Devon G. Peña : The Commodity Form Goes Molecular

Cyborg. Artist unknown. Image (and inset images below) from Environmental and Food Justice.
Capitalism and synthetic biology:
The commodity form goes molecular

By Devon G. Peña / The Rag Blog / August 22, 2012

"We’re moving from reading the genetic code to writing it." -- J. Craig Venter, JCV

"Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora." -- Freeman Dyson, Theoretical physicist

"Scientists are making strands of DNA that have never existed, so there is nothing to compare them to. There are no agreed mechanisms for safety, no policies." -- Jim Thomas, ETC Group

[Part 1 of 4.]

While many of us continue to worry about the effects of genetically-engineered organisms (GEOs) in our foods, there is another looming threat on the horizon that has not yet received the attention it deserves. The advent of commercialized synthetic biology (SB) poses new social, legal, economic, and ecological dilemmas the likes of which we have never really had to confront, even with the bewildering array of problems associated with agricultural transgenics.

What is synthetic biology? In a word: God. Or, humans playing at God, anyway. By inventing new life forms, manufacturing artificial biological organisms, synthetic biologists are really acting as Creators of life; or so they think.

The definition of synthetic biology is itself hotly debated, but a 2009 article in The New Yorker by Michael Specter provides a richly textured one that I believe captures the most significant qualities of this new interdisciplinary applied engineering field. According to Specter, synthetic biology combines the elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology in order to “assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world” in accordance with human needs.


This is not rocket science.

The principles are really as simple as ABC; well, actually the technology is a matter of rearranging ACGT -- the four nucleic acid bases that make up DNA. The “A” stands for Adenine and pairs with the “T” which stands for Thymine. The “C” stands for Cytosine and pairs with the “G," Guanine. These four nucleic acids are bound together in a nearly infinite double helix set of reiterations that constitute the genetic code, or DNA, of living organisms.

While not complicated in principle, synthetic biology is exceptionally tedious and very time consuming. So, it requires an inordinate amount of super-computing capacity to crunch the possible reiterations in the genome sequences of a living creature.

The approach championed by J. Craig Venter and his colleagues is basically a type of “subtraction” of genes. A June 2005 report in The Wall Street Journal summed it up this way:

The project to create an artificial cell dates back to 1995, when Dr. Venter led the first team to sequence all the DNA of a living organism, Haemophilus influenzae. The decoded germ had 1,800 genes, yet M[ycolplasma] genitalium, the second bacterium studied by Dr. Venter’s research group, proved to have fewer than one-third as many. “That started the whole thinking of, ‘How small can it be? What is the minimal definition of life?’” says Dr. Venter. “If we can’t answer that question, we can’t pretend to understand what life is.”...

For practical applications as well, a minimalist genome would be a helpful starting point because the bacteria wouldn’t have any unneeded parts, saving their energy for whatever process they’re being used for... Dr. Venter and a collaborator, Clyde Hutchison, began systematically disabling M. genitalium’s DNA a piece at a time, looking for colonies that could still grow despite the missing parts. From 517 genes, they pared the genome down to a must-have list of between 265 and 350... Drs. Venter and Smith concluded the only way to test the viability of a minimal genetic life form would be to build one. [Brackets added]

According to Specter’s New Yorker article, Venter and his team had by the end of 2008 “pieced together thousands of chemically synthesized fragments of DNA and assembled a new version of the organism.” Specter continues to elaborate how Venter and his team produced the entire genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, the results of which were published in the journal Science in May 2010.

In his interview with Specter, Venter waxed poetic about how “It should be possible to assemble any combination of synthetic and natural DNA segments in any desired order.” It is this type of arrogant explication that has so many ethcists concerned.

Regardless, Venter recently succeeded in transplanting the artificial chromosome into the walls of a undifferentiated cell and then “rebooted” the resulting structure in a sort of Frankenstein-style reanimation. The organism was then able to replicate its own DNA -- becoming the first truly artificial organism. The organism has been dubbed “Synthia.”

This is a strange turn because until now most systems biologists have thought that what makes a given set of chemical associations a living system is the principle of self-organization or what the Greeks called autopoiesis. Here, the principle is turned on its head with the scientist organizing the chemical associations and determining the conditions and processes under which the synthetic organism will replicate itself and therefore at least mimic autopoietic processes.

The promise Venter is making is nothing short of saving the world by repackaging these artifical life forms depending on customer needs or commercial uses. His corporation, Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI) is proposing that it might produce specific cancer-fighting drugs or perhaps an airborne bacterium reprogrammed to digest carbon in the atmosphere. See? Venter only wants to save the planet!

These promises to save the world are front and center on the company website that asks us to celebrate the coming synthetic utopia in which bioengineered organisms will replace coal with clean bioenergy and even allow us to convert greenhouse gases into life-saving vaccines. In the words of the company itself:

J. Craig Venter and his teams have discovered more than 20 million genes to date and view these as the design components of the future. SGI is designing, synthesizing and assembling genes, synthetic chromosomes and even whole genomes to produce clean energy, bio-chemicals and other high value products directly from carbon dioxide, plant biomass and coal.

Image from Synthetic Genomics
Synth-Ethics, or Synthia you ain’t the finest thing...

One might wonder why this story also ended up on the pages of the WSJ instead of just the scientific journals. The answer is as simple as "C," as in Capitalism. Public sector scientists have long viewed Venter as an opportunist who takes technologies developed by investments of the public sector to serve the aims of a for-profit corporate agenda; this happened with sequencing of the human genome and is now happening with the development of synthetic organisms.

Be that as it may, the current corporate development of synthetic life forms by Venter and his investors is entirely a for-profit venture, albeit with the inevitable “Trust us, we are going to save the planet” type of hubris that we have heard from every single previous capitalist-inspired panacea of the past 50 years: From numerical control and computers to robotics; and from biotechnology to nanotechnology and now synthetic biology.

None of these saved the world, ended hunger, or resolved the climate crisis; none ended disease, poverty, or war; none made agriculture more sustainable or equitable. These technologies did make a few investors very wealthy indeed and extended the life of capitalism beyond its moribund Fordist organizational forms of the 1950s.

This has not stopped Venter from trying to peddle a new panacea, based on the cheap promises of his first synthetic life form, with has the way too cute name of “Synthia.” Remember the lyrics from a Bruce Springsteen song called “Cynthia?” With apologies to The Boss, I have to rewrite these:

Synthia, when you come creeping out
You’re an inspirin’ sight
Synthia, under the electron microscope
You don’t smile, but that’s alright

Well now you ain’t the finest thing I’ll never have
Well, baby, it ain’t so bad,
Yeah, there ain’t a banker in this whole town
Who’ll say you ain’t fine
Well you make us rich, honey, when we sell you
To see sump’n’so good, in a world gone bad
There’s still Synthia, oh yeah.

The objections to synthetic biology are more serious than these justifiable complaints about the opportunistic exploitation of social sector investments to advance a private neoliberal agenda and profit making.

Serious analysts and ethicists have launched wide-ranging criticisms of synthetic biology that merit lengthy discussion. In the coming weeks, I will be addressing a selection of the nine most pressing issues of current concern to ethicists, environmental scientists, indigenous communities, and advocates of sustainability, social justice, and equity. These include:

1. Environmental implications and risks
2. Food regulation
3. Biomedical applications
4. Cosmetics regulations
5. Intellectual property
6. Bio-informatics
7. Occupational health
8. Implications for human and ecosystem rights guarantees
9. Trade and global justice.

Suffice it for now, as a matter of introducing this topic to my readers and followers, that there is (1) an excess of hubris by scientists who are also entrepreneurs with a lot to lose if their inventions and investments fail to pan out as imagined; (2) there is also a great deal of arrogance on the part of synthetic biologists who think they can just start snipping and snapping the pieces of the biological puzzle together without truly understanding gene-protein and gene-environment relationships and interactions; and (3) there is no predictive ecology or risk model for the assessment of the risks associated with SB.

The failure to abide by the Precautionary Principle in the past gave us the still-unfolding wreckage of social, economic, ecological, and health problems of commercial agricultural biotechnology and especially transgenic substances in our food supplies. We have an opportunity to prevent a repetition of this mistake and must act now to apply the precautionary principle to the entire domain of synthetic biology.

There should be no commercialization or environmental release of SB organisms until all the scientific evidence on risks has been gathered and evaluated. If the risks are determined to be too great, then the commercial release of synthetic organisms must be completely banned.

This is not a radical proposal. What is radical is the arrogant idea that scientists-cum-capitalists can pretend to have invented masterpieces, like so many colorful gems of genetic art, that they can just release on the rest of us without our consent.

