power to alter and to create; the power to design new species; scientists become gods? And yet, scientific miracles quickly become mundane. Already, the race to remake life doesn’t seem so surprising. We read that researchers have added human genes to mice to give them color vision, that the offspring of cloned cows are in our food supply, that some pigs have been altered to glow in the dark, and we’re no longer amazed. We’ve come to expect this kind of latter-day sorcery from modern science. Perhaps we haven’t realized just how far we’re about to go. We’re entering a new world.

One of the best places to catch a glimpse of that secretive new world may be to take a drive to Torrey Pines. Not to the manicured green and spectacular views at the golf course, the host to the 2008 U.S. Open, but right across the street from the driving range. Here are the San Diego offices of Synthetic Genomics and, nearby, the J. Craig Venter Institute, sparkling in the afternoon sun. Both the JCVI and Synthetic Genomics share the same CEO, Dr. J. Craig Venter, the maverick UCSD grad who raced the government to map the human genome.

“Now we’re trying to ask,” Dr. Venter told the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in Monterey this February, “can we regenerate life, or can we create new life?” His answer was that we can — and will — do both. In January, the JCVI announced that it had synthesized the entire DNA genetic code, the genome, of a living creature, a bacterium named Mycoplasma genitalium. As the name might imply, it’s a bacterium that lives in human genitals, and not a very friendly creature either; it’s thought to be responsible for conditions like pelvic inflammation. Venter’s team, however, picked it not because of where it lives but because of what it is: its genome is shorter than that of most bacteria and easier to synthesize. Venter’s team threw in a couple of tweaks. They added “watermarks” to the new DNA, like a hidden signature to mark it as their own creation: the world’s first man-made DNA. Using this technology, Synthetic Genomics plans to take the next step and begin designing organisms that don’t yet exist.

“We can either design and assemble genes, gene pathways, or whole chromosomes,” explains Melanie Wranaker with Synthetic Genomics. “That’s the bigger goal with this new field of synthetic genomics. Instead of just doing genetic engineering, you can have this organism from scratch that has the properties you want.” Eventually they want to have software that will let scientists design new species on a computer — maybe pick from a menu of traits they want their new single-celled life-form to have. “But we’re not at that stage yet,” Wranaker cautions. “We’re in the basic research and development stages, and we’re taking a much broader approach.”

What would these designer organisms do?

“We’re looking at harnessing photosynthetic organisms. We’re looking at microalgae and improving these microbes to produce biofuels directly from sunlight and CO2. And [applying that] to produce bioenergy or substitute for petrochemicals. There’s a lot of revolutionary applications that that could apply to.” In other words, if we don’t yet have the tools to overcome our coming energy crisis, why not design a whole new species to lend a hand? If bacteria and algae can be designed to synthesize chemicals or fuel, we’ll be able to keep on driving our cars and wrapping our food in plastic long after we burn through our dwindling oil supply.

And yet, some might ask, isn’t there another possibility as well? We’re not just designing machinery in a factory; we’re designing a new species, a new creature with a life of its own. Remember those horror movies where the scientist designs a germ that accidentally gets out of control and wreaks havoc?

Wranaker quickly dismisses that idea. “I don’t think you can do it inadvertently, but with any emerging technology that holds such great promise there is the potential for misuse. The J. Craig Venter Institute published a policy study on synthetic genomics that explores the risks and benefits of the technology. And of course there’s the potential for misuse, but this is very complicated science, so we’re encouraging that government and scientific communities put these adequate safeguards in place to prevent misuse.” For now, she emphasizes, the technology is in its infancy. Synthetic Genomics and the JCVI may have synthesized an entire genetic code, but there’s much yet to be learned; this quest is still in its early days. It seems an oddly appropriate one for a company with a CEO who owns a yacht named the Sorcerer II.

