States department of agricultu agriculture. Then we have the author of the book how to read a french fry, how to pick up each. Both explore the science of cooking, farming and flavor. He is the winner of multiple awards including the berg green a award for distinguished writing. Most of you probably know him as the former food editor and columnist of the l. A. Time which was his home for more than 25 years. Then we have ted person. He is the professor of environmental law. He is the Faculty Company director on Climate Change and the environment at ucla, past professional roles include serving as an advisor to domestic and International Institutions including the White House Office of science and technology policy, United Nations environment program, and the Council Office of the government of canada. Welcome gentlemen thank you so, this topic isnt controversial or anything. But we are not here to discuss whether or not there should be gm owes. The horses are out of the barn for decades now. So what im interested in hearing about this evening is more about other technologies because gm owes are such a small part. Sort of the larger landscape and of course some issues about ethics and larger cultural questions. First i want to start with russ. So, if we were to walk through the supermarket, what are we likely to put in our cards that might have some gm owes sprinkled through their depending on how you shop and what kind of cook you are, either everything or nothing. If you are buying processed foods that include different grain oils, things that have cornstarch or Corn Products in them, that whole, the boxes and cans part of the supermarket is pretty hard to avoid. If you are buying produce and fresh fruits and vegetables and meats, its almost impossible to find anything. There are a few types of zucchini that have been genetically modified, a hawaiian papaya has been modified and there may be a few other things but i think thats pretty much the limit of it. Did you know that papayas are genetically modified . If they werent, you wouldnt have any the hawaiian papayas. Okay, so bob you are the plant guy, tell us a little bit about what the dmo is and how to find that is in the context of larger Technology Work thats going on its a great question because those of us who do this, we think that all plants are gm owes because theres actually nothing that you buy in any of your Grocery Stores, whether its organic or conventional that hasnt been genetically modified. Every single broccoli, corn, cauliflower, kale, squash, pumpkins, everything was modified, meaning manipulated genes. There is really no difference between manipulating a gene the classical way by breeding because you are directing some change by selecting some traits that you want or by adding a gene. In the modern context of the popular context, dmo really means having a gene in the molecular sense that an individual wasnt born with. And so, there are two extremes, one is genetic modification by breeding and the other is by adding an additional gene or tweaking a gene by doing some molecular work in the cells. So, from the popularization of gm owes in this day and age, it is being born with a gene that didnt have originally, and i think most people would be really surprised that this technology is now 40 years old. Thats when genetic engineering was invented. You may also be surprised there are actually human beings Walking Around that are gm owes. That is a fact, they are only alive because i have a gene in them they didnt have when they were born because they were born with a lethal disease, most of you may be surprised that if you use insulin or other drugs, they are made that have human genes that were injured engineered in them. If you are wearing blue jeans, the blue color was reengineered. There are a lot of different organisms that are gm owes. From a plant point of view, those of us who do these things to try to improve agriculture, we would consider genetic modification the classical way or the modern way by adding genes or tweaking them. Okay. Thats whats so exciting i will come back to you about some more excitement. So ted, the next natural question would be, has there been work and how do we know these things are safe well you never know for sure because you cant prove a negative. Science doesnt prove anything and anytime somebody demands scientific proof of something, whether its scientific proof that human beings are changing the climate or proof that gm owes are safe, you know they are using debating tactics and that is not something that can ever be provided. We have an awful lot of evidence. If you think about, i have to say, i find it persistently puzzling what intense controversies there are around dmo. It seems to be a strange place for people that have passionate feelings and acute political controversies. If you think of the narrowest way those controversies and concerned are framed, concerns about healthy food and environmental impact, the fact that genetically modified organisms, organize organisms modified, the fact that we have 25 or 30 years of experience all over north america of these things being planted and cultivated at huge scale and eaten by essentially everybody and there is no sign of any differential Health Impact on north American Consumers relative to the europeans who provide a perfect natural experiment because they had very little. People have been exposed very little. That is an awful lot of basis for confidence that the narrowly framed worries that it will hurt you, it will make you sick or harm your health to the products genetically modified, we have an awful lot of confidence that is not a problem. How much discomfort of the subject you think as a result of its acting proxy for pushback against an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits is that to me to it could be to any of you i think the short of it is, in speaking about the ecology, theres nothing natural about agriculture. If you think about feeding people, at one point the United States we had the great plains with buffaloes and grass and natural grass and now theres