Kansas City Star | November 7, 1999 | SCOTT CANON
LUBBOCK, Texas - At the center of gleaming government laboratories in Lubbock, tucked into petri dishes nurturing man-made sprouts, coursing through roots of genetically engineered seedlings, lives an idea.
The idea came from a problem. Corporations are spending millions to blend genes and make plants impervious to insects and weed spray, plants that already make the cotton in your T-shirt and the sweetener in your soft drink.
Those companies, though, are worried about farmers simply stashing away seed from one year for the next spring's planting.
So the idea is simple enough: Just make sure that a plant will have no offspring. Design the plant for big yields of sterile seeds.
Suddenly, the know-how tucked in a seed would have hard-wired protection. Farmers would need to buy fresh supplies each year.
Critics see the idea as a Frankenstein's monster. They warn it could upset thousands of years of agricultural tradition in an arrogant attempt to cage biology's driving force - the need of any organism to reproduce.
But even some scientists, nervous that biotechnology could loose unnatural forces into wild, that gene swapping could create superweeds or corn that kills butterflies, like the idea.
Molecular biologist Mel Oliver hit on the since-patented inspiration several years ago - "It was a scientific brain teaser I couldn't let go" - and now spends much of his time in a government lab trying to reap an infertile harvest.
"I thought about whether this is something we should be doing given that it doesn't add anything to the farmer's crop," said Oliver at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's lab in Lubbock. "(But) this is the only way I know of to stop the transfer of (genetic engineering) into the environment."
To people like Oliver, the idea - dubbed "Terminator" by its critics and "technology protection system" by its advocates - is a leash on biotechnology.
Today, scientists pluck genes out of organisms - from viruses to bacteria to animals - and insert them into plants to achieve certain traits. That has led to fears, supported by preliminary research, that those artificial gene sequences could blow from the pollen of a genetically modified crop, mate with a wild plant and create a nearly indestructible superweed.
Terminator, many scientists hope, could stop a bacteria combined in the laboratory with a wheat plant from teaming with a wild grass in the field.
"Sterility," Oliver said, "is an evolutionary dead-end."
While it may offer protection to the environment - some people aren't so sure - Terminator will be driven by money.
Currently, without Terminator, seed companies find themselves suing American farmers for setting aside part of their harvests to plant the next year.
The biotechnology industry is reluctant to sell genetically altered seed abroad, where custom and unsympathetic legal systems don't favor their efforts to prevent farmers from keeping back some seed.
With Terminator, the biotechnology revolution would be export-ready and pirate-proof. Seed companies could watch the royalties pour in for decades.
Which is why many environmentalists detest it.
"It's really a form of environmental vandalism," said Indiana University biologist Martha Crouch. She worked in the genetic engineering of plants until she was overcome with fears about the technology several years ago.
"The idea that somehow you have the right to break the cycle of life, that goes on from seed to seed from time immemorial, doesn't make sense," Crouch said.
"I think it is immoral."
Protectionists in Europe have seized on the perceived dangers of genetically engineered food to keep out tons of American imports. They are joined by environmentalists for whom Terminator sums up all their worries about man playing God.
So controversial is Terminator that the company that stands the most to gain from it - St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. - talks now of shelving it.
Monsanto is one the major players in biotechnology. Pending Justice Department approval, the company is also planning to acquire Delta & Pine Land Co.
That seed company's genetically modified bug- and herbicide-resistant cotton plants account for nearly 60 percent of the crop grown in the United States. Those varieties are credited in some circles for winning a war against insects that were on the verge of chasing cotton out of Texas and Oklahoma.
Delta & Pine Land also shares with the U.S. Department of Agriculture the patent on Terminator technology. Environmentalists have feared the merger would mean the bundling of Terminator with existing biotechnology.
That, they suspect, could lead to both environmental and social problems.
Concentration of power
Already, seed and agriculture chemical companies are merging into a larger, more concentrated few. John Ikerd, an agriculture economist at the University of Missouri, worries that Terminator technology could help those companies achieve a monopoly over the world's agricultural gene pool.