“Now, I’ve argued that this is not Genesis, this is building on 3.5 billion years of evolution,” Venter told the TED conference. “Why do this? I think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs. We’re about to go from 6.5 to 9 billion people over the next 40 years. To put it in context for myself, I was born in 1946. There’s now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946. Within 40 years there’ll be four. We have trouble feeding, providing fresh clean water, medicines, fuel for the 6.5 billion. It’s going to be a stretch to do it for nine.” That’s why, he believes, the ability to create new species to carry out tasks is vital to our future. “We’re a ways away from improving people. Our goal is just to make sure we have a chance to survive long enough to do that.” In another few years, we could see scientists designing new life-forms that exist now only in the imagination. We’ve already taken the first step.

Some might say that we took the first step into the world of artificial life a long time ago, in 1994, to be precise, the first time a genetically engineered tomato went on the market. Fourteen years later, genetically engineered (GE) crops have become the norm. Today, from 70 to 75 percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves contain ingredients from genetically modified crops, according to Grocery Manufacturers of America; but that’s only an estimate. No labeling is required, so no one really knows for sure — the real number is probably higher still. Try to find all the foods on a supermarket shelf that contain corn starch, corn syrup, corn flour, canola oil, soy oil, soybeans, or sugar. Eventually you’ll give up; there are too many. All of them probably contain ingredients from genetically engineered plants.

According to the USDA, 73 percent of corn, 87 percent of cotton, and 91 percent of soybeans are GE, and those numbers are rising. Most Hawaiian papaya went GE a few years ago. Starting this year, much of our sugar comes from GE sugar beets, planted this year for the first time. It’s a reversal. Some companies like American Crystal Sugar didn’t used to accept GE sugar beets in their supply. Why did they make the switch?

“We’ve considered this carefully for a long time,” explains David Berg, president of American Crystal Sugar, the largest sugar supplier in the country. “You want to make sure you don’t have any consumer backlash.” But, he believes, a backlash is less likely — now that the popular mood has changed. “In the last two to three years, the opposition has just diminished significantly…The general feeling seems to be that this seems to be a technology that’s useful to farmers and to consumers.” And the price of being left out of the biotech boom might be high. “If we try to avoid biotech, we’ll be left behind, and we just can’t afford to do that.”

We eat corn that kills pests and sugar from beets that survive herbicides, and it’s normal now, just part of how we grow food. But we’re about to take another step.

Dr. Maarten Chrispeels is a professor of biology at UCSD and one of the founders of the San Diego Society for Molecular Agriculture (SDSMA), a group of UCSD, Scripps, and Salk Institute researchers who meet to work on new ideas in plant biology. He’s spent most of his life in the U.S., but he still speaks English with an accent, a legacy of his native Belgium, where he grew up and did his undergrad degree.

“Because I have a background in agriculture, I’ve always been interested in the interface of agriculture and plant-biology research,” Chrispeels explains, so much so, in fact, that he cowrote a textbook on crop biotechnology — the genetic engineering of crops. All living things, he explains, share the same genetic code — DNA. Think of it at a basic level a little like an extremely complicated code for a computer program; if you find a snippet of code that does something that you want — say, for instance, color vision — in one organism, you can take that snippet and insert it into the code for another organism — very carefully. This is what genetic engineering is all about.

“It’s the same genetic material [in all living things], but in addition, the sequences, the particular genes, you could very often recognize [them] because of evolution. So we have genes in common with bacteria, because everything is eventually descended from or evolved from primitive organisms — all organisms have similar genes. That doesn’t mean that new genes are not acquired. Humans don’t do photosynthesis [the process plants use to capture energy from sunlight], so we don’t have genes to do photosynthesis. So in the course of evolution, organisms acquired new properties, and those necessitated the evolving of new genes. But the basics of all cells are sort of the same, and those genes are all very much related to each other.”

