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US-backed researcher scours seas for
matter to create life
By Stephen Leahy
Brooklin, Canada, Aug. 19 (IPS)— Somewhere in the South
Pacific Ocean, a private research vessel owned by controversial genetic
scientist J. Craig Venter is collecting millions of bacteria from the
sea, hoping to find the biological building blocks he can use to create
a synthetic life-form that will one day become a new source of energy.
As fantastic as it sounds, US scientists, including Venter, have already
created such life forms from bits of DNA, the building blocks of the
cells that make up all living things.
For instance, in 2002, geneticists at the State University of New York
manufactured a polio virus. While that effort took years, Venter assembled
a bacteriophage — a virus that infects bacteria — in less
than two weeks late last year.
The process is called synthetic biology or nano-biotechnology, and uses
pieces of DNA and individual molecules to build what are in essence
living machines.
Venter and his peers are scouring the planet for bacteria that are much
more efficient than known varieties at converting sunlight and biological
matter into energy, the basis for the alternative energy source “biomass,”
which turns agricultural and other biological waste into fuel.
The DNA of those “super” bacteria would then provide the blueprint
for the living machines.
Creating the artificial bacteriophage involved making copies of segments
of DNA from a real bacteriophage and putting them together inside a
bacterial cell. The artificial bacteriophage looks and behaves just
like the natural one: it has the ability to infect and kill bacterial
cells and is indistinguishable from its “real” counterpart.
A bacteriophage is a very simple life form, with just 5,000 base pairs
in its genome or genetic map. (By contrast, the human genome has three
billion base pairs.) Bacteria have roughly four million base pairs,
and creating an artificial one will be much, much more complicated.
But there are those who believe it can be done. And, the US Department
of Energy (DOE) thinks Venter is the scientist for the job.
Last year the DOE gave Venter’s organization, the Institute for
Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA), nine million dollars to create
artificial organisms that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere and to produce biological energy sources.
“With this advance,” Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham said
in a statement, “it is easier to imagine, in the not-too-distant
future, a colony of specially designed microbes living within the emission-control
system of a coal-fired plant, consuming its pollution and its carbon
dioxide, or employing microbes to radically reduce water pollution or
to reduce the toxic effects of radioactive waste.”
But other observers see a more frightening future.
“The creation of new life-forms has enormous implications for all
humankind,” says Silvia Ribeiro of the environmental non-governmental
organization ETC Group.
“This is potentially much riskier than GM (genetically modified)
crops. Releasing completely new forms of life into the world might open
a Pandora’s box,” she told IPS from her Mexico City office.
“There should be an open, public debate about this.”
IBEA did not reply to IPS’ requests for an interview.
Brewster Kneen, a Canadian writer and biotechnology critic, sees Venter’s
quest as more of the US government’s continuing promotion of biotechnology
as the solution to all problems. “Rather than making real efforts
to deal with the sources of pollutants, they try to distract people
with this ‘magic bullet’ thinking,” he said in an interview.
Serious problems such as climate change need attention now, added Kneen,
publisher of The Ram’s Horn, a journal of food systems analysis,
but Washington has done little to reduce US emissions of the greenhouse
gases believed to cause global warming, nor has it signed the Kyoto
Accord — an international treaty designed to cut emissions.
David Caron, a marine biologist at the University of Southern California
(USC), says Venter’s project has the potential to solve some environmental
problems but is a very long-term proposition. “We can’t even
guess what they’ll find,” he told IPS.
An expert on marine microorganisms, Caron says bacterial diversity is
nearly limitless and therefore has great potential to contribute to
the development of useful products. For those reasons and to better
understand marine ecology, many other scientists are looking at ocean
bacteria, but on a smaller scale than Venter, he added.
The biologist supports this type of research and is working with other
scientists at USC to one day deploy millions of microscopic robots or
“nano-bots” in the ocean to monitor outbreaks of toxic algae.
The project will take at least a decade to achieve, if it ever succeeds,
but Caron points out that in the 1960s the idea of the internet seemed
far-fetched to many people.
Yet the world is anteing up for nano-technology. Investment in it will
total $8.6 billion in 2004, and the US government will contribute $3.7
billion into “nano” research over the next four years, New
York-based Lux Research Inc announced Aug. 17.
Tiny robots are less of a concern than putting artificial life forms,
which might reproduce or mutate, into the environment, says Sheldon
Krimsky, professor of environmental policy at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
Creating new life-forms from the bottom up will not make them any safer
than current biotechnologies, says Krimsky, who has written several
books on the subject. “The chemical industry creates its products
that way and has had a phenomenal history of mistakes.”
