Global planting of biotech crops grew 8 percent last year, to a record high of 395 million total acres, according to the latest report from Clive James at the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA). Despite the many regulatory hurdles that governments around the world have erected to the approval and adoption of biotech crop varieties, when farmers have the opportunity to plant them, they do. Last year, more than 16 and a half million farmers grew biotech crops in 29 different countries.

What’s particularly noteworthy is that, while activists try to portray biotechnology as a rich industrial world tool, the bulk of recent growth in biotech crop adoption has come among relatively resource-poor farmers in less developed and newly industrialized countries. The United States has, since the first biotech crop introductions back in the early 1990s, grown the largest number of acreage planted with biotech varieties. But, while annual acreage increases in countries like the U.S. and Canada is starting to flatten a bit, the most robust growth has come from Brazil, India, and China. LDCs and NICs now grow about half of the world’s total biotech crop acreage. In China alone, roughly 7 million poor farmers grow biotech crops on an average of just one and a quarter acres.

On a related note, in this short video, former Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter discusses the role that advanced technologies have played in making U.S. agriculture a vibrant and productive contributor to the global economy.

Twenty-nine years ago tomorrow, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Eli Lilly’s and Genentech’s Humulin, making it the first ever fully approved product of recombinant DNA, or what we now call modern molecular biotechnology. Humulin was the first biosynthetic human insulin, produced by splicing the human gene that codes for insulin production into a harmless microbe. Previously, diabetics who needed supplemental insulin used bovine or porcine insulin that was purified from the pancreases of cows and pigs. They worked reasonably well, but were not perfect analogues of human insulin. With the introduction of Humulin they could now take actual human insulin, which improved the treatment’s safety and efficacy.

According to The New York Times, my friend and colleague “Dr. Henry Miller, the medical officer in charge of Humulin at the F.D.A., said the development was a major step forward in the ”scientific and commercial viability of’” recombinant DNA techniques. ”We have now come of age,” Dr. Miller said.”

Since 1982, biotechnology has revolutionized the practice of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. Over the past 29 years, some 200 or so biotech medicines have been approved in the United States, with roughly 900 more now being developed to treat more than 100 diseases ranging from cancers and infectious diseases to autoimmune disorders and cardiovascular diseases.

Unfortunately, while food biotechnology has the same potential, it has not fared nearly as well. A broad scientific consensus has concluded that rDNA technology (known variously as gene splicing, genetic engineering, and genetic modification) is merely an extension, or refinement, of less-precise breeding techniques that scientists have long used for similar purposes, but it’s use has been hobbled by vast over-regulation in the U.S. and around the world — a phenomenon I have written about at length elsewhere. So, let’s celebrate the tremendous success of the medical biotechnology industry, but let us not forget how government has nearly strangled food biotechnology in its crib.

A couple of days ago, Talking Points Memo’s Jim Kozubek reported that the Food and Drug Administration had finally decided to approve AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon for human consumption, and that the “evaluation is now under review at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.” I’d seen the TPM article, but didn’t write about it at the time because premature reports of FDA being on the brink of approval have been filtering out through the media for several years now. (I filmed a TV interview for Fox News’s “Your World With Neil Cavuto” way back in 2005, when it looked like an approval was right around the corner, for example. And I talked about it again on John Stossel’s show last year.) But a friend of mine asked today why an FDA approval decision would have to get a second look from the White House, so I thought that would be worth discussing.

As the TPM article mentions, the AquaBounty salmon has been hugely controversial. Wild Atlantic salmon grow to full adult size in about three years, in part because they only grow six or seven months per year. As water temperatures decline in the late autumn months, a genetic switch turns turns off the gene that produces growth hormone, so the salmon can conserve energy through the winter. Energy conservation isn’t as big a problem for farmed fish, though, because they have easy access to food all year and little exposure to predators. So, AquaBounty engineered Atlantic salmon with a promoter (the genetic switch) from an Arctic fish called the ocean pout, attached to the growth hormone gene from Pacific Chinook salmon. And, voila! The engineered salmon grows year round and reaches normal adult size in about 18 months, lowering the cost of raising them and lowering the price of fish in grocery stores. Here’s the packet of scientific information FDA prepared for its scientific advisory committee last year.

Environmentalists don’t like it, of course. In part because ocean pen-raised farmed fish are known to occasionally escape into the wild, meaning the AquaBounty salmon could theoretically interbreed with wild salmon, with potential impacts on the wild gene pool. And in part because they just don’t like biotechnology. To address the arguably legitimate concerns, the AquaBounty salmon will only be raised in contained, inland pools, not open water pens, and they”ll be farmed only in Panama, where, if they do escape, the ambient water temperatures will be too high for them to survive. AquaBounty also uses two other breeding techniques that, with a 98 percent degree of certainty, produces only female fish that have been rendered infertile. So, even if they were to escape and survive, nearly all of them would be incapable of successfully mating with wild fish. Also, because the AquaBounty fish will be searching for food during the early spring months when wild Atlantic salmon are breeding, it turns out that the engineered fish have an extraordinarily low mating instinct. (Insert ribald, ex-wife joke here.)

Pacific salmon fishermen don’t like the AquaBounty fish because farmed salmon are the competition, and anything that makes the competition more efficient makes them less competitive. That’s why a group of Republican and Democratic congressmen are supporting a bill that would forbid the FDA to approve it.

Which brings us back to the OMB review. My friend asked, “What’s up with that? Does OMB usually get to sign off on FDA approval decisions? Or is this a special case, since the fish are genetically engineered?”

Ordinarily, OMB has authority to review proposed new regulations and guidance documents issued by executive branch agencies, not individual approval decisions — whether they’re biotech product approvals, drug approvals, pesticide approvals, broadcast spectrum license approvals, or any other individualized decisions. However, because the FDA Commissioner is appointed by the president, she technically works for the President of the United States. Commissioner Margaret Hamburg may well just be cooperating with the White House on the AquaBounty salmon approval, knowing that it will be controversial. So, one possibility is that FDA is just having the OMB staff (possibly, a division of OMB called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) have a look at the decision documents in order to ensure that all the political bases are covered.

Another possibility is that FDA may be issuing a new regulation or guidance document in conjunction with the approval, and that would need OIRA clearance. FDA decided during the George W. Bush Administration to regulate the novel trait in genetically engineered animals as New Veterinary Drugs (a stupid decision, but that’s a story for another day). In January 2009, FDA issued a guidance document explaining its legal authority to do that, and laying out the steps through which animal breeders would seek NVD approval. Ordinarily, I would have expected that to be done through a rulemaking procedure, rather than through guidance. So, it’s possible that the proposed rule has now been drafted and that OIRA review is necessary to clear that proposed rule for promulgation.

These possibilities are pure speculation on my part, and I haven’t ruled out the possibility that TPM just got the story wrong. After all, as I wrote above, we’ve been hearing stories for the past six years about FDA being on the brink of approval. It’s long past time that FDA approve it, though. The application has been at FDA for 16 years. The science is pretty clear that the product is safe for both consumers and the environment. And there’s good reason to believe that it would convey substantial health benefits for consumers by lowering the price of a food product that is highly nutritious, not to mention good for the environment by taking pressure off wild fish stocks that are often over-harvested. Why the White House might stand in the way of an approval decision is beyond me.

Over at the Scientific American magazine blogs, science writer Christie Wilcox takes on some of the mythology surrounding organic foods, including the belief (Myth #1) that organic farms don’t use pesticides and (Myth #3) that organic farming is better for the environment. I’ve been covering a lot of the same territory over the years (here and here, for example), but it’s nice to see this in a more “mainstream” publication.

A couple of highlights:

What makes organic farming different, then? It’s not the use of pesticides, it’s the origin of the pesticides used. Organic pesticides are those that are derived from natural sources and processed lightly if at all before use. This is different than the current pesticides used by conventional agriculture, which are generally synthetic. It has been assumed for years that pesticides that occur naturally (in certain plants, for example) are somehow better for us and the environment than those that have been created by man. As more research is done into their toxicity, however, this simply isn’t true, either. Many natural pesticides have been found to be potential – or serious – health risks. … Not only are organic pesticides not safe, they might actually be worse than the ones used by the conventional agriculture industry.

And this:

Even if the organic food you’re eating is from a farm which uses little to no pesticides at all, there is another problem: getting rid of pesticides doesn’t mean you’re food that is free from harmful things. Between 1990 and 2001, over 10,000 people fell ill due to foods contaminated with pathogens like E. coli, and many have organic foods to blame. That’s because organic foods tend to have higher levels of potential pathogens. One study, for example, found E. coli in produce from almost 10% of organic farms samples, but only 2% of conventional ones. The same study also found Salmonella only in samples from organic farms, though at a low prevalence rate. The reason for the higher pathogen prevalence is likely due to the use of manure instead of artificial fertilizers, as many pathogens are spread through fecal contamination.

And this:

But the real reason organic farming isn’t more green than conventional is that while it might be better for local environments on the small scale, organic farms produce far less food per unit land than conventional ones. Organic farms produce around 80% that what the same size conventional farm produces (some studies place organic yields below 50% those of conventional farms!).

Wilcox concludes:

As far as I’m concerned, the biggest myth when it comes to organic farming is that you have to choose sides. Guess what? You don’t. You can appreciate the upsides of rotating crops and how GMOs might improve output and nutrition. You, the wise and intelligent consumer, don’t have to buy into either side’s propaganda and polarize to one end or another. You can, instead, be somewhere along the spectrum, and encourage both ends to listen up and work together to improve our global food resources and act sustainably.

It’s an interesting read, and complete with citations to the published scientific literature.

Today’s Washington Post Food section contains a number of articles following up on the Post’s “The Future of Food” conference that I wrote about last week. There’s enough misinformation and uninformed opinion there to keep a food policy scholar like myself busy for a week. But one item that’s really gotten my panties in a bunch is the repetition of a pet peeve of mine, which is featured in a quote from Stonyfield Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg:

“I have yet to meet the consumer who says, ‘I want the milk with more synthetic hormones, please.’”

I assume that Hirshberg is referring to the use of recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST) to boost milk production in cows, but the language he and other opponents use to turn consumers against a pretty darn good technology is so misleading that it often makes me assume they’re being intentionally deceitful.

Leave aside, for a moment, that rbST is administered to the cows, not put into the milk, and that there is no detectable rbST in the milk itself. And never mind that milk is loaded with plenty of the cow’s own natural hormones, including endogenous somatotropin. The most egregious problem with Hirshberg’s claim is that Stoneyfield Farms actually adds synthetic hormones to its own dairy products, and they advertise that fact right on the cartons, as well as on the company website — presumably in the belief that consumers will find their presence in Stoneyfield Farms milk a feature, not a bug.

You see, practically every carton of fluid milk sold in the United States is fortified with vitamin D3. Stoneyfield Farms calls it “The wonder vitamin”. But what Hirshfield and his fellow travelers are apparently counting on is the fact that most people don’t realize that Vitamin D is a hormone (and a steroid to boot).  And where does the hormone that the dairy industry adds to its milk come from? Why, it’s synthesized in a laboratory, of course.  I’ll let University of California, Riverside biochemistry professor Anthony W. Norman explain:

The commercial production of vitamin D3 is completely dependent on the availability of either 7-dehydrocholesterol or cholesterol. 7-Dehydrocholesterol can be obtained via organic solvent extraction of animal skins (cow, pig or sheep) followed by an extensive purification. Cholesterol typically is extracted from the lanolin of sheep wool and after thorough purification and crystallization can be converted via a laborious chemical synthesis into 7-dehydrocholesterol. It should be appreciated that once chemically pure, crystalline 7-dehydrocholesterol has been obtained, it is impossible to use any chemical or biological tests or procedures to determine the original source (sheep lanolin, pig skin, cow skin, etc.) of the cholesterol or 7-dehydrocholesterol. Next the crystalline 7-dehydrocholesterol is dissolved in an organic solvent and irradiated with ultraviolet light to carry out the transformation (similar to that which occurs in human and animal skin) to produce vitamin D3.

This vitamin D3 is then purified and crystallized further before it is formulated for use in dairy milk and animal feed supplementation. The exact details of the chemical conversion of cholesterol to 7-dehydrocholesterol and the method of large-scale ultraviolet light conversion into vitamin D3 and subsequent purification are closely held topics for which there have been many patents issued (2). The major producers of vitamin D3 used for milk and other food supplementation are the companies F. Hoffman La Roche, Ltd (Switzerland) and BASF (Germany).

So yes, Gary, consumers really do want the milk with the added synthetic hormones. They might not realize it.  And YOU might be able to scare them into spending more for your product under the false assumption that it doesn’t contain synthetic hormones. But the added hormones are there for a reason. They’re safe.  They’re effective.  And they do a body good.

HRH the Prince of Wales delivered the keynote address at The Washington Post‘s “Future of Food” conference yesterday at Georgetown University. Tim Carman, from the Post’s Lifestyle section, offers some brief thoughts on the Post blog here. Carman calls the speech “inspiring”, quotes an organic advocate who was “really impressed” with it, and links to the prepared text, which you can find here. I thought it was a load of organic fertilizer, personally, so I submitted a lengthy comment, which I reproduce in full:

It’s not surprising that Samuel Fromartz, an organic farming advocate, would praise Prince Charles for a speech that advocates organic farming. But, while he’s condemning conventional agriculture for its use of “chemical pesticides” and “artificial fertilizers”, HRH might also want to acknowledge that organic farming has its own limitations.

Organic farmers also use plenty of chemicals — just ones that are lightly processed minerals such as copper sulfate, or ones derived from plants such as pyrethrum from chrysanthemum flowers. But, ounce for ounce, organic pesticides are just as toxic as modern synthetic pesticides. And in some cases, such as the organic fungicide copper sulfate, they are far more harmful to the environment. With only a few exceptions, organic pesticides control insects and plant diseases far less effectively than synthetic chemicals, so they must be used in much larger doses.

Furthermore, while organic farmers eschew synthesized fertilizers in favor of animal manure and so-called “green manures” — nitrogen-fixing legume crops like clover and alfalfa — plowing legume crops and animal wastes into the soil leads to nitrate leaching into groundwater and streams at rates similar to conventional agricultural practices. The chemical properties of soluble mineral fertilizers that are prohibited in organic farming are identical to those of that are released in uncontrolled quantities by the mineralization of organic matter.

It is also ironic that Prince Charles begins his speech noting that we will have to dramatically increase agricultural productivity over the coming decades to keep apace with population growth. Unfortunately, because organic crops generate lower yields, shifting away from conventional production will make it more difficult to reach this goal.

In any given growing season, the best organic fields can generate yields that are nearly on par with those of of average conventional farmers. Generally, though, organic crops yield from 5 to 10 percent lower than conventional ones, and as much as 30 to 40 percent lower for certain plants, such as potatoes, wheat, and rye. Even those yield figures can be misleading because soil nutrient replacement on organic farms requires lands to be fallowed with nitrogen-fixing plants for two or three years in every five or six, whereas conventional farming that incorporates soluble mineral fertilizers does not need to fallow land. Thus, conventional farms can achieve total yields per acre that are as much as 40 to 100 percent greater than organic farms.

Prince Charles would be well served by reading the UK Royal Society’s 2009 report, Reaping the Benefits: Science and the Sustainable Intensification of Global Agriculture. We currently use 1/3 of the world’s land area to grow food. The report explains clearly that we can not increase agricultural productivity AND save the environment without using the best science and innovative technologies in order to grow more food on less land.

 

In his writings, noted futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has said that he believes human technology will one day reach a point where the human life expectancy will be radically extended, resulting in near immortality. In a 2009 interview with Computerworld, Kurzweil put the date at which immortality could be achieved somewhere around 2040 or 2050 thanks to the ever-quickening pace of technological development and the rise of nanotechnology that will repair or even replace parts of the human body. Kurzweil may have overshot that date by a few decades, as today’s human achievement is the invention of nanospiders that can crawl along human DNA and change it.