You can insert certain parts of the genetic code of a mouse into a human, or the other way around, if you find a part of the code you want to use. This is how researchers have created goats that make spider silk, mice that see color, certain medicines that save lives. Genes can also be “knocked out” and disabled or “knocked in” and replaced. Many medications in clinical experiments are now tested on genetically engineered lab rats — sometimes lab rats engineered to better mimic a desired model. For Chrispeels, however, his focus is plant biology. “You have the gene in one plant resemble the gene in another plant; as a matter of fact many leaf plants have genes in common with humans and with all kinds of animals too.”

So far, most biotech companies like Monsanto have focused on altering plants to benefit farmers, by making them herbicide-tolerant or pest-resistant. This latter is especially important. Pests and plant diseases cause billions of dollars in damage every year. In developing countries in Africa or Southeast Asia, damage from pests like locusts can cause devastating famine. Many GE crops try to minimize that damage by creating plants that kill pests or resist viruses; yet even as scientists design crops that kill pests, the pests develop resistance, a war that’s a little like a never-ending arms race.

“There are three ways to go with developing resistance to pests,” says Chrispeels. “One is traditional breeding. You find a variety, maybe a wild variety, that is resistant to the pest, and you cross it in. It takes about seven to eight generations, and presto! you have a pest-resistant variety of wheat. But ten years later, you have to start over, because the pest will have evolved.”

We start to talk about evolution, and then he pauses a moment. “Can you guys talk about evolution in the Tribune [the SDUT] or not? Is that a no-no? It’s a fairly conservative newspaper that wants not to offend its readers.” That’s quite all right, I explain; I’m not writing for the Union-Tribune, and yes, we can certainly talk about evolution, SDUT or no SDUT. “So, the pest has evolved, and it has overcome that resistance. Okay, method number two is you spray [with pesticides]; however, spraying puts on a tremendous selection pressure, and within ten years, your pest has evolved and it’s resistant to your spray. You have to make a new spray, you have to invent a new pesticide. Number three is you make a genetically engineered plant, and the pests evolve and get around it. So no matter what method you use, pests, because of their short life cycle, evolve very fast. Insects have a life cycle, some of them, only a month or so. So they evolve much faster than the plants, who have a one-year life cycle. Pests developing resistance is nothing new. Does it make genetic engineering meaningless? Absolutely not. Because the companies will come up with new genetically engineered resistant plants and will probably start what’s called pyramiding genes — that is, you put in two genes at once. There will always be jobs for plant breeders.”

So we stay ahead in the arms race against pests by continually updating plants — or even by adding multiple modifications, redesigning plants to meet our specs. Genetic engineering has changed agriculture. “It certainly has raised productivity.” But haven’t some of these modifications been controversial? Some claim there could be unknown health risks from current — or future — modifications. Chrispeels believes the controversy is exaggerated.

“I personally am not worried about eating any of the GE products that are on the market. Having said that, if there are unknown health risks, then they are unknowable. And all this criticism of genetic engineering can be made also of any other method of crop improvement. For example, let’s say I do this breeding where I find my rust- [a wheat disease] resistant wheat in Turkey — you know that’s where wheat came from — so I find a rust-resistant variety of wheat, I cross it in with domestic wheat, and after seven or eight generations, I have my rust-resistant domestic wheat. Great. But that rust-resistant wheat, after seven or eight generations, has about one percent of the genes from that wild wheat — that’s, say, 300 genes. Do I know what those genes are? No. Can I claim that it has potential health risks? Absolutely, because I don’t know what those genes are.” In other words, genetic engineering is, he says, no different from any other method we use to develop new species of crops, whether cross-breeding or any other.