Freeman Dyson is completely wrong when he imagines that “Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.” But he is right about one thing: Many of these will not be masterpieces. No, they will be monstrosities, and once released there is no way to call them back into the confined spaces of the lab or to erase the biological damage and evolutionary havoc they will have unleashed.

It is not a personal thing, like some fashion trend, to unleash a synthetic bacterium on the entire planet, affecting all organisms, whether they wish to be affected or not. That is not personal freedom; it is biological totalitarianism. It is the worst sort of panacea since it carries within it the poison core of a biological Chernobyl while pretending to be our planetary savior served-up by an elitist and avarice-driven few over a powerless, non-consenting multitude.

[A lifelong activist in the environmental justice and resilient agriculture movements, Devon G. Peña is a Professor of American Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He blogs at Environmental and Food Justice.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jane Ayers : Willie Nelson and 300,000 Others Sue Monsanto

Willie Nelson. Image from OTRC.
Occupy the Food System:
Willie Nelson and 300,000
other activists sue Monsanto

By Jane Ayers / Reader Supported News / February 16, 2012

Little did Willie Nelson know when he recorded "Crazy" years ago just how crazy it would become for our cherished family farmers in America.

Nelson, president of Farm Aid, recently called for the national Occupy movement to declare an "Occupy the Food System" action. Nelson said that, "Corporate control of our food system has led to the loss of millions of family farmers, destruction of our soil," and much more.

Hundreds of citizens, including New York City chefs in their white chef hats, joined Occupy the Food System groups and Food Democracy Now, and gathered outside the Federal Courts in Manhattan on January 31, to support organic family farmers in their landmark lawsuit against Big Agribusiness giant Monsanto (Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association v. Monsanto).

Oral arguments were heard that day by 83 plaintiffs representing over 300,000 organic farmers, organic seed growers, and organic seed businesses.

The lawsuit addresses the bizarre and shocking issue of Monsanto's harassing and threatening organic farmers with lawsuits for "patent infringement" if any organic farmer ends up with any trace amount of GM seeds on their organic farmland.

Judge Naomi Buckwald heard the oral arguments on Monsanto’s "motion to dismiss," and the legal team from Public Patent Foundation represented the rights of American organic farmers against Monsanto, maker of GM seeds (as well as Agent Orange, dioxin, etc.).

After hearing the arguments, Judge Buckwald stated that on March 31 she will hand down her decision on whether the lawsuit will move forward to trial.

Not only does this lawsuit raise the issue of Monsanto's potentially ruining the organic farmers’ pure seeds and crops with the introduction of Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) seeds anywhere near the organic farms, but additionally any nearby GM fields that can withstand Monsanto’s Roundup herbicides, thus possibly further contaminating the organic farms nearby if Roundup is used.

Of course, the organic farmers don’t want anything to do with that ol' contaminated GM seed in the first place. In fact, that is why they are certified organic farmers. Hello? But now they have to worry about getting sued by the very monster they abhor, and even have to spend extra money and land (for buffers which only sometimes deter the contaminated seed from being swept by the wind into their crop land).

At this point, they are even having to resort to not growing at all the following organic plants: soybeans, corn, cotton, sugar beets, and canola... just to protect themselves from having any (unwanted) plant that Monsanto could possibly sue them over.

"Crazy, crazy for feeling so….."

The farmers are suffering the threat of possible loss of "right livelihood." They are creating good jobs for Americans, and supplying our purest foods. These organic farmers are bringing Americans healthy food so we can be a healthy nation, instead of the undernourished and obese kids and adults that President Obama worries so much about us becoming.

So what was President Obama doing when he appointed Michael Taylor, a former VP of Monsanto, as senior advisor to the commissioner at the FDA? The FDA is responsible for "label requirements" and recently ruled during Michael Taylor’s time as FDA Food Czar that GMO products did not need to be labeled as such, even though national consumer groups loudly professed the public’s right to know what is genetically modified in the food system.

Sad to remember: President Obama promised in campaign speeches that he would "let folks know what foods are genetically modified." These are the conflicts of interest that lead to the 99% movement standing up for the family farmers.

Just look at the confusing headlines lately that have revealed that Midwestern farms of GM corn will be sprayed with 2,4-D toxins found in the deadly Agent Orange. Just refer to the previous lawsuits taken all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court by U.S. Veterans who tried to argue the dangers of Monsanto’s Agent Orange, and high rates of cancers in our soldiers who had to suffer the side effects from their wartime exposure in Vietnam.

In 1980 alone, when all this mess started with corporations wiping out the livelihoods of family farmers, the National Farm Medicine Center reported that 900 male farmers in the Upper Midwest committed suicide. That was nearly double the national average for white men. Even sadder is the fact that some of the farmers’ children also committed suicide. Studies show that when one generation of family farmers lose their farms, then the next generation usually can’t revive the family business and traditions later.

Jim Gerritsen, president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, has pointed out that there are fifth- and sixth-generation family farmers being pushed off their farms today, and because of a "climate of fear" (from possible lawsuits from Monsanto), they can’t grow some of the food they want to grow.

These farmers are the ones who have been able to survive the changes over the past 20 years by choosing to go into the budding niche of organic farming. Now look at what they have to deal with while trying to grow successful businesses: Monsanto’s threats.

Even organic dairy farmers have had to suffer lawsuits (from Monsanto) when they labeled their organic milk "non-BGH" referring to Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone used by conventional dairies.

Consumers want organic food, and they want America’s pure food source to stay protected in America. Made in America, organically, is the way of the future, and family farmers and seed businesses should be free to maintain their high standards for organic foods. They deserve protection from Big Agribusiness’ dangerous seeds trespassing on their croplands, not to mention the use of pesticides and herbicides on GM crops.

The organic industry has an "organic seal" which is also important to the success of family businesses, and even that stamp of quality is threatened by the spread of Monsanto’s GM seed contaminating their pure seed banks.

The banking industry is also partly to blame. Years before the mortgage crisis and homes fiasco we have now, the farmers were the first to feel the squeeze. I interviewed Willie Nelson in the 1980’s, and he mentioned even then the high rates of farmer suicides, and that Farm Aid was receiving letters from family farmers saying the banks had "called in their loans," even though "we had never missed a payment."

Was this just a veiled land grab for fertile lands, or an attempt to intentionally bankrupt independent family farmers?

It was so inspiring years ago when Michelle Obama planted an organic garden at the White House. It was a great precedent for the future, but what happened? It was ruined when they discovered sewer sludge from previous administrations had contaminated their beautiful soil where the organic vegetables were planted. Just one small upset but it was remedied for future plantings.

What about our whole country’s organic food supply being contaminated by previous adminstrations’ bad choices? Why did they ever allow Monsanto to introduce genetically engineered seeds into our pure, organic, and heirloom stockpiles across America in the first place?

Recently, the Obama Administration, in an effort to boost food exports, signed joint agreements with agricultural biotechnology industry giants, including Monsanto, to remove the last barriers for the spread of more genetically modified crops.

But in this recent lawsuit filed by the Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, it was argued that a previous contamination of a "genetically engineered variety of rice," named Liberty Link 601, in 2006, before it was approved for human consumption, "extensively contaminated the commercial rice supply, resulting in multiple countries banning the import of U.S. rice." The worldwide economic loss was "upward to $1.285 billion dollars" due to the presence of GMOs.

What are everyday Americans going to do to turn it around, to get rid of Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds and the threat they pose to America’s heirloom and organic seed caches?

There is a high rate of cancer in America, and eating healthier, especially organic foods, has been shown to have great benefits in beating cancer and other diseases. When we have agribusiness threatening independent family farmers, which leads to the farmers feeling so scared that they don’t even plant their organic crops that Americans need, then perhaps we can all see what the 99% Occupy movement is trying to say about their conflict of interest and seemingly abuse of powers.

Willie Nelson just released a new poem on You Tube: "We stand with Humanity, against the Insanity, We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for… We’re the Seeds and we’re the Core, We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for; We’re the ones with the 99%."

Monsanto’s practices are a clear example of the direction that the 99% don't want our country to go in. How about shining some light on Monsanto, and before it is too late, realizing the dangers of genetically modified seeds which are contaminating the world’s food supply.

"Crazy, crazy for feeling so…… 99% ."

[Jane Ayers is an independent journalist (USA Today, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, SF Chronicle, Truthout) and is director of Jane Ayers Media. She can be reached at ladywriterjane@gmail.com. This article was published by Nation of Change and distributed by Reader Supported News.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Harvey Wasserman : Why Stewart Brand is Wrong on Nukes

Image from Greenopolis.
Reinventing the Brand:
Whole Earth icon is
Dead wrong on nukes

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2010

Stewart Brand has become a poster boy for a "nuclear renaissance" that has just suffered a quiet but stunning defeat. Despite $645 million spent in lobbying over the past decade, the reactor industry has thus far failed to gouge out major new taxpayer funding for new commercial reactors.

In an exceedingly complex series of twists and turns, no legislation now pending in Congress contains firm commitments to the tens of billions reactor builders have been demanding. They could still come by the end of the session. But the radioactive cake walk many expected the industry to take through the budget process has thus far failed to happen.

The full story is excruciatingly complicated. But the core reasons are simple: atomic power can't compete, and makes global warming worse

In support of this failed 20th Century technology, the industry has enlisted a 20th Century retro-hero, Stewart Brand. Back in the 1960s Brand published the Whole Earth Catalog. Four decades later, that cachet has brought him media access for his advocacy of corporate technologies like genetically modified foods and geo-engineering... and, of course, nuclear energy.

In response to a cover interview in Marin County's Pacific Sun, I wrote the following to explain why Stewart is wrong wrong wrong:

Stewart Brand now seems to equate "science" with a tragic and dangerous corporate agenda. The technologies for which he argues -- nuclear power, "clean" coal, genetically modified crops, etc. -- can be very profitable for big corporations, but carry huge risks for the rest of us. In too many instances, tangible damage has already been done, and more is clearly threatened.

If there is a warning light for what Stewart advocates, it is the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which much of the oil industry said (like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) was "impossible." Then it happened. The $75 million liability limit protecting BP should be ample warning that any technology with a legal liability limit (like nuclear power) cannot be tolerated.

Thankfully, there is good news: We have true green alternatives to these failed 20th-century ideas. They're cheaper, safer, cleaner, more reliable, and more job-producing than the old ways Stewart advocates.

Stewart and I have never met. But we have debated on the radio and online. Thank you, Pacific Sun, for bringing us to print.

Stewart's advocacy does fit a pattern. He appears to have become a paladin for large-scale corporate technologies that may be highly profitable to CEOs and shareholders, but are beyond the control of the average citizen, and work to our detriment. Because he makes so many simple but costly errors, let's try a laundry list:

1. Like other reactor advocates, Stewart cavalierly dismisses the nuclear waste problem by advocating, among other things, the stuff be simply dumped down a deep hole. This is a terribly dangerous idea and will not happen. Suffice it to say that after a half-century of promises (the first commercial reactor opened in Pennsylvania in 1957) the solution now being offered by government and industry is... a committee!!!
   
   Meanwhile, more than 60,000 tons of uniquely lethal spent fuel rods sit at some 65 sites in 31 states with nowhere to go. Like the reactors themselves, they are vulnerable to cooling failure, terror attack, water shortages, overheating of lakes, rivers and oceans, flooding, earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes, and much more. This is no legacy to leave our children.


2. Equally disturbing is the industry's inability to get meaningful private liability insurance. The current federally imposed limit is $11 billion, which would disappear in a meltdown even faster than BP's $75 million in the Gulf. According to the latest compendium of studies, issued this spring by the New York Annals of Science, Chernobyl has killed some 985,000 people, and is by no means finished. It has done at least a half-trillion dollars in damage. The uninsured death toll and financial costs of a similar-scaled accident in the U.S. are incalculable, but would clearly kill millions and bankrupt our nation for the foreseeable future.


3. Stewart points out that there are also risks with wind and solar power. But clearly none that begin to compare with nukes, coal, or deep-water drilling. If reactor owners were forced to find reasonable liability insurance, all would shut. A similar demand for renewables and efficiency would leave them unaffected.


4. Renewable/efficiency technologies today are cheaper, faster to deploy, and more job-creating than nukes. It takes a minimum of five years to license and build a new reactor. The one being done by AREVA in Finland is hugely over budget and behind schedule. There is no reason to expect anything better here. Among other things, the long lead time ties up for too many years the critical social capital that could otherwise go to technology that can quickly let the planet heal.


5. Like others who doubt the possibility of a green-powered Earth, Stewart posits the straw man of reliance on a deployment of solar panels that would blanket the desert and do ecological harm. In fact, the National Renewable Energy Lab estimates 100 percent of the nation's electricity could come from an area 90 miles on a side, or a relatively modest box of 8,100 square miles. But as we all know, that's not how it will be done. Solar panels belong on rooftops, where there is ample area throughout the nation, and an end to transmission costs.
   
   Likewise, wind farms do not "cover" endless acres of prairie, their tower bases take up tiny spots that remain surrounded by productive farmland. In this case, currently available wind turbines spinning between the Mississippi and the Rockies could generate 300 percent of the nation's electricity. There's sufficient potential in North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone to do 100 percent. Cost and installation times put nukes to shame.
   
   The liability is nil, as is the bird kill, which primarily affects obsolete, badly sited fast-spinning machines in places like Altamont Pass. Those must come down, and there will certainly be other surprises along the way. No technology is perfect, and we need to be careful even with those that are green-based. But as we have seen, further threats on the scale of Chernobyl and the Deepwater Horizon cannot be sustained.


6. As for GMO crops, Darwin was right. Plants evolve to avoid herbicides just as bugs work their way around pesticides (which Stewart correctly decries). Now we see that "super-weeds" are outsmarting the carefully engineered herbicides meant to justify the whole GMO scheme, bringing a disastrous reversion to horrific, lethal old sprays. Chemical farming may be good for corporate profits, but it can kill global sustainability. In the long run, only organics can sustain us.


7. Stewart mentions that he is paid only for speeches. But a single such fee can outstrip an entire year's pay for a grassroots organizer or volunteer. What's remarkable is that the nuclear power industry spent some $645 million lobbying for its "renaissance" over the past decade -- more than $64 million/year. It has bought an army of corporate lobbyists and legislators. Yet only a handful of folks with rear guard environmental credentials have stepped forward to fight for the old fossil/nuclear/GMO technologies.

The reinvented Stewart Brand. Photo by Marla Aufmuth / TED.
Stewart is certainly welcome to his own opinions. But not to his own facts. Pushing for a nuclear "renaissance" concedes that it's a Dark Age technology, defined by unsustainable costs, inefficiencies, danger, eco-destruction, radiation releases, lack of insurance, uncertain decommissioning costs, vulnerability to terrorism, and much more.

That the industry must desperately seek taxpayer help, and cannot find insurance for even this "newer, safer" generation, is the ultimate testimony to its failure. By contrast, renewables and efficiency are booming, and are a practical solution to our energy needs, which the corporate clunkers of the previous century simply cannot provide.

It's been a long time since the Whole Earth Catalog was published. Its hallowed founder should wake up to the booming holistic green technologies that are poised to save the Earth. They are ready to roll over the obsolete corporate boondoggles that are killing Her. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, the disasters in the coal mines and the Gulf remind us we need to make that green-powered transition as fast as we possibly can.

[Harvey Wasserman, an early co-founder of the grassroots "No Nukes" movement, is senior adviser to Greenpeace USA, and author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Agriculture : The Uses of Biotechnology

This page has moved. You will be redirected in 5 seconds.

Genetic science in agriculture:
The uses of biotechnology

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / November 22, 2009

I recently wrote about GMO’s on The Rag Blog ("The Future of Agriculture: Genetics and the Limits of Oil") and I want to expand a little on the thoughts I presented in that article.

Biotechnology is a powerful new tool that we are just learning to use, but it can give certain targeted benefits to agriculture. Maybe you could engineer a strain of cotton with some poison alkaloid genes expressed in the cotton bolls to defeat boll weevils for years or a decade, assuming boll weevils were your main problem.

We would all likely agree that we don't want to see Monsanto in charge of this work, but what if some U.S. government lab offered the results of the weevil resistant gene spliced cotton seeds to all southern U.S. farmers, both big and small at low government subsidized cost? A sort of shallow band aid approach reflecting our simple current understanding of gene splicing that might be of obvious benefit for a time, but that ought not to be privatized.

But what if global warming is your main problem, as is typically likely with many food crops? Here gene spicing will do little good. Why?

Because in the case of global warming, you really need to find strains of existing plants where nature and natural selection have already solved the problems of climate acclimation involving many genes in ways we do not understand and won't for many years. This assumes that our government would put a reasonable amount of effort into the basic research, now that we have the lab tools to greatly advance our deep understanding of how biology works.

Global warming (intensifies droughts in the Southwest, and floods in many cases) plus peak oil will hit U.S. and world agriculture quite hard and the forced response will require improved tolerant strains and varieties of crops from our genetic resource banks (now largely privatized?) to be developed and planted.

If I were advising some scholarly young person which branch of science to go into to make a good living for decades to come, I think I would now advise them to go into public sector agricultural science, and perhaps plant breeding in particular. Agriculture will have to become a lot more localized and I believe that crop experts good at passing on practical advice way down to the backyard garden level will be in big demand.

There is another side to the current revolution in genetic science, and that is personal medicine. The use of genome analysis and genetic engineering to solve medical problems on an individual level is likely to become a very profitable and effective branch of medicine since it can provide individualized advice on preventive medicine.

But biotechnology is rapidly moving to China. They have cheap, dependable, and skilled lab workers there and the highly targeted pharmaceuticals and methods like antibodies and genome analysis are labor-intensive.

This all cries out for socialized medicine or strong regulation of the biotechnology industry. Since I assume the Chinese have socialized medicine for their own domestic care, the emphasis maybe should be to ensure that the American companies don't charge a hundred times the real cost/Chinese price for delivering the same medical benefits in the U.S. -- now that we have largely failed to reform the high cost drivers in our medical health delivery system.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

The Future of Agriculture : Genetics and the Limits of Oil

Agriculture, genetics and a sustainable future...

...the oil requirement for U.S. food production and transportation will no doubt loom as a much bigger factor, forcing a restructuring of the food industry.

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / November 18, 2009

An old friend, Val Liveoak, posting on a Rag-junkie list, drew my attention to this interesting article on genetic engineering and its problems.

This got me thinking along the following lines. There are certain problems that, by its nature, genetic engineering can solve in a seemingly miraculous fashion. In the case they mention, the plants seem to have been made successfully insect resistant which takes less insecticide (until the insects evolve a resistance to the plant gene). On the other hand the other gene change making a crop plant herbicide resistant, while requiring use of Roundup herbicide, was encouraging fast natural selection of weeds resistant to that herbicide.

In other words genetic engineering can sometimes give you a narrow targeted benefit for a time as an alternative to selective breeding. But the latter often offers deeper more realistic solutions. Good stable solutions to environmental problems take a long time to evolve, and take the combined orchestration of many genes, in ways we are only beginning to understand. Only recently can we read genomes and relate this information to the plants we eat and use.

For example the best attempts by even the best genetic engineers to tinker with the genes of a common potato to try to make it more resistant to a cold arid climate would no doubt be an utter and complete failure when compared to the more traditional breeding approach. We simply don't now have much more than an initial idea of how the many genes we can now decode are somehow able to cooperate to produce a successful organism.

One had perhaps best start with an Andean Peruvian strain of potato that is well adapted to living in such harsh regions. Then a practical horticultural expert might do multiple generations of cross-breeding with other useful potato strains to come up with a good hardy suitable species, even though this may still have some troublesome quirks. In the United States a century ago, mules, while being infertile, were still widely used to solve practical agriculture power problems.

We are beginning to understand in a scientific way the details of such things as how and why plants survive harsh conditions, and the necessary trade-offs involved. It is proper to expect that the public sector should do open pro bono research, along similar lines to how the NIH was funded for decades, with wide public benefits. Intellectual "property" with wide public benefit in medicine and food production will need to be shielded from the pattern of private corporate profiteering that was somehow tolerated as normal until recently in our wildly-overextended, debt-ridden, infinitely expansionist global economy.

Here in the USA, a shortage of cheap fuel will almost certainly become apparent during the next five years. To help you understand why, here is the link to an excellent introduction to petroleum energy problems by Gail Tverberg of Energy Bulletin, together with some of her conclusions:

Oil production is reaching its limit: The basics of what this means

...There are many views of the task ahead. Some think more research is the answer, or more nuclear, or improved electric transmission plus wind turbines, or electric trains. To a significant extent, these views depend on a person’s view of the timeframe involved, their analysis of where we are now, and their view of how much or how little international trade will be affected in the years ahead.

My personal view is that the main task we should be focusing on now is how to move to a much simpler system—one that depends mostly on locally grown food and locally manufactured goods. This will likely mean a much lower standard of living. Limiting population should probably be a goal, because it will be easier to have enough for all if there are fewer mouths to feed.

I do not see climate change legislation as terribly helpful. Cap and trade will add huge overhead to the system—something we really cannot afford right now. Peak oil is likely to mean a continuing major recession, and a natural decline in fossil fuel use. To me, we would be better off spending our resources developing local agriculture and local manufacturing, and perhaps even sailing ships.

Since monoculture of crops is helping to encourage a lot of the bad habits of corporate agriculture (see Paul Roberts' book, "The End of Food"), why not solve two problems at once? Why is our normal city school education blind to agriculture? Why not encourage residential rainwater harvesting, and building rich absorbent organic soils appropriate to localized backyard agriculture as preparation for involving a high percentage of the local population involved in food production? If we believe external circumstances will eventually prod us along in that direction, why not raise our consciousness now and get a head start?

If we are going to have a safe and sustainable future fifty years from now, we are going to have to limit population and live a harder life, involving more of our time spent on growing and obtaining food. Everyone may have the ultimate pocket gadgets to stay in touch, but I think local community organization is still going to have to come back in some sense, maybe like the old Israeli agricultural cooperatives.

I think staples, grain and legume and vegetable oil production should be socialized like the ancient Roman daily grain allotment, whereas fresh produce should be more a free enterprise small farm local economics. Trucks and highways will largely have to give way to rail, which is slow and limited in range but very energy efficient. Slow water transport is so inherently efficient it will make a comeback.

This is what I see as a relatively optimistic well managed quasi-socialist scenario for the USA. You don't have to go far to find worse prediction, but if we are smart and remember our sense of humanity, we could muddle through the next few decades with a certain grace.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Monsanto : Those Genetically-Modified Self-Destructing Seed Planting Blues

Image from photobucket.
Monsanto : Ripe for the plucking

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2009

I see in the business news, Midwest version, that Monsanto is raising the price of seed 42%.

These jerkwads make genetically modified seeds that are supposed to self-destruct so farmers can't plant "legacy" crops. They also make farmers sign a contract to that effect and they DO sue if their customers don't rebuy but still appear to be growing the same stuff.

In the Midwest, that's called "turning farmers into sharecroppers."

Anyway, one of the first things the Obamites did was move Antitrust out of the Department of Commerce, where Bush had parked it (Can you say "Too big to fail?"), and put it back in Justice.

By contrast, the first thing the Bush Administration did was give away everything the government won in the Microsoft anti-trust case... and then they moved the whole deal out of Justice.

With any luck, Monsanto will be the first "victim" of the new Obama attitude. Would be good for farmers.

While I'm up here in Indiana, I have to pay attention to what happens to farmers, since I teach their kids.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Hawai‘i : Runaway Technology Vs. the Good Food Revolution

Hawaiian taro patch. Photo by Kirk Lee Aeder / HVCB Image Library.
The Good Food Revolution

On Kaua‘i, too, there are people engaged in remembering and reconnecting. Unlike the dry west side of the island, the North Shore is a lush place of almost heartbreaking beauty with a vibrant, racially mixed local culture.

By Claire Hope Cummings / March 9, 2009

The lush landscape of Hawai‘i once offered abundant food. What can these islands teach us about food and sufficiency?

The island of Kaua‘i is one of the most beautiful and fragile places on earth. From above, it looks like a vibrant green flower, lush and pulsing with life, floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The Hawaiian tourist industry calls it “The Garden Isle,” comparing it to the Garden of Eden. The image of Hawai‘i has always been sold as a “paradise.” But there is another side to life on this island, one that visitors rarely see.

The west side of this tiny island is home to the U.S. military’s Pacific Missile Range and testing grounds, part of the longstanding military occupation of the Hawaiian islands, and to the headquarters of giant agrochemical corporations Syngenta and Dupont. These corporations test and produce genetically modified crops on former sugar plantation lands here and throughout Hawai‘i, along with toxic herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers. It is the very worst of America’s “agrochemical military industrial complex,” imposed on the ancient homelands of a rich traditional farming and fishing culture, in the midst of some of the world’s most precious biodiversity.

When I visited the west side of Kaua‘i in 2006, the local newspapers were full of reports of children from Waimea Canyon School who had been sickened by chemicals used on nearby test plots. As many as 60 people were affected, including teachers and staff. It happened again in 2007, with school children suffering nausea, headaches, and dizziness. In 2008, for the third time in three years, chemicals being tested for industrial agriculture sickened children and adults and sent them to clinics and the emergency room with tears in their eyes, holding their heads in their hands, or vomiting. The corporations responsible for the tests deny any role in the incidences. But the open air testing of chemicals and genetically modified crops is a now a persistent worry for people living in this small rural community. Local activists have suggested that the welcome sign at the Kaua‘i airport be changed to warn tourists of what is going on there: “Welcome to the Mutant Garden Island.” Instead of being a source of health and well-being for the land and people, the American system of industrial agriculture has become a source of problematic food and even fear.

