Q J Med 2002; 95: 335-336
© 2002 Association of Physicians
Biologic |
Technophobia
The first forms of cultivated wheat—einkorn and emmer—evolved following the importation of their precursors from the Near East 10 000 to 12 000 years ago. Our Neolithic forebears were skilful genetic manipulators of crops, and they selected for the things that mattered. They achieved a progressive enlargement of the part of the plant that they used, and selected for the loss of seed dispersal mechanisms (this way you keep the entire crop). This was achieved in cereals by diminution of the fragility of the ear spindles, and in legumes by the loss of automatic pod opening mechanisms. They also selected for upright growth to ease harvesting, and for the simultaneous ripening of seeds or fruit.
They were good at it. The number of grains per gram of wild einkorn was between 77 and 100; in the (Neolithic) domesticated form it fell to 34–48. We do not know whether there was a movement that objected to the change from hand hoeing to ploughing in the Bronze and Iron Ages, although the characteristics of weed growth were selected for at this time by these changes. The Romans, of course, changed everything in Northern Europe by introducing estate management (and importing mangel, cabbage, garlic, coriander, fennel and savory together with apples, pears, sweet and sour cherries as well as walnuts, sweet chestnuts and grapes).
There has been relentless experimentation with our food for millennia. We have worked on animals too: the native dog, pig, cattle, sheep and goats of Northern Europe were joined by the horse in the Neolithic and by the chicken in around 400 BC; the Romans brought the donkey, mule, cat, pigeon and rabbit; and in the Middle Ages the duck came. But they were scrawny beasts. In the late Iron Age, cows with a shoulder height of 1 metre were normal. This did not change until the eighteenth, and more importantly the nineteenth century, when better record keeping and selection developed. Modern breeds of cow yield 10 to 20 times more milk than their seventeenth century forebears. In the twentieth century, experimental work including irradiation of seed and selection for ‘short’ cereals which are not blown over and made unharvestable, and, for example, the exploitation of variation in tomatoes that now yield twice as many globes as their 1940 equivalents, have been important. The increased utilization rates of nitrogen by modern rice and corn has proved vital—as Vaclav Smil says ‘if we were to provide the average 1995 per capital food supply with the 1900 level of agricultural productivity, we could feed only 2.4 billion people, or just 40% of today's total’.1
So why are we apparently so worried about the next steps in crop manipulation? It is easy to say that previous advances were all achieved without the use of a technology for direct genetic intervention—is it the style of intervention that is the problem? Well, we are not apparently disturbed by the direct genetic experiments we perform on ourselves. Hastings2 points out that the use of effective family planning, in utero diagnosis with termination, and embryo sexing in sex-linked recessive lethal mutations will lead to reproductive compensation and rapidly elevate the frequency of the mutation in the population—for Duchenne-type dystrophy or haemophilia it will increase by 33% in two to five generations.
In a thoughtful review in Genetics of how public opinion has been formed, Celest Condit3 points out that although views about public opinion in this area are often expressed, little serious discussion has taken place. There is no grasp of the concept that ‘public opinion’ is seldom a constructed collective view—what agreement is likely between those who need a kidney and those who fear pig viruses? Our idea that the public is the aggregate of all of the individuals in a given territory is strongly identified with a particular view of representative democracy, with the opinion poll as its marker—this simplistic example of xenotransplantation makes this difficult to accept uncritically. It is more realistic to regard the public as a collective concept, a grouping that avoids the influence of narrow immediate personal interests in order to achieve benefits for the community.
In genetics, there is little evidence that levels of education or specific instruction is important or influential in forming people's views (as in other fields, see reference 4). The role of special interest (pressure) groups is important; they exert much greater influence than the unorganized, and undoubtedly influence legislation.5 There is a substantial body of research that supports the opinion that ‘what gets said is what matters’6,7—and as what is said is more and more an expression of views of chat-show hosts and commentators, rather than the considered statements of those involved in research or (dread word) experts, special interests may have disproportionate influence. Add to this the fact that reservations about results seldom figure in media-based discussions of hazards, and that association and causation are often muddled, and we have the potential for the development of a polemic rather than a debate.
References
1. Smil V. Enriching the Earth. Cambridge MA and London UK, MIT Press, 2001.
2. Hastings IM. Reproductive compensation and human genetic disease. Genet Res2001; 77:277–83.[Medline]
3. Condit C. What is ‘public opinion’ about genetics. Nat Rev Genet2001; 2:811–15.[Web of Science][Medline]
4. Berry CL. Risks, costs, choice and rationality. In: Day P, ed. Proceedings of the Royal Institution. Oxford Science Publications, Oxford, 1996:125–43.
5. Page B, Shapiro RY. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in American's Policy Preferences. Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
6. Hogan JM. The Nuclear Freeze Campaign: Rhetoric and Foreign Policy in the Telepolitical Age. Lansing MI, University of Michigan Press, 1994.
7. Vatz R, Weinberg L. Media and polling; measuring and creating the salience of George Bush as a wimp. Mass Commun Rev1987; 14:23–7.
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