“It’s here” was all his grove manager needed to say to force him over to the side of the road.
The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green, already
ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the state’s storied
groves. Mr. Kress, the president of Southern Gardens Citrus, in charge
of two and a half million orange trees and a factory that squeezes juice
for Tropicana and Florida’s Natural, sat in silence for several long
moments.
“O.K.,” he said finally on that fall day in 2005, “let’s make a plan.”
In the years that followed, he and the 8,000 other Florida growers who
supply most of the nation’s orange juice poured everything they had into
fighting the disease they call citrus greening.
To slow the spread of the bacterium that causes the scourge, they
chopped down hundreds of thousands of infected trees and sprayed an
expanding array of
pesticides on the winged insect that carries it. But the contagion could not be contained.
They scoured Central Florida’s half-million acres of emerald groves and
sent search parties around the world to find a naturally immune tree
that could serve as a new progenitor for a crop that has thrived in the
state since its arrival, it is said, with Ponce de León. But such a tree
did not exist.
“In all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of
immunity,” the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said.
In all of citrus, but perhaps not in all of nature. With a precipitous
decline in Florida’s harvest predicted within the decade, the only
chance left to save it, Mr. Kress believed, was one that his industry
and others had long avoided for fear of consumer rejection. They would
have to alter the orange’s DNA — with a gene from a different species.
Oranges are not the only crop that might benefit from genetically
engineered resistance to diseases for which standard treatments have
proven elusive. And advocates of the technology say it could also help
provide food for a fast-growing population on a warming planet by
endowing crops with more nutrients, or the ability to thrive in drought,
or to resist pests. Leading scientific organizations have concluded
that shuttling DNA between species carries
no intrinsic risk to human health or the environment, and that such alterations can be reliably tested.
But the idea of eating plants and animals whose DNA has been manipulated
in a laboratory — called genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.’s —
still spooks many people. Critics worry that such crops carry risks not
yet detected, and distrust the big agrochemical companies that have
produced the few in wide use. And hostility toward the technology, long
ingrained in Europe, has deepened recently among Americans as organic
food advocates, environmentalists and others have made opposition to it a
pillar of a growing movement for healthier and ethical food choices.
Mr. Kress’s boss worried about damaging the image of juice long promoted as “100 percent natural.”
“Do we really want to do this?” he demanded in a 2008 meeting at the
company’s headquarters on the northern rim of the Everglades.
Mr. Kress, now 61, had no particular predilection for biotechnology.
Known for working long hours, he rose through the ranks at fruit and
juice companies like Welch’s and Seneca Foods. On moving here for the
Southern Gardens job, just a few weeks before citrus greening was
detected, he had assumed his biggest
headache would be competition from flavored waters, or persuading his wife to tolerate Florida’s humidity.
But the dwindling harvest that could mean the idling of his juice
processing plant would also have consequences beyond any one company’s
bottom line. Florida is the second-largest producer of orange juice in
the world, behind Brazil. Its $9 billion citrus industry contributes
76,000 jobs to the state that hosts the Orange Bowl. Southern Gardens, a
subsidiary of U.S. Sugar, was one of the few companies in the industry
with the wherewithal to finance the development of a “transgenic” tree,
which could take a decade and cost as much as $20 million.
An emerging scientific consensus held that genetic engineering would be
required to defeat citrus greening. “People are either going to drink
transgenic orange juice or they’re going to drink apple juice,” one
University of Florida scientist told Mr. Kress.
And if the presence of a new gene in citrus trees prevented juice from
becoming scarcer and more expensive, Mr. Kress believed, the American
public would embrace it. “The consumer will support us if it’s the only
way,” Mr. Kress assured his boss.
His quest to save the orange offers a close look at the daunting process
of genetically modifying one well-loved organism — on a deadline. In
the past several years, out of public view, he has considered DNA donors
from all over the tree of life, including two vegetables, a virus and,
briefly, a pig. A synthetic gene, manufactured in the laboratory, also
emerged as a contender.
Trial trees that withstood the disease in his greenhouse later succumbed
in the field. Concerns about public perception and potential delays in
regulatory scrutiny put a damper on some promising leads. But intent on
his mission, Mr. Kress shrugged off signs that national campaigns
against genetically modified food were gaining traction.
