A Short History of GM (From Socrates to Ventner and beyond)

"Ah! How terrible is knowledge to the man whom knowledge profits not". This statement is a key part of the saga of Oedipus rex and was purportedly made by Tiresias long before anyone thought of genetically modifying sages. Although of course even 2,500 years ago Salvia officinalis had already been taken into selective cultivation around the Mediterranean. Thereby hangs my tale.

Fast food for fast profit has at the best produced the couch potato syndrome while fast genetics for fast profit has to date not even produced its unfair share of fat cats.

I am often asked what is my opinion of GM foods and GM pharmaceuticals? As someone who is proud to be a scientist and someone who lived in pre-antibiotic days I have to answer "fantastic potential for good but also for evil".

When pressed I continue by explaining that I am all for GM crops and drugs as long as their planning, evaluation and especially their field trials have been carried out with due care and attention both to the upstream and downstream effects on the environment and to society. To date I have found no examples where this appears true.

However as a communicator I am forced to speculate what would have happened if the Genetic Engineers had first turned their attention on a protein-rich Third World crop like say, millet, and engineered it to use less water or fertilizer. Would they have got a softer reception or did they know that if there were such a thing as a freer lunch, then evolution would have already exploited the opportunity. Sadly the weedy members of the Brassicacae were more ready for the first Roundup than were farm economics.

I still wonder what happened to the early GM hype about transferring the potential and the problems of nitrogen fixation into eukaryotic cells. Was it possible or were the dangers of a super plant taking over the world just too much?

In like kind I have to ask if the Deep Greens had grasped the nettle and condoned the patenting of hybrids produced by the age old methods of selection and cross breeding, would there really have been any need to consider terminator technology to gain patents?

If intellectual property rights are not part of the Post Saddam Era then the war was waged in vain and with the secrets of Hoodia gordoni the Kalahari Bushmen’s ultimate fat buster in the hands of a chemical giant one hopes that the milk of human kindness will not be genetically modified.

At last cheaper retroviral's are beginning to come on offer to those countries where the need is greatest. However I am still waiting for someone, perhaps WWF (the World Wrestling Foundation of course), to finance an advertising campaign for Viagra in the right area of the world to help persuade the locals that there is a proven substitute double blind tested for the bones and gall of Siberian Tigers. Which are sadly, now like the Panda heading for extinction in the wild.

Alternative everything seems to have its problems in the eyes of the other side whose aspirations profit not.

Perhaps the worst problem is that today scientific research has advanced beyond the economics of string and sealing wax, (both in their original form herbal products) engendering a brave new industry of ultra expensive gadgetry that has to be recouped by and for someone. The same goes for modern farming.

Sadly many of the members of the green movement do not want to understand that the vast majority of the real organic farming systems across the world require the use of animals to provide organic manures.

They also require the culling of a whole range of furry animals from the Rats of Neem through the Little Red Vixen to the Bright Eyes of Watership Down.

What is more nitrogen fixation by even the best managed organic farms can continue long after there are crops to safely trap it into useful biomass.

Both economic and environmental ethics come in more shades of green than organic peas and the media sees its job as stirring the muck rather than applying it in the right place or even reporting the many success stories.

Single issue campaigning to try to stop certain things happening has always been a doddle compared with science-based ethics to steer things in the right direction.

Cautionary Sting in their Tales

As a result of losing a Government enquiry on the effects of removing of import restrictions under Australia’s obligations to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, tobacco growing in Australia was effectively retired.

The politicians were able to claim a big win for Australia’s image as a grower of clean and green crops at World Market Price. A win-win situation you might conclude.

However there were unseen disastrous results. To keep the farmers in business tens of thousands of hectares of native vegetation were cleared for the simple reason that they had to grow roughly 3 times as much irrigated sugar, mangos and bananas to make as much money as they used to make from growing tobacco.

In addition to this, all these new crops use three times as much irrigation water per hectare as does tobacco. The centre pivot irrigator being the villain of the piece as it is across the world, a sign of unsustainability visible from the air.