The connection to the military is the key to understanding how this tragedy came about. Most of the toxic chemicals used in agriculture came from the implements of war, such as nerve poisons and defoliants developed during World War II. And our military has been repeatedly used to impose our system of industrial agriculture on other lands, depriving traditional farmers of their livelihoods and redirecting their natural resources to the use of U.S. business interests. American plantation owners used the military to force the monarchy of Hawai‘i out of power. The takeover of Hawai‘i—the imposition of plantation agriculture on Hawai‘i’s traditional system and the conversion of the Hawaiian people to a Western lifestyle—is a case history and a warning for all of us concerned about the future of food. We are facing an urgent problem: Given global warming, growing populations, and declining natural resources, how will we feed ourselves?

Before colonization, Hawaiians had a sophisticated system of land, water, and ocean resource use that fed populations equal to or even greater than those on several of the islands today (excluding the urban populations of O‘ahu). Now, residents of Hawai‘i import 85 percent of their food. The descendants of the first Hawaiians, like most native peoples who have been colonized, suffer from some of the worst poverty and diet-related health problems of anyone living in the United States.

The food being imported into Hawai‘i is produced, processed, packaged, and transported using enormous amounts of fossil fuels. By one measure, the current U.S. food system uses 10 times more energy than it produces in the form of food calories. Even if you like industrial agriculture, its built-in obsolescence is a problem. When oil production peaks, and prices rise again, as they inevitably must, food in Hawai‘i will become unaffordable. What will happen when the gas pumps and grocery store shelves are empty? This is a question all of us will face, sooner or later, since we are all on what David Brower called “Earth Island,” a small planet floating in a sea of space.

A Storied Land

Mythologists like Joseph Campbell tell us that many creation myths are stories about how a food plant or animal came to people, usually as a gift from their creator. But invariably, these gifts came with instructions about maintaining respect for and reciprocity with the sources of one’s food, to assure its continuing productivity. These stories are central to the formation of a culture’s core values. And they affect us now, not just in how we feed ourselves, but in how we relate to the natural world and each other.

A Hopi creation story, as told by Frank Waters in The Book of the Hopi, is a good example, illustrating the values inherent in the choices we make. As Waters explains, the continuity of the Hopi people comes from these values and the way corn forms the sacred center of their lives, kept alive in ritual and practices to this day.

Since the beginning of their existence, the Hopi have emerged through several worlds. Whenever they were overwhelmed by wickedness or corruption, their world would be destroyed. Later, they would emerge into the next world. At each emergence, the Creator would give them corn for sustenance. When the people entered the Fourth World, the one we are living in now, the Creator decided to find out how much greed and ignorance there still was among these humans. Many ears of corn were laid out of all different shapes, sizes, and colors. The people had divided into many races, and each was told to choose, according to its wisdom, the corn they would take with them into the Fourth World. They rushed forward and took different corn ears—long ears, fat ears, and ears of different colors. The Hopi held back and waited. All that was left for them was the smallest ear. But, they said, it was like “the original humble ear given them on the First World.” They recognized that this corn would be the best one to help them survive the harsh desert climate where they now lived.

Traditional people worldwide have developed long-standing symbiotic relationships among themselves, their homelands, and their foods. And their farming practices are intimately adapted to the places they inhabit. All over the Americas, people developed corn varieties that were finely tuned to local conditions. According to Boone Hallberg, a botanist and one of the world’s experts on corn, some of these varieties were drought-resistant; some withstood wind, crowding, local pests, and different soils; and some even fixed their own nitrogen. These plants are evidence of an incredible genius at work in the reciprocal relationships among people, plants, and place. New Mexican activist Miguel Santistevan describes how, in the Pueblos, each type of corn “drank” from its own river, producing seed that was specific to its own watershed.

One of the world’s most influential creation stories comes from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. It is often told incorrectly, without the warnings and prohibitions that are in the story—as if the children of Adam and Eve were entitled to control creation. Whether you read this story literally or metaphorically, it has had a powerful impact on Western thought. Many scholars believe that our current environmental conditions came about because our society interpreted this story as a license to dominate nature. When told this way, the development of our military-industrial system of agriculture makes sense. We can see the long arc of history, the search-and-destroy missions throughout the ages, including manifest destiny and the conquest of native peoples, their lands, and their well-developed integrated food systems.

And the good, no, the really wonderful news, is that all over the world, people are engaged in relearning traditional ways, weaving them into new life-enhancing technologies, and making essential ecological and economic reconnections.

We can see the gradual and painful dismembering of North America. Europeans brought with them a fragmented system of agriculture, breaking the sod, fencing, and buying and selling parcels of land. Piece by piece, they went about destroying the natural systems that gave this land its enormous fertility. Their ancestors had deforested many European countries, and they continued seeking sustenance by taking more than was returned, depleting the resources they used, and then moving on. After using up the larger landscapes, they now have turned to smaller frontiers—genes and molecules.

Genetic engineering in agriculture was developed as a way to squeeze more from corn, wheat, and rice, turning these plants into little machines. We demanded that these plants put out more and more for us, and pumped them full of chemicals and hormones. Now, almost 80 percent of corn grown in the United States is genetically modified. The rest is contaminated with GMOs, and the parent seed lines of corn are privately owned by the agrochemical companies. If we cared to learn, corn would have been able to teach us about generosity, adaptability, and resiliency. But rather than learn from nature, we still believe that our limited human imagination is sufficient and that we can solve systemic problems in mechanistic ways.

This approach is fundamentally flawed. Production-based solutions to hunger have failed miserably. And yet the urge to control nature seems unbounded. Farmers at the beginning of the 20th century could make a decent living. They saved and exchanged seeds, and bred their own crop varieties.

Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, a growing private seed industry used the new medium of radio advertising to heavily promote commercial hybrid seeds as the way to increase production. Hybrids can be bred to increase vigor, but they do not produce seed that is “true,” meaning that each year new hybrid seeds have to be purchased and planted. On-farm seed saving and plant breeding began to go out of fashion. Not content with just a good share of the seed market, seed companies began pushing for changes to the law, and by the end of the 20th century, farm-based seed saving and plant breeding ended. Now, sexually reproducing, living plants can be patented—a moral, biological, and legal outrage.

American commodity agriculture has become a bloated industrial machine dependent on chemical inputs and government subsidies to survive. Commodity farming is not about food for people. It’s an extractive industry, often compared to mining. It mines the soil and pollutes the water and creates mountains and rivers of waste. Soil regenerates on a slow natural timescale, about one inch of topsoil in every 500 years. The United States is losing topsoil 13 times faster than it can be replaced, costing the nation an estimated $37.6 billion in productivity losses each year. According to a recent U.S. Geological Survey, the one billion pounds of pesticides that American farmers use every year have contaminated almost all of the nation’s streams and rivers, as well as the fish living in them, with toxic cancer-causing chemicals. Fertilizers pour off farms into the Mississippi watershed, stimulating algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico and creating a “dead zone” where nothing lives.

If science had remained publicly funded and in the hands of land grant universities committed to conducting research in the public interest, production-based innovations might have added another useful tool to farm technology. Instead, private commercial interests hijacked the research agenda and privatized its technologies. Corporations and a few foundations took over the social mechanisms for problem solving, leaving us with only for-profit solutions in the form of products. Government not only deregulated many toxic technologies; it abdicated its responsibility to protect our health and safety.

There are no brakes on this runaway technology train. The continual expansion of corporate power poses even greater looming dangers. Biotechnology, especially as used in agriculture, has been harmful enough, but nanotechnology and synthetic biology, now being developed for biofuels, promise to do far more harm than good.

Industrial agriculture contributes almost 17 percent of all greenhouse gases, along with accelerating deforestation, desertification, and profligate water use. A study released in January this year in the journal Science predicts that half of the world’s population will face food shortages by the end of this century as rising temperatures, drought, and loss of soil moisture depress crop production. Who, indeed, will be feeding us then? Monsanto, with its patented “climate-ready” crops, or the organic farmer who sells at your local farmers market?

As a Native American friend of mine used to say, “Here’s a little bit of native wisdom: If we don’t change direction pretty soon, we’ll end up right where we’ve been headed!”

Severing and Remembering

Another way to look at this rather dismal story is this: At every step of the way, we have disconnected and dismembered the intricate relationships that form the web of life. Recombinant DNA technology, for instance, cuts a genome, inserts foreign material, and severs the original evolutionary lineage of that organism.

