Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (4 page)

Federal officials didn’t register any serious objections in their conversations with Blake, and by the summer of 2003, he thought he had his bases covered. He had consulted with scientific and legal experts. The licenses to produce the neon Nemos were in hand. And the fish farmers were ready to start churning them out. Blake set a launch date of January 2004, but then California caught him by surprise. The state’s Fish and Game Commission instituted a regulation prohibiting the production and sale of all genetically modified fish. Anyone who wanted to breed, buy, sell, or own these organisms needed to appear before the commission and request a formal exemption.

That fall, Blake was busy preparing for his hearing before the commission when a technical glitch suddenly made the company’s password-protected website available to all eyes. The press got wind of Blake’s Seussian fish, and within a week, the animals were discussed everywhere from National Public Radio to Al-Jazeera. Many publications ran anxiety-provoking stories, but the fearmongering award winner had to be a
New York Times
headline:
WHEN FISH FLUORESCE, CAN TEENAGERS BE FAR BEHIND?
As the story put it, “This is the tipping point, when the world irrevocably turns toward the science-fiction fantasies of writers … No doubt humans could be made to glow if parents with foresight knew that one day they would be desperately trying to find their middle school child at a dark and crowded school dance.”

The stories made GloFish seem like monsters, harbingers of some sort of ethical or scientific apocalypse. Indeed, the genome can seem like a set of commandments—handed down and carved into stone—and fiddling with it makes us nervous. Selective breeding has become an accepted practice, but our ability to root around in the genome directly and move pieces of DNA between different species is still unsettling. “These are techniques that are advancing the threshold of human power over other species,” says Richard Twine, a sociologist and bioethicist at Lancaster University. “It’s a way of increasing the continuum of control over the animal and genotype and phenotype. There’s an intensification, a new power that we didn’t have before.” What’s more, once GloFish officially went on sale, they’d be available to anyone with five dollars, meaning that organisms once confined to pulpy science fiction novels could be living in your neighbor’s den. With the launch of GloFish, biotechnology would come to our houses and knock on our front doors.

The California Fish and Game Commission seemed acutely aware of these concerns when it convened to discuss GloFish in December 2003. Unless you are an expert on the cold calculus of culling wild turkeys or an aficionado of the tender lovemaking habits of the New Zealand mud snail, Fish and Game meetings can be brain-deadening experiences. But on this particular afternoon, there would be a captivating showdown over our biotechnological future.

When Blake came to the podium for his opening remarks, he had a slightly bewildered air about him, like a straight-A student who suddenly finds himself called to the principal’s office. He was well-mannered and deferential, peppering his comments with “sir”s and “gentlemen”s. As he spoke, it was obvious that he had done his homework. All the scientists that he had consulted—as well as the experts that the Department of Fish and Game had conferred with before the hearing—had concluded that GloFish were safe. But Blake had made a critical miscalculation: that the data would be enough.

GloFish may have been a laboratory triumph, but debates over biotechnology rarely come down to the science. According to public opinion polls, only 27 percent of Americans believe that the government should base its decisions about genetic engineering purely on science. Compare that with the 63 percent who think such decisions should take “moral and ethical factors” into account. That’s just what the California commission did. Commissioner Sam Schuchat told Blake that he had already done a lot of thinking about whether GloFish should be sold in California. He’d even called his rabbi to discuss his concerns. “The question for me became an ethical question,” Schuchat said at the hearing. “Here we are, playing around with the genetic basis of life, creating new organisms that don’t exist. Now it is true that we human beings have been doing that for tens of thousands of years. But I guess at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s right to produce a new organism just to be a pet. I look at this issue in front of us and I think to myself, ‘So, what’s next? Pigs with wings? Pink horses?’”

“Let me be clear,” he continued. “I’m not opposed to genetically modified organisms. But I don’t think it is a good idea to employ this technology for what I would characterize as frivolous purposes … To me, this seems like an abuse of the power that we have over life, and I’m not prepared to go there today.”

