Reducing Life

later development of genetically modified organisms and the Gene Revolution.7

Notably, the Rockefeller-funded genetic scientists in the new field of molecular biology congregated at the same Cold Spring Harbor site of the Eugenics Records Office, financed by Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, to hold major scientific symposiums on the "genetics of micro-organisms" beginning in 1946 just after the war's end.8

Reducing Life Risks entailed weren't interesting to the Rockefeller group. Their methodology went back to what was termed "reductionism" by Rene Descartes, and to the method of Charles Darwin, namely that living creatures were machines whose only goal was genetic replication-a matter of chemistry and statistics. The Rockefeller methodology was an extension of the belief that a complex life form cold be reduced to a basic building bloc or "elementary seed;' from which all traits of the life form could be deduced. It was of little interest to Weaver and others at the Rockefeller Foundation that scientific reductionism had been thoroughly refuted. "Who pays the Piper picks the tune." They had a social agenda and their reductionist genetics supported that agenda.

One scientist critical of the risks of GMO research, Prof. Philip Regal, who organized the first meeting between leading university ecologists and molecular biologists, genetic engineers in industry, and representatives from government agencies, at the Cold Spring Harbor Banbury Center in August 1984, defined the flaw of the molecular biologists' reductionism:

In the case of DNA, this molecule is stable in a test tube. But it is not stable in populations of reproducing organisms. One cannot reduce the behavior of DNA in living organisms to its chemical properties in a test tube! In living systems, DNA is modified, or "destabilized" if one prefers, at a minimum by mutation, gene flow, recombination, and natural selection. This would make it extremely difficult or even impossible to have a true genetic engineering, in the sense of which it had been spoken. Many molecular biologists certainly "knew" facts

about mutation and natural selection as abstract facts, but they were not a working part of their professional consciousness.9

Once they had made the idea popular in US science that organisms were reduced to genes, they could conclude that organisms had no inherent nature. Anything was "fair game." But nature was far more complex than a digital computer. In one example pointed to by biologists, whereas a given DNA molecule would be stable in a test tube, it became highly unstable in living organisms, interacting in extremely non-linear and complex ways. Life was not a binary computer program. It was marvellously non-linear and complex as traditional biologists had attested for centuries. to

The Rockefeller Foundation's molecular biology and their genetics work was consciously based on that fundamental scientific error, reductionism. Their scientists used the term "genetic programming" as a metaphor for what happens in a computer, but no scientist was able to generate an organism from a genetic program. As one British biologist, Professor Brian Goodwin, pointed out, "You need to know more than gene products in order to explain the emergence of shape and form in organisms."ll

Such details were of no interest to the Rockefeller eugenicists, who were masquerading in the 1980's as geneticists. More likely than not, many of the younger generation of biologists and scientists receiving Rockefeller research grants were blissfully unaware that eugenics and genetics were in any way related. They simply scrambled for scarce research dollars, and the dollars all too often had the name and strings of the Rockefeller Foundation attached.

The foundation's research goal was to find ways to reduce the infinite complexities of life to simple, deterministic and predictive models. Warren Weaver was intent on using science, bad science if need be, to shape the world into the Rockefeller model. The promoters of the new molecular biology at the foundation were determined to map the structure of the gene, and to use that information, as Philip Regal described it, "to correct social and moral problems including crime, poverty, hunger and political instability."12 Just how they would correct such social problems would be kept under wraps for decades. Regal described the Rockefeller visioh:

From the perspective of a theory reductionist, it was logical that social problems would reduce to simple biological problems that could be corrected through chemical manipulations of soils, brains, and genes. Thus the Rockefeller Foundation made a major commitment to using its connections and resources to promote a philosophy of eugenics.

The Rockefeller Foundation used its funds and considerable social, political, and economic connections to promote the idea that society should wait for scientific inventions to solve its problems, and that tampering with the economic and political systems would not be necessary. Patience, and more investment in reductionist research would bring trouble-free solutions to social and economic problems.

Mason and Weaver helped create a network of what would one day be called molecular biologists, that had little traditional knowledge of living organisms and of communities of organisms. It shared a faith in theory reductionism and in determinism. It shared utopian ideals. It learned to use optimistic terms of discourse that brought grants and status. The project was in the general spirit of Bacon's New Atlantis and Enlightenment visions of a trouble-free society based on mastery of nature's laws and scientific/technological progress.

