[A-List] Errors sow new doubts for biotech

["Ralph Johansen" <michele@xxxxxxxx>]

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Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

Errors sow new doubts for biotech
Justin Gillis The Washington Post
Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Modified crops face tighter rules in U.S.

KNIERIM, Iowa One spring day, just outside this hamlet in north-central
Iowa, two brothers named Joe and Bill Horan tore open a big wooden crate to
find a lot of paperwork and some bags of seed corn.

They planted the corn and watched it grow tall in the rich black earth of
their native state, one of the best places in the world to grow that grain.

This was not just any old corn: The plants had been genetically altered to
produce a drug in their kernels that might prove useful for people with the
life-threatening ailment cystic fibrosis.

The crop was the culmination of a half-dozen years of effort by the Horan
brothers, who felt they were well on their way to establishing a new
industry for the Corn Belt and its hard-pressed farmers.

Fields of food plants would become living factories capable of churning out
as many as 400 new drugs and industrial enzymes. New laboratories and
workers would be needed to purify the drugs. The investment could ultimately
be worth billions of dollars.

"You can see what this starts to look like to a place like rural Iowa," Bill
Horan said.

But today the Horan brothers' dream is threatened, and the biotechnology
industry in the United States is in turmoil. Errors by ProdiGene Inc., a
small biotech company based in College Station, Texas, have called into
question the whole idea of growing drugs in food crops, seeming to vindicate
years of warnings from environmental groups.

ProdiGene's mistakes opened the possibility that traces of genetically
altered corn had reached other crops intended for human consumption. In one
case, 155 acres (63 hectares) of corn that might have been contaminated by
pollen from genetically altered crops had to be burned. In another, bits of
genetically altered corn may have been mixed in with a crop of soybeans.
Those soybeans were harvested and brought to a warehouse containing 500,000
more bushels (175,000 cubic meters). After learning of the problem, the
Agriculture Department determined that about 550 tractor-trailer loads of
beans would have to be destroyed.

ProdiGene has acknowledged errors in both incidents, agreed to a $250,000
fine and said it would reimburse the Agriculture Department as much as $3
million to buy and burn the entire warehouse full of beans.

No suspect grain is known to have reached the food supply, but the errors
nonetheless set off a political struggle, with farm interests, food
companies, biotech companies and government agencies debating what to do
next.

New rules to regulate "pharming" have been in the works at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture for a while, but now they are likely to get
tougher, and two other agencies - the Food and Drug Administration and the
Environmental Protection Agency - also appear ready to take a stronger
approach. Bills to strengthen regulation are pending in Congress.

Broad public interests are at stake. Plants may be the cheapest way, or in
some cases the only way, to produce a host of proteins that would be useful
as drugs, industrial compounds or even renewable sources of fuel.

But the recent problems raise questions about whether these unusual crops,
if planted widely, could be properly confined or whether they would
inevitably make their way into the food supply.

In the mid-1990s, Monsanto Co. and its competitors introduced crop varieties
containing foreign genes to help the plants resist worms and weeds. These
varieties were a hit with farmers and quickly took over half the U.S.
acreage of row crops but then ran into fierce opposition, particularly in
Europe. The crops have generally proven safe to eat. But confining them to
their plots has proven to be the Achilles's heel of the technology:
genetically altered crops are starting to show up in unexpected places. The
most dramatic example occurred in 2000, when a corn variety called StarLink,
approved for use only as an animal food, made its way into the food supply
and wound up on grocery shelves, causing concern about allergic reactions
and prompting expensive recalls of taco shells and other products.

The pace of development slowed, though biotech companies continued to push
forward with plant research. These days, the new frontier is "plant-made
pharmaceuticals," a catch-all term that includes industrial enzymes.

Well before the recent troubles, environmental groups wondered what would
happen if, say, animals were exposed to human drugs by eating field crops.
These groups often favor health-related uses of the technology but want
these plants locked up in greenhouses or laboratories - a restriction the
biotech companies say is impractical.

More recently, scarred by the StarLink experience, food companies and their
influential lobbies in Washington have raised alarm bells, contending that
federal regulators have failed to put adequate safeguards in place.

"We are the final step to the consumer," said Rhona Applebaum, executive
vice president of the National Food Processors Association. "The food
industry is left holding the bag."

 Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune