April 09, 2002
Problem in Mirror May Be Larger Than It Appears...
I get an uneasy feeling whenever I come face-to-face with a problem that's difficult for me to get my arms around; it seems like some challenges are just too hard to think about.
The latest such proposition to elicit this feeling is the recent scientific breakthroughs deciphering the genetic code of rice, the basic food staple for half the people on the planet.
Like all crops, it can suffer from inclement weather, adverse farming methods, and every other force of life around it. The uneasy feeling started for me when I realized how complex simple every-day rice is. Each variety of rice contains tens of thousands of distinct genes and over 400 million unique base pairs.
The fact that we can even know this level of detail brings me up short.
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Scientists worldwide are extremely enthusiastic about these breakthroughs, as well they should. Science is clearly emerging into a new Golden Age.
After deciphering the basic elements of rice, scientists say that they will seek to engineer more robust strains, resistant to disease or variations in temperature and the like. There's even talk that we might eradicate hunger and feed the world.
But this presents even more complexities. Let's say our tinkering with this rice is a wild success. With full bellies and good nutrition, how many more humans will we then need to feed after that? And how much can the earth truly support?
Even so, these are scientists talking; they are speaking about what is technically possible. And any scientist will tell you, there's frequently a wide gap between what's possible and what's likely.
For starters, there's money and politics.
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As different laboratories all over the world break down these genetic codes, one question I have is: Who owns this information? Indica, a long-grained rice, was studied by a scientific team at the Beijing Genomics Institute, while japonica, a short-grained variety, was broken down by the California-based research arm of a corporation based in Switzerland.
Those two examples alone reflect the government of the People's Republic of China, as well as a publicly-traded international company.
Look up Syngenta AG. It describes itself as "the world's first global, dedicated agribusiness," and was created several years ago by spinning off and merging the agrochemicals business of a British concern and the crop protection and seeds business of a second Swiss company.
No matter what, it sounds to me like pure science itself might, at best, be a poor relation, and at worst, a pawn, in the world that actually enabled these miracle advances.
Who exactly is watching the ethics? How do we tell if what we engineer is in balance with nature? How can we really know the long-term risks? With the cries of starving children ringing in our ears, is it inhumane to not feed them? But what if our immediate solution to feeding them might endanger the total environment in the long run?
Science today not only generates far more questions than answers, it is possible that these responsible questions actually do not have responsible answers.
And that leaves me feeling, as I say, uneasy.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
