Roger Beachy is a founding father of agricultural biotechnology. In the mid-1980s, his research at Washington University in St. Louis led to the first genetically engineered plants resistant to viruses and the first field testing of virus-resistant food crops such as tomatoes.
Presently with the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., Beachy recently was appointed to head the planned Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. The $146 million institute, to be completed in 2000, will be the largest agricultural research facility in the world, with business and academic partners that include the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The son of a Mennonite minister, Beachy is an outspoken advocate of using plant biotechnology to lessen world food shortages and is a tireless defender of genetic crop engineering.
There has been a big push for gene therapy in the form of cancer treatments or cures for inherited diseases, so why are so many people unexcited or even suspicious when it comes to genetically engineered plants?
A: It comes from what I call the arrogance of plenty. Plant biology has not been widely supported in America because people think we have a lot of food, so why should we do more to increase the amount we can produce?
That arrogance doesn’t wash well when we consider the problems of malnutrition and starvation that affect hundreds of millions of people in the developing world. Unless you go to countries such as Kenya, India or Thailand and recognize the disparity between what they can grow and what we can grow, you can’t understand their challenges in food production. The main concern of farmers there is feeding their families.
Q: Yet many people, especially in Europe, are afraid that genetically altered foods might be unsafe to eat or may present other unknowable dangers. Britain’s Prince Charles has been quoted as saying genetic modification of plants should be “left to God.” What scares people?
A: In Germany at least, the concern probably has its roots in the Holocaust and the association of genetic improvement with discredited theories of racial purity.
But there’s nothing to indicate that genetically modified tomatoes, soybeans or other crops are chemically different than those produced by standard breeding techniques.
People who raise that fear are often simply those who don’t want anything genetically modified at all, no matter what the cost. That’s the kind of attitude that would have prevented hybrid corn from gaining acceptance when it was introduced 40 years ago. In fact, some people did label it unnatural and against God’s will. Yet hybrids increased corn yields, made animal feed more plentiful, and helped produce the whole modern culture of inexpensive beef and pork.
Q: So opponents of biotechnology who push for `natural’ agriculture might actually end up making some kinds of food more scarce?
A: Yes, and there are even those who would just as soon see the world’s population decrease through hardship.
That’s not my philosophy. It’s not Christian, and it’s not scientifically or morally valid. We must produce high quality food on as little land as possible, for the benefit of the many.
Q: What role can genetic engineering play in addressing world hunger?
A: The first wave of agriculture biotechnology hasn’t really hit the Third World yet. We’ve already seen the development of crops that require fewer adverse chemical insecticides while maintaining a high level of production. We’ve developed new strains of cotton, potatoes, corn and soybeans that can grow in the presence of herbicides, and vegetables that are genetically resistant to diseases.
Our challenge is to get this technology where it’s most needed. At Scripps, we’ve brought scientists to our labs from Asia, Latin America and Africa to help us identify the crops and plant diseases they need help with. As a result, we have some new strains of rice being tested in Malaysia, the Philippines and China, and in Colombia they’re using the first genetically modified cassava root, which is a major staple for 800 million people around the world. We’ve trained dozens of people to modify these crops, do plant DNA fingerprinting, and establish programs of local value.
That’s a start. What we will need in the new research center in St. Louis is to expand that type of research. The Missouri Botanical Garden, which is a partner in the new center, has wonderful worldwide connections in the tropics because it has been identifying exotic plants and screening them for cancer fighting potential for years.
Q: What could be the next big advances in plant genetic engineering?
A: Some of the most exciting possibilities in terms of the U.S. market will be improving the nutritional benefits we get from plants. We’d like to produce a crop that has better carbohydrate production, or grow soybeans that have more diverse kinds of proteins than nature gave them.
In some cases we don’t know where we’re going. We know that some crops like broccoli seem to have an anti-cancer effect, but we don’t know exactly what causes it, and we wouldn’t know how to produce similar effects in Brussels sprouts, carrots or celery. That’s going to take fundamental new discoveries.
Q: How do we pry those secrets out of plants?
A: I’d like to see a way to integrate the vast and broad applications that come out of genomic research of the kind we’ve seen from the human genome project. It will mean isolating and characterizing plant genes, determining what they do, and modifying them to do something different than what the original gene had been structured for.
The strains we’ve worked on up to now have been developed one gene at a time, or were been based on our knowledge of one gene that gets transferred in. When you’re talking about the ability to produce plants that grow in less water or other extreme conditions, those advances will require the activity of many genes, not just one at a time. We need information about more genes, and that’s what the genome projects will give us.
Q: Are there any examples of genetically engineered plants that are having a really significant practical impact?
A: Yes. The papaya industry in Hawaii, for instance, was virtually wiped out by the papaya ringspot virus. By genetic modification they’ve now developed a virus-resistant papaya. A few genetically modified vegetables soon will be on the U.S. market, including cucumbers, squash, tomatoes and potatoes, most of which will stay fresh longer or be more disease-resistant.
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An edited transcript
