I'm taking an undergrad class about
food this term. As an autodidact, it's good to measure
self-knowledge against good old-fashioned learning, see how they
align – and like any person who spends time obsessively reading
about a topic, it all becomes a question of bandwidth, there are big
blank areas of knowledge and then there are things I really know a lot
about.
A recent class was a forum about
genetically modified organisms or GMO. Despite my slightly crunchy
affiliation with the Farmer's Market and a steadfast believer in the
organic standards as they exist currently (which doesn't allow for
GMOs), I can be generally regarded as pro-GMO. Yes, Monsanto is an
evil, aggressive, morally bankrupt institution – If they were
someone in my social circle, I might call them out for suing growers
whose fields cross-pollinate with their precious protected roundup
seed and say, “Dick move, Monsanto”. I can pine for a day when
University or foundation research made things like seed improvement
available for the public good while I wait out the Ayn Rand,
hyper-individualism to either produce things like polio vaccines or
die away.
Then the discussion about GMO's turned
to the terminator gene. The terminator gene is a concept where people
think it is possible to insert a sequence of of genes so that an
organism never reaches the seed stage; plants won't be able to
reproduce, saving Monsanto the trouble of litigating seed savers,
because there will be no seed to save. Setting aside this is
practical for basil or broccoli, plants that are trimmed to force the
energy into stems and leaves, but we actually grow some plants, corn,
soy, wheat FOR THEIR SEED.
Okay, fine, whatever because people
believe that technology is so insidious that GMOs will produce a crop
with seeds that just won't reproduce. And this is totally evil, just
like certain hybrids we've been using for 100 years or navel oranges
and seedless watermelon. But wait, straight from the worn trope of do
we control technology or does technology control us, the terminator
gene will escape and crossbreed/pollinate/infect other crops regardless of Kingdom, phylum, class, it will get all hasta la vista on everything from brassicas to grasses, to prunus, to bovine and everything will DIE!
Ironically, of course, except the terminator gene itself, whose drive
to live will defeat the known laws of biology to stay alive
in a new host.
This is bad science fiction, light on
the science, heavy on the fiction – Like if Picard and Troi land on
the planet devoid of organisms to investigate what happened to the
colony. Troi uses her natural and trained powers to deduce
“something is wrong”, we will know this because she monotonously
states, “Something is wrong”, perhaps qualifying it first with “I
sense”. She is after all, an empath, as well as prone to making the
most obvious observation. Before the second commercial break, both
she and Picard are stricken by this terminator gene, and only Data
and his not as functional as an iphone (only bigger) tricorder can undo the damage by the third break. Maybe Joss Wedon,
who masterfully subverts cliches, could have have pulled it off if
the crew of Serenity landed on the same planet, but who knows.
Yet something we would not tolerate
on a Star Trek episode is a subject we need to pay attention to because it is being talked about by serious people like Vandana Shiva, so adults in
a college classroom have to talk about something as real and as
frightening as a monster under a bed. Get the torches and pitchforks.
Or separate the technology from the
business practices. I wish people could talk about food biotechnology
like they do with biotech advances in medicine. There are plenty of
legitimate reasons to hate Monsanto, that have nothing to do with
GMOs. As matter of fact, most of the time when people complain about
GMOs, they are really complaining about the way Monsanto practices
business. This technology, so full of promise, is in its infancy –
if we were to have looked a surgery in the Civil War, with infections
and death rates, we would have banned it instead of allowing it to
evolved into a lifesaving and life improving wonder.
No comments:
Post a Comment