The solution to all this severing and disconnection is re-membering, meaning “to put back together.” This is the fundamental lesson traditional peoples keep trying to teach us. They often say that they are minding the rituals that hold the world together. They say that if we want to save the places, peoples, and plants we love, we have to remember their stories. They know that the answers we seek are already available, once we begin reweaving the social and biological webs that sustain us.

Independent science supports this interconnected approach to solving problems. The biotechnology industry asked several major international institutions like the U.N. and the World Bank to study how best to feed the world. After a four-year global study, 400 experts prepared a peer-reviewed report, adopted by 60 countries, known as The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. Ironically, the report said biotechnology cannot feed the world. There is now a consensus in government and the scientific community that small-scale farming, traditional knowledge, and a focus on local economic vitality and adaptable agro-ecological methods are the optimal way forward.

And the good, no, the really wonderful news, is that all over the world, people are engaged in relearning traditional ways, weaving them into new life-enhancing technologies, and making essential ecological and economic reconnections. Young farmers, urban activists, cooks and chefs, teachers and students, community organizers, and faith groups are bringing local organic food, seed saving, and sustainable work projects into the mix. The values of the natural world—diversity, integrity, adaptability, and resiliency—are reemerging and re-entering the cultural exchange, just when we need them the most.

On Kaua‘i, too, there are people engaged in remembering and reconnecting. Unlike the dry west side of the island, the North Shore is a lush place of almost heartbreaking beauty with a vibrant, racially mixed local culture. There, the Waipa Foundation hosts a weekly farmers market selling organic local food to support its work reviving traditional foodways. Like many Native Hawaiian organizations, they have a Hawaiian-language immersion school that integrates traditional food, farming, and fishing into their curriculum. They connect local farmers with schools, which are getting young people out of the classroom and into the mud of the taro patch. Activists on the island and throughout Hawai‘i are working toward food security. They achieved a ban on genetically modified coffee and are bringing back the original “gift economy” of exchanging traditional varieties of taro.

Just up the road from the Waipa farmers market, Limahuli Garden is restoring the traditional Hawaiian land-use system called an ahupua‘a. Kawika Winter, an engaging young ethnobotanist, Native Hawaiian, and the garden’s director, says the name lima huli means “turned hand.” It refers to a Hawaiian proverb which, roughly translated, says, “If your hand is turned up, you will be hungry; if your hand is turned down, toward the soil, your belly will be full.” The up-turned hand, Winter says, is not a positive symbol for Hawaiians. It is a sign of supplication. The down-turned hand, however, represents the hard work of cultivating the land.

Winter explains that the work they are doing there is all about remembering that the land is our ancestor. “We know that the way to get through difficult times is to use what was left to us—our land and our traditional knowledge. That will carry us into the future,” he says. “This is also our gift to the world.”

[Claire Hope Cummings wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Claire is an environmental lawyer, journalist, and the author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Beacon Press, 2008).]

Source / Yes! Magazine

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Genetically Modified Crops and the Coming Capitalist Consensus

"GMO giant Monsanto is steamrolling India:" A Greenpeace protester sprays milk-based paint on a Monsanto research soybean field near Atlantic, Iowa. AP photo.

These folks are pushing Genetically Modified crops (GMO's) onto the Third World in the name of ending hunger, much as the Rockefellers did with the 'Green Revolution' that was used to open world markets to chemical and hybrid agriculture.

By Scott Pittman / The Rag Blog / February 3, 2009

Walden Bello has written a chilling essay about "The Coming Capitalist Consensus" [see below] for Foreign Policy In Focus.

This is one of the most succinct articles I have read on what we face right now. This is the beguiling rhetoric that has been brewing for the past five to eight years. If you notice, you have Bill Gates, and George Soros listed as part of this pack; they are joined by the Rockefeller brothers in Arkansas, The World Bank and other Capitalist cheerleaders.

The first so called revolutions killed millions of villagers around the world, just as now the GMO giant Monsanto is steamrolling India into the second go round of "squeezing blood from a turnip" which has resulted in unprecedented suicides among farmers who have lost their farmland to bad debt incurred from this unholy technology.

No one has talked to the farmers of India or of Africa as Gates and the Rockefellers put their millions to work convincing the various governing bodies in those countries to get on board the gravy train. They have managed to get Kofi Annan to sign on. This whole campaign is driven with the cynical appeal to world hunger which is a perfect neoliberal slogan to convince the ignorant and environmental poseurs of the campaign's good intentions.

While we are focused on major bank greed and bailouts the uber rich are plotting control of the world's food! What is really unsettling about this is that I think that Gates, and perhaps Soros think that they are doing a good thing. Being rich, unfortunately, doesn't mean you have to be smart. The World Bank, on the other hand, knows exactly what it's doing.

[ScottPittman, a former Austin activist and contributor to The Rag in Sixties Austin, is director of the Permaculture Institute.]

The Coming Capitalist Consensus
By Walden Bello

Not surprisingly, the swift unraveling of the global economy combined with the ascent to the U.S. presidency of an African-American liberal has left millions anticipating that the world is on the threshold of a new era. Some of President-elect Barack Obama’s new appointees – in particular ex-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to lead the National Economic Council, New York Federal Reserve Board chief Tim Geithner to head Treasury, and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk to serve as trade representative – have certainly elicited some skepticism. But the sense that the old neoliberal formulas are thoroughly discredited have convinced many that the new Democratic leadership in the world’s biggest economy will break with the market fundamentalist policies that have reigned since the early 1980s.

One important question, of course, is how decisive and definitive the break with neoliberalism will be. Other questions, however, go to the heart of capitalism itself. Will government ownership, intervention, and control be exercised simply to stabilize capitalism, after which control will be given back to the corporate elites? Are we going to see a second round of Keynesian capitalism, where the state and corporate elites along with labor work out a partnership based on industrial policy, growth, and high wages – though with a green dimension this time around? Or will we witness the beginnings of fundamental shifts in the ownership and control of the economy in a more popular direction? There are limits to reform in the system of global capitalism, but at no other time in the last half century have those limits seemed more fluid.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has already staked out one position. Declaring that “laissez-faire capitalism is dead,” he has created a strategic investment fund of 20 billion euros to promote technological innovation, keep advanced industries in French hands, and save jobs. “The day we don’t build trains, airplanes, automobiles, and ships, what will be left of the French economy?” he recently asked rhetorically. “Memories. I will not make France a simple tourist reserve.” This kind of aggressive industrial policy aimed partly at winning over the country’s traditional white working class can go hand-in-hand with the exclusionary anti-immigrant policies with which the French president has been associated.

Global Social Democracy

A new national Keynesianism along Sarkozyan lines, however, is not the only alternative available to global elites. Given the need for global legitimacy to promote their interests in a world where the balance of power is shifting towards the South, western elites might find more attractive an offshoot of European Social Democracy and New Deal liberalism that one might call “Global Social Democracy” or GSD.

Even before the full unfolding of the financial crisis, partisans of GSD had already been positioning it as alternative to neoliberal globalization in response to the stresses and strains being provoked by the latter. One personality associated with it is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who led the European response to the financial meltdown via the partial nationalization of the banks. Widely regarded as the godfather of the “Make Poverty History” campaign in the United Kingdom, Brown, while he was still the British chancellor, proposed what he called an “alliance capitalism” between market and state institutions that would reproduce at the global stage what he said Franklin Roosevelt did for the national economy: “securing the benefits of the market while taming its excesses.” This must be a system, continued Brown, that “captures the full benefits of global markets and capital flows, minimizes the risk of disruption, maximizes opportunity for all, and lifts up the most vulnerable – in short, the restoration in the international economy of public purpose and high ideals.”

Joining Brown in articulating the Global Social Democratic discourse has been a diverse group consisting of, among others, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, George Soros, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the sociologist David Held, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and even Bill Gates. There are, of course, differences of nuance in the positions of these people, but the thrust of their perspectives is the same: to bring about a reformed social order and a reinvigorated ideological consensus for global capitalism.

Among the key propositions advanced by partisans of GSD are the following:

• Globalization is essentially beneficial for the world; the neoliberals have simply botched the job of managing it and selling it to the public;
• It is urgent to save globalization from the neoliberals because globalization is reversible and may, in fact, already be in the process of being reversed;
• Growth and equity may come into conflict, in which case one must prioritize equity;
• Free trade may not, in fact, be beneficial in the long run and may leave the majority poor, so it is important for trade arrangements to be subject to social and environmental conditions;
• Unilateralism must be avoided while fundamental reform of the multilateral institutions and agreements must be undertaken – a process that might involve dumping or neutralizing some of them, like the WTO’s Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs);
• Global social integration, or reducing inequalities both within and across countries, must accompany global market integration;
• The global debt of developing countries must be cancelled or radically reduced, so the resulting savings can be used to stimulate the local economy, thus contributing to global reflation;
• Poverty and environmental degradation are so severe that a massive aid program or “Marshall Plan” from the North to the South must be mounted within the framework of the “Millennium Development Goals”;
• A “Second Green Revolution” must be put into motion, especially in Africa, through the widespread adoption of genetically engineered seeds.
• Huge investments must be devoted to push the global economy along more environmentally sustainable paths, with government taking a leading role (“Green Keynesianism” or “Green Capitalism”);
• Military action to solve problems must be deemphasized in favor of diplomacy and “soft power,” although humanitarian military intervention in situations involving genocide must be undertaken.