Only in recent months has he begun to face the full magnitude of the gap
between what science can achieve and what society might accept.
Millenniums of Intervention
Even in the heyday of frozen concentrate, the popularity of orange juice
rested largely on its image as the ultimate natural beverage,
fresh-squeezed from a primordial fruit. But the reality is that human
intervention has modified the orange for millenniums, as it has almost
everything people eat.
Before humans were involved, corn was a wild grass, tomatoes were tiny,
carrots were only rarely orange and dairy cows produced little milk. The
orange, for its part, might never have existed had human migration not
brought together the grapefruit-size pomelo from the tropics and the
diminutive mandarin from a temperate zone thousands of years ago in
China. And it would not have become the most widely planted fruit tree
had human traders not carried it across the globe.
The varieties that have survived, among the many that have since arisen
through natural mutation, are the product of human selection, with
nearly all of Florida’s juice a blend of just two: the Hamlin, whose
unremarkable taste and pale color are offset by its prolific yield in
the early season, and the dark, flavorful, late-season Valencia.
Because oranges themselves are hybrids and most seeds are clones of the
mother, new varieties cannot easily be produced by crossbreeding —
unlike, say, apples, which breeders have remixed into favorites like
Fuji and Gala. But the vast majority of oranges in commercial groves are
the product of a type of genetic merging that predates the Romans, in
which a slender shoot of a favored fruit variety is grafted onto the
sturdier roots of other species: lemon, for instance, or sour orange.
And a seedless midseason orange recently adopted by Florida growers
emerged after breeders bombarded a seedy variety with radiation to
disrupt its DNA, a technique for accelerating evolution that has yielded
new varieties in
dozens of crops, including barley and rice.
Its proponents argue that genetic engineering is one in a continuum of
ways humans shape food crops, each of which carries risks: even
conventional crossbreeding has occasionally produced toxic varieties of
some vegetables. Because making a G.M.O. typically involves adding one
or a few genes, each containing instructions for a protein whose
function is known, they argue, it is more predictable than traditional
methods that involve randomly mixing or mutating many genes of unknown
function.
But because it also usually involves taking DNA from the species where
it evolved and putting it in another to which it may be only distantly
related — or turning off genes already present — critics of the
technology say it represents a new and potentially more hazardous degree
of tinkering whose risks are not yet fully understood.
If he had had more time, Mr. Kress could have waited for the orange to
naturally evolve resistance to the bacteria known as C. liberibacter
asiaticus. That could happen tomorrow. Or it could take years, or many
decades. Or the orange in Florida could disappear first.
Plunging Ahead
Early discussions among other citrus growers about what kind of disease
research they should collectively support did little to reassure Mr.
Kress about his own genetic engineering project.
“The public will never drink G.M.O. orange juice,” one grower said at a
contentious 2008 meeting. “It’s a waste of our money.”
“The public is already eating tons of G.M.O.’s,” countered Peter McClure, a big grower.
“This isn’t like a bag of Doritos,” snapped another. “We’re talking about a raw product, the essence of orange.”
The
genetically modified foods
Americans have eaten for more than a decade — corn, soybeans, some
cottonseed oil, canola oil and sugar — come mostly as invisible
ingredients in processed foods like cereal, salad dressing and tortilla
chips. And the few G.M.O.’s sold in produce aisles — a Hawaiian papaya,
some squash, a fraction of sweet corn — lack the iconic status of a
breakfast drink that, Mr. Kress conceded, is “like motherhood” to
Americans, who drink more of it per capita than anyone else.
If various polls were to be believed, a third to half of Americans would
refuse to eat any transgenic crop. One study’s respondents would accept
only certain types: two-thirds said they would eat a fruit modified
with another plant gene, but few would accept one with DNA from an
animal. Fewer still would knowingly eat produce that contained a gene
from a virus.
There also appeared to be an abiding belief that a plant would take on
the identity of the species from which its new DNA was drawn, like the
scientist in the movie “The Fly” who sprouted insect parts after a
DNA-mixing mistake with a house fly.
