The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (10 page)

“Isn't there a gene,” Kress asked Irey, “to hurry up Mother Nature?”

For a time, the answer seemed to lie with a third scientist, William O. Dawson at the University of Florida, who had managed to alter fully grown trees by attaching a gene to a virus that could be inserted by way of a small incision in the bark. Genes transmitted that way would eventually stop functioning, but Kress hoped to use it as a stopgap measure to ward off the disease in the 60 million citrus trees already in Florida's groves. Dawson joked that he hoped at least to save the grapefruit, whose juice he enjoyed, “preferably with a little vodka in it.”

But his most promising result that year was doomed from the beginning: of the dozen bacteria-fighting genes he had then tested on his greenhouse trees, the one that appeared effective came from a pig.

One of about 30,000 genes in the animal's genetic code, it was, he ventured, “a pretty small amount of pig.”

“There's no safety issue from our standpoint—but there is a certain creep factor,” an Environmental Protection Agency official observed to Kress, who had included it on an early list of possibilities to run by the agency.

“At least something is working,” Kress bristled. “It's a proof of concept.”

A similar caution dimmed his hopes for the timely approval of a synthetic gene, designed in the laboratory of a fourth scientist, Jesse Jaynes of Tuskegee University. In a simulation, Jaynes's gene consistently vanquished the greening bacteria. But the burden of proving a synthetic gene's safety would prolong the process. “You're going to get more questions,” Kress was told, “with a gene not found in nature.”

In the fall of 2010, an onion gene that discouraged psyllids from landing on tomato plants was working in the Cornell laboratory of Kress's final hope, Herb Aldwinckle. But it would be some time before the gene could be transferred to orange trees.

Only Mirkov's newly fine-tuned trees with the spinach gene, Kress and Irey agreed, could be ready in time to stave off what many believed would soon be a steep decline in the harvest. In the fall of 2010, they were put to the test inside a padlocked greenhouse stocked with infected trees and psyllids.

 

The Monsanto Effect

 

Kress's only direct brush so far with the broader battle raging over genetically modified food came in December 2010, in readers' comments on a Reuters article alluding to Southern Gardens' genetic engineering efforts.

Some readers vowed not to buy such “frankenfood.” Another attributed a rise in allergies to genetic engineering. And dozens lambasted Monsanto, the St. Louis–based company that dominates the crop biotechnology business, which was not even mentioned in the article.

“If this trend goes on, one day, there will be only Monsanto engineered foods available,” read one letter warning of unintended consequences.

Kress was unperturbed. Dozens of long-term animal feeding studies had concluded that existing GMOs were as safe as other crops, and the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, and others had issued statements to the same effect.

But some of his researchers worried that the popular association between GMOs and Monsanto—and in turn between Monsanto and the criticisms of modern agriculture—could turn consumers against Southern Gardens' transgenic oranges.

“The article doesn't say ‘Monsanto' anywhere, but the comments are all about Monsanto,” Mirkov said.

It had not helped win hearts and minds for GMOs, Kress knew, that the first such crop widely adopted by farmers was the soybean engineered by Monsanto with a bacteria gene—to tolerate a weed killer Monsanto also made.

Starting in the mid-1990s, soybean farmers in the United States overwhelmingly adopted that variety of the crop, which made it easier for them to control weeds. But the subsequent broader use of the chemical—along with a distaste for Monsanto's aggressive business tactics and a growing suspicion of a food system driven by corporate profits—combined to forge a consumer backlash. Environmental activists vandalized dozens of field trials and protested brands that used Monsanto's soybeans or corn, introduced soon after, which was engineered to prevent pests from attacking it.

In response, companies including McDonald's, Frito-Lay, and Heinz pledged not to use GMO ingredients in certain products, and some European countries prohibited their cultivation.