Blake had heard this objection before from some of the scientists he first consulted about his business plan. When Eric Hallerman, a fish geneticist at Virginia Tech, heard about GloFish, he worried that they were “a fairly trivial use of technology.” But Hallerman, who has advised the federal government about risks that accompany genetically modified animals, overcame his initial skepticism, even joining the Yorktown Technologies Scientific Advisory Board. As Hallerman explains, when it comes to GloFish, “there’s no harm being done, and there’s fairly few enterprises that humans engage in, including agriculture, in which no harm is being done.”

Let’s not forget that even selective breeding can do harm. Those ornamental goldfish varieties that we’ve created to have eerie, unearthly eyes—enlarged and bulging, or covered by enormous growths, or positioned to look up toward the sky—can be nearly blind. From an ethical standpoint, isn’t a fully functional transgenic fish preferable to an artificially selected but severely handicapped one?
*

Not, apparently, to the California commissioners. After they finished querying Blake, they voted, three to one, to deny his request. Commissioner Michael Flores was the lone dissenter. “We have a gentleman out here who’s gone to the scientific community, those that are very precautionary, and they say that there’s no risk,” he said at the meeting. “So we’re going to ignore that science, and that has me a little bit concerned.” But Flores’s single vote wasn’t enough, and the objections of his colleagues meant that there would be no GloFish in the Golden State.

California could have been a huge market for Blake, who was disappointed with the ruling, but there were still forty-nine other states to sell in, and just days after the California commission rejected GloFish, the FDA released an official statement on the pets. It read, in full: “Because tropical aquarium fish are not used for food purposes, they pose no threat to the food supply. There is no evidence that these genetically engineered zebra danio fish pose any more threat to the environment than their unmodified counterparts which have long been widely sold in the United States. In the absence of a clear risk to the public health, the FDA finds no reason to regulate these particular fish.”

A few opponents refused to accept the FDA’s ruling as the final word. Just after GloFish hit pet stores in January 2004, the International Center for Technology Assessment and the Center for Food Safety—two affiliated nonprofits that have raised concerns about a variety of biotechnologies—filed a lawsuit. They alleged that the FDA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had shirked their legal duty to subject GloFish to a thorough review. In an attempt to convince the court that they had the right to sue, the plaintiffs constructed an unconventional argument. How had GloFish harmed them? Well, among other things, they said, the sale of the freaks of nature could lead to “aesthetic injury from viewing genetically engineered GloFish and other animals in aquaria…” The suit was eventually dismissed, but the “aesthetic injury” argument was a testament to just how desperate some opponents were to keep the animals out of pet shops. (Aesthetic injury? If that’s a valid legal argument, I’ve got a couple of lawsuits I’d like to file. Mexican hairless dog, I’m looking at you.)

The aesthetic-injury argument apparently didn’t find much traction with the public either, because GloFish, and their Kodak-worthy colors, are a hit, available in all of America’s major pet store chains. (Yorktown Technologies sells its fish only in the United States, although the Taiwanese company Taikong sells its own version of the paint-box pets in Asia. Though he’d love to sell to customers in Canada and Europe, Blake doesn’t want to tangle with these jurisdictions’ ultratight restrictions on genetically modified organisms.) At first, Yorktown Technologies sold only red GloFish, but the company added green and orange varieties in 2006 and blue and purple in 2011. In 2012, the company introduced an entirely new fish: a white skirt tetra (
Gymnocorymbus ternetzi
) genetically modified to fluoresce bright green.
*
Petco, PetSmart, and Walmart also sell GloFish “kits,” special tanks that come equipped with blue lights designed to bring out the fish’s brilliance.

“We have e-mails from customers who love the fish,” Blake tells me. “We’ve gotten thousands and thousands of e-mails and, on average, every year, we get—four? five?—e-mails from people that are expressing negativity. There are probably more people that claim to see Elvis flying a UFO in any major U.S. city every year.”

