Tag: genetic modification

Nigeria Okays New GM Cowpea Variety – Why it Matters

The crop is an important source of protein for over 200 million people. The move could potentially help reduce rural poverty and hunger.

Late last year the world’s first genetically modified (GM) cowpea was registered and approved for release to smallholder farmers in Nigeria. The new variety carries a microbial insecticidal gene making it resistant to a major pest that affects this crop.

The decision is significant because this will be the second GM crop commercialised in the country following Bt Cotton, and the first one is a food crop. The release of a GM crop in Africa is particularly noteworthy as many countries on the continent are still wary of biotechnology.

It is important for another reason too: cowpea, also known as Black-Eyed Pea, is a staple crop in the country and is an important source of protein for over 200 million people. Nigeria is also the world’s largest producer of cowpea. But it still has to import around 500,000 tonnes to meet internal demand. This is because the potential loss in yield due to insects is over 90%.

By controlling one of the major pests – the cowpea pod-borer – the country could become self-sufficient. It could also potentially help reduce rural poverty and hunger. Nigeria has a massive poverty problem – more than 91 million people are estimated to live without enough food to eat.

New variety

The new variety, named Sampea 20-T, carries a microbial insecticidal gene from a bacterium and represents a biotechnology product that has been nearly 20 years in the making. It is fully resistant to a damaging pod-borer insect.

It was developed by an international team, led by the African Agricultural Technology Foundation in collaboration with the Commonwealth Industrial and Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in the US.

The gene used to develop this variety was provided by Bayer on a humanitarian basis so that smallholder farmers could access it royalty-free.

There’s been a very slow uptake of GM crops across the continent. The message of anti-GMO organisations sent from Europe has been an obstacle in many African countries. But thanks to science outreach efforts and community information sessions, the concerns about GM crops were left behind, in this case, to embrace their potential to solve critical food security issues.

Also read: Arrival of Alphonso Mangoes This Year Impacted by Unexpected Weather

Over the last 20 years, some of the political resistance and public fear have been overcome, and several African countries including South Africa, Burkina Faso, Egypt, and Sudan have introduced GM crops. Many more countries now have passed laws to allow the cultivation of GM crops.

The team that has developed Sampea 20-T was formed in response to requests from African cowpea breeders for a solution to the cowpea pod-borer, Maruca vitrata, a major pest of this crop in West Africa.

Developing the new variety using traditional breeding was not possible due to the lack of any resistant breeding stock. This means that there were no sources of natural resistance to insects in cowpea anywhere in the world. The only solution possible was to create a GM insect-resistant cowpea using biotechnology.

The partners, supported by the US Agency for International Development and also by the Rockefeller Foundation and the CSIRO, worked to develop a cowpea variety that would provide in-built protection against the pest, allowing a cheap, safe and practical solution to the problem.

The only option farmers have at the moment is to apply chemical insecticides to control the pest. These are expensive and can be dangerous if they aren’t familiar with how to use them safely, or don’t have the necessary protective clothing.

The science

The new variety carries a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). This is a soil bacterium that can produce a natural insecticide that has been used by humans to control insect pests for over 80 years. It was discovered at the beginning of the 20th century by a Japanese biologist Shigetane Ishiwatari who found that it was killing silkworms. It was first used as an insecticide on flour moths in the 1930s, but it was in the 1980s that the use of Bt increased worldwide due to insects becoming resistant to many chemical insecticides.

The toxin produced by the bacterium is a crystalline inclusion (called crystal) in the Bt spores. There are many types of Bt crystals, and they have specific toxicity against an insect species but are innocuous to other insects or animals. Bt crystals have been part of commercial insecticide formulations for decades and are the principal active ingredient of organic insecticides. With the adoption of gene technology, GM plants were produced by introducing in them the genes that encode the toxic crystal from Bt.

Also read: Most Forest Fires in India Are Due to Human Activity

In 1995, the USA Environmental Protection Agency approved the commercial production and distribution of Bt crops (corn, cotton, potato).

Most of the corn and cotton were grown around the world are Bt varieties. New Bt crops have been developed such the eggplant varieties in Bangladesh and soybean in Latin America.

Future prospects

The new cowpea variety is expected to be taken up by a number of countries in West Africa including Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

And work on new varieties continues. The second generation of improved cowpea carrying more than one type of Bt gene is under development. This, together with an appropriate insect resistance management plan for the right use of this product, will help guarantee long-lasting protection against the pod-borer and future-proofing the benefits of this biotech product. The Conversation


The article was originally published on The Conversation. You can read it here.

China Jails Scientists for CRISPR Gene-Edited Babies

A court has found Chinese scientist He Jiankui guilty of illegal medical practice. He had claimed credit for genetically engineering twins resistant to HIV in a controversial procedure.


A Chinese court on Monday sentenced biophysics researcher He Jiankui to three years in prison for creating the world’s first “gene-edited” babies.

Two other scientists who assisted He were also handed lesser sentences.

“The three accused did not have the proper certification to practice medicine, and in seeking fame and wealth, deliberately violated national regulations in scientific research and medical treatment,” said the court, according to China’s Xinhua news agency.

