SPECIAL ISSUES: BIOTECH

May 15, 2001

Biotechnology Debate Requires Both Scientific Understanding and Public Discourse
By Steve Pueppke, Associate Dean for Research in the College of ACES at the University of Illinois.

The first serious attempts to improve plants through biotechnology began in the mid-1980s with the testing of crop varieties modified to resist pathogens and insects. These plants were created by novel tools that isolated single genes and then precisely transferred them from organism to organism. Yet, intentionally or subconsciously, farmers have been tampering with plants for millennia, seeking to improve them to meet their needs.

Plant selection, one of the earliest means of human intervention, is still widely practiced. Our senior associate dean, Don Holt, who grew up on an Illinois farm tells of his grandfather, who used to sit at the back of the wagon as it was unloaded with the harvest, pulling out the largest corn ears with the plumpest kernels, and flinging them into a bushel basket. Like early farmers, he was selecting the best seed for next year‘s planting.

Over the centuries, this simple practice has led to enormous changes in plant form and properties. Even those familiar with plants and agriculture may be astonished at the difference between corn and its teosinte ancestor. Kale, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts are well known garden vegetables. Each has a unique form and purpose, yet all are selections of a single species. Humans also learned to graft and hybridize plants, in the process creating dwarfs and other useful forms.

Although biotechnology has heightened awareness of species boundaries, there is in fact nothing new about artificially mixing of genes from more than one crop species. Many genes have been deliberately moved by classical means from wild plant species into their cultivated relatives. In other cases, cross-species hybrids were created on purpose.

Some of our most useful grafts deliberately transcend species boundaries, too. Commercial pears often are produced on the rootstock of the common quince. Similarly, much of the orange juice that many of us drink for breakfast is pressed from fruits hanging on sweet orange shoots grafted onto the rootstock of another species, the bitter orange.

The main distinction between the classical and the biotechnology tools is precision and not the crossing of species boundaries. Selection, hybridization, and grafting are all rather crude from the genetic standpoint—the dice are simply rolled, the genomes recombine, and if the new plant form is desirable, it is utilized. Yet, the genetic uncertainties associated with the classical tools have never prevented us from exploiting them for the benefit of humanity.
Humans have been improving plants for millennia. We have moved genes and combined and recombined genomes for centuries. These manipulations have created a tremendous variety of new plant forms tailored to our needs as people. Now we have immense new knowledge and vastly greater options in the form of second generation biotechnology tools. They allow us to rearrange plant genes with a precision and scope unimaginable just a few decades ago.

Many in the scientific community, especially biotechnologists themselves, view these advances as good news. They look forward to applying even more powerful biotechnology tools to agricultural problems. But the general public and some in the scientific community are apprehensive. These complex forces have created a "biotechnology debate" and moved it into the public arena, in the process placing biotechnologists into an uneasy position.

Biotechnology must be held to the same standards of good science that have been applied to other techniques. The concerns of the public, on the other hand, will not be assuaged by recourse to purely scientific arguments or by one way communication from "experts" to "the uninformed." We need a scientific understanding, but ultimately, the public debate must be two way and framed in terms of public concerns.

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