The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Harvesting Biotechnology

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ROBERT MacNEIL [voice-over]: These dwarf peach trees yield twice as much fruit as the standard varieties -- the latest example of what`s been called "the green revolution." Now, scientists are using the new tools of genetic engineering with the hope of even more spectacular gains in future food production.

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MacNEIL: Good evening. The Senate Budget Committee today approved $36.4 billion in government spending cuts, $2.3 billion more than President Reagan asked for. This rapid committee action will be followed by swift consideration in the full Senate by the end of next week. One group who would feel the Reagan budget ax if the House of Representatives goes along are farmers. The spending cuts reduce government farm price supports and loan programs with a view to returning agricultural products to the free market. That will be one more blow to American farmers who already face a year of drought, a wheat embargo that depressed prices, and rising costs in farmland, equipment, fertilizer, and fuel. It was their reward for being the most efficient growers of food in human history.

But somewhere out there, experts say, there`s good news for farmers. Scientists may be on the verge of harnessing the new techniques of genetic engineering to make crops that don`t need fertilizer or pesticides, crops mat might even grow in salt water. As far-fetched as that sounds, it`s got businessmen excited enough to invest millions of dollars in research. So tonight, the second green revolution: harvesting biotechnology. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, the first so-called green revolution came in the 1960s. Scientists found ways, using mostly chemical fertilizers and pesticides, to dramatically increase crop yields. It`s one of the reasons, for instance, that the yield for corn has jumped from 20 bushels per acre in 1930 to more than 100 bushels now. The same is true for wheat, rice, and other staples. Norman Borlaug`s scientific research, specifically on rice and wheat, won him the Nobel Prize in 1966, and earned him the unofficial title of "father of the green revolution." But his and the other breakthroughs of the `60s mostly depended on petroleum products -- fossil fuel energy that is getting more scarce and more expensive every day. Thus, the turn of scientific attention to another way to do the job that fertilizers and pesticides do - - genetic engineering. And thus, a second revolution. Producer Ken Witty and reporter Anita Harris went to one of the leading centers for this kind of research, the Davis campus of the University of California. Here is their report narrated by reporter Harris.

ANITA HARRIS [voice-over]: This is an exciting period for plant scientists, especially those working in the field of molecular biology. There`s a feeling these days that a Nobel Prize may be waiting for the scientists who can use gene-splicing techniques to increase crop production. At Davis, Professor Ray Valentine heads a large genetic engineering team.

RAY VALENTINE, molecular biologist: There`s never been, in my career in science, a technology as powerful as the recombinant technology -- the gene-splicing technologies -- that we are now developing primarily at this point in the medical areas, in microorganisms. We are certain that this technology of recombinant DNA will be applied in the future to the plant world.

HARRIS: Well, what difference is this technology going to make?

Prof. VALENTINE: Recombinant DNA technology offers a wholly new concept in genetic manipulation, and any gene from any organism-- a gene from corn could be, theoretically, introduced into soybean or potato; a microbial gene could be introduced into a plant. We now have the ability to move any gene from any organism -- any particular trait that we`re interested in -- could be moved from one organism to another. So this is the power of the technology of recombinant DNA.

HARRIS [voice-over]: One of the hottest areas of recombinant DNA research involves soybeans, this country`s largest cash crop, valued at some $15 billion a year. Soybeans and some other plants, like alfalfa and peas, have the ability to manufacture their own supply of nitrogen fertilizer. They get their nitrogen from billions of bacteria that live in nodules attached to the plant`s roots. These nodules act like tiny factories that take one form of nitrogen and convert it into another form that plants need in order to grow.

Prof. VALENTINE: Now, one of the problems that we`ve encountered with the nodules on the soybean plants is that they are wasting energy. They are not energy-efficient in many cases. More than two-thirds of all the nodules on the farmers` fields in the U.S. are wasting energy. So we are studying a particular set of genes which we call the hydrogen afterburner genes -- or energy afterburner genes -- which would help to recover a small portion of that energy that`s lost from the nodule.

HARRIS [voice-over]: By introducing more efficient bacteria into the soybean, Valentine believes he can raise yields by up to 10 percent. That may sound small but the payoff to farmers could work out to more than one and a half billion dollars a year. That`s the near future -- perhaps no more than a few years away. Eventually, scientists hope to use gene- splicing techniques to adapt other basic crops like wheat and corn to make their own nitrogen fertilizer. Another goal of the new green revolution is to reduce farmers` dependence on herbicides and pesticides.