Asked if tomatoes containing a gene from a fish would “taste fishy” in a
question on a 2004 poll conducted by the Food Policy Institute at
Rutgers University that referred to one company’s efforts to forge a
frost-resistant tomato
with a gene from the winter flounder, fewer than half correctly
answered “no.” A fear that the genetic engineering of food would throw
the ecosystem out of whack showed in the surveys too.
Mr. Kress’s researchers, in turn, liked to point out that the very
reason genetic engineering works is that all living things share a basic
biochemistry: if a gene from a cold-water fish can help a tomato resist
frost, it is because DNA is a universal code that tomato cells know how
to read. Even the most distantly related species — say, humans and
bacteria — share many genes whose functions have remained constant
across billions of years of evolution.
“It’s not where a gene comes from that matters,” one researcher said. “It’s what it does.”
Mr. Kress set the surveys aside.
He took encouragement from other attempts to genetically modify foods
that were in the works. There was even another fruit, the “Arctic
apple,” whose genes for browning were switched off, to reduce waste and
allow the fruit to be more readily sold sliced.
“The public is going to be more informed about G.M.O.’s by the time
we’re ready,” Mr. Kress told his research director, Michael P. Irey, as
they lined up the five scientists whom Southern Gardens would
underwrite. And to the scientists, growers and juice processors at a
meeting convened by Minute Maid in Miami in early 2010, he insisted that
just finding a gene that worked had to be his company’s priority.
The foes were formidable. C. liberibacter, the bacterium that kills
citrus trees by choking off their flow of nutrients — first detected
when it destroyed citrus trees more than a century ago in China — had
earned a place, along with
anthrax
and the Ebola virus, on the Agriculture Department’s list of potential
agents of bioterrorism. Asian citrus psyllids, the insects that suck the
bacteria out of one tree and inject them into another as they feed on
the sap of their leaves, can carry the germ a mile without stopping, and
the females can lay up to 800 eggs in their one-month life.
Mr. Kress’s DNA candidate would have to fight off the bacteria or the
insect. As for public acceptance, he told his industry colleagues, “We
can’t think about that right now.”
The ‘Creep Factor’
Trim, silver-haired and described by colleagues as tightly wound (he
prefers “focused”), Mr. Kress arrives at the office by 6:30 each morning
and microwaves a bowl of oatmeal. He stocks his office cabinet with
cans of peel-top Campbell’s chicken soup that he heats up for lunch.
Arriving home each evening, he cuts a rose from his garden for his wife.
Weekends, he works in his yard and pores over clippings about G.M.O.’s
in the news.
For a man who takes pleasure in routine, the uncertainty that marked his
DNA quest was disquieting. It would cost Southern Gardens millions of
dollars just to perform the safety tests for a single gene in a single
variety of orange. Of his five researchers’ approaches, he had planned
to narrow the field to the one that worked best over time.
But in 2010, with the disease spreading faster than anyone anticipated,
the factor that came to weigh most was which could be ready first.
To fight C. liberibacter, Dean Gabriel at the University of Florida had
chosen a gene from a virus that destroys bacteria as it replicates
itself. Though such viruses, called bacteriophages (“phage” means to
devour), are harmless to humans, Mr. Irey sometimes urged Mr. Kress to
consider the public relations hurdle that might come with such a
strange-sounding source of the DNA. “A gene from a virus,” he would ask
pointedly, “that infects bacteria?”
But Mr. Kress’s chief concern was that Dr. Gabriel was taking too long to perfect his approach.
A second contender, Erik Mirkov of Texas A&M University, was further
along with trees he had endowed with a gene from spinach — a food, he
reminded Mr. Kress, that “we give to babies.” The gene, which exists in
slightly different forms in hundreds of plants and animals, produces a
protein that attacks invading bacteria.
Even so, Dr. Mirkov faced skepticism from growers. “Will my juice taste like spinach?” one asked.
“Will it be green?” wondered another.
“This gene,” he invariably replied, “has nothing to do with the color or taste of spinach. Your body makes very similar
kinds of proteins as part of your own defense against bacteria.”