DNA nanospiders, created by Columbia University scientists, are small robots (about 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair) made of DNA molecules. As ScienceNews reports:

The “arachnoid nanobots” have three to four legs and walk across expansive landscapes of exquisitely folded DNA. Some of these molecular machines can take 50 steps all by themselves.  Others sport wiggly arms that can pick up and carry around nanoparticles.

Their purpose is to get DNA molecules to organize themselves and the spiders are powered by the natural DNA-DNA interactions programmed into their foundation. The spiders move along DNA“origami.” Created in 2006 by Caltech synthetic molecular biologist Paul Rothemund, DNA origami is an engineered strand of DNA that acts like a railroad track f or the spiders to move along and do their work.

Scientists hope the nanobots will one day do things like seek and destroy cancers in the human body, assemble nano-sized medical devices, and build tiny computers vastly smaller than current technology. According to the Daily Mail, the spiders can be programmed to sense the environment around them and react accordingly. They can already detect known disease markers on a cell surface, identify if it is a health threat, and then bring in a compound to destroy it.

O’REILLY: Everybody knows that scientists have enough knowledge to clone a human being if they wanted to.

O’DONNELL: Right.

O’REILLY: But they’re not, at least not that we know of. And now they’re in the monkey realm. And I don’t understand, if that’s the possibility that people might be cured, why the objection. Because I never buy the slippery slope….

O’DONNELL: By their own admission these groups admitted that the report that said, “Hey, yay, we cloned a monkey. Now we’re using this to start cloning humans.” We have to…

O’REILLY: Let them admit anything they want. But they won’t do that here in the United States unless all craziness is going on.

O’DONNELL: They are – they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they’re already into this experiment.

Fact check:

Presumably O’Donnell was misremembering a 2005 report about growing human brain cells within mice. Not the same as an actual functioning human brain. Yes, it has been demonstrated that some mice are more intelligent than members of Congress but no genetic manipulation was required.

Regarding O’Reilly, as per usual when you see the term “everyone knows” it’s a hint of something untrue. It is possible that scientists now have the capability of cloning a human being.

But cloning mice proved fairly easy, sheep much harder, and monkeys much harder yet. Until somebody actually does clone a human being, we won’t know whether scientists have enough knowledge. But of course at some point they will have the knowledge and the will clone humans. And it won’t be the end of the world. We already have human clones. They’re called identical twins.

To much celebration and media play, the first human trial of embryonic stem cells has begun.

With a grand total so far of one patient.

“I don’t understand [having] human trials because the animal studies aren’t very convincing,” David Bennett, a University of Alberta neuroscientist renowned for his experimentation with spinal-cord injuries, told me for my AOL News piece today. “My gut feeling is that it’s a scam,” he said.

My article explains why the company behind it, Geron, felt compelled to proceed. It comes down to one word: money. In part, they’ve been spending on this work for 15 years with no human experimentation. Stockholders don’t like that.

But there’s much more to the Geron “scam.”

For example, Geron says it will only treat patients injured in the preceding two weeks. Yet that’s when injured spinal cords are spontaneously generating new cells in an effort to heal.

Studies in cats with completely severed spines show that with mere treadmill exercise, as one found, all of them could walk again without assistance, though sadly their mouse-chasing days were behind them.

Even if none of Geron’s patients shows any improvement in sensation or mobility, sensitive tests like electromyography or one mercifully abbreviated to SEP can detect increases in cell growth or something called plasticity.

That would give Geron a chance to claim success when there was none.

Meanwhile, there has already been success using adult stem cells to treat human paralysis. But money for these trials has steadily been diverted to, yes, ESC work.

Incidentally, Bennett has 106 citations in MedLine, but nobody else in the media quotes the real experts. Instead, they go to the “old reliables” who just happen to have millions of dollars invested in embryonic stem cell research. Which is why, unfortunately, you read stuff like this here first.

(See insert: In studies, cats have routinely had severed spinal chords heal to where they could walk unassisted, though Mike’s cat prefers to lay down and “monitor” him in – more ways than one. [Model credit: Aspen H. Cat])

Have a listen here.

CEI Senior Fellow Greg Conko, author of The Frankenfood Myth, talks about the promise and imagined peril of genetically modified salmon. The controversial creature reaches normal size twice as fast as unmodified salmon.