Some of Kress's scientists were still fuming about what they saw as the lost potential for social good hijacked by both the activists who opposed genetic engineering and the corporations that failed to convince consumers of its benefits. In many developing countries, concerns about safety and ownership of seeds led governments to delay or prohibit cultivation of needed crops: Zambia, for instance, declined shipments of GMO corn even during a 2002 famine.

“It's easy for someone who can go down to the grocery store and buy anything they need to be against GMOs,” said Jaynes, who faced such barriers with a high-protein sweet potato he had engineered with a synthetic gene.

To Kress in early 2011, any comparison to Monsanto—whose large blocks of patents he had to work around and whose thousands of employees worldwide dwarfed the 750 he employed in Florida at peak harvest times—seemed far-fetched. If it was successful, Southern Gardens would hope to recoup its investment by charging a royalty for its trees. But its business strategy was aimed at saving the orange crop, whose total acreage was a tiny fraction of the crops the major biotechnology companies had pursued.

He urged his worried researchers to look at the early success of Flavr Savr tomatoes. Introduced in 1994 and engineered to stay fresh longer than traditional varieties, they proved popular enough that some stores rationed them, before business missteps by their developer ended their production.

And he was no longer alone in the pursuit of a genetically modified orange. Citrus growers were collectively financing research into a greening-resistant tree, and the Agriculture Department had also assigned a team of scientists to it. Any solution would have satisfied Kress. Almost daily, he could smell the burning of infected trees, which mingled with orange-blossom sweetness in the grove just beyond Southern Gardens' headquarters.

 

A Growing Urgency

 

In an infection-filled greenhouse where every nontransgenic tree had showed symptoms of disease, Mirkov's trees with the spinach gene had survived unscathed for more than a year. Kress would soon have three hundred of them planted in a field trial. But in the spring of 2012, he asked the Environmental Protection Agency, the first of three federal agencies that would evaluate his trees, for guidance. The next step was safety testing. And he felt that it could not be started fast enough.

Mirkov assured him that the agency's requirements for animal tests to assess the safety of the protein produced by his gene, which bore no resemblance to anything on the list of known allergens and toxins, would be minimal.

“It's spinach,” he insisted. “It's been eaten for centuries.”

Other concerns weighed on Kress that spring: growers in Florida did not like to talk about it, but the industry's tripling of pesticide applications to kill the bacteria-carrying psyllid was, while within legal limits, becoming expensive and worrisome. One widely used pesticide had stopped working as the psyllid evolved resistance, and Florida's citrus growers' association was petitioning one company to lift the twice-a-season restrictions on spraying young trees—increasingly its only hope for an uninfected harvest.

Others in the industry who knew of Kress's project were turning to him. He agreed to speak at the fall meeting of citrus growers in California, where the greening disease had just been detected. “We need to hear about the transgenic solution,” said Ted Batkin, the association's director. But Kress worried that he had nothing to calm their fears.

And an increasingly vocal movement to require any food with genetically engineered ingredients to carry a “GMO” label had made him uneasy.

Supporters of one hotly contested California ballot initiative argued for labeling as a matter of consumer rights and transparency—but their advertisements often implied that the crops were a hazard: one pictured a child about to take a joyful bite of a pest-resistant cob of corn, on which was emblazoned a question mark and the caption “Corn, engineered to grow its own pesticide.”

Yet the gene that makes corn insect-resistant, he knew, came from the same soil bacterium long used by organic food growers as a natural insecticide.

Arguing that the Food and Drug Administration should require labels on food containing GMOs, one leader of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group, cited “pink slime, deadly melons, tainted turkeys and BPA in our soup.”

Kress attributed the labeling campaigns to the kind of tactic any industry might use to gain a competitive edge: they were financed largely by companies that sell organic products, which stood to gain if packaging implying a hazard drove customers to their own non-GMO alternatives. He did not aim to hide anything from consumers, but he would want them to understand how and why his oranges were genetically engineered. What bothered him was that a label seemed to lump all GMOs into one stigmatized category.

