GENETICS, GM FOOD, AND GREENIE PARANOIA
This summer brings the 50th anniversary of the full deciphering of the genetic code — the four-billion-year-old cipher by which DNA’s information is translated and expressed — and the centenary of the birth of Francis Crick, who both co-discovered the existence of that code and dominated the subsequent 13-year quest to understand it.
The genetic code was the greatest of all the 20th-century’s scientific discoveries.
It came out of the blue and has done great good. It solved the secret of life, till then an enigma: living things are defined by the eternal replication of linear digital messages. It revealed that all life shares the same universal but arbitrary genetic code, and therefore shares common ancestry, vindicating Charles Darwin.
From the very moment that Crick first showed a chart of the genetic code, on May 5, 1966 at the Royal Society in London, speculation began about the dangers of using this knowledge for the eugenic enhancement of human beings or for making biological weapons.
The discovery only three years ago of a precise gene-editing tool (known as CRISPR-Cas9) has revived that debate yet again, not least with the first application, by Kathy Niakan of the Crick institute, to use CRISPR experimentally (not therapeutically) on very early human embryos.
Yet in truth the threat of eugenics is fainter than ever. This is for three reasons.
First, the essence of eugenics was compulsion: it was the state deciding who should be allowed to breed, or to survive, for the supposed good of the race. As long as we prevent coercion, we will not have eugenics. Our politics would have to change far more drastically than our science.
Remember that many of the most enthusiastic proponents of eugenics were socialists. People such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Karl Pearson and Harold Laski saw in eugenic policies the start of the necessary nationalization of marriage and reproduction — handing the commanding heights of the bedroom to the state.
In The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion, an appendix to Shaw’s play Man and Superman, one of the characters writes: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man.” Virginia Woolf thought imbeciles “should certainly be killed”.
Surprisingly, it was California that pioneered the eugenic sterilization of disabled and “imbecile” people in the 1920s; and it was from California that Ernst Rüdin of the German Society of Racial Hygiene took his model when he was appointed Reichskommissar for eugenics by the incoming National Socialist government in 1933.
The California conservationist Charles Goethe returned from a visit to Nazi Germany overjoyed that the Californian experiment had “jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”
The second reason we need not fear a return of eugenics is that we now know from 40 years of experience that without coercion there is little or no demand for genetic enhancement. People generally don’t want paragon babies; they want healthy ones that are like them.
At the time test-tube babies were first conceived in the 1970s, many people feared in-vitro fertilization would lead to people buying sperm and eggs off celebrities, geniuses, models and athletes. In fact, the demand for such things is negligible.
People wanted to use the new technology to cure infertility — to have their own babies, not other people’s. It is a persistent misconception shared among clever people to assume that everybody wants clever children.
Third, eugenics, far from being inspired by genetic knowledge, has been confounded by it. Every advance in genetics over the past 116 years has shown that it is less easy to enhance human beings than expected, but easier to cure diseases. The discovery of genes — effectively in 1900, when Gregor Mendel’s work was disinterred — made the selective breeding of people much harder than Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, had expected.
This was because it meant that “undesirable” traits could be hidden in healthy people (“recessive” genes) for generations. It would therefore take centuries to “breed out” any trait thought undesirable by the state.
The more recent discovery that traits such as intelligence are caused by the complicated interaction of multiple genes of small effect means that it is going to be virtually impossible to decide what genetic recipe to recommend to somebody who wants a clever child, or a good-looking one, or an athletic one.
By contrast, the genetic changes that cause terrible afflictions such as Huntingdon’s disease or cystic fibrosis are singular and obvious.
Selecting embryos that lack such traits, or editing the genes of people so that they are born without carrying such traits, will always be much easier than selecting genetic combinations that might, in the right circumstances and with the right upbringing, lead to slightly higher IQ. Cure will always be easier than enhancement.
Fifty years on, the discovery of the genetic code has produced a cornucopia of good and very little harm. It has convicted the guilty and exonerated the innocent in court on a huge scale through DNA fingerprinting. It has enabled people to avoid passing on terrible diseases.
It has led to the development of new drugs, new therapies and new diagnoses. It has given partial sight back to a blind man through gene therapy. It has increased the yield of crops while reducing the use of chemical pesticides.
Yet still we are bombarded with scares about Frankenstein foods, biological warfare, designer babies, genetic discrimination and the return of eugenics. We have a virtual ban on GM crops and put huge obstacles in the way of GM vaccines.
The exhaustive and cautious new report from the American National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.
The European Union was wrong to reject them 25 years ago and is wrong to continue rejecting this beneficial technology. The European Commission conceded in 2010 that GM crops are not per se more risky than, for example, conventional plant-breeding technologies, but still makes it all but impossible to grow them.
Insect-resistant “Bt” crops in particular have better yields and need fewer pesticides, resulting in “higher insect biodiversity on farms”, the academies’ report concludes.
Back in the 1990s I argued that organic farmers — who had used Bt as a spray for decades — should have embraced genetic modification from the start, instead of campaigning against it: it was going to reduce insecticide use, which was what they said they wanted.
In future genetically engineered crops will be even safer, even better for the environment and also better for human health. It is a disgrace that Greenpeace still campaigns against golden rice, a vitamin-enhanced variety that could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year.
Papayas, bananas, cotton and other tropical crops are beginning to benefit from biotechnology, and the main beneficiaries are small-scale farmers, not multinational businesses.
But opposition from rich westerners adds to the cost of bringing such crops to the market, restricting the spread of the technology and benefiting large companies that can afford the regulatory price and can face down the onslaught of the big green pressure groups.
The Greens, having begun to encounter “donor fatigue” on the topic of climate change, have recently upped their opposition to genetically engineered crops, especially in America.
The new Vermont GMO-labeling law that comes into effect in July is effectively a national law. This means that despite failing to impose state-wide initiatives in California, Oregon and Washington (three of the most liberal states you can imagine) the Greens have managed to win nationwide by turning the legislature of a tiny, and otherwise unimportant, state.
Labeling GM food but not other forms of nourishment leaves consumers with the impression that there is something wrong, and food manufacturers then pull out of using the crops: Danone has recently made this decision.
The national academies report makes the obvious point that genetic engineering is a method, not a category of crop. It makes no sense to single it out for special labeling — regulation should be based on traits, not techniques. After all, we don’t regulate food safety according to whether food is boiled or roasted, but according to what’s in it.
The report points out that “emerging genetic technologies have blurred the distinction between genetic engineering and conventional plant breeding to the point where regulatory systems based on process are technically difficult to defend.” Gene editing in particular will soon allow scientists to improve crops in ways that have none of the even theoretical risks that the Greens have trumpeted.
For Crick’s sake, let us agree that genetics has been a huge force for good, and especially for the food we eat. It’s far past time to dismiss the paranoid scaremongering of the Greenie Left.
Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist, and as 5th Viscount Ridley is a Member of the British House of Lords. His latest book is The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge.
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