“They’ve crossed the bottom line of ethics in scientific research and medical ethics.”

He used a procedure known as CRISPR which allows one to edit snip and replace gene

‘My work will be controversial’

In 2018, He released a YouTube video announcing the results of his medical intervention and the birth of gene-edited twins. He said the genes were edited using CRISPR to prevent embryos from contracting HIV, noting that the twins’ father had the virus.

“Their parents don’t want a designer baby,” He said. “Just a child who won’t suffer from a disease which medicine can prevent. I understand my work will be controversial, but I believe families need this technology and I’m willing to take the criticism for them.”

Ethical issues

His actions were widely condemned by the scientific community for failing to adhere to research guidelines that forbid such practices, especially without oversight.

In the US, the medical procedure is strictly limited to laboratory research. In China, while human cloning is outlawed, gene editing is not.

The MIT Technology Review warned that “the technology is ethically charged because changes to an embryo would be inherited by future generations and could eventually affect the entire gene pool.”

A study published afterward found that the people who have comparable natural genetic modification are likely to die earlier .

This article was originally published on DW.

Scientists Create Genetic Code From Scratch for the Win, But Will We Always Win?

With the influx of money, it seems likely we will have a breakthrough superseding Syn61 very soon. Whether this will be in service of Big Pharma or in public interest remains to be seen.

A culture of Escherichia coli in a petri dish doesn’t look like much. To the naked eye, these gut bacteria are white blobs, the kind of thing you would expect to find after neglecting your lunchbox for a few days.

However, these unassuming microbes have been the subject of intense research in the fields of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. By tinkering with their genetic code, scientists around the globe are working towards solving big problems that baffle us – from cancer treatment to the climate emergency.

Earlier this month, in a supposedly landmark achievement, a team led by Jason Chin, a molecular biologist at the University of Cambridge, reported successfully creating the first set of E. coli bacteria with a completely synthetic and radically altered genetic code.

Also read: How a Rogue Chinese Experiment Might Affect Gene-Based Therapies in India

This means all of this E. coli‘s DNA has been created from scratch. Chin and his colleagues at England’s Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology used a computer program to write the code, which they have claimed is more ‘efficient’ than the one found in naturally occurring E. coli.

Then they ordered the DNA building blocks that would physically make up this genetic sequence from a supplier. These parts were used to replace the original genetic code with the lab-made version.

Wait, what?

DNA is the literal stuff of life. It’s what encodes your genes and determines a lot about you, from your eye colour to your predisposition to mental illnesses. The set of all your genes taken together is called a genome.

Every cell in the human body contains the complete set of genes that make up your genome. Your genes are located along the 23 chromosomes in these cells and encoded by deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.

In effect, DNA is the molecule that carries all your genetic information. It is made of smaller components called nucleotides. The molecular stores and transmits information through its two nucleotide strands that wrap around each other to form a double helix.

And if you think of the DNA double helix as a spiral staircase, then each step is a hydrogen bond that connects nitrogenous bases on either strand with each other.

There are four kinds of bases: cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A) and thymine (T). The order of these bases along a single strand of DNA makes up the genetic code.

To go with an imperfect writing analogy, if chromosomes make up a sentence, the genes along the chromosomes are the words making up that sentence. And your DNA is the alphabet, with the A, T, G and C as its only letters.

This alphabet is read in sets of three, called codons. Individual codons code for specific amino acids and a sequence of amino acids form a protein. Proteins are what carry out all the functions of life.  For example, the AGC codon codes for the amino acid called serine.

The genetic code is universal, meaning all organisms on earth use the same code for the most part. It’s also kind of wasteful, meaning multiple codons code for the same amino acid. For example, serine is also coded for by TCG and TCA.

Why bother to rewrite code?

There are 20 naturally occurring amino acids. If nature were efficient, it would use 20 codons for 20 amino acids, and one more codon for ‘stop’. Since this is not the case, scientists like Chin have been ‘recoding’ the genetic dictionary to create a more efficient code.

Here, the redundant codons are replaced by codons that can be assigned new functions. So a cell with a recoded genome could potentially be used like a factory to produce useful enzymes and proteins.

Chin and his team replaced every occurrence of the serine codon TCG with AGC; every TCA with AGT; and every TAG (the ‘stop’ codon) with TAA. In all, there were 18,214 replacements.

“There are many possible ways you can recode a genome, but a lot of them are problematic: the cell dies,” Chin told STAT News. Supposedly synonymous codons sometimes make proteins with characteristics that kill the cell.

Also read: How Viruses Engineer their Way to Bringing Disease, and Also Life

He calls the resulting line of E. coli Syn61 for the number of codons it uses, as reported in a peer-reviewed paper. Instead of the standard 64 codons overall, his redesigned E. coli uses 51 codons to make all 20 amino acids and two ‘stop’ codons instead of three.

Syn61 grows to be a little longer than E. coli usually are and also grows much slower. Otherwise, it seems to be doing just fine.

This is the largest synthetic genome ever created. It is also the most number of coding changes that have been made to a genome thus far, Tom Ellis, a synthetic biology researcher at Imperial College London, told The Guardian.