When some of the scientist’s promising trees got sick in their first
trial, Mr. Kress agreed that he should try to improve on his results in a
new generation of trees, by adjusting the gene’s placement. But
transgenic trees, begun as a single cell in a petri dish, can take two
years before they are sturdy enough to place in the ground and many more
years to bear fruit.
“Isn’t there a gene,” Mr. Kress asked Mr. Irey, “to hurry up Mother Nature?”
For a time, the answer seemed to lie with a third scientist, William O.
Dawson at the University of Florida, who had managed to alter fully
grown trees by attaching a gene to a virus that could be inserted by way
of a small incision in the bark. Genes transmitted that way would
eventually stop functioning, but Mr. Kress hoped to use it as a stopgap
measure to ward off the disease in the 60 million citrus trees already
in Florida’s groves. Dr. Dawson joked that he hoped at least to save the
grapefruit, whose juice he enjoyed, “preferably with a little vodka in
it.”
But his most promising result that year was doomed from the beginning:
of the dozen bacteria-fighting genes he had then tested on his
greenhouse trees, the one that appeared effective came from a pig.
One of about 30,000 genes in the animal’s genetic code, it was, he ventured, “a pretty small amount of pig.”
“There’s no safety issue from our standpoint — but there is a certain
creep factor,” an Environmental Protection Agency official observed to
Mr. Kress, who had included it on an early list of possibilities to run
by the agency.
“At least something is working,” Mr. Kress bristled. “It’s a proof of concept.”
A similar caution dimmed his hopes for the timely approval of a
synthetic gene, designed in the laboratory of a fourth scientist, Jesse
Jaynes of Tuskegee University. In a simulation, Dr. Jaynes’s gene
consistently vanquished the greening bacteria. But the burden of proving
a synthetic gene’s safety would prolong the process. “You’re going to
get more questions,” Mr. Kress was told, “with a gene not found in
nature.”
And in the fall of 2010, an onion gene that discouraged psyllids from
landing on tomato plants was working in the Cornell laboratory of Mr.
Kress’s final hope, Herb Aldwinckle. But it would be some time before
the gene could be transferred to orange trees.
Only Dr. Mirkov’s newly fine-tuned trees with the spinach gene, Mr.
Kress and Mr. Irey agreed, could be ready in time to stave off what many
believed would soon be a steep decline in the harvest. In the fall of
2010, they were put to the test inside a padlocked greenhouse stocked
with infected trees and psyllids.
The Monsanto Effect
Mr. Kress’s only direct brush so far with the broader battle raging over
genetically modified food came in December 2010, in the reader comments
on a Reuters article alluding to Southern Gardens’ genetic engineering
efforts.
Some readers vowed not to buy such “frankenfood.” Another attributed a rise in
allergies
to genetic engineering. And dozens lambasted Monsanto, the St.
Louis-based company that dominates the crop biotechnology business,
which was not even mentioned in the article.
“If this trend goes on, one day, there will be only Monsanto engineered
foods available,” read one letter warning of unintended consequences.
Mr. Kress was unperturbed. Dozens of long-term
animal feeding studies had concluded that existing G.M.O.’s were as safe as other crops, and the
National Academy of Sciences, the
World Health Organization and
others had issued statements to the same effect.
But some of his researchers worried that the popular association between
G.M.O.’s and Monsanto — and in turn between Monsanto and the criticisms
of modern agriculture — could turn consumers against Southern Gardens’
transgenic oranges.
“The article doesn’t say ‘Monsanto’ anywhere, but the comments are all about Monsanto,” Dr. Mirkov said.
It had not helped win hearts and minds for G.M.O.’s, Mr. Kress knew,
that the first such crop widely adopted by farmers was the soybean
engineered by Monsanto with a bacteria gene — to tolerate a weed killer
Monsanto also made.
Starting in the mid-1990s, soybean farmers in the United States
overwhelmingly adopted that variety of the crop, which made it easier
for them to control weeds. But the subsequent broader use of the
chemical — along with a distaste for Monsanto’s aggressive business
tactics and a growing suspicion of a food system driven by corporate
profits — combined to forge a consumer backlash. Environmental activists
vandalized dozens of field trials and protested brands that used
Monsanto’s soybeans or corn, introduced soon after, which was engineered
to prevent pests from attacking it.