And when the EPA informed him in June 2012 that it would need to see test results for how large quantities of spinach protein affected honeybees and mice, he gladly wrote out the $300,000 check to have the protein made.

It was the largest single expense yet in a project that had so far cost more than $5 million. If these tests raised no red flags, he would need to test the protein as it appears in the pollen of transgenic orange blossoms. Then the agency would want to test the juice.

“Seems excessive,” Mirkov said.

But Kress and Irey shared a sense of celebration. The path ahead was starting to clear.

Rather than wait for Mirkov's three hundred trees to flower, which could take several years, they agreed to try to graft his spinach-gene shoots to mature trees to hasten the production of pollen—and, finally, their first fruit—for testing.

 

Wall of Opposition

 

Early one morning a year ago, Kress checked the Agriculture Department's web site from home. The agency had opened its sixty-day public comment period on the trees modified to produce “Arctic apples” that did not brown.

His own application, he imagined, would take a similar form.

He skimmed through the company's 163-page petition, showing how the apples are equivalent in nutritional content to normal apples, how remote was the likelihood of cross-pollination with other apple varieties, and the potentially bigger market for a healthful fruit.

Then he turned to the comments. There were hundreds. And they were almost universally negative. Some were from parents, voicing concerns that the nonbrowning trait would disguise a rotten apple—though transgenic apples rotten from infection would still turn brown. Many wrote as part of a petition drive by the Center for Food Safety, a group that opposes biotechnology.

“Apples are supposed to be a natural, healthy snack,” it warned. “Genetically engineered apples are neither.”

Others voiced a general distrust of scientists' guarantees: “Too many things were presented to us as innocuous and years later we discovered it was untrue,” wrote one woman. “After two cancers I don't feel like taking any more unnecessary risks.”

Many insisted that should the fruit be approved, it ought to be labeled.

That morning Kress drove to work late. He should not be surprised by the hostility, he told himself.

Irey tried to console him with good news: the data on the honeybees and mice had come back. The highest dose of the protein the EPA wanted tested had produced no ill effect.

But the magnitude of the opposition had never hit Kress so hard. “Will they believe us?” he asked himself for the first time. “Will they believe we're doing this to eliminate chemicals and we're making sure it's safe? Or will they look at us and say, ‘That's what they all say'?”

The major brands were rumored to be looking beyond Florida for their orange juice—perhaps to Brazil, where growers had taken to abandoning infected groves to plant elsewhere. Other experiments that Kress viewed as similar to his own had foundered. Pigs engineered to produce less-polluting waste had been euthanized after their developer at a Canadian university had failed to find investors. A salmon modified to grow faster was still awaiting FDA approval. A study pointing to health risks from GMOs had been discredited by scientists but was contributing to a sense among some consumers that the technology is dangerous.

And while the California labeling measure had been defeated, it had spawned a ballot initiative in Washington State and legislative proposals in Connecticut, Missouri, New Mexico, Vermont, and many other states.

In the heat of last summer, Kress gardened more savagely than his wife had ever seen.

Driving through the Central Valley of California last October to speak at the California Citrus Growers meeting, Kress considered how to answer critics. Maybe even a blanket “GMO” label would be OK, he thought, if it would help consumers understand that he had nothing to hide. He could never prove that there were no risks to genetically modifying a crop. But he could try to explain the risks of not doing so.

Southern Gardens had lost 700,000 trees trying to control the disease, more than a quarter of its total. The forecast for the coming spring harvest was dismal. The approval to use more pesticide on young trees had come through that day. At his hotel that night, he slipped a new slide into his standard talk.

On the podium the next morning, he talked about the growing use of pesticides: “We're using a lot of chemicals, pure and simple,” he said. “We're using more than we've ever used before.”

Then he stopped at the new slide. Unadorned, it read “Consumer Acceptance.” He looked out at the audience.