In 2010, a geneticist named Craig Venter and his team had assembled the entire genome of the Mycoplasma mycoides bacteria through recoding. Scientists have also synthesised two of the 15 chromosomes making up the genome of a strain of baker’s yeast.

However, compared to Mycoplasma‘s 1.08 million base pairs and the yeast chromosome’s <1 million, E. coli is in a league of its own with 4 million base pairs.  This is what makes the creation of Syn61 such a big deal.

The recoded genome is also more likely to be resistant to viruses.

Remember how the genetic code is universal? This has traditionally meant that organisms are susceptible to viral infections. But with Syn61’s novel genetic code, Abhishek Chatterjee, a chemist at Boson College who reviewed Chin’s paper for Nature, told STAT this problem could be avoided.

“Recoding DNA could also allow scientists to program engineered cells so their genes won’t work if they escape into other species,” Finn Stirling, a synthetic biologist at Harvard Medical School, told the New York Times.

The revolution will be synthetic

The hope is to use synthetic biology to make living factories out of these hybrid organisms. From cancer treatments to producing biochemicals at an industrial scale, scientists are dreaming big. And they aren’t entirely misguided.

As of 2013, the antimalarial drug artemisinin has been produced at industrial scale from yeast, sidestepping the costly process of isolating it from the Chinese sweet wormwood plant. In 2016, a new immune cell engineering treatment yielded a 50% remission rate in blood cancer patients who were terminally ill.

Modern Meadow, a biotech company, has been trying to develop a sustainable alternative to leather with properties and texture similar to animal-derived leather.

Also read: How an Ancient Chinese Text Fought Malaria and Won a Nobel, While India Lags Behind

Further efforts to produce alternative biofuels from algae are on through a collaboration between ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomic Inc. ExxonMobil anticipates that 10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day could be produced by 2025 based on research conducted till date and emerging technical capacity.

Of course, it’s weird to see ExxonMobil’s name here. This is the same company that plans to pump 25% more oil and gas in 2025 than in 2017. It’s also currently being sued for funding efforts to deny climate change despite being aware of the impact of using fossil fuels as early as 1977.

However, nothing speaks louder than money and ExxonMobil is very familiar with Earth’s online climate catastrophe, and how this is already leading to divestment from ‘dirty energy’ like coal. So it only makes sense that it would invest in clean energy.

In fact, a lot of this sort of biofuel research is backed by the oil industry. These corporations also receive millions in  taxpayer money, which has drawn the ire of environment activists who say oil companies shouldn’t be rewarded for putting profits ahead of human health and the environment. Diverting investments away from proven clean technologies like wind and solar energy is wasteful, they say.

Significantly, the UN has called for restraint and caution when it comes to synthetic biology.

Life-forms like Syn61 have the potential to create an entirely new set of problems. They could turn into invasive species that evict or destroy indigenous species in the natural environment, threatening biodiversity and public health.

“Misuse of these technologies and failure to account for unintended consequences could cause irreversible environmental damage,” Pinya Sarasas, an environment specialist, wrote on the UN Environment page. “The potential far-reaching impacts of synthetic biology demand governance methods and research guidelines that promote its ethical and responsible use.”

This would require stringent risk assessment; administrators must include diverse stakeholder perspectives when developing and handling new synthetic biology products.

Such perspectives are key in India. In the last five years of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule, government measures amending the Forest Rights Act and other instruments protecting the rights of Adivasis and forest dwellers have paralleled corporate land-grabs by large corporations.

A second BJP term has civil society groups up in protest because of this government’s history of indifference to the climate emergency – giving the go-ahead to deforestation for ‘ease of business’ through coal-mining and construction, e.g. – while investing in solar energy.

It is a self-defeating and farcical approach but more importantly it shows up an important way in which India is not prepared to deal with more radical solutions to the climate problem.

Also read: Why Did Modi Win the UN’s Champions of the Earth Award?

Still, there is no denying that the potential of synthetic biology has drawn eager investors. In 2018, a record 98 companies drew $3.8 billion (Rs 26,400 crore) in funding, and this is unlikely to slow anytime soon. By 2020, the synthetic biology component market is expected to approach $40 billion.

Another development has been the emergence of DIY biology groups and initiatives like iGEM. Simple protocols found online and specialised kits have driven this movement’s rapid expansion. In 2017, there were about 168 DIY bio groups worldwide.

There are thousands of interchangeable DNA building blocks held in various databases, such as the public one run by the BioBricks Foundation, used in the annual international iGEM synthetic biology competition.

Back to the future

So Syn61 is a landmark achievement, and synthetic biology is flush with money and interest. Experts say it is poised to be the new industrial revolution. The thing is, we know where both brought us – to late capitalism, soaring student-loan debt, unaffordable home-ownership and an agrarian crisis marked by decades of farmer suicides.

There are both models of research and development: the open source one favoured by international movements like iGEM and the BioBricks Foundation, and the one based on patents characterised by big corporates making commercial products like drugs and food ingredients.

In the 1990s, Venter pitted his former company Celera Genomics against a publicly funded initiative to sequence the human genome, the Human Genome Project.

This led to concerns that the company might claim intellectual rights to the building blocks of life. Given this precedent, we should definitely temper the enthusiasm about synthetic biology with very real concerns.