The idea is to breed disease resistance into the plants themselves. Leaf rust is a common disease in wheat that cost farmers millions of dollars each year. But researchers have found a wild plant called goat grass that is naturally resistant to this disease. Working at the chromosome level, scientist Jan Dvorak has identified the group of genes in the wild grass that makes it resistant to rust. Now, he can rapidly zero in on those crosses which carry the disease resistant gene.

The result is a new hybrid wheat that is both healthy and high-yielding. Plant research may also have an answer for a big problem facing California growers -- the buildup of salt on the land. The salt is deposited when cropland is irrigated. That`s what is happening in the San Joaquin Valley. Today, the Valley is known as the fruit and vegetable basket of the nation. But the salt buildup is lowering productivity, and threatens one day to turn this rich farmland into a desert. One way to get rid of the salt is to flush it from the fields through a series of ditches and canals. But that`s a costly solution that requires a lot of water. Another possibility is to develop plants that can survive in salty soil. That`s what Davis researchers are doing at this experimental station on the Pacific Coast.

Here, special varieties of wheat and barley are being irrigated with salt water pumped from the sea. The hope is that hybrids like these can be grown in the salt-affected fields of the San Joaquin Valley. And if that works, the scientists imagine the day when coastal deserts can be turned into croplands using sea water for irrigation. Back at Davis, Bill Ranes is using new methods to develop salt-tolerant strains of alfalfa. He`s working with alfalfa cells.

BILL RANES, plant scientist: I have an example here of such a cell culture. These are alfalfa cells, and within this plate there are millions and millions of cells. That particular culture then allows us to select from these millions individuals that might show tolerance. The technique is fairly simple. You take a liquid media like this and grow the cells in this liquid media. This flask containing millions and millions of cells would take 100,000 acres of land to duplicate if you took each cell out and made a plant out of it and planted it out to find out whether it would grow in salt or not. I am growing these in a flask. And by using a sledgehammer approach, we can add large doses of salt -- lethal doses -- which will kill off all the cells that are not tolerant. What`s left over then are the survivors, the ones that tolerate salt. Now, that is basically academic unless some way you can get the plant back. In other words, you have to take the cells and bring them back to an alfalfa plant. And through various procedures I can begin to obtain a plant. This is beginning to look like a plant: I have a shoot here; I have roots; it`s growing on its own. And then after a time I can bring it to a pot, and now I have an alfalfa plant back from these cells. The question is, is this successful and can you use this to select for the characteristic you want? Well, I have an example here where we actually have regenerated from the cells selected lines. This plant is tolerant to salt. As you can see by the appearance of this plant, it was not tolerant of salt.

HARRIS: What can you do now that you couldn`t do before?

Mr. RANES: What we can do now is basically evaluate on large numbers. This is a numbers game in the sense that looking at cells, we`re looking at millions and billions of cells. And so we can evaluate large numbers of these sorts of individuals to see if they have the characteristics. The other advantages that we have, for example, in this situation we hope we can reduce the time; that instead of having to wait year upon year for the new generation of plants to grow, we can get these cells to divide about every day or so, so we get a new generation every day. That shortens the time necessary to select for the characteristics.

MacNEIL: But it`s not only universities that are carrying on this research. Private industry has invested heavily in genetic engineering applied to agriculture. David Padwa is one of a growing number of entrepreneurs entering the field. His company, Agrigenetics, is a Denver-based seed company with sales last year of $75 million and its own genetic research lab. Mr. Padwa, what makes this field so alluring to business now?

DAVID PADWA: We have a world food problem. The technology promises to alleviate that problem to some extent. And to produce lower food prices to a hungry world.

MacNEIL: How would genetic engineering ultimately turn a profit for you and your investors?

Mr. PADWA: Well, for us it would allow us to sell improved varieties of seed to farmers.

MacNEIL: I see. Which is something you do now, but this would be a whole different order of new varieties of seed, would it? I mean, you now sell the most improved varieties you can get a hold of, presumably.

Mr. PADWA: I`d say that in the genetic engineering area applied to agriculture the researchers in this area have a considerable continuity with research in the past. So people have been improving plants for thousands of years, and are going to continue to improve plants. There`s nothing very remarkable in that.

MacNEIL: Listening to Anita Harris`s piece at Davis, it sounds as though this is sometime in the future. How quickly do you see the possible payoff on this coming?

Mr. PADWA: The payoff has occurred a thousand years ago with the selection of the first ancestral corn types; it has occurred in the 1960s with some of the dwarfing mechanisms in wheat that led to the so-called first green revolution. It`s occurring right now as you saw in some of those alfalfa varieties, and it`s going to continue to occur for as long as people keep fooling around with plants.

MacNEIL: I guess what I was wondering about is this. Is it not true that the real breakthrough has yet to happen? You haven`t yet been able to alter the genetic structure of a plant, to splice the genes, as has been possible in some other forms of biology?

Mr. PADWA: Well, it`s important to use correct terminology here. In effect, when a traditional plant breeder, a classical geneticist, is borrowing some pollen from one plant with a camel`s hair brush and putting it onto another plant. He is actually doing gene-splicing and genetic engineering. Now. I know that we are really talking about these newer biotechnology`s and our ability to go down from the whole plant level to cellular and subcellular, and ultimately, to the molecular level which is affecting the nature of the plant. Depending on the species, some of the things that we can do to improve plant productivity are available to us rather near-term. I`d say in the two- to three-year range Other more ambitious projects you`d have to put in the five- to ten-year range. Other "moonshot" categories you`d have to put in the 10- to 20-year-if-ever range.

MacNEIL: I see. What do you put in the "moonshot" category?

Mr. PADWA: I`d say getting a corn plant to fix 100 percent of its own nitrogen.

MacNEIL: I see. And that is way down the line, you think?

Mr. PADWA: I think a bit, yes.

MacNEIL: What kind of project is your firm working on right now?

Mr. PADWA: We`re not only doing classical genetics and conventional plant breeding and plant hybrid work in about 50 crop species, and we`re also working with these nodule-forming bacteria that you saw. but we`re interested in phenomena such as how do you improve disease resistance in plants. Nearly a third of the U.S. crop gets lost every year to some form of pasture pathogen prior to harvest. We think that this is an area where there may be some spectacular gains in the future.

MacNEIL: Well, if you could recover a third of the crop, that would be the equivalent of greatly improving the productivity of a particular plant.

PADWA: I`m not so sure you`d make money for farmers.

MacNEIL: Taking your company and all the companies big and small that are into this -- and big chemical and oil companies and so on -- how much money would you estimate is now going into this kind of research?

Mr. PADWA: From private industry?

MacNEIL: Yes

Mr. PADWA: I`d be very much surprised if private investments in plant research exceeded -- on an annual basis today -- exceeded $50 million.

MacNEIL: Fifty million. Well, thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Not everybody is that excited about the second green revolution, particularly the big involvement of privately-owned companies and corporations. The Environmental Policy Center, a Washington-based lobbying group, is among the concerned. Jack Doyle is the Center`s lobbyist on agricultural policy. Is this revolution all it`s cracked up to be?

JACK DOYLE: Well, we feel that there are certainly gains to be made through laboratory and through careful plant breeding. But I think in the recent newspaper headlines, the great fanfare about genetic technology and agrigenetic technology in particular, I think, is coming on very quickly. And we have some concerns about the kinds of the venture capital and the kinds of corporations who arc moving in to provide financing, and who are in fact acquiring seed companies in the last 10 years or so.

LEHRER: What arc those concerns specifically?

Mr. DOYLE: Well, in the seed industry itself, since 1970 there have been acquisitions by about 25 multinational corporations -- Dow Chemical Company, Monsanto, Dutch Royal Shell. ITT. Those firms have acquired some 70 independent firms, a lot of whom were once independent, family-owned seed businesses. That gives us-- we`re concerned about that kind--

LEHRER: Now. why? What is the basis of the concern?

Mr. DOYLE: Well, we`re concerned that these firms may control and work on specific kinds of plants, and the characteristics which these firms develop may not be the best kinds of characteristics which are beneficial for nutrition or for disease resistance. Now, this is not necessarily the fault of the breeding programs, but it`s the material that they have to work with. Because there-- in the United States, for example, we are said to be grain-rich but gene-poor. And one of the reasons for that is that we have a very limited genetic base to draw on here in the United States. We have to go outside of the United States to collect genetic strains -- native strains -- that we need for our breeding programs. And at present at USDA, the germ plasm collection and storage program is not very adequate. So that the breeding that is taking place in some of the laboratories across the country is working with a very limited genepool.

LEHRER: Well, back to the question about the corporations and the companies involved in this. If the research is done-- well, what is the harm as to whether the research is done, say. at a university laboratory like the one we saw in California, or at one of Mr. Padwa`s laboratories or at a Dow Chemical laboratory or whatever, as long as the research is done?

Mr. DOYLE: Well, we think that if the multinational corporations -- if the Dow Chemicals and ITTs, etc. -- are calling the tune for the kind of research that`s being done, they will have an impact on the university system. First of all. they will be pulling people out of the university system into the private laboratories. Secondly, there is documentation on the West Coast and some other areas -- the land grant schools -- that the large corporations have been putting money into the university systems and receiving specific kinds of research for their products and their kinds of technologies. Another thing that concerns us is not only that the multinationals have acquired seed companies in the last 10 years; those changes have occurred. But it`s also the fact that the same corporations who are acquiring seed houses are also providing venture capital for large genetic engineering firms. Then on the third front, you find the same corporations putting money into the university system or drawing people away from the university system. So that capital prowess on the part of the large corporations--

LEHRER: In a nutshell, though, you`re saying that you don`t think that the corporate interest would necessarily translate into the public interest in terms of feeding the hungry, as Mr. Padwa says?