The land clearance also led to the death of millions of native animals and an added threat to the rare and now endangered Mahogany Glider whose global habitat was in the sugar cane expansion area.

Did Australia achieve a major political advantage or balance of payments benefit through all of this? The answer is quite simply no. Sugar and mango producers now face ruin through overproduction and price collapse both there and in other much poorer companies and Australia has doubled its import bill for tobacco and tobacco products. Of course they can boast that they are at least smoking other peoples carcinogens.

The increase in the number of cane toads and eutrophication of run-off speeding the demise of the Great Barrier Reef, one of Australia’s major tourist attractions, is still being audited.

Shades of the effect of the Common Agricultural Policy to the rural economy and the biodiversity of Britain. Dare I even mention the Common Fisheries policy, which did much the same to our local fishing communities and fish stocks?

When Julian Pettifer made a film concerning the environmental downside of Fish Farming, as it is spoke in Scotland, the BBC threatened him with sacking, although the excuse was that he should resign as President of the RSPB, because as such he could never be viewed as holding an unbiased view.

We have recently been asked to celebrate the first glut of farmed cod. No need to ask where their food will come from because permission has recently been given to continue industrial fishing of capelin and sand eel in the Irish Fish Box by members of what we used to call the Benelux countries. Please note that these tiny fish are a crucially important part of the food web upon which our native cod stocks are meant to recover, now our fishing fleets are banned from fishing their own waters.

Something stinks in more than the state of Denmark who have for economic reasons dumped a future in wind power even if it is offshore but are still pedalling it especially in Scotland. No wonder the sustainable Brussel Sprout is not even on the drawing board.

Even if we ever knew, we seem to have forgotten that there is a law of Economics coined by Engel’s note well, it is Ernst Engel’s not Frederick, collaborator of Karl Marx, which states that with rising incomes the share of expenditure on food products declines. In essence, as people get wealthier they spend less of their available income on food.

In effect this means that despite subsidies, neither the small farmer nor fisher can keep up with the Audi let alone the Range Rover set. So fields and fishing gear get larger, inputs of fossil fuels, chemicals and food miles get bigger, biodiversity and the hope of sustainable rehabilitation get ever more costly and the good heart aspirations of small farming and fishing families go to the wall of extinction.

For anyone tempted to question this by saying, untrue, we all spend more in supermarkets, fast food joints and expensive restaurants. Those increase goes to middle-people not to the producer.

How have we got ourselves into this sad state of affairs?

The University of London of which I am proud to be a graduate and in which this crucially important meeting is taking place, properly dignifies itself by holding out the PhD as its highest degree. Reflect for a moment on what that means. A degree is a teaching qualification in philosophy in philo Sophia, in the love of the goddess of wisdom.

In the West this all started with Socrates and Plato. In the year 387 BC, Plato established the first university, it was called ‘The Academy’ and it was visited, by Socrates. Most of what we know about Socrates is from Plato’s writings. Socrates saw that philosophy is essentially about life. In his comment ‘we are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live’ he showed that he shared a common concern with mankind today.

‘The Art of Life’, not just narrow disciplinary endeavour is what University was for our classical predecessors. Today when we speak of academic excellence we should remember that we are drawing on the translation of the Greek word arête, which meant all round virtue of excellence. What is most important to us here is that we can see from Plato’s, Timaeus and Critias, how very much the social debate was conducted within an understanding of ecological history.

The Critias tells us how the felling of the native woods of parts of Greece had reduced the land to a state whereby "you are left with something rather like a skeleton of a body wasted by disease; the rich soft soil has all run away leaving the land with nothing but skin and bone".

Socrates’ own relationship with Nature is a telling one it reflects an initially ambivalent attitude to learning from nature apparent in many academics today. Yet Socrates had the humility and wisdom, in the end to admit his initial narrowness of view. Plato portrays this beautifully in the Phaedrus. Here Phaedrus meets Socrates wandering about barefoot in Athens. He manages to persuade Socrates to leave town and so the pair wander out to a grove by the river.