But with the influx of money, it seems very likely that we will have a breakthrough superseding Syn61 very soon. Whether this will be in service of Big Pharma or in public interest remains to be seen.

Riddhi Dastidar is a journalist and gender studies scholar at Ambedkar University Delhi. She has a BSc in biology and worked on mesenchymal stem cell therapies in the Karp Lab at Harvard-MIT HST before she returned to India to join the development sector.

Why Bt Brinjal Is a Hit in Bangladesh

Bangladeshi politicians, unlike their Indian counterparts, have defended the country’s agricultural scientists and supported farmers who wanted to adopt the improved brinjal seeds.

It was recently reported that farmers in Haryana are growing Bt brinjal without regulatory approval. Although the original source of the genetic modification is still not clear, what few seem to realise is that India’s neighbour Bangladesh has already been growing Bt brinjal on an increasingly wide scale since the government approved its use in October 2013.

With all the arguments, this is an opportunity to understand what impacts Bt brinjal can have in the real world. In my role as director of Farming Future Bangladesh, I have been working with Bt brinjal farmers in Bangladesh for several years. I have visited them in the field numerous times in different regions across the country. While of course their specific situations and practices vary, there are some clear conclusions that can be drawn.

Overall, Bt brinjal has been very popular. The number of Bangladeshi farmers growing it has jumped from just 20 in 2014, when it was first released on a limited scale, to 6,512 in 2017 and most recently to 27,012 in 2018, covering roughly 17% of the country’s brinjal growers. Over the last few years, nearly a fifth of Bangladeshi brinjal farmers have started growing Bt brinjal, making it the fasted adopted GM food crop. Farmers in all vegetable growing districts of Bangladesh now use Bt brinjal.

Also read: ‘Why I’m Quitting GMO Research’

The reason for this popularity is that Bt brinjal performs well in the field in combating the destructive impact of the main pest, the fruit and shoot borer. The Bt gene produces a protein that is toxic to the borer pest but harmless to other types of insects and humans. So Bt brinjal fruits suffer less pest damage and their overall productivity is higher.

The crop has also been shown to reduce pesticide use, as intended. Earlier, before Bt brinjal was introduced, farmers in Bangladesh sprayed their brinjal crops as much as 84 times a season. Surveys found that at least half of all farmers said they experienced some form of illness as a result of their proximity to these toxic substances.

Bt brinjal does not require spraying against the fruit and shoot borer pest, meaning that farmers can reduce the amount of time and money on sprays. A survey conducted by the Bangladesh On-Farm Research Division of 850 farmers growing brinjal across 35 districts of Bangladesh found that they their pesticide costs fell by 61%. The number of sprays also fell from 41 times a season on average on non-Bt-brinjal to just 11 times on Bt brinjal. (Although Bt brinjal offers close to 100% protection against fruit and shoot borer, these remaining sprays were necessary for other sucking pests that still affect the crop.)

All this helps improve farmers’ livelihoods significantly. The same study as above also found that the net returns per hectare were $2,151 (1.5 lakh Indian rupees) for Bt brinjal as opposed to $357 (25,000 Indian rupees) for non-Bt brinjal, meaning Bt brinjal farmers were earning six-times as much as their non-Bt counterparts per year.

This has largely been a public sector and philanthropic effort. The original genetic engineering using the Cry1Ac gene (also used in Bt cotton and maize) was performed by Mahyco, the Maharashtra-based seed company. Then, the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute, under the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, introgressed the material into nine different farmer-preferred varieties. This project also involved Cornell University and was funded by US Agency for International Development (a.k.a. USAID).

The Department of Agricultural Extension distributed the seeds and also sold them last year to 17,950 farmers through the government-owned Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation. There are no royalties payable, and farmers can also save, share and trade the seeds freely among themselves.

However Bt brinjal in Bangladesh – as in India – has been inevitably drawn into the wider GMO controversy. For example, an organisation called UBINIG, which promotes organic farming and opposes genetic engineering, claimed at a press conference in Dhaka in February this year that some farmers were discontinuing their commitment to Bt brinjal because of poor performance.

This has not been independently confirmed, but either way, at least Bangladeshi farmers have a choice. They can either grow Bt brinjal if they wish or they can continue with the conventional varieties. Indian farmers have been denied this freedom since the indefinite moratorium imposed by the previous government in 2010.

Also read: Should GM Crops Feature in the ‘Evergreen Revolution’ India Dearly Needs?

Bangladesh can also be a useful case study for Indian policymakers, especially because Bangladeshi politicians, unlike their Indian counterparts, have defended the country’s agricultural scientists and supported farmers who wanted to adopt the improved brinjal seeds.

As Begum Matia Chowdhury, the then agriculture minister, said in 2017, “We will be guided by the science-based information. … As human beings, it is our moral obligation that all people in our country should get food and not go to bed on an empty stomach.”

In India, the country’s leaders will need to make their own decisions about how they respond to this latest development. I hope that amidst all the noise of the GMO ‘debate’, they can take time to look across the border and learn some useful lessons from the real-world experience of the smallholder farmers of Bangladesh.