"I can't think of any more powerful economic position to be in than to control the seed that determines a country's food supply," he said.
That, Ikerd warns, could create a sort of modern-age feudal system of agriculture, with farmers acting as serfs beholden to seed companies.
"I deal a lot with Third World agriculture," Ikerd said. "These are people who are lucky if they can afford to buy the technology once. But how about some poor devil in Peru or Bangladesh or whatever? Terminator technology is going to doom his ability to grow crops the next year."
Ikerd and others foresee further concentration of the expertise needed to develop new seeds into companies with a poor record for serving the needs of Third World farmers.
"The farmers are going to end up in a real bind, where they'll be stuck growing what the seed companies make available," said Margaret Mellon, a molecular biologist and attorney at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"Farmers won't be independent decision makers."
Rockefeller Foundation president Gordon Conway told Monsanto's board of directors in June that his organization, which is involved in farming in developing countries, was opposed to Terminator. Last month Monsanto chairman and chief executive officer Robert Shapiro responded in a letter, saying "we are making a public commitment not to commercialize ... Terminator."
But later in the letter he qualified that position, saying that use of the technology was being delayed "until a full airing of the issues is complete and we have responded publicly to the concerns that are raised."
Monsanto's scientists are divided on the issue.
Meantime in Lubbock, Oliver and his colleagues tend to tobacco plants designed to test the Terminator. If that works, they will move on to cotton, soybeans, wheat and rice.
Oliver contends Terminator holds powerful incentives for industry to perfect herbicide-immune, bug-fighting, drought-resistant crops that could bring Third World farmers out of their hand-to-mouth existence.
"I truly believe biotechnology is our only hope for feeding the world," Oliver said. Terminator, he said, "will make biotechnology more and more economically sensible."
And Delta & Pine Land is moving ahead as if Terminator is headed for market.
"The merger (with Monsanto) has not occurred yet," said Harry Collins, a geneticist and vice president of technology transfer at Delta & Pine Land.
"As of right now we're continuing with our research" and the company expects to be selling Terminator cotton by the 2005 planting season.
The work goes on, he said, because the theft of seed technology must be stopped.
Three years ago, members of a South American delegation visiting Delta & Pine Land plots near the company's headquarters in Scott, Miss., were caught stashing genetically modified cotton seeds in their pockets.
"They were trying to do in 10 minutes," Collins said, "what it took us 10 years to accomplish."
What protects seed company intellectual property could also defend the environment, said Allison Snow, a plant ecologist at Ohio State University.
"From an ecological standpoint," she said, "I think it would do a lot more good than harm" by reducing the chance that a genetically engineered plant would pass on traits to wild species.
One school of thought, however, suspects that Terminator could have the unintended effect of increasing the development of superweeds.
The Roundup brand herbicide, a Monsanto specialty that kills nearly everything green it is sprayed on, does not harm so-called Roundup Ready crops. That means a farmer can wait for crops to bloom and spray only once a season, a time- and money-saving advantage.
Roundup Ready crops have been wildly popular in the United States.
That's made the herbicide more popular, too. But it's fed fears that more farmers spraying Roundup increases the chances for the emergence of a mutant, but naturally occurring, herbicide-immune weed.
"If resistance is out there, and we spray enough herbicide, we'll probably find it," said Michael Christoffers, a scientist at North Dakota State University who sees Terminator as significant barrier to the evolution of superweeds.
Some critics worry that Terminator crops could cross with wild plants and spread a generalized infertility through the ecosystem. Supporters say that couldn't happen because sterile plants, by definition, can't pass on their genetics.
Then there's the possibility of Terminator working well, but not perfectly.
A crop that's 90 percent sterile would probably protect a biotech company's investment - although it might let laboratory genetics escape into the wild - because it wouldn't be worthwhile to a farmer to plant seed if only 10 percent of it would germinate.
"To be effective at preventing gene flow it has to be 100 percent effective," said Rebecca Goldburg, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. "(But) it does not have to work perfectly to provide economic advantage for the company."
