Cardinal Turkson is no dope (according to his Wikipedia bio he “is able to speak English, Fante, French, Italian, German, and Hebrew, in addition to understanding Latin and Greek.”) Here he seizes upon the crucial point. Every time HTWW covers the issue of genetically modified organisms, some readers immediately accuse me of anti-science bias. But I don’t actually have a position on whether GMOs are by definition good or bad for the environment or human health or even the challenge of alleviating hunger in the developing world. My basic stance, in fact, is pro-science: I believe technological advances have greatly advanced human health and affluence, and will continue to do so, if properly regulated. My concern re GMOs has always stemmed from a profound skepticism that profit-seeking corporations can be trusted to responsibly serve the public good. One need look only at the constant stream of reports detailing unethical and criminal behavior by major pharmaceutical companies to realize that this is hardly a hypothetical concern.

In the case of GMOs we are dealing with a remarkable concentration of intellectual property ownership in just a handful of corporations. Like all well-endowed corporate actors, these companies do not shy from vigorously lobbying governments in favor of putting into place place legal frameworks that are designed to maximize profits and minimize caution.

Cardinal Turkson is from Ghana, where this process is exquisitely visible. Most African countries are signatories to the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol, which calls for national biosafety laws to include something called the “precautionary principle.” The precautionary principle puts the burden of proof on those who favor taking a specific action, (such as introducing genetically modified cassava plants into Ghana) rather than on those who resist that action. In other words, a biotech company would have to prove its product was safe, rather than Ghana prove it was unsafe. For understandable reasons, the likes of Monsanto and Syngenta hate the precautionary principle, and are doing everything within their power to ensure that national biosafety laws avoid any mention of such a horror.

If you google Ghana and genetically modified crops, you will very quickly run into the name Walter Alhassan, a consultant for the Accra-based Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), and a strong advocate for the position that Ghana’s government “needs to speed up the passage of the Biosafety Bill to the global trend to improve agriculture and food security.”

From AllAfrica.com:

Prof. Alhassan however brushes aside the fears expressed against GM crops. “GM crops are safer than non-GM crops because they go through stringent measures. Those who have expressed misgivings about it are only doing so because of fears of the unknown.”

He admits that GM technology could be misused. “It is possible that someone can move one gene from one crop to another to cause problems. But that is why regulatory bodies are set up to ensure that the technology is properly guarded.”

But who sets up the regulatory bodies? Tracing a connection between Alhassan and the GMO industry is child’s play. Last November, the South African-based Center for African Biosafety documented some concerns about how African biosafety laws were being shaped by foreign biotech concerns. Alhassan’s employer, FARA, noted the report’s author, Haidee Swanby, was a major player in prepping the region for “the safe deployment of modern biotechnology.”

In May 2009 the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA) and FARA announced their partnership to launch a 3 year project for capacity building in biosafety in sub-Saharan Africa. The Project on Capacity Strengthening for the Safe Management of Biotechnology in Sub-Sahara Africa will be implemented by the Sub-Regional Organisations and the National Agricultural Research System in six countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Malawi. FARA will manage the $1,265,565 project under the leadership of Professor Walter Alhassan.

Let’s be clear here: Syngenta’s motivation in strengthening the capacity of sub-Saharan Africa to safely manage the introduction of genetically modified crops is not motivated by a corporate desire to end hunger. Perhaps some Syngenta scientists are energized by such a goal, but the private-sector funding of FARA is authorized under the expectation that it will help carve out new markets for Syngenta products. In the face of such pressure, caution is always warranted.

The Democrats emphasized the job creation aspect of the amendment.

Republicans opposed the bill, but praised a provision that would give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to approve generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs, along the lines favored by brand-name companies like Genentech.

One important line repeated by at least two representatives: “I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options.”

That’s as much detail as Pear provides on the substantive issue at the heart of Genentech’s concerns, but it’s worth drilling down on a bit more, because it so aptly demonstrates a fundamental failure of government as currently practiced in the United States.

The “provision” that would give the FDA “authority to approve generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs” is actually an amendment proposed by Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo that would protect companies like Genentech from generic competition. Unsurprisingly, Eshoo represents the San Francisco Bay Area district in which Genentech is headquartered.

Specifically, the amendment gives producers of so-called biologics — complex biotech drugs — 12.5 years of “data exclusivity” protecting the test results associated with the development of a particular drug.

The test result data is critical to the formulation of “biosimilars” — generic versions of complex, “large molecule” biotech drugs. There’s a valid reason for this, which is explained coherently by Genentech on its own Web site. State-of-the-art biologics are created through a manufacturing process so complicated and sensitive that even the  smallest differences in the process can result in significant differences in the structure and effect of the resulting drug, even if the end product “looks” more or less similar to the original. The biotech industry position is that since generic versions of these drugs will be manufactured differently than the originals, they should go through the same extensive safety testing process as the originals did before being ruled safe for human use.

Of course, if the generic manufacturers were required to spend the same amount of time and money proving the safety of their drugs as the original manufacturers, there wouldn’t be much of a cost advantage for them. And that would negate the whole point of giving pharmaceutical companies limited patent durations for their drugs. As a society, we have decided that it makes good sense to limit the patent duration on drugs to 20 years. This encourages the biotech companies to keep making new drugs, and ensures that the cost of existing drugs steadily falls.

For the generic manufacturers to be able to successfully prove that their drugs are as safe as the originals, they need access to the test data compiled at great expense by the original manufacturers. And that’s where the battle is currently being fought. Genentech and the rest of the biotech companies want to maintain test data exclusivity for as long as possible. The generics want a shorter period.

You can read a paper, funded by PHARMA, the lobbying organization for the big pharmaceutical companies, explaining why the period of test data exclusivity should be at least 12.9 and possibly as high as 16, years, to ensure that the drug companies can at least break even on their investment, here. And you can read a paper, paid for by a major producer of generics, explaining why the term should be only seven years, here.

This is not an all-or-nothing argument between information-wants-to-be-free absolutists and hardcore free-marketers who believe in eternal patents and the strictest possible intellectual property laws. This is a very granular argument. In a range from seven to 16 years, what period of test data exclusivity best serves the public interest?

In my ideal world, scientists and economists whose salaries were paid for by us, i.e., the government, would be conducting the research necessary to come up with a good answer to this very specific question.

But instead, we get Democrats and Republicans regurgitating statements about “appropriate balance” that have been written by lobbyists for companies that have a vested interest in the outcome of the bill.

And that’s this week’s installment in how the world does not work.

These insights come from a fascinating new paper, “The Evolution of Heat Tolerance of Corn: Implications for Climate Change” by North Carolina State University’s Michael J. Roberts, a professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Wolfram Schlenker, an economist at Columbia University. The researchers take advantage of a 100 years of incredibly detailed information on corn yields and temperature records in Indiana, the third-largest corn-growing state in the U.S.

Since the mildest scenario for climate change would result in heat extremes “worse than the worst of the Dust Bowl years” the question of corn heat tolerance is critical for the future of the American corn belt. Perhaps most alarming:

The… decline in heat tolerance might be due to the fact that maximizing corn plants for average yields also makes them more sensitive to suboptimal growing conditions…”

Which leads to the question “whether recent increases in yields could only be achieved by making plants less heat resistant, or whether future breeding cycles can increase both heat tolerance and average yields at the same time.”

Monsanto, I am sure, would answer the latter part of that question with a resounding affirmative. But the alternative is chilling: We have been progressively breeding and engineering crop strains that are less and less able to cope with climate change.

Roberts and Schlenker conclude with an interesting point about crop prices and income inequality, and a slight dig at Michael Pollan. Pollan has argued for years that subsidizing corn production has led to artificially low prices for corn products and thus contributed to undesirable things such as the obesity crisis. In that scenario, higher prices for corn would be better for our health.

But Roberts And Schlenker point out that such would only be true in a world without vast disparities in income. Rich people, or rich countries like the United States, shrug off rising grain prices and continue to merrily go about their carnivorous corn-fed-meat-eating ways. But poor people in poorer countries can’t handle even minor price increases, and starve.