Arif Hossain is director of Farming Future Bangladesh, an advocacy and communications initiative for improved understanding of science-based agricultural technology in Bangladesh.

Time for India to Set up a Framework to Use Gene-Editing Tech in Its Farms

If India classifies genetic editing as gene modification, we will be signalling our unwillingness to participate in the genetic editing race, whose winner will clearly hold the key to development in the 21st century.

The European Court of Justice has ruled that organisms altered using gene editing tools should be subjected to the same rules as genetically modified organisms (GMO). This has led to disappointment among researchers, whose hopes had been buoyed earlier by a court document suggesting that gene editing would be treated differently.

On the other hand, the US Department of Agriculture held that only genetically modified organisms (GMO), and not genetically edited organisms, deserved special regulation.

However, India should create its own framework for regulating genetically edited organisms instead of following either the European or American models.

Climate change, loss of arable land and increasing human population have together strained our existing food resources, so new plant traits are needed to cater to the rising demand. These plants may be resistant to pests, have higher yield or be bio-fortified with vitamins or minerals. Plant breeding, gene-modification and gene-editing are all tools to achieve genetic changes that lead to better plant varieties.

Plant breeding is the traditional method where plants with anticipated traits are crossed and the desirable offspring are selected. This process causes multiple genetic changes throughout the plant’s DNA and is not specific to the trait of interest.

In GMOs, genes derived from other organisms are added to a target organism to confer the trait of interest. For example, Bt cotton contains a gene from the bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, which confers resistance to pink bollworms.

Gene editing employs technologies to edit the host organism’s existing genes, making this the most precise way to elicit a genetic change. This is the key difference between a genetically modified organism – GMO – and a genetically edited organism – GEO. A GMO contains a piece of foreign DNA while a GEO have its own DNA altered, with no addition of any foreign genes.

All three processes methods to genetic changes and all three processes can have off-target effects. However traditional plant breeding is a slow process and will be unable to cope with the rate of climate change. Gene modifying/editing technologies are relatively fast, easily replicable and can be used for mass production. Examples of impactful GMOs include Bt cotton, which has made India a global leader in cotton production, golden rice, which is under trial in Philippines and Bangladesh, and Bt brinjal, which has made considerable progress in Bangladesh.

GMOs have, however, not been easily accepted in India. The sole exception has been Bt cotton, cultivated in over 90% of all the land used to grow cotton in the country. But other GM food crops, including GM mustard and Bt brinjal are yet to pass regulatory hurdles in spite of having been developed in India. The case for GMOs is confounded by regulatory ambiguity and strong opposition by anti-GMO NGOs.

There are risks associated with the use of any emerging technology and genetic modification/editing is no different. However, these risks can only be alleviated through transparent governance, not through moratoria. Further scientific risks, such as the development of resistance in bollworms to Bt Cotton, are applicable to crops derived using any technology. Such risks can be anticipated and mitigated through regulation and dialogue between farmers, policymakers and industry. Moratoria, on the other hand, do not help the industry or farmers and may be harmful to the growth of technology.

In the case of Bt brinjal, more than Rs 12,000 crore’s worth of investments in biotechnology research have dried up following the moratorium.

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We are now in the midst of a technology revolution, where the combined use of artificial intelligence and gene editing could empower scientists to design plants with desired traits suited for local conditions. Unlike GMOs, it will be difficult to distinguish genetically edited crops from traditionally bred plants. In the face of strict regulation companies, may resort to a shadow economy; gene-edited crops could be passed as traditionally bred and escape all scrutiny.

Alternatively, we risk choking the genetic editing industry that has the potential to solve our food problems. Instead, a discussion on the importance and need for genetically edited crops and a governance framework that balances their promotion and safety of the environment is required. A framework that imposes stricter checks as genetically edited crops near commercialisation will help promote research in this field.

A strong redressal mechanism, transparent disclosure of safety tests and inclusion of farmers and industry representatives in the regulatory structures will increase confidence in genetically edited crops. To ensure that such crops are not limited to the major agricultural companies, it is also important that smaller companies invest in the research. This can be only enabled by well-defined governance that rewards companies that focus on the safety and efficacy of the edited organism.

Genetic editing is an emerging technology and holds strong potential to alleviate problems in many sectors – including agriculture, healthcare and environment. However, it needs to be backed by policy to help realise this potential. A single adverse regulation may have disastrous consequences and will likely spill over to other applications of genetic editing.

If India classifies genetic editing as gene modification – and so doom GEOs to the fate of GMOs – we will be signalling our unwillingness to participate in the genetic editing race, whose winner will clearly hold the key to development in the 21st century.

Shambhavi Naik is a research fellow at the Takshashila Institution. She has a PhD in cancer biology from the University of Leicester.

The Success of This GM Tech Depends on Numerous Unanswered Questions

In times of rural distress, it’s important that the debate around GM technology combines talks about food safety issues with their sociological ramifications.

In times of rural distress, it’s important that the debate around GM technology combines talks about food safety issues with their sociological ramifications.

Mustard. Credit: johnloo/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Mustard. Credit: johnloo/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

“People are scared that if they consume GM foods they might grow horns or might grow a wagging tail.”

