What's GM and what has it done to my food? Even before genetic technologies made their appearance, a walk down the grocery aisle would have turned up quite a few genetically modified products. Nearly every food we eat has gone through some process of artificial selection, some process of modification through biotechnology. Whole wheat? Check--humans were cultivating (and artificially selecting) wheat as early as 10,000 BC. Beer? Sure--Egyptians were using yeast to brew the golden beverage 8000 years ago. Potatoes? Rice? Beans? Try Peru and Southeast Asia, 10,000 years ago. Now, however, genetic modification (GM) techniques are revolutionizing medicine, animal breeding, and agriculture. For thousands of years, humans painstakingly and artificially selected desirable traits in the plant and animals they raised. Now, although the processes are still painstaking, they are far faster. Transgenesis involves the incorporation of foreign genes into an animal or plant's genome, with pharmaceutical, agricultural or other applications. Researchers develop transgenic crops with aims of enhancing yields; improving taste and nutritional value; lengthening shelf life; reducing fertilizer and pesticide dependence; and producing fuel, medicine and biodegradable plastics. Transgenic animals can secrete needed proteins, such as blood clotting factors needed by human hemophilia-sufferers, in their milk. Incorporating genes coding for growth hormone protein into a transgenic animal's genome can produce a faster-growing, leaner animal. Transgenic bacteria can produce growth hormones such as bovine somatrophin (BST) on a commercial scale. When injected into dairy cattle, BST stimulates milk yields. But what are the consequences of introducing bovine growth hormone in a time of milk surplus, in an era when the number of dairy cows fell throughout the 1980s and 1990s in both England and the United States? What impact would mass marketing of BST to large commercial farming operations have on already belabored small farmers? Developing ideas or viable technologies does not exempt scientists from ethical responsibility. As Lewis Wolpert claims, good scientists recognize "their obligation…to make public any social implications of their work and its technological applications, and to give some assessment of its reliability"(1). Once that information has been disclosed, however, the task of determining the ethical applications of scientific knowledge and technology falls not to scientists themselves, but to ethicists, advisors, regulators, and informed members of the public. Science--very loosely defined--is the quest to determine and understand the causal relationships underlying the behavior of the universe and the things within it. Science produces ideas about how and why the world functions the way it does. Technology uses these ideas to produce usable objects. It is the study of ethics, however, that addresses what we ought and ought not to do, rather than the how or why of what actually happens. It prescribes, rather than predicts and describes; it tells us how best to take the knowledge that we acquire in the laboratory and apply it to the world.   Get those genes out of my pool--the makings of a controversy The ethical debates surrounding GM food can be lumped in three broad categories. There are issues of general welfare: how can one provide for the well-being of the individual, the community and the environment? There are questions of right: how can one insure the fulfillment of basic human needs, the maintenance of freedom of choice, and the preservation of the integrity of all life? Then there are deliberations of justice: how can one equitably distribute burdens and benefits among those impacted by technology? According to many regulatory bodies, genetically modified crops pose no greater threat to health than those crops produced by traditional breeding. According to some researchers such as Mike Gale, head of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, the precision and accuracy of genetic modification offer a great advantage over the comparative clumsiness of conventional breeding. As Gale claims in a recent edition of Nature, "Surely putting in one gene is better than shuffling around tens of thousands at random"(2). Although genetic manipulation more efficiently and elegantly permits the production of desired traits within an organism, this is hardly the end of the story. The fact that such techniques are possible does not preclude the need to investigate thoroughly the effects of their implementation--the impact that their use, and the food they produce, may have on the environment, on social structure, and on individual welfare. By 1998, there were 27.8 million hectares of GM crops, 74% of them in the United States. Susan Wuerthele, a risk assessor at the US Environmental Protection Agency, warns of the potential threat posed by the imminent introduction, on a global scale, of thousands of GM foods. The threat stems not so much from what is clear about GM foods as from what is still cloudy: the risks are uncertain and, some cases, completely unknown. This has not prevented GM foods from infiltrating markets in countries like the United States and China with comparatively little public debate or demand for regulation. In contrast, the European community has resisted the introduction of GM foods, calling vehemently for stricter regulation of their production and sale. In 1993, keeping in mind two basic consumer rights--the right to know (in this case to know the components of food products) and the right to choose (in this case, to choose to buy or not to but those same products)--the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development established the notion of "substantial equivalence." A GM food could be considered equivalent to the comparable non-GM food if composition, nutritional value, and intended use remained unchanged. Consumers International, a worldwide federation of 246 consumer groups, as well as countries such as Denmark, Norway, and India have called for more detailed labeling of all foods produced with GM techniques. The United States has opposed demands for stringent labeling. Many echo the argument of Stuart Eizenstat, US Under-Secretary of State for Economic, Buiness and Agricultural Affairs, who claims that such labeling--in addition to being costly and complicated--suggests that "GM products are somehow dangerous or of lesser quality, when scientific evidence, testing and approvals show no risk to human health" (3). The Nuffield Council on Bioethics counsels that consumers have the right "not to be involuntarily subjected to possible risks posed by the developers and growers of GM crops; the right …to choose not to consume GM foods, and perhaps to have non-GM foods kept available" (4). However, the matter is not just one of individual welfare, or even of individual choice, but rather one of technology's cumulative and global effects. The council goes on to emphasize the rights of citizens, particularly those of developing countries, to have their interests considered in policy decisions and to have their needs met by the application of new technologies. Yet these are precisely the rights some worry will be most forgotten. The development of staple GM crops--with their promise of improved yield, accentuated nutrition, and ready availability--has enormous potential to improve the plight of the over 800 million underfed persons in the world. "'More food for the hungry,' unlike 'tomatoes with longer shelf-life,' [see Test Tube Tomatoes] is a strong ethical counterweight to set against the concerns of the opponents of GM crops," the Nuffield Council claims. Public-sector research drove the innovations of the Green Revolution. Today's GM research, in contrast, is held mainly in the hands of large agrochemical and seed multinational companies. Some would argue that patenting facilitates this power concentration. Patents encourage research; many argue without the safeguarding of intellectual property, there would be no incentive to spend time, money, and energy on research. Others argue, however, patenting encourages research that follows dollars rather than need, reduces information exchange among researchers, and--perhaps most importantly--concentrates power in the fists of a few multinational companies. Fourteen companies own nearly 80% of all genetically engineered plant patents (5). Rather than focusing on the production of "cheap, labor-intensive, robust and high-yielding staples for human food," current research revolves around developing cost-efficient, herbicide-resistant, non-staple crops for large farms in industrialized countries (4). Cotton, oilseed, tobacco, soy beans and yellow corn animal feed were the principal crops grown on the 27.8 million hectares sown with GM crops. The overwhelming emphasis on these crops is detrimental not only to other humans, but to the entire ecosystem. Sir Robert May, chief scientific advisor to the British government, reiterates that agriculture continues to develop crops "that nobody eats but us." Combined with invasive farming techniques, such "selfish crops" have detrimental consequences for animals such as birds and small mammals.   The dangers of tinkering Other criticisms of GM have focused on more immediately observable side-effects. In an effort to reduce crop damage due to herbicide application, herbicide-resistant transgenic crops have been produced. With similar hopes of diminishing herbicide damage, scientists have produced insect-resistant plants&emdash;which, once modified to produce the toxins made by the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), kill specific target pests such as aphids. However, some researchers worry about the environmental damage such plants may wreak. Angelika Hilbeck of the Swiss Federal Research Station for Agroecology and Agriculture in Zurich showed that insect-resistant plants might harm beneficial insect species. Of two different groups of lacewings (a beneficial insect species), the group that fed on larvae of target insects that had eaten Bt corn had a higher death rate than the one fed on larvae that had not eaten the modified corn (2). Concern mounts, as well, that cross-pollination might result in the inter-species transfer of herbicide resistance--eventually producing a crop of super-tolerant, super-adapted "superweeds." A similar fear arises over the introduction of fish genetically engineered to live in cooler waters; some worry that such fish will continue to increase their range, ultimately displacing native species. With the gradual diminution of diversity--whether this occurs by a decrease in actual number of species or an increase in shared genotype--comes the general risk of increased reliance on smaller number of varieties susceptibility to disease epidemics. GM plants may help to stir up such epidemics. Much has been made over the differences between the tolerance of GM foods, on the one hand, by countries like the United States, and resistance by countries like the UK and India on the other. Some have attributed it to the greater distance in the US between farmland and the rest of the countryside. In contrast, the Europeans and the English were more concerned with these issues because more of their countryside is employed in agriculture. However, a good deal of European resistance to GM foods may stem from the BSE disaster. In March 1996, the UK government announced a presumed link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or "mad cow disease"), present in UK dairy herds since 1985, and cases of a neurological prion disease in the human population. By far the greatest casualty was consumer confidence: the announcement decimated faith in both British beef and the British government, and the resulting scare led the EU to impose a worldwide ban on the export of British beef. At first glance, the relation to GM foods seems tenuous. The incidence of BSE had nothing to do with genetically modified foods. The British beef scare contributed to general European consumer concern with food regulation and led in particular to demands for more consistent governmental monitoring and disclosure. When faced with an unknown quantity, people look toward authorities for guidance. Scientific authority must be coupled with ethical authority. Government, consumers, farmers, and researchers must band together, both in sponsoring initial research and development, promoting good science, and in establishing monitoring programs--ensuring good ethics.