The Limits of Global Social Democracy

Global Social Democracy has not received much critical attention, perhaps because many progressives are still fighting the last war, that is, against neoliberalism. A critique is urgent, and not only because GSD is neoliberalism’s most likely successor. More important, although GSD has some positive elements, it has, like the old Social Democratic Keynesian paradigm, a number of problematic features.

A critique might begin by highlighting problems with four central elements in the GSD perspective.

First, GSD shares neoliberalism’s bias for globalization, differentiating itself mainly by promising to promote globalization better than the neoliberals. This amounts to saying, however, that simply by adding the dimension of “global social integration,” an inherently socially and ecologically destructive and disruptive process can be made palatable and acceptable. GSD assumes that people really want to be part of a functionally integrated global economy where the barriers between the national and the international have disappeared. But would they not in fact prefer to be part of economies that are subject to local control and are buffered from the vagaries of the international economy? Indeed, today’s swift downward trajectory of interconnected economies underscores the validity of one of anti-globalization movement’s key criticisms of the globalization process..

Second, GSD shares neoliberalism’s preference for the market as the principal mechanism for production, distribution, and consumption, differentiating itself mainly by advocating state action to address market failures. The kind of globalization the world needs, according to Jeffrey Sachs in The End of Poverty, would entail “harnessing…the remarkable power of trade and investment while acknowledging and addressing limitations through compensatory collective action.” This is very different from saying that the citizenry and civil society must make the key economic decisions and the market, like the state bureaucracy, is only one mechanism of implementation of democratic decision-making.

Third, GSD is a technocratic project, with experts hatching and pushing reforms on society from above, instead of being a participatory project where initiatives percolate from the ground up.

Fourth, GSD, while critical of neoliberalism, accepts the framework of monopoly capitalism, which rests fundamentally on deriving profit from the exploitative extraction of surplus value from labor, is driven from crisis to crisis by inherent tendencies toward overproduction, and tends to push the environment to its limits in its search for profitability. Like traditional Keynesianism in the national arena, GSD seeks in the global arena a new class compromise that is accompanied by new methods to contain or minimize capitalism’s tendency toward crisis. Just as the old Social Democracy and the New Deal stabilized national capitalism, the historical function of Global Social Democracy is to iron out the contradictions of contemporary global capitalism and to relegitimize it after the crisis and chaos left by neoliberalism. GSD is, at root, about social management.

Obama has a talent for rhetorically bridging different political discourses. He is also a “blank slate” when it comes to economics. Like FDR, he is not bound to the formulas of the ancien regime. He is a pragmatist whose key criterion is success at social management. As such, he is uniquely positioned to lead this ambitious reformist enterprise.

Reveille for Progressives

While progressives were engaged in full-scale war against neoliberalism, reformist thinking was percolating in critical establishment circles. This thinking is now about to become policy, and progressives must work double time to engage it. It is not just a matter of moving from criticism to prescription. The challenge is to overcome the limits to the progressive political imagination imposed by the aggressiveness of the neoliberal challenge in the 1980s combined with the collapse of the bureaucratic socialist regimes in the early 1990s. Progressives should boldly aspire once again to paradigms of social organization that unabashedly aim for equality and participatory democratic control of both the national economy and the global economy as prerequisites for collective and individual liberation.

Like the old post-war Keynesian regime, Global Social Democracy is about social management. In contrast, the progressive perspective is about social liberation.

[Walden Bello is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, and a professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.]

Source / Foreign Policy in Focus / Originally posted Dec. 24, 2008.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Rice University : A Beer That Fights Cancer and Heart Disease!

Genetic engineering could give Joe Six Pack anti-aging and cancer-fighting benefits
By Sharon Gaudin / October 21, 2008

Have you ever picked up a cold, frosty beer on a hot summer's day and thought that it simply couldn't get any better?

Well, you may have to think again.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin in June had called resveratrol, which is a natural component of grapes, pomegranates and red wine, a key reason for the so-called French Paradox -- the observation that French people have lower rates of heart disease despite a cuisine known for its cream sauces and decadent cheeses, all loaded with heart-clogging saturated fats.

The Wisconsin researchers had noted that adding small doses of resveratrol to the diet of middle-aged mice significantly slows their aging and keeps their hearts healthy. And they added that giving high doses to invertebrates extends their life spans, and high doses also stave off premature death in mice fed a high-fat diet.

Stevenson said that the Rice research group, most of the members of which aren't old enough to legally drink alcoholic beverages, came up with the idea of adding resveratrol to beer during a casual conversation about potential projects to undertake. "The idea is that it may have greater effects [in beer than in wine]," he added. "The amount of red wine you'd need to drink to get the same results they get with rats in labs is about half a bottle a day."

He explained that the amount of resveratrol in wine varies from bottle to bottle, since it depends on growing conditions for the grapes and other variables. The researchers felt they could design a beer with higher and more consistent concentrations of the cancer-fighting chemical.

The students, using their own Dell, Lenovo ThinkPad and Gateway laptops, are now in the process of developing a genetically modified strain of yeast that will ferment beer and produce resveratrol at the same time. Stevenson said that as the research advances, the team will need to use one of Rice University's computer grids to run compute-heavy genetic models.

The Rice effort is the latest in a series of projects that use technology to find cures to major health concerns like cancer and heart disease.

In August, scientists at Stanford University announced that they have found a way to use nanotechnology to have chemotherapy drugs target only cancer cells, keeping healthy tissue safe from the treatment's toxic effects.

And in July, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, reported that they had discovered a way to use nanotechnology-based "smart bombs" to streamline lower doses of chemotherapy treatments to cancerous tumors, cutting down on the cancer's ability to spread throughout the body.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin announced in May that they had developed a silicon chip that they say can more quickly and accurately diagnose heart attacks.

Stevenson noted that the lab strains of yeast the team used initially certainly wouldn't produce a tasty beer. The taste issue is why the team this summer turned to the Saint Arnold Brewing Co., a craft brewery in Houston, for some good beer-making yeast to use. In general, the addition of the resveratrol shouldn't affect the taste of the beer, since the chemical is odorless and tasteless, he said.

"We're now putting these genes into the yeast," he added. "We're fairly confident that it will work because all the components have worked separately."

Stevenson said the modified yeast strain could one day be sold to breweries where beverage companies could make their own disease-fighting beer. He noted that the research and development phase of the effort could take five years.

The research team is looking to enter their so-called BioBeer in the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition next month in Cambridge, Mass.

Source / Computerworld

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Old McDonald Had a Pharm...

...And genetically modified his goats and chickens to produce drugs for humans.

But hold on. Should we be doing this to animals?
By Elizabeth Svoboda / June 11, 2008

Encompassed by pastoral green fields, the headquarters of GTC Biotherapeutics looks like any other New England farmstead. But its serenity is deceiving. Behind barn doors, the farm's most valuable employees -- a herd of pygmy goats from New Zealand -- are working round the clock, their milk glands churning out hundreds of gallons of high-grade pharmaceutical compounds.

The white gold extracted from the goats' udders will someday command big bucks in the American healthcare marketplace -- or so GTC hopes. The company's genetically modified animals possess a human gene that allows them to produce milk rich with a protein called antithrombin, which helps prevent blood clots from forming and staves off related conditions like heart attacks and strokes

Tom Newberry, GTC's vice president of corporate communications, leads me into a corrugated-metal hutch. Goats enclosed in pens train inquisitive rectangular pupils on us and poke their heads through the bars. "They're looking for a handout," Newberry says, chuckling. But we can't give these goats kibble or even a pat on the head; that would be a breach of strict sanitary regulations.

ATryn, GTC's goat-derived antithrombin, cleared its first regulatory hurdle in 2006 when the European Commission approved it for sale in all 25 European Union countries. This past fall, GTC successfully lobbied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to designate ATryn as a "fast-track product," making it eligible for accelerated review on this side of the Atlantic.