This is how Shekhar Gupta represented the perceptions and fears associated with genetically modified (GM) foods when he was in a ‘Walk the Talk” conversation with Prof. Deepak Pental, the former vice-chancellor of Delhi University who, along with a few others, have bred DMH-11, a GM mustard hybrid. Shekhar Gupta’s statement needn’t be taken literally or as a verbatim representation of people’s fears. But as a metaphor for generic, misplaced, ill-informed fear, it’s a bad one.

Bodily harms and threats posed by GM foods, even in lay imagination, are not as idiotically dramatic or infantile. The fears are for harms that cannot be seen, risks that cannot be assessed by lay publics. The task of any representation of this fear should be to draw attention to the contested terrain of genetic modification, and to ask the difficult questions so that what is obfuscated from scrutiny is revealed and made available for civic engagement.

Questions of safety

Unlike other crops – maize, bajra, rice, sunflower and cotton for instance – there are no commercial hybrids for mustard. The reason is simple: mustard is a self-pollinating plant (each mustard flower is a “perfect flower” that contains both male stamen and female pistils and therefore does not require another flower/plant to pollinate). In other words, if a hybrid mustard crop has to be created, it would need to be genetically engineered to enable hybridisation. The aim, as claimed, is to exploit heterosis, or hybrid vigour, by crossing the Indian mustard with an East European strain known for its higher yields, and thereby achieve greater productivity.

This hybridisation is achieved by means of the two genes barnase and barstar, derived from a soil bacterium called Bacillus amyloliquefaciens. Put very simply, the barnase gene confers male sterility to a plant in which it is inserted and enables crossing of the male sterile line with the fertility restorer (barstar gene) line – to produce fertile hybrid plants and seeds.

Most biosafety studies – including those by Pental’s team – attest to negligible toxicity and allergenicity of the three proteins in a human, mammal and arthropod body. These conclusions are contested but these contestations only affirm the need for Pental’s team to share the raw data that has been used to draw these conclusions, a requirement mandated both by a Central Information Commission (CIC) directive and a Supreme Court ruling.

But attention needs to be drawn to a third gene of the triad – the bar gene – and the biosafety implications that are generated by the attendant work that the herbicide glufosinate does for it.

The bar gene synthesises an enzyme called PAT, which confers tolerance to glufosinate in a plant. Glufosinate is a broad-spectrum herbicide, similar to Monsanto’s ‘Round-up’ (glyphosate), which indiscriminately eliminates weeds and, indeed, any plant that does not incorporate the bar gene and is hence not ‘herbicide tolerant’. Essentially, this is done to mark out the GM crops from the non-GM progeny. The ones that are non-sterile hybrids are eliminated with a glufosinate-herbicide spray. This is done in order to ensure that pollen-free, sterile GM crops are grown over successive generations. Interestingly, glufosinate is a patented technology of Bayer CropScience, and marketed worldwide as ‘Liberty Link’ and ‘Basta’.

A report titled ‘Assessment of Food and Environmental Safety of GE Mustard‘, submitted by the centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants (CGMCP), University of Delhi, affirms the safety of the three genes/proteins for human health and animal safety. However, there are virtually no references with respect to biosafety studies for Glufosinate, the herbicide that enables the marker gene – bar – to mark the GM crop from the non-GM ones.

It does state very cursorily (on page 65) that “this gene is used as a selectable marker in the experiments and does not imply that the basta [glufosinate] spray is required during the cultivation of the said hybrid.” This is confusing: In the absence of the Basta sprays, how will successive generations of pollen-free crops be ensured? And if Basta sprays will be mandated, why have biosafety/risk assessments not been done?

A pesticide risk assessment of glufosinate ammonium conducted by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) cited the following risks of glufosinate in 2012: “Overall, based on the available data, a high long-term risk to mammals cannot be excluded for the representative use in orchards.” In a study conducted on rats in 2005, it notes that “there are severe developmental toxicity induced by glufosinate ammonium seen as pre- and post implantation losses, vaginal bleedings, abortions and dead foetuses not induced  by maternal toxicity.” EFSA issues a proposed classification of glufosinate ammonium as a category 2 substance: “Toxic: may cause harm to the unborn child.” It also reported increased kidney weight in rats in long term assessment of toxicity of glufosinate.

The risk assessment to the herbicide is separate from the risk assessment of allergenicity and toxicity of the inserted gene-protein. Were EFSA evaluations on food safety of glufosinate taken into account by CGMCP, Delhi University? This is an important question because we need to know what haematological and biochemical changes observed in animal testing can be extrapolated or dismissed for human beings.

Questions of ownership

In 2003, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee, under the environment ministry, deferred the commercial approval of GM mustard variety that used the same bar-barstar-barnase technology. Back then it was Proagro Seeds India, Ltd., a subsidiary of the agro-chemical giant Bayer CropScience, that sought to market the same genetically engineered, triple gene combination in a mustard plant with the same promise of 20-30% increased yield. A key worry even then was that Proagro’s main purpose of developing the GM hybrid was to promote the conjunctive use of glufosinate over which Bayer had a patented monopoly. Bayer still holds the patent for proprietary brands of glufosinate: Basta. There ought to be issues of market dependence that need to be factored in for a monopoly product that piggy-backs on a publicly owned technology.

