BIO 2003
A reporter's notebook on the biotech industry's annual get-together
Washington, DC.—For the next 3 days I will be writing a reporter's notebook detailing what I learn and hear at the Biotechnology Industry Organization's (BIO) big annual convention, which is being held in Washington, DC this year. BIO 2003 may be the biggest biotech industry confab ever; some 17,000 representatives from industry, universities, and government have signed up to attend.
Covering such a vast event is spotty at best. There are scores of panels, discussions, press briefings, speeches, and hundreds of exhibition booths; so everyday I will offer the best bits of news and ideas that I hear while I rush from one event to another.
Prior to BIO 2003, on Friday I met with a group of South African scientists and farmers who are in town to push for access to the benefits of plant biotechnology for Africa. Peter Rammutla, a cereal farmer and president the South Africa's National African Farmers Union, said he was in DC to put a "special focus on access to this new exciting technology that we believe can help our farmers and improve our food security." Jocelyn Webster, a microbiologist who is a director of AfricaBio, wants "to facilitate access to this technology for all sectors of society." She adds, "We don't want biotechnology to be undermined by groups that have been very vocal but don't really represent very many people. The application of biotechnology in Africa is really very critical." She fingered groups like Biowatch, Earthlife, Consumers International, Food First and the Organic Farmers' Cooperatives as being particularly egregious in peddling anti-biotech misinformation in South Africa.
The anti-biotech activists have been very successful in frightening people in countries where scientific literacy is even lower than the abysmally low level of the developed countries. Webster cited some horror stories to highlight the lack of knowledge about plant biotechnology. In one case, a South African parliamentarian asked during a hearing whether or not biotech foods are "having an effect on our children by making them sexually active at ages 9 and 10?" Another anti-biotech group argued that they "didn't want genes in their food." (Of course every living thing has genes—I suppose they could eat minerals.) A call came into AfricaBio from someone who worried that biotech foods had turned her pet rat pink. And another person whose neighbor had just given birth to a very big baby, wondered if biotech foods weren't to blame. Rammutla pointed out that activist misinformation campaigns are very effective. After all, he said, "If someone tells you that this crop will give you cancer, you don't say, 'Oh I think I'll try it and see.' You run away. This is one of the activist tactics in South Africa."
Thanduiwe Myeni, a woman cotton farmer from the Makhithini Flats region of Kwazulu/Natal in South Africa, said, "I am here to tell how biotech cotton has changed and affected my life and how it has helped us a lot." She pointed out that a hectare of conventional cotton, which is typically drenched in pesticides weekly, produces 4 to 5 bales of cotton. Meanwhile, the new insect resistant biotech cotton produces 9 to 10 bales of cotton. When asked about the price of the biotech seeds, she acknowledged that these are more expensive but said, "We more than made up for the cost on what we saved in reduced pesticide purchases."
Of course, one of the big stories last year was the refusal of the governments of Zimbabwe and Zambia, countries in which 12 million people were on the verge of starvation, to accept shipments of food aid from the United States because they contained biotech corn. When I was in South Africa for the Earth Summit last September I learned that both countries had been importing biotech insect resistant corn from South Africa for years without objection. The AfricaBio representatives confirmed that this was so. So apparently, only American biotech corn is dangerous.
THE BIOTECH PRESS LUNCHEON
On Sunday, BIO launched its annual convention by feeding us journalists genetically enhanced foods. The press luncheon featured dishes made using ingredients from biotech crops. For example, there was a papaya smoothie made from papayas genetically enhanced to resist a viral disease. There was a vegetable napoleon cooked using corn oil from herbicide resistant corn and composed of layers of squash and zucchini that were also genetically engineered to resist diseases. Finally, we were served a chocolate toffee desert made using soybeans modified to resist herbicides. I sat beside a German journalist from Cologne who had no problem devouring all of the genetically enhanced food on her plate despite the huge fears being peddled by anti-biotech activists in Europe. According to BIO, 6 million farmers in 16 countries planted 145 million acres of biotech crops in 2002, up 12 percent over 2001.
The luncheon speakers focused on efforts to use biotech to solve medical and food problems in poor countries. Jean Pierre Garnier, CEO of the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) started the session off describing his company's efforts to supply drugs to people in poor countries. For example, GSK has launched a $1 billion campaign to "wipe lymphatic filiariasis from the face of the earth." The filiariasis parasite infects as many as 200 million people and causes a condition called elephantiasis. GSK is donating its drug albendazole for 15-20 years to programs to eradicate the disease in poor countries. So far they have treated 100 million people. Garnier believes that the only way to get drugs to people in impoverished countries is a combination of for-profit development in rich countries with drug purchases on behalf of the poor by foundations or government agencies. He cited the $750 million donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund efforts like the International Vaccine Initiative.
Kenyan biotechnologist Florence Wambugu who heads up A Harvest Biotech Foundation International, has created a biotech sweet potato that resists a viral disease. This biotech sweet potato should be available to African farmers in the next couple of years. She points out that Africa missed the Green Revolution and she wants to make sure that the continent doesn't miss the Gene Revolution. Her organization focuses on crops important to African food security, particularly genetically enhanced sweet potatoes, bananas, cassava and rice. Insect resistant corn has been a great success in South Africa. "Biotech is not merely desirable, it could be the best option for the world to get Africa out of poverty, hunger and malnutrition," she argued.
Una Ryan, CEO of Avant Immunotherapeutics, spoke about how her company is aiming to make a profitable business out of developing bacterial and viral vaccines for diseases like cholera and typhoid that would be especially useful in poor tropical countries. "What drives progress is free market business and I want to see if I can make a business out of global health," she declared. In other words, she thinks that she can get the cost of manufacturing safe effective vaccines down so low that even the poorest can afford them. So Avant is developing a new generation of oral vaccines that are single dose, rapid acting, and require no refrigeration. A lot of current vaccines are costly because they require refrigeration that is a scarce and costly resource in a lot of poor countries.
Robert Horsch from Monsanto spoke next. He is in charge of public/private partnerships to get biotech to smallholder farmers in the developing countries. He offered five reasons for why plant biotech was relevant to developing countries: (1) it's a product built into the seed and farmers know how to use and cultivate seeds; (2) plant biotechnology is scale neutral, that is it works as well on 1 acre as it does on 1000 acres; (3) plant biotechnology can solve problems that other techniques like conventional plant breeding, agricultural chemicals, and crop management can solve; (4) biotech crops are recyclable, biodegradable, solar powered products; and (5) biotechnology is an information technology, which means that it is shareable and scaleable—it can be shared by a lot of farmers on a lot of acreage unlike other inputs like tractors and fertilizers. Plant biotechnology is particularly valuable in poor tropical countries where pest pressure is constant and unrelenting.
The final speaker was Ganesh Kishore, VP for Technology Agriculture and Nutrition at DuPont. He pointed out that nonbiotech cotton often requires as many as 16 sprays of pesticides in developing countries. This is very expensive and if a farmer misses one spray his whole crop could be lost. DuPont is conducting research to improve the taste and texture of soybeans as well as ways to increasing the amounts of beneficial amino acids like lysine in them.
THE BIOETHICS PANEL
Next up was a panel on bioethics. Without offering a blow by blow account, there were some remarkably interesting insights offered by the panelists. Craig Venter, whose company Celera raced the government to the decoding of the human genome, made a passionate statement concerning Congressional attempts to outlaw stem cell research. "It is the most important field in biology," he declared. He decried "the tremendous insertion of religious beliefs into the heart of science." He denounced Congress' attempt to "criminalize stem cell research, criminalize patients who would travel abroad to get stem cell treatments and criminalize parents who would seek stem cell treatments for their children. These are some of the most frightening trends we've ever had in this country." In a controversial move, Venter suggested that "we should encourage poor countries to steal our technology." He argued that entrepreneurs in the United States used to steal technologies from Europe which greatly aided our economic development. Once countries achieve a certain level of development, we should begin to enforce our intellectual property rights against them.
Pennsylvania University bioethicist Arthur Caplan argued that "more than any other nation on earth, we are technologically oriented." Therefore it is hard to set limits on the use of biotechnology because of our technological optimism. Simon Best, CEO of the British company Ardana Biosciences noted, "In Europe we are much less in love with technology and much more in love with limits." Best noted that in discussing biotech developments, "there is always the fear that we are going to rush to the limits." So he said that we end up having furious "science fiction" debates over hypothetical developments that are years away from becoming real prospects. In conversation later, Best pointed out that Europe, by rejecting biotech crops, is effectively deciding that it will be the region of the world whose consumers eat the highest levels of pesticide residues.
Kevin Fitzgerald, a Georgetown University bioethicist and Roman Catholic priest, said that when he is asked about stem cells, "My first reaction is to duck." He noted that there is a lot of confusion in this area. "We shouldn't start with the question of what is the moral status of the embryo, we should first ask what is an embryo?" said Fitzgerald. "We need a good definition of an embryo." He noted that 75 percent of naturally produced embryos "never make it." They fail to implant in the uterus and simply disappear in women's menstrual flows. To show how confused the situation is Fitzgerald cited the recent University of Pennsylvania stem cell research that apparently produced human eggs from human embryonic stem cells. "Now what if it turns out that this egg created by stem cells, unlike a normal human egg, can be parthenogenically activated—that is it can start dividing and developing into a complete embryo without needing to be fertilized. What was it before it arose from the culture dish of stem cells?" he asked.
Francis Collins, the head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, opined that we have made an artificial distinction between embryonic and adult stem cells anyway. He pointed to the recent discovery of the nanog gene that maintains stem cells in their pluripotent (capable of becoming any of the tissues of the body) or even totipotent (capable of developing into a complete embryo) state may make the distinction irrelevant. "What happens when it becomes possible to drop a skin cell into a chemical cocktail to make it totipotent?" Collins asked. He added, "That's coming soon."
Francis Fukuyama, author of Our Posthuman Future and a Johns Hopkins professor, noted that "if there is as much plasticity in human cells as Francis Collins suggests, then the issue of embryonic stem cells versus adult stem cells will become quite irrelevant."
The one thing that all panelists agreed on was that reproductive cloning, that is, cloning to make a baby, would be immoral because the risk of harming the eventual child is far too high. They also agreed that reproductive cloning, even if it were possible to do safely, would never be very important in the long run.