In response, companies including McDonald’s, Frito-Lay and Heinz pledged
not to use G.M.O. ingredients in certain products, and some European
countries prohibited their cultivation.
Some of Mr. Kress’s scientists were still fuming about what they saw as
the lost potential for social good hijacked both by the activists who
opposed genetic engineering and the corporations that failed to convince
consumers of its benefits. In many developing countries, concerns about
safety and ownership of seeds led governments to delay or prohibit
cultivation of needed crops: Zambia, for instance, declined shipments of
G.M.O. corn even during a 2002 famine.
”It’s easy for someone who can go down to the grocery store and buy
anything they need to be against G.M.O.’s,” said Dr. Jaynes, who faced
such barriers with a high-protein sweet potato he had engineered with a
synthetic gene.
To Mr. Kress in early 2011, any comparison to Monsanto — whose large
blocks of patents he had to work around, and whose thousands of
employees worldwide dwarfed the 750 he employed in Florida at peak
harvest times — seemed far-fetched. If it was successful, Southern
Gardens would hope to recoup its investment by charging a royalty for
its trees. But its business strategy was aimed at saving the orange
crop, whose total acreage was a tiny fraction of the crops the major
biotechnology companies had pursued.
He urged his worried researchers to look at the early success of Flavr
Savr tomatoes. Introduced in 1994 and engineered to stay fresh longer
than traditional varieties, they proved popular enough that some stores
rationed them, before business missteps by their developer ended their
production.
And he was no longer alone in the pursuit of a genetically modified
orange. Citrus growers were collectively financing research into a
greening-resistant tree, and the Agriculture Department had also
assigned a team of scientists to it. Any solution would have satisfied
Mr. Kress. Almost daily, he could smell the burning of infected trees,
which mingled with orange-blossom sweetness in the grove just beyond
Southern Gardens’ headquarters.
A Growing Urgency
In an infection-filled greenhouse where every nontransgenic tree had
showed symptoms of disease, Dr. Mirkov’s trees with the spinach gene had
survived unscathed for more than a year. Mr. Kress would soon have 300
of them planted in a field trial. But in the spring of 2012, he asked
the Environmental Protection Agency, the first of three federal agencies
that would evaluate his trees, for guidance. The next step was safety
testing. And he felt that it could not be started fast enough.
Dr. Mirkov assured him that the agency’s requirements for animal tests
to assess the safety of the protein produced by his gene, which bore no
resemblance to anything on the list of known allergens and toxins, would
be minimal.
“It’s spinach,” he insisted. “It’s been eaten for centuries.”
Other concerns weighed on Mr. Kress that spring: growers in Florida did
not like to talk about it, but the industry’s tripling of pesticide
applications to kill the bacteria-carrying psyllid was, while within
legal limits, becoming expensive and worrisome. One widely used
pesticide had stopped working as the psyllid evolved resistance, and
Florida’s citrus growers’ association was petitioning one company to
lift the twice-a-season restrictions on spraying young trees —
increasingly its only hope for an uninfected harvest.
Others in the industry who knew of Mr. Kress’s project were turning to
him. He agreed to speak at the fall meeting of citrus growers in
California, where the greening disease had just been detected. “We need
to hear about the transgenic solution,” said Ted Batkin, the
association’s director. But Mr. Kress worried that he had nothing to
calm their fears.
And an increasingly vocal movement to require any food with genetically
engineered ingredients to carry a “G.M.O.” label had made him uneasy.
Supporters of one hotly contested California ballot initiative argued
for labeling as a matter of consumer rights and transparency — but their
advertisements often implied the crops were a hazard: one pictured a
child about to take
a joyful bite
of a pest-resistant cob of corn, on which was emblazoned a question
mark and the caption “Corn, engineered to grow its own pesticide.”
Yet the gene that makes corn insect-resistant, he knew, came from the
same soil bacterium long used by organic food growers as a natural
insecticide.
Arguing that the Food and Drug Administration should require labels on
food containing G.M.O.’s, one leader of the Environmental Working Group,
an advocacy group, cited “pink slime, deadly melons, tainted turkeys
and
BPA in our soup.”