One major reason for those errors, which include PCBs — toxic chemicals
used as coolants and in electrical products and that are released into
the environment as by-products of incineration — results from a
simplistic view of biology when, in fact, all living things co-exist
in a complex ecosystem of inter-relationships, Krimsky said in an interview.
Synthetic biology, he argues, fits into the same model of linear thinking
that believes creating life is just a matter of putting the right biological
building blocks together.
Researchers are creating life forms without any public or governmental
oversight, adds Krimsky, and that shows no sign of changing, he said.
“Until products are ready to leave the labs, there will be no public
attention on this issue.”
ETC Group’s Ribeiro and members of other civil society organizations
that met at the first Americas Social Forum in Quito, Ecuador in July
say they are now trying to increase public awareness. They have also
agreed to create a network to track Venter’s work and to discuss
its implications.
They are also concerned about possible patents of life forms, although
Venter has signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) or other agreements
with countries where he has taken bacteria samples.
But such deals have not been subject to debate nor have the terms been
made available publicly despite Venter’s assurances they would
be, says Ribeiro.
According to Chilean activist Camila Montecinos, “there is nothing
in the MOU with Chile or the Galapagos to prevent monopoly patent claims
on any commercially useful results derived from our collected diversity.”
“We are profoundly troubled by the potential of Venter or others
to privatize microbes found in our region,” she added in a statement
issued by Spain-based organization GRAIN, an NGO that promotes the sustainable
management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s
control of genetic resources and local knowledge.
Ribeiro said many delegates at the Quito forum were calling Venter’s
project the “mother of all bio-piracies” and were extremely
worried about the dangers inherent in creating entirely new forms of
life. “Doing this is both dangerous and arrogant,” she says.
“Is this the kind of science we need in the world today?”
GM clash in French corn field
By Alex Duval Smith
Paris, France, Aug. 17— A new front has opened up in the
controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food with
the surprise emergence in France of a group of radical rural campaigners
claiming to be in favor of open-field experiments.
In a corn field near Marsat in the Puy-de-Dôme at the weekend,
gendarmes intervened after the anti-globalization campaigner José
Bové and 500 of his supporters came to blows with a new group
describing itself as “volunteer farmers and researchers in favor
of GMO tests.”
The clash came amid growing signs that the French authorities are wavering
in their opposition to open-field tests of GM crops, the seeds of which
are developed in laboratories to be resistant to certain pests or to
herbicides. In recent weeks even the conservative French wine-growing
industry has announced it wishes to keep an open mind over the possible
benefits of GMOs.
The weekend clash, which resulted in two arrests, was the first physical
confrontation between the two camps. France -- where anti-GMO campaigners
trample experimental crops most weekends -- has become Europe’s
main battleground over the issue, but police rarely intervene and most
confrontations have been confined to courtrooms. Bové has called
on his supporters -- known as “the volunteer reapers” -- to
step up their campaign of civil disobedience before a European Commission
decision on the issue due this autumn.
The commission, which in May for the first time authorized the planting
of a genetically modified maize seed manufactured by the Swiss company
Syngenta, is divided and must decide by November whether to authorize
the US chemical giant Monsanto to sell its transgenic NK603 maize in
the EU.
Bové’s “volunteer reapers” said yesterday that
the emergence of a group campaigning in favor of open-field tests was
an attempt by the GMO industry to give a “grassroots flavor”
to its efforts to win over public opinion.
The Green MP Moisette Crosnier said: “Eighty percent of Europeans
are against GMOs in their food and 75 percent of French people are opposed
to open-field experiments. We have to keep up the pressure on the government
and remind it of the will of the people.” So far only 21 open-field
GMO tests have been authorized on 48 plots totaling 18 acres.
However, the “volunteer reapers” have strong grassroots support
and have convinced 3,000 French mayors to ban GMO tests in their area.
One mayor, in Bax, Haute-Garonne, is facing court action by the prefect
of his département who wants to overrule him. Last year, Bové
served six weeks in prison for destroying GM crops and he is due to
be interviewed by police next week over an incident in Haute-Garonne
at the end of July.
The “volunteer farmers and researchers in favor of GMOs” are
led by Pierre Pagesse, a farmer and the managing director of the French
biotechnology firm Biogemma. He says he launched his group because the
“continuing destruction of crops is playing into the hands of France’s
competitors.”
He said: “At this rate European farming will fall behind. To have
sustainable agriculture you first of all need to sustain the farmers.”
Pagesse is president of Limagrain, a leading European seed company of
which Biogemma is the research arm.
Despite popular opposition to GMOs, the farming industry and French
scientists are increasingly arguing that the phenomenon is unstoppable.
The agriculture ministry has begun a process of public consultation
by internet and a report by the French food security agency, AFSSA,
last month claimed that GM maize and cotton, as well as beetroot and
rice, showed health benefits.
Source: Independent (UK)
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