If incomes were not so divergent, prices would simply rise until enough people substituted to a presumably more healthy diet with less meat. The main reason climate change impacts on agriculture pose such a great threat lies not just in the size of potential production impacts, but also because massive income inequality limits potential adaptation on the demand side of the market. The greatest hope is an uncertain one: that technological change will obviate the need for behavioral change.

Or at least that’s one theory. Some researchers at Penn State, led by biologist Andrew Stephenson, set out to find out exactly what we can expect to happen as transgenic squash genes migrate into the wild. They planted mixed populations of transgenic and wild squash and recorded their susceptibility to various viral and bacterial pathogens over a three-year period. (Abstract of paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science here. Layman-friendly summary of research here.)

As expected, the GM squash did a good job of resisting the viral pathogens, which instead hit the wild squash hard, resulting in stunted, slower growth and fewer flowers. But then an interesting thing happened. Squash have evolved in conjunction with their own specialist herbivores, cucumber beetles. Most herbivores are repelled by bitter compounds produced in squash leaves called cucurbitacins. But not tcucumber beetles; they just can’t get enough of the stuff. Unfortunately for the squash, the cucumber beetles are a transmission agent for a bacterial squash killer — wilt disease — which spreads via beetle poop that falls into the “open wounds” of chewed-upon squash leaves.

Cucumber beetles, quite understandably, don’t enjoy feasting on stunted, droopy squash plants that have been hammered by viruses. Instead, they seek out the biggest, healthiest, most abundantly flowering squash plants they can find. Which means the Penn State researchers discovered that the genetically modified squash that had most successfully resisted viral infection perversely attracted hordes of beetles, and thus were more likely to contract the deadly wilt disease than their wild counterparts. Built-in resistance to one set of mortal threats unexpectedly set them up to be vulnerable to an entirely different doom.

The moral of the story? In this case, the dangers of viral resistance from genetically modified squash escaping to the wild and creating a race of super-squash weeds that would rampage through the corn fields might be a little overblown. That does not mean, however, that Mother Nature will automatically maintain the status quo no matter how dramatically humans tinker with the structure of living things. It just tells us that figuring out how ecosystems will react to the introduction of new species with new traits is a complex business, with a host of unexpected variables lying in wait to trip us up.

So what did Saffo actually say?

From the Sunday Times;

As the biological revolution spreads, Saffo sees many moral dilemmas ahead. For example, by using genetic testing and tailor-made drugs it may be possible to mitigate many common ailments that affect the aging population — but such improvements will probably be available only to the super-rich.

In the future, they may be able to grow their own replacement organs, take specially designed drugs made just for them and use genetic research tools to alert them of any possible health dangers for them or their children.

“That’s social dynamite,” said Saffo. “I sometimes wonder if the very rich will become a completely separate species. Imagine if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think what that means about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.”

I am not sure that I see exactly where the mechanism for actual “evolution” in a rigorous scientific sense come into play here. Sure, the rich will have better access to top-of-the-line medical care and they will pass on such advantages to their children. For “evolution” into a different species to occur, however, they would need to be fundamentally redesigning the genetic structure of their children, and then those children would have to mate with similarly redesigned neo-homo sapiens to pass on their new attributes. Are the super-rich capable of such coordination? Isn’t it just as likely that they’ll all redesign themselves in different, innovative ways, and then discover that they are biologically incompatible and incapable of reproducing? Problem solved.

But even if the super-rich did succeed in species-separation, how exactly is this news? The rich have always had better access to health care, and have always been mating with each other. The emergence of “a divide between the classes” is hardly some kind of nightmare future scenario; it is a staple of human existence since societies started hierarchically organizing themselves at the dawn of civilization. To paraphrase the apocryphal but still useful Fitzgerald retort to Hemingway: Yeah, sure, the super-rich are super-different from you and me. They have more money. And always have.

And finally, there’s an easy way to avoid this dystopian future in which the descendants of Bill Gates and Lloyd Blankfein are born with immaculate complexions, huge brains, and the ability to run 40 yards in under 4.0 seconds. Tax the hell out of the rich, and use it to pay for healthcare for the rest of us neo-Neanderthals. Problem solved, again.