Mr. Kress attributed the labeling campaigns to the kind of tactic any
industry might use to gain a competitive edge: they were financed
largely by companies that sell organic products, which stood to gain if
packaging implying a hazard drove customers to their own non-G.M.O.
alternatives. He did not aim to hide anything from consumers, but he
would want them to understand how and why his oranges were genetically
engineered. What bothered him was that a label seemed to lump all
G.M.O.’s into one stigmatized category.
And when the E.P.A. informed him in June 2012 that it would need to see
test results for how large quantities of spinach protein affected
honeybees and mice, he gladly wrote out the $300,000 check to have the
protein made.
It was the largest single expense yet in a project that had so far cost
more than $5 million. If these tests raised no red flags, he would need
to test the protein as it appears in the pollen of transgenic orange
blossoms. Then the agency would want to test the juice.
“Seems excessive,” Dr. Mirkov said.
But Mr. Kress and Mr. Irey shared a sense of celebration. The path ahead was starting to clear.
Rather than wait for Dr. Mirkov’s 300 trees to flower, which could take
several years, they agreed to try to graft his spinach gene shoots to
mature trees to hasten the production of pollen — and, finally, their
first fruit, for testing.
Wall of Opposition
Early one morning a year ago, Mr. Kress checked the Agriculture
Department’s Web site from home. The agency had opened its 60-day public
comment period on the trees modified to produce “Arctic apples” that
did not brown.
His own application, he imagined, would take a similar form.
He skimmed through the company’s 163-page petition, showing how the
apples are equivalent in nutritional content to normal apples, how
remote was the likelihood of cross-pollination with other apple
varieties and the potentially bigger market for a healthful fruit.
Then he turned to the comments. There were hundreds. And they were
almost universally negative. Some were from parents, voicing concerns
that the nonbrowning trait would disguise a rotten apple — though
transgenic apples rotten from infection would still turn brown. Many
wrote as part of a petition drive by the Center for
Food Safety, a group that opposes biotechnology.
“Apples are supposed to be a natural, healthy snack,” it warned. “Genetically engineered apples are neither.”
Others voiced a general distrust of scientists’ guarantees: “Too many
things were presented to us as innocuous and years later we discovered
it was untrue,” wrote one woman. “After two cancers I don’t feel like
taking any more unnecessary risks.”
Many insisted that should the fruit be approved, it ought to be labeled.
That morning, Mr. Kress drove to work late. He should not be surprised by the hostility, he told himself.
Mr. Irey tried to console him with good news: the data on the honeybees
and mice had come back. The highest dose of the protein the E.P.A.
wanted tested had produced no ill effect.
But the magnitude of the opposition had never hit Mr. Kress so hard.
“Will they believe us?” he asked himself for the first time. “Will they
believe we’re doing this to eliminate chemicals and we’re making sure
it’s safe? Or will they look at us and say, ‘That’s what they all
say?’ ”
The major brands were rumored to be looking beyond Florida for their
orange juice — perhaps to Brazil, where growers had taken to abandoning
infected groves to plant elsewhere. Other experiments that Mr. Kress
viewed as similar to his own had foundered. Pigs engineered to produce
less-polluting waste had been euthanized after their developer at a
Canadian university had failed to find investors. A salmon modified to
grow faster was still awaiting F.D.A. approval. A
study pointing to health risks from G.M.O.’s had been
discredited by
scientists, but was
contributing to a sense among some consumers that the technology is dangerous.
And while the California labeling measure had been defeated, it had
spawned a ballot initiative in Washington State and legislative
proposals in Connecticut, Vermont, New Mexico, Missouri and many other
states.
In the heat of last summer, Mr. Kress gardened more savagely than his wife had ever seen.
Driving through the Central Valley of California last October to speak
at the California Citrus Growers meeting, Mr. Kress considered how to
answer critics. Maybe even a blanket “G.M.O.” label would be O.K., he
thought, if it would help consumers understand that he had nothing to
hide. He could never prove that there were no risks to genetically
modifying a crop. But he could try to explain the risks of not doing so.
Southern Gardens had lost 700,000 trees trying to control the disease,
more than a quarter of its total. The forecast for the coming spring
harvest was dismal. The approval to use more pesticide on young trees
had come through that day. At his hotel that night, he slipped a new
slide into his standard talk.
On the podium the next morning, he talked about the growing use of
pesticides: “We’re using a lot of chemicals, pure and simple,” he said.
“We’re using more than we’ve ever used before.”
Then he stopped at the new slide. Unadorned, it read “Consumer Acceptance.” He looked out at the audience.
What these growers wanted most, he knew, was reassurance that he could
help them should the disease spread. But he had to warn them: “If we
don’t have consumer confidence, it doesn’t matter what we come up with.”
Planting
One recent sunny morning, Mr. Kress drove to a fenced field, some
distance from his office and far from any other citrus tree. He unlocked
the gate and signed in, as required by Agriculture Department
regulations for a field trial of a genetically modified crop.
Just in the previous few months, Whole Foods had said that because of
customer demand it would avoid stocking most G.M.O. foods and require
labels on them by 2018. Hundreds of thousands of protesters around the
world had joined in a “March Against Monsanto” — and the Agriculture
Department had issued its final report for this year’s orange harvest
showing a 9 percent decline from last year, attributable to citrus
greening.
But visiting the field gave him some peace. In some rows were the trees
with no new gene in them, sick with greening. In others were the 300
juvenile trees with spinach genes, all healthy. In the middle were the
trees that carried his immediate hopes: 15 mature Hamlins and Valencias,
seven feet tall, onto which had been grafted shoots of Dr. Mirkov’s
spinach gene trees.
There was good reason to believe that the trees would pass the E.P.A.’s
tests when they bloom next spring. And he was gathering the data the
Agriculture Department would need to ensure that the trees posed no risk
to other plants. When he had fruit, the Food and Drug Administration
would compare its safety and nutritional content to conventional
oranges.
In his office is a list of groups to contact when the first G.M.O. fruit
in Florida are ready to pick: environmental organizations, consumer
advocates and others. Exactly what he would say when he finally
contacted them, he did not know. Whether anyone would drink the juice
from his genetically modified oranges, he did not know.
But he had decided to move ahead.
Late this summer he will plant several hundred more young trees with the
spinach gene, in a new greenhouse. In two years, if he wins regulatory
approval, they will be ready to go into the ground. The trees could be
the first to produce juice for sale in five years or so.
Whether it is his transgenic tree, or someone else’s, he believed,
Florida growers will soon have trees that could produce juice without
fear of its being sour, or in short supply.
For a moment, alone in the field, he let his mind wander.
“Maybe we can use the technology to improve orange juice,” he could not
help thinking. “Maybe we can find a way to have oranges grow year-round,
or get two for every one we get now on a tree.”
Then he reined in those thoughts.
He took the clipboard down, signed out and locked the gate.
We have been hearing a lot recently about a revolution in the way we
think about human health -- how it is inextricably linked to the health
of microbes in
our gut, mouth, nasal passages, and other "habitats" in and on us.
With the release last summer of the results of the five-year National
Institutes of
Health's Human Microbiome Project, we are told we should think of
ourselves as a "superorganism," a residence for microbes with whom we
have coevolved, who
perform critical functions and provide services to us, and who
outnumber our own human cells ten to one. For the first time, thanks to
our ability to
conduct highly efficient and low cost genetic sequencing, we now
have a map of the normal microbial make-up of a healthy human, a
collection of bacteria,
fungi, one-celled archaea, and viruses. Collectively they weigh
about three pounds -- the same as our brain.
A mycorrhiza or fungus root in cross section. The stained-blue tissue is fungal.
We hear about many endangered animals in the Amazon and now all
around the world. We all know about the chainsaw-wielding workers
cutting trees in the
rainforest. But we hear relatively little about the destruction of
the habitat of kingdoms of life beyond plant and animal -- that of
bacteria and fungi.
Some microbiologists are now warning us that we must stop the
destruction of the human microbiome, and that important species of
microorganisms may have
already gone extinct, some which might possibly play a key role in
our health.