Mr. DOYLE: Not necessarily so. Yes, that`s our--

LEHRER: Their motivation would be what? Just the big buck?

Mr. DOYLE: Well, in the past if you took at other environmental concerns in the past -- air pollution, water pollution, toxic waste -- you find that profitmaking corporations have-- they seek to maximize profit, and part of the maximization of profit is externalizing certain social costs: costs which can`t always be foreseen ahead of time, but which arc passed on to the public. We`re saying in this instance with the biotechnology that Wall Street is way ahead of what`s happening, or is way ahead of Congress, for example, and probably way ahead of the American people in terms of praising the wonders of this technology, but there are some good reasons for a very cautious approach between the laboratory and the commercialization step. Once you go to large-scale commercial production, there are good reasons to be cautious there.

LEHRER: I see. Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Mr. Padwa, what do you think of Mr. Doyle`s worry?

Mr. PADWA: Well, I think it`s mostly kind of a populist witch-hunting. And I also think he ought to be corrected. Dow and Monsanto -- great companies as they are -- do not own any seed companies at all. And some of the most innovative and exciting work is being done at the small startup companies that are undercapitalized, and supported by private investors like Calgene at Davis.

MacNEIL: What would you think of his point that the motive of private industry doing this research would be to develop strains which were-- their biggest priority would be to develop profitable rather than nutritious strains?

Mr. PADWA: Well, presumably, if farmers want them enough they`ll be profitable. And nutrition is part of a desirable characteristic in a plant, so unless Mr. Doyle is worried that we`re going to cause a lot of tooth decay or something, the fact is we`re producing higher protein levels in wheats than ever before. And this work is coming out of private research.

MacNEIL: What is the basis of that worry, Mr. Doyle? That companies developing new strains would not be interested in having the food materials nutritious?

Mr. DOYLE: Well, the basis-- we worked in Congress this year trying to have Congress take a very careful look at the Plant Variety Protection Act which was passed in 1970. That Act was recently amended over our objection and the objection of other groups like the National Farmers Union and other responsible organizations around the country. The point there was that if you look at the Plant Variety Protection Act, for example, there is no performance criteria in that act which requires-- if you come in with a new variety of potato, for example, in order to get a certificate of protection or a patent, you do not have to produce a nutritionally superior variety. It can be a blue potato rather than a white potato, I mean, and that`s a novel characteristic satisfying the criteria for the patent.

MacNEIL: Is there not going to continue to be, Mr. Doyle, a lot of research done in the universities? After all, even with the proposed administration budget cuts in agriculture, they`re still proposing, as I understand it, some $20 million in agricultural research. Won`t there continue to be parallel research in the universities?

Mr. DOYLE: Yes, there will be, and, you know, we hope that-- we`re encouraged to see that the administration has increased the research budget for agriculture but if you look specifically at which functions those increases have gone for, there are also some other questions about whether they`re financing production or they`re looking at nutrition. The kinds of increases that occur within the university research budget are important, and-- but given the enormous shifts which have occurred in the biotechnological area with a lot of the large corporations taking away the people from the universities-- but still the people who remain in the universities, I think, will also be influenced by money that is flowing from the corporations into the universities for specific projects.

MacNEIL: Do you feel that private industry is dictating the way university research goes in this field?

Mr. PADWA: No. I think that`s not serious. First of all, any quality scientist will not have his research agenda dictated for him.

Mr. DOYLE: We`re not saying "dictated."

MacNEIL: Well, that was my word, Mr. Doyle. I was abbreviating what I thought you were saying.

Mr. DOYLE: Well, I think that the word is influence, and if Monsanto or whoever -- Agrigenetics -- wants to fund a specific kind of asparagus plant, and they put $10 million into a university earmarked for that specific project, I think they have achieved an influence in the university structure there.

MacNEIL: In a word, is that the way it works?

Mr. PADWA: I think that a university researcher who was underfinanced by the competitive grants program of USDA would be very happy to get some support for, say, a rust-resistant wheat from Monsanto or ourselves or anyone else.

MacNEIL: We have to leave it there, I`m afraid. I`m sure sometime in the distant future we`ll be back to this. Thank you very much, Mr. Padwa, Mr. Doyle, for joining us. And good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That`s all for tonight. We will be back tomorrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.