Mendel in the Kitchen: a Scientist's View of Genetically Modified Foods

Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist's View of Genetically Modified Foods by Nina Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown Joseph Henry Press, 2004; $24.95

It is marvelous how submicroscopic strands of DNA, through their many permutations, can influence the structure, development, and functioning of every living species on the planet. Yet to Nina Fedoroff, a molecular biologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, it also seems ironic that the same molecules have played such a powerful role in the recent political life of our species.

Here in the United States, the methods of genetically modified (GM) agriculture have been applied nationwide. Outside the U.S., however, genetic modification is regarded as a horrific form of tinkering with nature--so much so that the chromosomal makeup of fruits and vegetables has been a major bone of contention in agreements between the European Union and its trading partners.

Fedoroff grants that ecological and ethical issues abound. But she still believes that GM foods are no more dangerous than foods were before this particular round of technology became available. A little more understanding of the science behind GM food production and consumption, she seems to think, might cool down the doomsday rhetoric. So with the able assistance of science writer Nancy Marie Brown, she has produced not only an authoritative primer on the science and ecology of agricultural genetics, but a much-needed guide for the perplexed.

The main point Fedoroff makes is that plant manipulation is nothing new to the farmer. Agriculture, from the beginning, has been all about fooling Mother Nature. Millennia before Mendel, the first farmers to domesticate wheat and corn bred their stock selectively to tilt the balance of the gene pool toward features they favored--harvestability, size, flavor, and the like. For centuries, orchard managers have cloned their favorite fruit stocks by grafting branches of a desirable plant onto the trunks or branches of other trees. (Intriguingly, that practice, accepted today even by organic farmers, drew its share of opposition in the late 1700s, when it was first introduced in America by John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed.)

By the twentieth century, agricultural scientists were crossbreeding plants extensively, according to the trial-and-error method pioneered by Luther Burbank: selecting desirable variants and frequently accelerating variability by dosing the plants with radiation or chemicals.

What is different about modern genetic manipulation, of course, is that it can be accomplished at the molecular level. The outcome is usually predictable and often quite precise, dispensing as it does with so much of the trial and error of earlier techniques. The methods of recombinant DNA make it possible to select desirable genes from widely divergent species, and even to add or delete genes at will. In the 1990s, for instance, workers inserted a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis into corn and potato chromosomes, creating plants that produce their own insecticides. The new varieties have reduced the need for chemical insecticides. Who knows what new and ingenious organisms may yet be produced?

It's that "who knows?" that will no doubt keep the opposition going. Yet to all but the harshest critics of GM, Fedoroff and Brown certainly seem to have made their case: genetic modification, deployed with the same wisdom as any other agricultural innovation, is more of a boon than a hazard.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He is the 2005 winner of the Education Prize of the American Astronomical Society.

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