13

During the 1970's, molecular biologists in the United States intensely debated the issue of whether recombinant DNA research, later referred to as genetic engineering, should at all proceed, or whether, owing to the incalculability of the possible dangers to life on the planet and the risk of an ecological accident, research should be voluntarily ceased in the interest of mankind. By 1973, the essential techniques of genetic engineering had been developed in the laboratory. 14

One biologist, Dr. Robert Mann, a retired Senior Lecturer of the University of Auckland, emphasised that there was indeed a problem with how Rockefeller reductionist simplification ignored possible social risks: "Attempts at risk analysis for Genetic Engineering are, obviously, doomed to be even more misleading:' Mann noted:

The system of a living cell, even if no viruses or foreign plasm ids (let alone prions) are tossed in, is incomparably more complex than a nuclear reactor. There is no prospect of imagining most of the ways it can go badly wrong ... . Many gene-splicings come to naught; some others may yield only the desired outcome; but the few major .

mishaps, as with nuclear power, dominate the assessment so as to rule out this approach to science and life. IS

Mann sounded the alarm: one of the countless scientific warnings buried by the powerful agribusiness propaganda machine that stood with the Rockefeller Foundation behind genetically engineered organisms. 16

«Among the biological materials used for GE," Prof. Abigail Salyers warned in the prestigious Microbiological Review: [A]re small pieces of DNA called plasmids, depicted ... as simple predictable carriers of engineered genes. According to conventional wisdom, a plasmid used to introduce a gene into a genetically engineered micro-organism can be rendered non -transmissible ... [on the contrary] there is no such thing as a "safe" plasmid ... a riddle we may have to answer in order to survive: what can be done to slow or stop the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. But the gene jockeys claim they can, Godlike, foresee the evolutionary results of their artificial transposings of human genes into sheep, bovine genes into tomatoes, etc. 17

The heart of genetic engineering of plants, unlike the longstanding methods of creating plant hybrids by cross-breeding two varieties of the same plant to produce a new variety with specific traits, involved introducing foreign DNA into a given plant. The . combining of genes from different organisms was termed recombinant DNA or rONA. An example was the creation of GE sweet corn or Bt sweet corn. It was made by inserting a gene from a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, into the genome of a corn variety to protect it from the European Corn Borer pest. In 1961,Bt had been registered as a pesticide. Its ability to combat specific insects was questionable however. One 1999 scientific report warned:

Evolution of resistance by pests is the most serious threat to the continued efficacy of Bt toxins .... With millions of hectares of Bt toxinproducing transgenic plants grown yearly, other pests are likely to evolve resistance uickly unless effective countermeasures are designed and implemented soon.18

Gene transformation usually required a tissue culture or regeneration of an intact plant from a single cell that had been treated

with hormones or antibiotics and forced to undergo abnormal development. In order to implant a foreign gene into a plant cell, in addition to a genetically engineered bacteria (Agrobacterium tumefaciens), a "Taxi" or "Gene cannon;' a method known also as biolistics, short for bio-ballistics. The gene cannon had been developed in 1987 at Cornell University by John Sanford. Unlike the creation of plant or animal hybrids, genetic engineering of plants bypassed sexual reproduction entirely, and hence was not limited by their species barriers, so that the natural species barriers could be "jumped."19

Biologist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, head of the London Institute of Science in Society, stressed that "entirely new genes and combinations of genes are made in the laboratory and inserted into the genomes of organisms to make genetically modified organisms. Contrary to what you are told by pro-GMO scientists;' she went on to say that "the process is not at all precise. It is uncontrollable and unreliable, and typically ends up damaging and scrambling the host genome, with entirely unpredictable consequences."20

Neither the Rockefeller Foundation nor the scientists it funded, nor the GMO agribusiness they worked with, had any apparent interest in examining such risks. It was self evident they would have the world believe that risks were minimal.21

The first genes had been spliced in 1973 and the recombinant gene technique spread widely among research labs, amid heated debate about the potential risks of misuse of the new technology. There was intense scientific concern about the risk of a so-called "Andromeda Strain" scenario of an escaping mutating species. The term was drawn from science-fiction writer Michael Crichton's 1968 novel, The Andromeda Strain, about a deadly disease which causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood, and threatens all life on Earth.

In 1984, no serious scientific consensus existed within America's research laboratories on the dangers of releasing genetically modified plants into a natural environment. Yet, despite the fact that very significant doubts persisted, the Rockefeller Foundation made the decision to devote major global funding to the genetic modification process.