Why the US Government Doesn't Regulate Genetic Engineering

How It Happened That We Don't Regulate Biotech
by Donella Meadows posted. 8.18.00

Back in the 1970s the awesome news that scientists had learned how to
redesign genes started a regulatory flurry. Distinguished panels met to ask
imponderable questions. Could some human-created form of life carry
self-multiplying havoc into the world? How can we prevent such a disaster?

Back then genetic escapes were considered so likely that gene-splicing
research was carried out in sealed labs. The citizens of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, home of Harvard and MIT, forbade such labs within their city
limits. Congress debated dozens of bills to regulate genetic engineering.

Then, suddenly, the concern disappeared. Genetic engineering became routine
in academia and a hot field of competition in business. Nowadays scientists
and corporations create gene-spliced organisms and release them into nature
with astounding little oversight.

I always wondered how that happened. It's not as if the serious questions
about "genetic pollution" were ever answered. Our ignorance of the health
and ecological and evolutionary impacts of gene-spliced crops and other
products is still enormous. But somehow the biotech enterprise got a social
and regulatory green light. No questions asked. Full speed ahead.

Why? How? When?

A partial answer to that question has appeared in the July issue of "Gene
Watch," the bulletin of the Council for Responsible Genetics. Susan Wright,
a science historian at the University of Michigan, writes about an MIT
archive in which she found the transcript of a fateful meeting that took
place in 1976 at the National Institutes of Health.

Then, as now, the greatest area of concern was microbes. Higher organisms
carry their DNA around in discrete packages inside cell nuclei. They release
genes into the world only under relatively controlled acts of reproduction.
Bacteria and viruses, on the other hand, slosh genes around in a shockingly
messy way.

They pick them up and drop them off, shuffle them, trade them, insert them
into the supposedly organized genomes of higher forms of life. That's how
viruses infect us. It's also one of the ways geneticists paste genes from
one kind of critter into another. First they insert a snipped-out gene, from
a flounder, say, into a virus or bacterium. Then they use the microbe to
smuggle the flounder gene into, say, a salmon or a tomato.

The problem is that once the gene has been loosened from the organized
flounder into the disorganized microbial world, there's no telling where it
might end up. One single-celled creature could pass it to another. For all
we know, it could end up in a minnow or a whale or in our own guts.

In 1976 an august committee of NIH virologists was asked to test this
danger. They were to snip out from a virus a gene that causes tumors when
the virus infects mice. They were to paste that gene into bacteria and then
see whether the bacteria could cause tumors in other animals. If so, it
would not only be evidence that some kinds of gene-splicing might turn
cancer into a communicable disease, it would also be evidence that genes
unleashed into microbes could spread beyond anyone's recall.

The committee debated what kind of bacteria to use in the test.
Scientifically the answer was obvious; you seek out the worst case. You use
bacteria likely to thrive and infect the test animals. But the virologists
had more than science in mind. They worried about politics, about public
controversy, about their own work being regulated. So they chose to use
weakened bacteria that were unlikely to do harm.

In short, they fudged the test. Here are some of the things they said,
recorded in the transcript of the meeting. "By using known pathogens, it
seems to me we go politically in the wrong direction even though
scientifically it does make more sense." "If we want to get these
experiments done so we can go about our work quickly, maybe one shouldn't
introduce problems of this level." "It's molecular politics, not molecular
biology, and I think we have to consider both, because a lot of science is
at stake."

They wanted "a slick New York Times kind of experiment." But even the
weakened bacteria they ended up using did infect some test animals with
tumors. That result, says Wright, "had the NIH campus buzzing at the time."

So they fudged again. The disturbing results were never published in a major
journal. To the contrary, a 1979 NIH press conference announced that "this
form of research is perfectly safe." The New York Times reported that "the
risks are considerably less than had been feared." All through the 1980s and
90s, this study was cited as evidence that bioengineering poses no threats.
Only in 1988, at a meeting of federal regulators, did one of them honestly
articulate our government's actual policy: "If the American public wants
progress, they will have to be guinea pigs."

Next time you hear a scientist asserting that gene splicing is safe, remind
yourself that there is no scientific evidence for that statement. We are
profoundly ignorant about what we are doing to the code that generates all
life. And unfortunately some scientists, including those entrusted with
public safety, are willing to lie.
****************************
Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at
Dartmouth College. More about Donella Meadows. Her column appears each
Friday in Tidepool at http://www.tidepool.org/home.html

"All policymakers must be vigilant to the possibility of research data being
manipulated by corporate bodies and of scientific colleagues being seduced
by the material charms of industry. Trust is no defence against an
aggressively deceptive corporate sector,"
THE LANCET, April 2000

"When a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa, it can cause a hurricane in New
York."