farms making foods using coin and slavery and wheat and canola and that means the ecology of that area has been drastically changed. The question really is, can you in fact feed the 9 billion people we will have by 2050 which is an enormous number of people in which we have to double the food supply and actually make more food than weve ever made in the whole history of humankind, how are you going to go about doing that with minimum ecological impact and i think the way in which that can be done is by good science, and i think some of the dmo that are out there have helped the environment quite a bit rather than negative. Its very difficult in agriculture to do something environmentally friendly what would you say to people who, for example the New York Times article came out recently and said this will be a fallacy that gm owes are sold to the public all the time on this promise of higher yields and they did a study covering 30 years comparing canada and europe and in fact showed no higher yields and gets a little technically complicated to go into in this forum, but i can give you an example based on how the hawaiian papaya was very susceptible to disease and was being wiped out. That means the yield is being dropped. It could be insects or fungi or viruses and bacteria but just wipes outcrops. Think about the irish famine that wiped out potatoes. Think about locust in the bible. This goes very deep because these things are at war with the plans they eat. The hawaiian papaya was susceptible to a virus and essentially 20 years ago, it was immunized by a very slick genetic engineering technique that i wont describe, but essentially it prevented the virus from infected the papaya which meant, if you havent genetically engineered it, you would have zero papaya. If you engineered it you now have a thriving population which means that genetic engineering did increase the yield of papaya because it went from zero to one 100 . Its a very complicated thing. Yield means grow more on less space. There is really no one gene that would be the yield gene. I dont think the gm owes were sold on the basis of yield. They were sold on the basis of we can do this without pesticides. We can do this without plowing the soil over. It was an efficiency an economic point of view. In terms of increasing yield, we havent even tapped the potential of what genetic modification can do in the molecular sense. In the classical sense, think hybrid corn. You can take two different varieties of corn, grow them together in the offspring are taller, hardier than the parents. If we could learn what those a are, we would very much be able to do that in the laboratory, and then be able to think about increasing yield on a scale which we cant even dream of today i would like to take a question in a somewhat different way. I would like to take on the broader implications. It strikes me that very often when people express concern about their opposition to dmo they are more motivated by a set of broader concerns about the character of the food and agricultural system. They are concerned about things, lets back up a little and ask, what kinds of things would you want out of in agriculture and Food Production system . It seems to me you might want healthy good, safe food produced in quantities to meet the needs of feeding people in an environmentally Sustainable Way and a way that is consistent. I think anybody who turns her attention to thinking about food and agricultural system will come up with a similar set of things. Doing all of those is really challenging and there are a lot of concerns about our current way of organizing and producing food that implicates all of those. They implicate the environmental ones more acutely than the health and safety once. So, if you think that way, you will be concerned about things like agricultural practices broadly. You will be concerned about the scale and uniformity of agricultural production. You will be concerned about the concentration of ownerships involved in it and also the concentration of ownership in the intellectual property and youll be concerned about the conditions of safe employment. Those are all really important legitimate concerns. What puzzles me a bit is that focusing on dmos is a lousy proxy for those concerned. Of a lousy proxy for any of them. Youre going to think about antitrust, the breath and scope and duration of property protection. You will think about environmental regulations and the whole suite of mechanisms we try to put in place to push agriculture and other enterprises toward sustainability. Feeding 7 billion people safely and sustainably is going to be really hard. Its going to be harder than getting off fossil fuels to solve Climate Change. Its coming down the pike at a slower so we havent embraced how severe it is. You will think about worker self safety and health concerns. They implicate a bunch of areas in Public Policy but gm owes are a weird place to focus concern and attention and opposition. Im not saying there is no connection, but im saying its a thin connection and its a strange place to have intensity of conflict dont you think its natural given the introduction to most of us with these products, this process went from a company who is a chemical company, often known for agent orange, not monsanto but one of the others, tao, but a lot of these companies are chemical and Seed Companies and are becoming intellectual property owners. It would be great to also talk about that. I think those issues are issues that make having this discussion much more difficult. , with all that comes with that idea, it makes having a discussion about the safety of this technique much more laden than if it had been coming to us through another way. Here is the irony of all of that. In the old days, in the beginning of biotechnology, exactly what you said applies to the farming industry, its in a parallel worlds, but the irony is in the old days, back in the old days when genetic engineering was invented, there were scores of little Tiny Companies that were entrepreneurial and going down different areas and exploring the front niches. It was extremely exciting. Im not going to take up that discussion right now but what happened is the cost. The irony is all of the original discoveries were done by Tiny Companies, not by the dupont or monsantos, they didnt have enough resources or money to get to the revenue just like with stage one, two and three clinical trials. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars. We created these monsters and theres no spot for tiny startups because they wouldnt have the capital get through the whole thing. Agriculture is very big. Not so much making the gmo in the lab, its making the billions and billions of seeds in different geographies and climates that go to the farmers and thats where the cost is, plus the regulatory cost. Its a challenging issue do you want to talk about intellectual property and patents . Thats a great topic it is a great topic. There has been a lot of intellectual property in agriculture, but it didnt come a new with gm owes. Seeds have been patented for 80 years since the 1930s there you go. Patents on life forms were affirmed in 1980. There is intellectual property. Patents dont last forever so, there are limits to our system of intellectual property, and im not sure it makes sense to think about intellectual property as the unique locust of the problem any more than it makes sense to think about gm owes as being the unique locust, its a big complicated system that has to serve a diversity of societal ends, and its very complicated to push and maneuver in that direction. I find your observation fascinating that there is a pathological partnership between the drive for very effective, careful regulation of the health and safety of this new technology and the concentration of ownership necessary to live with the system that also elicits the suspicion, it sounds like a perfect perverse vicious circle for consumers, whats ironic, the gm owes that are out there, lets say you have some soybean products and stuff, theyve gone through ten or 15 years of testing before they are approved by the epa. There is not one conventional variety of crop given new new varieties, theres nothing you bought in the Grocery Store thats gone through any regulatory whatsoever. For example, in my lab, and this is the irony, in about two weeks i could give you a hyper allergenihypoallergenic peanut. People are allergic to peanuts would have no reaction, that will go through ten or 15 years of testing before it will ever be approved, if it ever is. On the other hand, on another part of my laboratory, i could use classical breeding to breed a peanut that might has ten times the concentration in the seed that the ones you buy in the Grocery Store and i can give it to the farmers tomorrow without any form of regulation whatsoever. Thats for the system, i think, is screwed up. The National Academy of science and the panels that ive been on basically said we need to think about the final product and whether its safe with respect to allergens or toxicity and focus on the product and not the way its made. Genetic engineering is the process, not the end. I think we need to consider that as a society i think from the consumers point of view, i think a lot of the opposition i hear the focal point of the opposition goes back to an uneasy relationship that has become a standin. I think we have, one of the really reassuring things thats happened in food and Farmers Market and all that and it kind of reinforces the idea of this romantic process that happened in our parents and grandparents day, but it actually is just a romantic image. I think people who live on farms and when you talk to them, they dont want to leave everything to nature to take its course. Its natural, these interventions that we dont li like, they hold a mirror up to things that we dont like about ourselves or our society at this point, but its probably the wrong argument im really curious to know have how you have walked the place that you are. You look at it from a very big picture view point, and you have a middle ground that you have staked out my journey yes. You have been painted with that brush from time to time. I admit, i have. Twentyfive years covering much of what i covered with agriculture and food, ive spent a lot of time talking to ag scientists and walking dirt. As a journalist, the two things i try to keep in mind, how do i know what i think i know, and the other is what does the other side say. That doesnt mean that what the other side said is right, but it does mean i need to fully investigate that and find out what is valid about it, if there is validity to it. I think, for me, the journey started back in the 80s with the organic movement and the organic philosophy which has seen such a wonderful thing but then again when the regulatory arm stepped in and became a catalyst of things that needed to be done, in a weird way it kind of got set in stone at the time that it was legislated. And so, i would talk to people about organic this and that and the image was either you are either buying stuff from barefoot baby jesus or you might be mainlining agent orange. I knew those farmers and i would walk those fields, i knew these pictures that were being painted didnt fit the reality that i saw, and when i started looking at what was being made and pulled apart, i realized what was being painted in the organic world, and some of my best friends are organic farmers was this black and white world of two extremes in the reality of the agriculture that happen in this gray area in the middle were conventional farmers were using cover crop and Pest Management and integrated Pest Management, they were using all kinds of organic techniques but they were too ornery to go through the certifications because they reserved the right, they believed it was better to use some of the things that were outlawed and organic. There were plenty of paradoxes. so anyway, questioning that led to questioning when gm started coming out and they think they have a little bit more a little bit more open mind and a little more questioning mind. The things i would hear, argument agains