Transgenics: Recognizing the ambiguity

Transgenics: Recognizing the ambiguity

Yanuar Nugroho
Researcher & General Secretary
Uni Sosial Demokrat
Jakarta
yanuar-n@unisosdem.org

One of the issues to be raised at the WSSD (World Summit on
Sustainable Development) in Johannesburg in September 2002 is the
controversy over the so-termed "genetically modified" (GM) or
"transgenic" organisms that have started to worry people in many
parts of the world.

The case of transgenic corn plants in Brazil, which wiped out
more than 13,000 honey bee peasants, or the dispute aroused over
transgenic cotton plants in Sulawesi, Indonesia, some time ago,
are obvious examples. Yet, still, it seems to be not easy to
address the problem properly, as there have been so many
interests involved. It is profit-oriented business, spliced with
the advancement of technology, that has played an important role
in intervening in the creation of living beings. Of course,
legitimacy from a public agency is needed to bring the
"creatures" to the market, in the name of human prosperity. When
and how did this problem begin?

It was on May 19, 1994 that newspaper headlines all over the
United States reported that the U.S. Food and Drugs
Administration (USFDA) had given its final approval to Calgene,
Inc. to put its genetically engineered tomato, the Flavr Savr, on
the market. What differentiates Flavr Savr from other tomatoes?
It did not decay as fast as its natural counterparts since it had
one gene reversed -- the gene meant to make the tomato ripen and
so rot, as normal. When the gene was reversed, the tomato stayed
fresh for longer.

And the news did not stop there. Later on, Associated Press
(AP), Nov. 2, 1994 announced, "seven more genetically engineered
foods are safe. The USFDA has completed the inspections of seven
other genetically altered plants, i.e. three more tomatoes, a
squash genetically altered to naturally resist two deadly viruses
and a potato that naturally resists the Colorado potato beetle."
The keyword in this announcement is "naturally". In what sense do
these beings "naturally" exist at all, let alone possess the
powers advertised?

These things are neither natural nor unnatural: They are
beyond natural and unnatural. What we have here is no longer the
mass manufacture of objects that belong to us and not to nature.
Instead, it is the beginning of a new organic regime, blessed
with unimaginable fertility, giving birth to infinite
possibilities, all of them in their own "natural" way. Instead of
manufacturing objects it is recreating the process of birth. This
is the new nature, rather than nonnature or antinature, where
these possibilities reach well beyond potato blight, squash rot
and tomato decay: We are looking out towards the horizon. These
new "creatures" are entities in whose presence the entire world
is altered. How can this -- the new nature -- come into
existence?

A transgenic organism is understood to be one that has its
gene(s) "transplanted" across biological boundaries between
species or even biological kingdoms, such as plant and animal. As
the Flavr Savr -- and other new creatures -- had a gene added
from a foreign source, a bacterium (or other), which was used to
keep track of the changes, it was transgenic. Here, precisely,
lies the ambiguity: Is the new genetic object going to be a fatal
invasion or a benign enrichment? Is it created for bad, or for
good?

If we look carefully at these objects, we might lose all our
certainties and find ourselves facing a horizon of questions.
These new things are an incarnation of the next "world-shaping"
science, whose story is all about the breakdown of categories.
Its upsurge into the world announces the bending of all the "old"
concepts, including the very time and space in which we all
dwell.

This might be an inseparable phenomenon of development
nowadays. Time speeds up in some places under this new regime:
things grow faster, messages move more quickly. But time has also
been slowing down: Tomatoes decay more patiently, just as the
time needed for the new potatoes in fighting beetles. Time is
simply not what it was -- time is changing. The old earth is
passing away and a new earth is being born. Our familiar time
bends and quakes in the presence of such objects like Flavr Savr
and its transgenic successors, which possess the weird property
of rerouting time and space. Just take the new "seed" like the
well-known Monsanto GM Round-Up Ready Soya Beans as an example.
It grows very well according to many new laws: More quickly, more
enduringly, with more yields, in new places.

GM products have redefined for us the meaning of the future
and therefore the present in its turn. The future is coming
closer as its presence is ready-to-hand for us. Going further,
the ecosystem is now a being that has arisen as we have become
conscious of destroying it: It is the presence of a threatened
future.

To this point, have we ever addressed this question seriously:
To whose benefit do these changes accrue?

This genetic engineering is inseparable from global economic
systems, with its global reach and ambition. This is the arena
where knowledge, business power and state legitimacy come
together. Universities try to produce knowledge, much of it in
the form of texts, but also some in the form the new living
knowledge. A year before Flavr Savr, again AP reported that
mutant mice bred by Harvard University turned into a test bed in
1993 for curing cancer. This practice was legal as the university
had already been granted the U.S. patent in 1988, the first ever
for an artificially engineered natural life form. The creature
seems to be alarming because it breaks all the boundaries:
artificial and natural, engineered and living. But the news also
emphasized that its ownership was equally hybrid: DuPont de
Nemours and Bio, Inc. of Washington, Delaware owned the
commercial rights.

It is clear that the mouse -- as well as other GM organisms --
is an academic product and a commercial commodity. It is a
research tool and a room in a sales catalog; it is the hope of
cure and the glitter of profit. Inserting a bacterium gene into a
tomato is one small change in vegetable marketing, but it is also
one large change in the international economy, which signifies
the trademark of the symbiosis between industry and academia.
But, be careful: Trademarks belong to the economic world;
symbiosis is part of nature. Again, the categories curve into
each other.

Here nothing stays distinct and separate. To exist is to have
the potential for becoming connected to other entities, for being
absorbed, overlapped or redefined. The university does not differ
from the GM tomato in this respect: It has no clear boundaries,
but exists in relation with other entities: Industry and
government. We can no longer say where the academic centers stop
and the commercial organizations start. The university used to be
a system of well-patrolled borders -- between disciplines, and
between the academy and various outside worlds.

True, there were many secret crossings; but now there is a new
age and the border controls have been desperately removed --
instead of being adjusted. Can we see that these overlaps and
mergers could look like another breed of corruption? Are we not
losing our institutes of "pure" learning? Shall we denounce
"nostalgia" for "pure research" on several grounds?

This problem, to be addressed in the next World Summit at
Johannesburg -- and will also have been started at Bali at
PrepComIV and IPF (the Indonesian People's Forum) meetings -- is
not as simple as rejecting or accepting the new biotechnoscience
embedded in the transgenic organisms. But rather, how the process
of applying such technologies is to the benefit of our shared
life nowadays, when the term "customer" has depersonified the
poor and "market" hidden the investor's interests. Isn't it true
that the idea of democracy is the control of power -- including
spliced technology and business -- toward public accountability?