Coming up in the pipeline are drought-resistant wheat, fast-growing crops, and foods redesigned to be more nutritious — say, to carry omega-3 oils and vitamins. Genetically engineered crops have become especially important for the biofuels industry, where many companies are working with genetically modified algae or other crops to augment productivity. Other companies have designed crops that produce medicines — to give one example, rice with human genes added so that it produces lactoferrin, a protein found in breast milk. The genetically engineered crops are then used to produce medicines or dietary supplements. There are believed to be hundreds of acres of such “pharmacrops” being grown right now in the U.S. It’s difficult to know exactly how many or where, because the USDA classes many of the details on ongoing field tests of new GE crops as “confidential business information,” or CBI; some of the companies participating in required USDA field tests do not want the USDA to disclose to the public the locations, modifications, or other details about the tests.

Pharmacrops in particular have some researchers concerned. Through cross-pollination, plants can share their genes with other plants of the same species. What happens if a corn plant being used to make insulin shares that gene with a corn plant being grown for human consumption? It could very easily happen, if the pharmacrops were planted near food crops of the same species. Bees, insects, or the wind (depending on the crop) would then carry pollen from one field to the other and with it into our food.

Dr. Michelle Marvier is an ecologist who’s done some work in the field of genetically engineered crops — specifically to determine how they impact the environment. Pharmacrops are worrisome, she believes, because they have the potential to enter the food supply. “I would say it’s absolutely not desirable. These are things that would be prescribed, so clearly you don’t just want people taking them willy-nilly.” She gives an example of a case where that nearly occurred during a field test. “ProdiGene [a biotech company] had a corn that they developed to produce a vaccine that would prevent pig diarrhea, and there were some ‘volunteer plants’ that popped up the following year, mixed in with other crops, and so a huge amount of soybeans and corn had to be destroyed.” That was almost six years ago. Today, field trials of other pharmacrops are still ongoing. Medications from pharmacrops should soon be reaching the market and could be a cheaper method to produce drugs and dietary supplements, the latest scientific advance to become part of our way of life. Other researchers have accomplished the same goal a different way: by genetically engineering animals, like goats, to produce proteins for medications in their milk. Some of these products also are awaiting approval.

As scientists learn how to take life apart and put it back together, tinker with it, change it, and create it, the technology is quietly changing our world; the way we make fuel, clothes, plastics, medicines, the way we eat and drink, and, eventually, us. The possibilities are as endless as the imagination. We could free ourselves from our oil addiction, power our cars, increase our food supply, produce organs for transplant to humans in animals, cure hereditary disease — all by redesigning plants, animals, and bacteria and improving on nature. But there are many who wonder if in our search to remake life we may have gone too far.

Ocean Beach People’s Organic Foods Market has been unique for several decades now: the only completely vegetarian, member-run natural food co-op in San Diego. When it started. OB People’s occupied a former pool hall; for the last few years, it’s had its own brand-new two-story building on Voltaire Street, an environmentally friendly structure built using recycled-content steel, lit by skylights during the day and powered by solar panels on the roof. The atmosphere is totally laid back. It’s tough to tell the employees, like the guy in dreads stocking the organic tomatoes, from the customers. Colorful paintings by local artists line the walls. If you’re looking for GE food, you won’t find it here. At People’s, organic is less like a choice than a religion.

Amber McHale is a marketing manager at People’s; she’s been working there on and off for much of her life. She can even remember to the day when she first volunteered at People’s. “August 19, 1971…it was the day after my birthday.” McHale was just ten years old. She has a quiet kind of idealism about her; you can hear the strength of her convictions in the way she talks. I incautiously refer to GE foods as genetically modified, or GM, and she corrects me. It may seem like a subtle point, but she believes the term is a subtler form of spin. “I have a really strong feeling about the terms GM versus GE. GE is the correct term, and you’ll only ever see it GE in our newsletter. GM is misleading, because we’re not talking about modification, we’re talking about crossing the species barrier. I was listening to a professor on NPR the other day who was putting a spin on the technology by referring to it as GM. She was claiming that this was very similar to what we’ve always done with plant breeding, when in fact it’s completely different.”

