Last Straw

“Did an ice­berg sink the Titanic or unfoun­ded tech­no­lo­gical optim­ism, over-confidence and pride?“
—Key Les­sons from the His­tory of Sci­ence and Tech­no­logy: Knowns and Unknowns, Break­throughs and Cau­tions, March 2001, pg32

New Zea­l­and is widely known as being nuc­lear free, yet we use nuc­lear mater­i­als in can­cer treat­ment, in radio­ther­apy. We use them in the labor­at­ory and dia­gnostics and tracer tech­niques. We use them in smoke alarms. We use them out in the com­munity in small-scale safe ways. And yet we are nuc­lear free because we banned power sta­tions and ships.

Just like we are Nuclear-Free, we can be GE-Free. This does not mean turn­ing our backs on the pos­it­ive things the under­stand­ing of genet­ics can do for our medi­cine, our research, our under­stand­ing of life and com­mer­cial oppor­tun­it­ies. It simply means we do not release genet­ic­ally engin­eered organ­isms into our envir­on­ment, our agriculture.

It’s this poten­tially irre­vers­ible and unpre­dict­able release of genet­ic­ally engin­eered organ­isms that New Zeal­anders are rightly con­cerned about, along with many emin­ent scientists.

We are being told that we should be guinea pigs, that we should put up with the risks of releas­ing genet­ic­ally engin­eered organ­isms into our environment.

We are being told this by the same people who told us the Titanic could not be sunk, the same people who told us asbes­tos was fine, the same people who told us global warm­ing does not exist, the same people who now admit that global warm­ing exists but deny that humans have a major part to play, the same people who told us CFCs do not deplete the ozone layer, the same people who told us it was safe to pump preg­nant moth­ers full of Thalidom­ide, the same people that hailed the can­cer caus­ing drug diethyl­stil­bestrol (DES) as a won­der drug ignor­ing advice to the con­trary, the same people who hail anti­bi­ot­ics as animal growth stim­u­lants, the same people who saw sci­entific oppos­i­tion to wide­spread and indis­crim­in­ate use of long-lived toxic pesti­cides not as a sci­entific chal­lenge to their dom­in­ant pos­i­tion but as a pub­lic rela­tions prob­lem, the same people who assured us BSE wasn’t a threat, the same people who told us the answer to pol­lu­tion was dilu­tion res­ult­ing in acid rain and the increas­ing homo­gen­isa­tion of our planet’s diversity, the same people who told us rab­bits would be great for NZ, and then pro­ceeded to tell us weasels, stoats and fer­rets were needed to con­trol rab­bits, the same people who told us Atmo­spheric Nuc­lear test­ing was safe, the same people who told us Nuc­lear power was safe, the same people who told us that the prob­lem of safely stor­ing radio­act­ive wastes was just a tech­nical ques­tion, and the same people who tell us that arti­fi­cial food addit­ives are safe but con­veni­ently ignore accu­mu­lat­ive affects.

Then we stand around scratch­ing our heads try­ing to fig­ure out why we get cancer.

I believe that the risks of releas­ing genet­ic­ally engin­eered organ­isms into the envir­on­ment far out­weigh the sup­posed pro­jec­ted bene­fits, and that is all they are — supposed.

I note that one of the con­cerns, should we fail to go the bio-tech way, is that we would have a mass exodus of sci­entific minds. How about cre­at­ing an envir­on­ment in which New Zea­l­and sci­ent­ists become lead­ers in the devel­op­ment of eco­lo­gic­ally benign and sus­tain­able sci­ence? I believe that were we to cre­ate such an envir­on­ment we would see an influx of sci­ent­ists which would prob­ably out­weigh the depar­ture of the bio-tech enthu­si­asts. Fur­ther­more we would have developed a very valu­able know­ledge base which would be sought after bey­ond New Zealand.

And to those that say genet­ic­ally engin­eered food has the poten­tial to improve life for the mal­nour­ished and sick, assum­ing for a minute, against cur­rent evid­ence, that GE does even­tu­ally cre­ate bet­ter yields, I say the pesticide/fertiliser revolu­tion has already proven this to be a false assump­tion. The prob­lem of mal­nour­ish­ment is not a pro­duc­tion prob­lem, it is a dis­tri­bu­tion prob­lem. All the pesticide/fertilzer revolu­tion did for the third world was to increase its pop­u­la­tion and cre­ate a dev­ast­at­ing depend­ence on first world tech­no­logy. Many of these com­munit­ies are now try­ing to find ways of going back to tra­di­tional organic agriculture.

I believe that the argu­ments for and against the release of genet­ic­ally engin­eered organ­isms into the envir­on­ment have been adequately can­vassed. The con­cern now is that the best decision is made giv­ing atten­tion to the risks involved.

It would appear that in mak­ing decisions too often we tend to feel an urgency to jump on the band­wagon. This may be rel­ev­ant for eco­nom­ies much lar­ger than New Zea­l­and. How­ever for a small eco­nomy we have the oppor­tun­ity to cre­ate a vis­ion which goes bey­ond the “band­wagon” men­tal­ity and find a dir­ec­tion which has the poten­tial to make us leaders.

I believe that in a world envir­on­ment where it can be expec­ted that bio-technology will become increas­ingly prac­ticed, the case for main­tain­ing the New Zea­l­and envir­on­ment as a sanc­tu­ary of non mod­i­fied genetic mater­ial becomes a very rational pro­pos­i­tion. We have the geo­graphic isol­a­tion to be able to estab­lish what could vir­tu­ally be regarded as an Ark of ori­ginal life forms. I believe that such an envir­on­ment could ulti­mately become the worlds most pre­cious possession.

There’s a reason why frogs can’t shag potatoes.

Keep it in the lab!