Public ownership of GM mustard technology (by Delhi University and Dhara Vegetable Oil and Foods Company) is one of the main attractions of this technology. So apart from being 20-30% more productive, they will also be cheaper in comparison to the monopoly prices and royalties commanded by trans-national companies like Monsanto for patented monopoly and seeds like Bt cotton.

However, there are two issues that beg questions. If the conjunctive use of glufosinate is necessary for the success of the technology and for the promised higher yields to be delivered by successive generations of mustard hybrids, is there a concern for market dependence and food safety that should be factored in?

There are a further set of questions for which no clear answers emerge. The bar-barstar-barnase gene is a patented technology. Who owns these technology patents? A preliminary search revealed the two out of the triad of patents – the bar gene and the barstar – are held by Bayer CropScience. Delhi University (with Deepak Pental et al as inventors) that holds the patents for the ‘methods‘ for obtaining male sterile lines and fertility restorer systems would have needed to acquire these genes from their proprietorial holders. What technology agreements and/or material transfer agreements (MTAs) have been entered into by DU?

Questions of rights

It is also understood that the ‘army of sterile mustard crops [will be] grown by crossing sterile barnase crops with normal mustard crops (that have no barstar gene to reverse sterility)’. After a Basta spray – which will eliminate the fertile non-GM plants – what we will have is a standing crop of sterile mustard plants. What implications do these have for farmers who may not be able to harvest and reuse seeds for successive replantation?

The Protection of Plant Variety Protection and Farmers Rights Act (2001) grants farmers the right to save and reuse seeds. The networks of property and technology may actually end up making these rights meaningless, apart from pushing a cultivator into the nexus of market and technology over which she has little control. And if the argument is that farmers need not sign-up for GM crop cultivation, then what happens to the target of achieving higher yields and greater oilseed productivity to reduce import burdens?

In times of acute rural distress, it is important that the debate around technology combines talks about issues of food safety and environmental diversity with sociological, political-economy ramifications.

There is a problem with an approach that considers risks for human health and safety, or the environment as sufficient for the grant of regulatory sanctions. The problem with this approach is too much faith is reposed in science as a foundation on which to establish regulatory decisions. The principal actors framing the problem are the expert scientists granted the status of an objective voice in the dialogue between innovators and regulators. The broader public – consumers, which includes farmers – is provided with a limited information and limited opportunity to participate in regulatory decision-making. She is expected to be content with the assessments of low-risk probability. Entirely outside this assessment are unknown, unintended effects that are tactically accepted or considered manageable. It is always important to be aware of the democratic deficit that exists in the regulation of technology.

Rajshree Chandra teaches political science at the University of Delhi and is a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. She is the author of The Cunning of Rights: Law, Life, Biocultures (OUP: 2016)

In Nobel Laureates v. Greenpeace, Don’t Ignore the Sociology of GM

It is with caution that promises and claims of biotechnology must be evaluated, even when signed by a hundred Nobel Laureates. We don’t need rocket science to uncover the politics of technology.

It is with caution that promises and claims of biotechnology must be evaluated, even when signed by a hundred Nobel Laureates. We don’t need rocket science to uncover the politics of technology.

Bt cotton. Credit: nostri-imago/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Bt cotton. Credit: nostri-imago/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

When over a hundred Nobel Laureates in unison stand in ardent support of Golden Rice, you sit up and take notice. In that instance, when you read the headline – Nobel Laureates Slam Greenpeace’s Opposition to GMOs, Golden Rice – you are converted by the sheer weight that singular voice of ‘expertise’. You are induced into suspending your own analytical gaze and say, “If so many of the most honoured experts of the world are saying that Golden Rice (a rice that contains beta carotene, a source of vitamin A) will remove vitamin A deficiency (VAD), will prevent childhood blindness and premature deaths in millions, it must be true.” You are persuaded into believing that Greenpeace, the organisation against whom the ire of Nobel Laureates’ letter was directed, was really committing, as alleged, a “crime against humanity”. But all such proselytising acts, persuasive as they may be, need to be revisited and re-reasoned.

Technology is seldom about technological capacities only. If it were just about that – the capacity of transgenic seeds to be high yielding, to repel pests, to increase agricultural outputs, to remove VAD – the debate could well have been carried out in the expert domain occupied by molecular scientists, biotechnologists and medical biologists. But though the persona of technical expertise persuades and induces, at times it also seeks meek submission.

Imagine a scenario where there were no patent rights, no technology or license fees (to be paid for 20 years to the patent holder), no privileging of breeders’ rights, no international politics or pressures on governments to align intellectual property rules with that of the WTO, UPOV, no Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) TRIPS Plus agreements. Imagine a field of low monetary returns where technology played the global humanist on a mission to remove the scourge of hunger and disease from the face of the earth. If it’s hard to imagine, it is because ‘technological humanism’ as such does not seem to exist. And why should it? Companies are not in the business of humanitarian service. Their investments need to be incentivised, their profit-returns need to be secured. Only then can we expect technology to serve the so-called ‘interests of humankind’.

