Protesters Will Confront Gene Giants in San Diego

Protesters plan to swarm San Diego biotech convention
Gene-altered foods top demonstrators' list of concerns

San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, June 18, 2001
Tom Abate

Genetically engineered foods could cause indigestion when the
Biotechnology Industry Organization holds its annual convention in San
Diego.

Even before the scientists, executives and financiers begin arriving on
Sunday, thousands of activists are expected to hit the streets in what
is becoming an annual protest.

At the BIO conference in Boston last year, demonstrators dumped
genetically engineered soybeans as 2,500 people rallied peacefully
against everything from gene patents to the price of medicines.

This year, activists hope for twice that turnout as biotech becomes a
poster child for the science-driven global economy they find scary.

"If I look at corporate globalization, biotech is one of the most
insidious (examples)," said John Sellers, 34, director of the Ruckus
Society, an activist group in Oakland. "I don't think anyone's as
audacious as these companies, to carry on this unchecked experiment with
the entire planet. It's like a science fiction movie, but we're in it."

Sellers was among a handful of activists who spent 90 minutes explaining
why people such as himself are so worried about biotechnology that
they'll come from all over the world to protest in San Diego.

It didn't take long to figure out the big draw. "Most of the people
(coming to) San Diego are stirred about food," said Kimberly Wilson, 26,
with the Greenpeace office in San Francisco where we met a week ago. She
said the protest has been fueled by the refusal of industry and
government authorities to require that genetically engineered foods be
labeled.

"We view genetically engineered foods as having the potential for the
largest environmental disaster in human history," said fellow
Greenpeacer Jeanne Merrill, 29, who raised the specter that
herbicide-resistance genes, bioengineered into crops, would pollinate
wild plants to create super-weeds.

Biotech foods won't be the only protest issue. Paul Billings, with the
Council for Responsible Genetics, a Massachusetts group that has spoken
out on issues ranging from embryo research to gene patents, said he'll
be coming to San Diego to poke holes in biotech's image.

"Part of the ticket biotech has used to get into its exalted position in
the public psyche is science," said Billings, 48, a physician and
geneticist. "But there's a lot of uncertainties in science and a growing
skepticism about certain aspects of applied science in the service of
industry."

But food seems to be the meat and potatoes of the protest. This is a
movement that sees genetically engineered crops as the latest corporate
effort to replace the family farm with industrialized agriculture. Now
pollen drifting over from the fields of genetically engineered crops
have the potential to contaminate organic fields and wipe out the price
premium their products should fetch, said Skip Spitzer of the Pesticide
Action Network.

"I again encourage you to look at the farmer impacts," Spitzer, 37,
wrote in an e-mail. "Impacts (of biotech foods) on growers is an area
that is far more immediate and consequential than health and
environmental issues."

But it wasn't my mission to evaluate or investigate these claims, simply
to understand and explain the concerns that are making biotech
increasingly controversial in some quarters.

I also wanted to satisfy a personal curiosity about what I call
America's left-brain, right-brain dichotomy over biotechnology.

America's left brain is frightened by Frankenfoods. While writing this
column I got a call from a massage therapist in Marin who was pretty
certain that soybean oil would contain traces of genetically engineered
proteins. The therapist, who works with babies, thought the soybean oil
might prompt an allergic reaction. She said she would continue using
organic olive oil.

America's right brain is fixated on the human embryo. In recent weeks
I've tracked the controversy over embryonic stem cells. Biotech firms
and university scientists say these cells could be used to create spare
body parts.

Anti-abortion groups have done their best to thwart this research
because they consider the embryo legally human.

Why, I wondered aloud, were the protesters coming to San Diego more
attuned to the genetic engineering of soybeans than to what seems like a step toward the genetic engineering of humans?

"We have genetically engineered foods out there in the marketplace,"
Merrill said. "Thankfully we don't have designer babies yet. Food is the
thing that's out there now."

I asked whether the protest would turn violent.

"Some members of the media are hoping for a fight," said Sellers, whose
Ruckus Society has become the tactical backbone of the protest movement.

Since 1995, Ruckus has run training camps for protesters. It was Ruckus
volunteers who pulled off some of the most visible stunts at the 1999
World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Last month, Ruckus trained
activists for San Diego.

"We don't want to get into a tactical fight with the police," Sellers
said. "Most everyone I talk to who is coming out there wants this to be
about our world view versus their incredibly short-sighted corporate
world view.

"We want more local economies, producing goods in more labor-intensive
ways that give people a purpose," Sellers said.

Philosophically I like the idea of local economies, but I have trouble
understanding how any force could reverse current trends in agriculture,
which produce more food with less labor, providing busy urbanites like
me the convenience of frozen foods and microwave ovens.

"We don't see the supermarket cheap-food model as the good life,"
Spitzer said, adding, "whatever the good life is, it doesn't have to do
with corporations having the same degree of control they have today."

The protesters continually cycled back to this fear of global corporate
power. In this regard, biotech seemed to me the wrong target. Biotech
companies are like flies. Yes, there's a swarm of them, but so what? Why
not tackle Detroit? Automakers are bigger, more global and hardly
paragons of progress.

"Biotech is about commodifying life forms, it's about control over
nature, it gets to people on a deeper level," Wilson said. "It's not
like making a car. "

For more about the protest, visit the Web site www.biodev.org.