Once there, Socrates is overwhelmed by such a delightful place. Chastening himself he begs forgiveness for having presumed that "as a lover of learning, trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in town do"

The footprint of Plato’s Academy founded on a green field site, a grove of trees beside a stream, was recently discovered not far from what is now The British Embassy when developers started excavation for a multi-storey. A parking lot to serve what is today a grid locked highly polluted hot spot for the world’s biggest industry, tourism.

What of modern universities and education? In our experience, nearly every university around the world today is becoming a groveless academy. Car parks grow where trees once stood. Playing fields are sold off to supermarket lots. Life is filtered and packaged into virtual reality and with the stress of fees waiting to be paid, students less likely to become rebels with a cause.

In these multi-choice swot shops, we are in danger of producing graduates more comfortable with the computer than in relating to a living community, either of people or of Nature. If it continues down this track, the modern Academy, the university, will become a betrayal of philosophy because young minds are being deprived of the insights of the ancients within the very institutions that were founded on their wisdom.

Just how far the prostitution of our universities is being pushed is exemplified by a government white paper on science, technology and engineering entitled "Realising our potential". If not peer reviewed it had certainly been doctored by spin, even back in 1993

Listen to what it says. It calls fundamentally for "key cultural change" to accord academia with the needs of government and industry. It stresses wealth creation as the acid test of relevance, seeking interaction on a much larger scale between scientists and businessmen in the day-to-day business of selling in competitive markets.

What is even more disturbing we are told that our children are to be included in all this, by the government having embarked on, "a radical agenda of changes in the education and training system, including changes in the curriculum… for the whole of compulsory schooling".

Ten years on with our schools struggling to be "world class," whatever that means, and with many of our most promising young graduates standing outside the financial institutions in which they work, smoking their blues away all too often in the rain. It appears that wisdom is still out and only the values of the market appear to be valued.

There are however lights up on the horizon. Remember the message of Live Aid "don’t give them food, enable them to feed themselves sustainably" Well during Rio plus Ten, thanks to a small charity called Glimmers of Hope which gives small loans to small farmers, it was announced that Ethiopia could be self-sufficient for food. Thanks to those small farmers who pay their debts back promptly and with fair interest.

The only thing standing in their way is a pernicious drought thanks to global warming and/or catchment mismanagement. Who knows, although the insurance companies are beginning to blame the latter?

The good news is that clear across the world the green renaissance is taking hold. Even the ultra rich are demanding organic food and alternative medicine and if they were both subsidised to the extent of the fast mainstreams they would be economically viable on a much broader scale.

As a scientist and a grandfather, I beg neither side to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

As we join renaissance Africa and embrace the potential of organic husbandry and herbal medicine, stewardship, precision farming and integrated crop management have an immense part to play in feeding the world in a more caring way while stabilizing the balance of nature.

Greengro techniques of growing fruit, vegetables and herbs and composting a significant part of the waste stream are already up and running in Kent, and are closing the water, nutrient, pesticide and waste stream cycle while offering safe contained research space for continuing ethically-based GM procedures.

The only sad spin-off to that one is that if all pick-your-own farms in Kent went this way, there would be enough water for some of John Prescott’s dreams of covering more of The Garden Of England with starter homes. What is more, with new technologies of space heating, wave power and fuel cells coming on line, we can start to forget Kyoto.

Complex isn’t it? That is why we need a Panel of Independent Scientists as part of the mix to make sustainable decisions.

At his capital trial, when charged with teaching subversive views to the youth of Athens Socrates said in his defence, "if in your annoyance, you will finish me off with a single slap, then you will go on sleeping until the end of your days, unless God in his care for you, sends someone to take my place". Today the world needs the ethics of the Academy more than ever before.

We must not allow philosophy or creative evolution to be failed.