So let us then understand that technology is also a social construct. It is in a socioeconomic field – determined by corporate/national/class interests –  that technology operates. It is a field where scientists innovate, where experts generate consensus, where publics demand, where capital is mobilised, where research is funded, and where legal rules secure economic returns for technological innovations. These together form the field of discourse where each becomes the sine qua non, a defining condition, of the other.

Technology therefore has a sociology. Supposedly ‘noble’ claims of technology have to be assessed not merely for their capacity to augment production, increase yields (as claimed in the instance of Bt Cotton, oilseeds and rice) but also for the social causes that underlie and social effects that are generated.

Most debates have tended to assess the effect of GM crops on human bodies. Supporters claim the positive benefits of GM technology to improve the quality and quantity of yields. Detractors claim that there are various harms that can, potentially or actually, come to bear upon human bodies.

It is important to flag that both GM supporters and GM opposers base their claims on a common concern, i.e the human body. Both sets of arguments worry about the end-consumer whose health and vulnerability to various risks (hunger, nutrition, vitamin deficiency, disease etc) is at stake. They both invoke an idea of ‘somatic individuality‘, where the individual body/bodies is/are at risk. What is undermined, ironically, is the very capacity of GM technology to be authoritative and to yield unambiguous answers to biological puzzles. This should, at the very least, make us confused, circumspect and guarded against the bigger claims.

At the same time we should also place these claims in a larger social field.  It is important for us to understand that we – the populace demonstrated to be at risk one way or the other – are not the only consumers of GMOs. There are farmers and peasants, outside of these networks of science and technology, perhaps even literacy, who are consumers of seeds as both grain and as a factor of production. So what happens to cultivating farmers in the process of integrating with globalised networks of technology and commerce is a question that needs to be asked.

Vidarbha district in Maharashtra, India, is nearly a 100% Bt cotton (of the total cotton area) producing region. Local, land varieties of cotton seeds have almost disappeared from the scene. Vidarbha shows both increases in acreage under Bt cotton farming and yield. Yet it is also a region that has earned the epithet of being the suicide capital of India. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, at least 284,694 Indian farmers have taken their lives since 1995. This occurred at an annual average rate of 14,462 in the five years from 1995 to 2000, and 17,699 in the 12 years between 2000 and 2012. That is, since 2001, around 49 farmers have taken their own lives each day, on average – more than one every half hour.

The reasons for farmers suicides are complex and overlaid with a number of structural and institutional factors. But what cannot be put aside, at least with conscience, is that farmers are put to greater risk in their interface with technology that they do not understand, control or produce. Take the case of Monsanto’s Bt Cotton, a technology that was sold to farmers with a promise of eradicating susceptibility of the cotton crop to its scourge, bollworms. Over time both Bollguard I (in 2009) and Bollgurad II (in 2015) have become susceptible to pink bollworms. The Central Institute of Cotton Research reports Gujarat may have lost 7-8% of its cotton to the pink bollworm in 2015. The National Seed Association of India has asked Mahyco Monsanto Biotech, Ltd. to pay compensation to farmers who suffered losses due to the Pink Bollworm that has developed resistance to the company’s much-touted Bt cotton variety this year.

Another important fact to bear in mind is that although in India a farmer has a right to save seeds, hybrid seeds incorporating GM technology are ‘programmed’ in such a way that seeds produced from hybrid plants lose their ‘hybrid vigour’ so new seeds must be purchased every planting season. In other words, GM seed production prevents farmers from saving and replanting hybrid seeds.

Do note that unlike products, where the technology to reproduce is outside of the product we consume, for a farmer the technology of production is embedded in the seed itself. So it matters whether the farmer is a consumer or a producer. In one case, he reaps the economies and control of production as producer, and in another he relinquishes it to the seed company and their researchers.

As a producer, who can save, sell, exchange, make his own seeds according to the generational knowledge that he has amassed and practices that he has inherited, the farmer has a fair degree of control over both costs and inputs of production. As a consumer, both the process (aspects of agricultural production) and the product are appropriated and substituted, reducing seeds as industrial inputs for manufactured products.

While the physical aspects of biotechnologies raise issues of appropriation and substitution, the proprietary aspects of biotechnology are related aspects of this process. A network of legal rights and obligations accompanies technologies of production. Such legal and technological means together often subsume the traditional forms of wealth generation and ownership strategies in spaces of every such encounter. Technological interventions, together with legal paraphernalia of multiple, imbricated property rights reconstitute the realm of ownership, wherein the absence of science/technology-led innovation, traditional forms of ownership are rendered ineffective as protective or remunerative mechanisms.

So when we talk of technologies of production and their capacitates to enhance production and avert risks, we also need to talk property rights – those that are protected and those that are diminished. In the absence of it, all assessment of technology as a means of averting risks are at best partial, at worst, obfuscatory.

It is therefore with caution and skepticism that promises and claims of biotechnology must be evaluated, even when signed by a hundred Nobel Laureates. We often don’t need rocket science to uncover the politics of technology.

Rajshree Chandra is an associate professor of political science at the University of Delhi and the ICSSR Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi.