Food Biotechnology

by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

The new biotechnology is in the news so much these days that it now goes by the handy nickname biotech. In medicine, it has assumed heroic proportions, with Science magazine hailing it as the last great technical innovation of the 20th century the progenitor of genetic probes, synthetic hormones, and other life-saving marvels.

In food production, however, it has not been so warmly welcomed:

The European Economic Community has banned use of a genetically engineered hormone to increase milk production in dairy cows.

American grocery chains have refused milk from such cattle. Activists fearing agricultural experimentation have sued to prevent field testing even of genetically engineered petunias.

What's going on with our food supply?

The short answer is the new biotechnology, a scientific revolution less than 20 years old that's already changing the foods we eat.

The jargon of the new biotech may sound pretty ominous to the average consumer. Cloning, genetic manipulation, cell fusion, and mutation may seem more like fantasies out of Star Trek than the results of processes we want to contemplate at the supermarket. Nonetheless, these scientific processes are soon likely to be applied to more and more of our foods.

It's important to understand what food biotechnology is before forming our opinions about it. Although the jargon may sound unnatural, the science is the reverse. In fact, it can be viewed as a method of organizing nature to bring out the best in nature. It's essentially a refinement of what we've known and done for a very long time.

Biotech Old and New

Biotechnology is the use of biological systems living things to create or modify products.

Traditional biotechnology is almost as old as agriculture itself. The first farmer who bred the best bull with the best cow in the herd to improve the stock, rather than allowing the animals to breed randomly, was implementing biotechnology in a simple sense. The first baker who used yeast enzymes to make bread rise was likewise using a living thing to produce an improved product. Indeed, one anthropologist argues that a desire to raise grain for brewing beer a classic biotechnology product was the impetus for the first systematic farming 10,000 years ago.

The old biotech that produced these changes is obviously not a single process but a number of different methods. The one feature common to these traditional biotechnologies is use of natural processes to introduce changes in foods.

The new biotechnology is likewise a number of methods of using organisms to make or modify products. It differs from traditional methods by modifying the genetic material of organisms directly and precisely. It enables the transfer of genes between diverse organisms, allowing combinations unlikely to occur by conventional means.

Unlike their predecessors, who progressed by trial and error, today's farmers can exploit the subtleties of genetics. Science has found ways for them to introduce quickly and directly specific crop and animal improvements that formerly took generations. The result may be the same, but the new precision multiplies the possibilities available for achieving specific practical results.

It was not always thus. Mark Twain spins the tongue-in-cheek yarn of an agricultural experimenter named William Beazeley who pined away because of his obsessive, but futile, desire to grow turnips on vines. Nineteenth-century readers scoffed at this absurd idea, but that satire of the 1860s could become a technical possibility in the 1990s if there were any point to achieving it. Fortunately, the new biotech projects in view have more practical goals than Beazeley's.

New biotech springs from our ability to rearrange or recombine DNA, the basic genetic material of living things, a feat made possible in 1974, when American scientists first cloned (isolated and duplicated) a specific gene. From that beginning, the new biotechnology has developed as wide a range of applications as traditional methods. In food production, it is revolutionizing old processes like fermentation and cross-breeding. Both in the field and in the food-processing plant, it is joining in the age-old quest for a healthy, abundant and nutritious food supply.

Evolution or Revolution

In the 1860s, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian priest (who, ironically, had flunked biology in his teacher's examination), deduced the laws of heredity. Working with pea plants in his monastery garden, Mendel discovered he could predict the characteristics of plants bred from specific types of parents. From there it was just a short step to producing at will such characteristics as color, height, and pod position or appearance. Although published in the 1860s, his findings were ignored until researchers rediscovered and confirmed them in 1900.

Mendel's work ultimately made possible scientific farming based on genetics. By the 1930s, organ culture techniques made it possible to isolate plant embryos as a basis for breeding more successful hybrids. Corn production in the United States quickly doubled as a result. Through such methods, agricultural wheat was crossed with wild grasses in order to acquire such properties as greater yield, increased resistance to mildew and bacterial diseases, and tolerance for salt or adverse climate conditions.

Similar progress with many foodstuffs enabled China and India, threatened with famine in the mid-1970s, to invigorate their agriculture to the point that today they are net exporters of grain. Although much of this achievement came from ambitious applications of traditional biotechnology, the new biotech now sustains it, notably in work on rice and the other grains on which so many people worldwide subsist. Today, the new biotech strives to develop drought-tolerant crops that, in time, could alleviate the famines devastating Africa.

New biotech continues its quest for fruitful harvests only under protest. In one case in Maryland, opponents long delayed field testing of corn engineered to resist the European corn borer, a caterpillar that annually spoils $400 million in American crops unless deterred by heavy treatments with pesticides. In Wisconsin, where farmers forfeit $800,000 yearly in crops and pesticide expenses in their losing battle against brown spot disease in green beans, university researchers had to curb their hunt for a new-biotech alternative because of difficulties getting approval for field tests.

One current focus of research is a tomato genetically engineered not to go soft for far longer than ordinary products. Its developer claims that it looks the same, feels the same, and tastes the same as other tomatoes; its nutritional value is identical. The only difference researchers found a difference achieved by isolating and counteracting a single gene that makes tomatoes rot rapidly is that this tomato keeps longer. The reversal of that one gene in the 10,000 making up the plant is all that was needed to make this biotech tomato significant.

Waiting in the wings is another tomato plant altered to contain a bacterial protein toxic to plant-attacking insects but not to other living things. The primary safety issues with both of these new tomatoes are whether their introduction of single new properties might mask other unforeseen changes as well, and whether the products of these new genes are safe to eat.

The Context of Controversy

Traditional biotechnology also continues to develop even as the new biotech comes into play. A recent triumph is the beefalo, a hybrid animal whose meat combines the tenderness of domestic beef with the leanness of American buffalo. This development alarmed nobody and has won consumer acceptance.

Yet, when the traditional biotechnology of farmyard and field moves toward the new biotech of the laboratory, many people become alarmed at its very efficiency. As Margaret Mellon of the National Wildlife Federation put it, ?I feel an affection for the natural world the way it is the way 4 billion years of evolution have made it. I resist the notion of improving nature in the future, just as I lament the loss of nature as it was in the past. Refinements that once would have taken generations may now be induced deliberately and rapidly too rapidly for such observers.

Perhaps our imaginations have been colored by gimmick picture postcards of gigantic foodstuffs, whether gondola-sized potatoes or enormous bass asserted to be typical of particular resorts. Perhaps films showing humanity beleaguered by Frankenstein monsters or mutant insects dispose us to envision enormities. More soberly, some critics make analogies to past introductions of novelties into our environment, such as kudzu plant, which became a troublesome weed, or the starlings whimsically imported into North America only to multiply and foul our cities. Others fear harm to consumers from new foodstuffs.

About the Author

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FDA is A United States government body that oversees medical devices, including contact lenses, intraocular lenses, excimer lasers and eyedrops. In the US, these products must be approved by the FDA before they can be marketed.