Once GloFish hit the market, their fate was determined not by some abstract debate over biotechnology but rather by public demand. Customers simply like the fish. The success of GloFish is all the more remarkable in light of the public opinion surveys that show that most Americans aren’t fans of lab-grown companions. (In one survey, 40 percent of respondents said that creating disease-resistant animals—such as chickens safe from the ravages of avian flu—was a “very good reason” to meddle with the genome. Compare that with the 4 percent who said that creating new pets was a “very good reason” to do so.) Is it possible that GloFish have changed our minds? Maybe there are some people out there who went into pet stores expecting something monstrous and came away thinking that GloFish were not only harmless but actually downright cool. It’s what can happen when we get the opportunity to have close, personal encounters with biotechnology.

And it’s one reason Blake takes his responsibilities seriously. Yes, he has a financial interest in GloFish’s success, but he also knows that he has an opportunity to help shape public opinion. He hopes that GloFish will be a bright, shining example, proof that species engineering doesn’t have to be so scary. “Biotechnology is often demonized,” Blake says. “And then you see this tiny little fish, just swimming around, as happy as can be.”

*   *   *

Are the fish happy? Are fish even capable of “happiness”? These are the questions I ponder as I stand, once again, at Petco, looking into a tank of glowing fish. It has occurred to me that just about the only thing I haven’t done in the GloFish research department is invite them into my home. So here I am, ready to take the plunge. I grab the special GloFish aquarium and am about to pick out some plain gray stones to put in the bottom of the tank, but my boyfriend spots a bag of mixed gravel in hues that look like they belong on a tie-dyed T-shirt. “You should get those,” he says.

“Won’t that be tacky?”

“You’re getting genetically modified, fluorescent fish,” he says. “Don’t you think that ship has sailed?”

I might as well go all in. I grab the fluorescent gravel and some neon plastic plants.

Then it’s over to the corner tank that GloFish call home. They’re swimming around in a hallucinogenic jumble, and I ask a clerk to corral six of them for me: two Electric Greens, two Starfire Reds, and two Sunburst Oranges. (At $5.99 each, I am stocking an aquarium with next-gen pets for less than $40—far less than the cost of my Cavapoo.) An employee plops the fish into a plastic bag filled with water. I hold the bag up to my face and come eye-to-eye with the doctored fish. They continue their openmouthed stares, hovering silently in the water. I don’t exactly fear for the fate of the Earth. (“You’d think they were six feet long with fangs and they’d bite your head off, the way they’ve been portrayed,” Blake once told me.)

I tote them home and set up the tank up in my living room. Under the blue light coming from the bulb, the GloFish gleam like jewels. I don’t know if they’re happy, but they certainly don’t appear to be suffering. Neither am I—it’s entrancing to watch them swimming around, a kaleidoscope in constant motion. These fish may be frivolous, but they’re just a teaser, a preview of the coming attractions. If we can get black-and-white fish to glow neon red, green, and orange, what else can we get animal bodies to do?

2. Got Milk?

When scientists first learned how to edit the genomes of animals, they began to imagine all the ways they could use this new power. Creating brightly colored novelty pets was not a high priority. Instead, most researchers envisioned far more consequential applications, hoping to create genetically engineered animals that saved human lives. One enterprise is now delivering on this dream. Welcome to the world of “pharming,” in which simple genetic tweaks turn animals into living pharmaceutical factories.

Many of the proteins that our cells crank out naturally make for good medicine. Our bodies’ own enzymes, hormones, clotting factors, and antibodies are commonly used to treat cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and more. The trouble is that it’s difficult and expensive to make these compounds on an industrial scale, and as a result, patients can face shortages of the medicines they need. Dairy animals, on the other hand, are expert protein producers, their udders swollen with milk. So the creation of the first transgenic mammals—first mice, then other species—in the 1980s gave scientists an idea: What if they put the gene for a human antibody or enzyme into a cow, goat, or sheep? If they put the gene in just the right place, under the control of the right molecular switch, maybe they could engineer animals that produced healing human proteins in their milk. Then doctors could collect medicine by the bucketful.