GE, McHale believes, is less a modern miracle than an environmental pollutant. She talks about drift, or cross-pollination of a gene from a modified plant. “It’s been proven to cross the species barrier. Biotechnologists swore that this would not happen. But it has. And when a GE crop through drift contaminates an organic field, it loses its certification.” Once we add a gene to a plant, through cross-pollination other plants of the same or closely related species could end up with the same gene as well. For organic farmers, like those who supply People’s, this is a huge problem. Food can only be certified organic if it’s not genetically engineered, and cross-pollination will often mean that GE crops share genes with organic crops planted in neighboring fields, forcing the organic farmers to destroy their crops. The Sierra Club and other groups are using this same argument in the lawsuit they filed to overturn approval of GE sugar beets. The lawsuit is still pending.

Part of the problem, she says, is that the biotech industry is self-regulated to an extent its critics find worrisome. “The biotech companies are getting away with a general revolution that’s changing our world. I might not want to eat GE food. That’s my right. But I lose that right because of drift.”

Above all, McHale says, when we try to redesign life itself, there is the question of what we don’t know. “The ramifications of this stuff. For one, GE is a brand-new science. It’s a largely misunderstood science. And we humans are the guinea pigs for this science. There’s already been a litany of things that have gone wrong.” Many of those who question our rush to redesign life ask some of the same questions. They believe we’re like children playing with fire. We’ve opened Pandora’s box. Sooner or later, they say, between our designer bacteria and our pharmaceutical farms, we’re going to kill ourselves.

But what’s the alternative? After all, the world’s population is growing. Start reading this sentence, and by the time you finish, another four children will have been born. With oil prices skyrocketing, we’ll soon need plants to feed our cars as well. Some critics argue that organic farming wouldn’t be able even to feed the 6.5 billion people alive today. Why would we pass up on such a promising technology, one that offers seemingly limitless potential?

There may be something just as important, McHale believes — that we find a way to preserve our environment. “It’s how we’ve farmed for tens of thousands of years. Organic farming is the hope of agriculture. Sustainable farming is the only way to keep the planet alive. We keep on dumping chemicals into our environment. How long can we keep that up?” As McHale reminds me, many of our past decisions, however wise they seemed at the time, carried unintended long-term consequences for the environment. Think, for example, of the damage wrought by DDT on the bald eagle and other species or the unfolding impact of climate change around the globe. Will the alterations we make to plant and animal genomes — and eventually, perhaps, to human DNA — later bear similar consequences, ones we can’t begin to predict? Or is the tremendous potential of genetic alteration simply too great to leave untapped? Whatever happens, People’s will be there to offer an alternative, the other way to grow, and with that in mind they hope to open another San Diego–area co-op soon.

On my way out, I mention that I might take advantage of the chance to stop by their salad bar; they have some all-organic strawberry crumble I’m eager to try. McHale stops me with a smile. “It’s your salad bar,” she tells me. Because that, after all, is what People’s is all about.

A quarter of an hour later and a few blocks away, I walk by a florist’s shop. I run my eye across the roses and for a moment imagine the familiar flower turned blue, the missing color in the Balboa garden; the abiding hope, the miracle made real. For 20 years, researchers at Florigene, an Australian company, have sought to change the color of the rose — they claim to have only recently succeeded. “The first genetically modified rose variety will be available in Japan next year,” says Dr. Steve Chandler with Florigene. They hope to release them in the U.S. as well. So roses are red, roses are blue, we might say, someday soon. Who would want to change a rose? I ask.

Or perhaps…who wouldn’t? Ever since the dawn of civilization, we’ve wanted to believe we could control nature. We saw wolves, we tamed and bred them; we saw rivers, we built dams; we saw plants, we gave them Latin names and classified them. We launch satellites and map clouds to forecast weather; we split the atom to make energy; and wherever we go we pave over the wilderness to make room for our dreams. It’s part of what it is to be human, like children playing with fire, chasing the wind, seeking the mystery of life itself.

— Jonathan Parkinson