But GTC is out to prove it's no one-trick ruminant. Staff scientists have created transgenic goats that can churn out a smorgasbord of human proteins, including compounds that halt tumor blood-vessel development and blood-clotting factors for hemophiliacs. Protein-based human antibodies that protect against all kinds of diseases -- from SARS to incurable cancers -- could be next in the dairy pipeline.

A bevy of biotech companies is crowding the drug market with takes on the transgenic-remix concept. Origen, located in Burlingame, Calif., is developing a transgenic production line that employs chickens instead of goats as drug incubators. The company has bred birds that produce a range of human anticancer proteins and other antibodies in their eggs. In Athens, Ga., AviGenics is using a transgenic-chicken system to make a protein compound that stimulates the bone marrow to make more white blood cells -- essential in helping cancer patients bounce back after chemotherapy.

"Transgenic drug technology has been in the incubation stage for a long time," says Robert Kay, president and CEO of Origen. "But within the next five to 10 years, we should be seeing many new products in the clinic and pushing their way toward approval." Future drug-producing menageries, he predicts, will include pigs, cows and rabbits.

While these transgenic pioneers might seem to be cruising toward FDA approval, the road is hardly without obstacles. To the frustration of executives like Kay and Newberry, most of the snags are not financial or logistical but arise from people's reflexive reactions -- as in, Omigod, they're putting human genes into animals! It's "The Island of Dr. Moreau" made real.

But the revulsion to transgenic animals is more than reflexive; some animal biologists say biotech companies are overselling the safety of the resulting drugs. Meanwhile, ethicists question whether we should be restyling animals as drug producers at all.

GTC transforms goats into drug factories thanks to a recently perfected biological sleight of hand. Once a goat embryo is artificially fertilized in the lab, technicians zero in on the portion of the goat's genome that codes for a sugar found in goat milk and insert a human gene that codes for a naturally occurring protein. When the animal reaches maturity and begins producing milk, every cup of the white stuff contains large quantities of the therapeutic protein, which can be chemically extracted in pure form. "The mammary gland is nature's way of making proteins that are nutritious for offspring," Newberry says. "All we're doing is placing extra DNA coding in this natural pathway."

Before transgenic breeding, pharmaceutical companies normally extracted such protein compounds from donated blood plasma. But to get the same kilogram of antithrombin that a single transgenic goat produces each year, you'd have to get 50,000 people to donate blood -- a time-consuming process with its own inherent risks. "It's so bloody expensive, excuse the pun," Newberry says, "and the Red Cross just got hit with another set of fines for insufficient screening. Now, would you rather have a drug derived from human blood donors, or from our goats, given that we know where they slept last night?"

That question ignores a key fact. "Using goats for drug production has unpredictable effects, and the genetic inheritance of the modified genes is not a given -- 90 to 99 percent of the animals bred are killed immediately because they don't incorporate the desired gene," says Jessica Sandler, director of the regulatory testing division at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Creating transgenic animals does indeed have a high failure rate. With the technique known as pronuclear injection, only about one to 10 of every 100 attempts results in transgenic offspring, producing a high number of animals typically earmarked for euthanasia. The more sophisticated nuclear-transfer method that GTC uses ensures that virtually 100 percent of viable offspring are transgenic. Still, the transgene does not always land in the targeted section of the genome, and some offspring end up with severe birth defects for reasons that are still not well understood.

Tom Regan, a philosophy professor emeritus at North Carolina State University and author of "Empty Cages," sees the death and suffering of defective animals as a grave ethical misstep. "The animals used for these purposes are in fundamental ways like us -- their behavior tells us they're like us, evolutionary theory tells us they're like us," he says. "What we have with transgenic research is another incentive for reducing animals to something whose purpose for being in the world is to serve human interests. And that's fundamentally flawed."

Others contend that raising animals to produce drugs is no crueler than raising them for agricultural purposes. "I've been involved in this for a long time, and the animals we have are positively spoiled," says dairy scientist Robert Bremel, founder of transgenics company ioGenetics. "If the drug product is innocuous to the animals themselves, they do fine."

Debates over animals' welfare and self-determination aside, there's the question of whether transgenic animals will produce drugs that create unexpected side effects in humans. "We have to be careful about the activation of retroviral or pathogenic agents," says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists' food and environment program, adding that human drug products derived from animals could potentially pass on such pathogens to recipients.

Spurred by similar worries, the National Academy of Sciences' research council formed a committee to assess the safety of animal biotechnology products. "The mere fact that something is produced by a genetically altered animal does not make it harmful," says John Vandenbergh, a biologist who chaired the committee. "But there was concern that some of these new proteins could induce allergic reactions in people." The report the committee issued in 2002 recommended controls to keep transgenic animal products out of the food supply. (GTC adheres strictly to such standards, Newberry says: "We don't sell our milk, and we give our dead goats to a licensed contractor that incinerates them.")

To be sure, squeamishness about human-animal hybrids has a storied pedigree: Geryon of Dante's "Inferno," who dwells in the lowest circles of hell, is a fearsome crossbreed with a human face and a scaly tail. But is equating chimerism with fallen virtue still justified? What rules should govern foisting part of the genetic code that makes us human -- no matter how small -- onto chickens, goats and rabbits?

"With chimeras, we are challenging our concepts of what it means to be 'human,'" bioethicist Linda MacDonald Glenn, a former ethics fellow at the American Medical Association, said in a 2003 speech. "We need to be prepared to ask, 'How can we preserve our human rights and dignity despite the fact that our "humanness" may no longer be the exclusive possession of Homo sapiens?'"

Today, Glenn still struggles with questions about what "humanness" signifies. "If you say, 'Humans are the ones who can reason,' what happens when you have a child who's born with mental deficiencies?" she says. "It's insulting to say that child's not a person. On the other hand, there are also animals that have high cognitive abilities." The lack of a clear-cut distinction between humans and animals, Glenn says, makes it difficult to justify the process of drastically modifying animal genomes, though she feels some genetic alterations may be appropriate if they stand to improve human health and well-being significantly. "We are all interconnected. It's important that we treat the goats with respect, because they're really not that far away from us."

In Newberry's view, this kind of deep-waters philosophy is unwarranted. He scoffs at the implication that GTC's operations are even in the Dr. Moreau ballpark. "People say, 'Are they breeding centaurs out there, some kind of man-goat beast?' No, of course not. We put a control sequence in the transgene to make sure it's only turned on during lactation. And there's a big difference between manipulating a single gene, like we're doing, and manipulating a whole chromosome. Treating them the same is like saying, 'I moved my brother-in-law into his new apartment with a pickup truck. Now I'm going to move all of New York City with that same truck.'"

Despite the deeply ingrained public perception that, darn it, there's something just not right about this kettle of fish, companies like GTC may succeed if they can make a lights-out case for the medical necessity of their products. After all, even conservative grande dame Nancy Reagan became a stem-cell research crusader once she realized the treatment was the best hope to reverse her late husband's Alzheimer's.

"The bottom line is that people do these trade-off calculations," says Edna Einsiedel, a communications professor at the University of Calgary. The World Organization for Animal Health commissioned her to write a 2005 survey report assessing the tenor of public opinion regarding transgenic animals. "There seems to be a hierarchy in terms of preferences -- people view medical-related applications more positively than food-related ones. But there's still some discomfort with the idea that you're taking genes from one species and putting them into another. People ask things like, 'What kind of animal will you end up with?'" At the same, Einsiedel continues, "Sometimes when you explain things to people in greater depth, their initial reluctance can change."

Naturally, Newberry is at the ready with examples illustrating how transgenic drugs can transform patients' lives. If hemophiliacs had an unrestricted supply of factor-7 protein -- a drug that currently costs more than $1,000 a milligram -- courtesy of his goats' mammary glands, the drug "could be used as a prophylactic, not just a rescue therapy," he says. This development, he adds, could markedly improve sufferers' prospects, as they'd no longer have to endure the pinpoint bleeds that cause debilitating joint damage over time.

In reality, though, transgenic drug development simply isn't far enough along for the public to perceive it as a medical grand slam. Being able to treat clotting disorders more cheaply and effectively is great, but whether transgenic medicines will ever vanquish intractable tumors or keep drug-resistant tuberculosis in check is still an open question.

Still, extrapolation -- warranted or not -- is one of the things visionary firms do best, and GTC is no exception. The company's current full-tilt focus is on shepherding ATryn through the FDA approval process. When Newberry looks ahead, he likes to picture the day when GTC's goat herd will become the pharmaceutical equivalent of a soft-drink machine, dispensing a vast array of life-giving substances on command.

"You can make hundreds of different proteins this way, and the system is linearly scalable: If you need more, you breed more," he says. "This is like 'Back to the Future.' It's Buck Rogers combined with farming, the oldest trade known to man."

Source. / salon.com

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...