[applause] thank you. U. I hope you will still talk to me after tonight. L [laughter] the panel is extremely esteemed so please forgive me for reading, but the current director of the institute which is an Intercampus Institute that tells the university of walls h california los angeles. Hes a molecular biologist who specializes in the area of plant genomics and served twice as the head of the Genetics Program at the United States department of agriculture. Then, the author of the book held to pick a peach and both explore the science of cooking, farming and flavor. Hes a member of the James Beard Foundation food and beverage and america and the winner of multiple journalism awards including the distinguished writing. Most of you probably know him as the former food editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Times which was his home for more than 25 years. Then we have mr. Ted parson, the professor of environmental law and faculty codirector of the institute on Climate Change and environment at ucla and past roles include serving as an advisor to domestic and International Institutions including the White House Office of Science Technology policy, United Nations environmentale ae programs and the Council Office of the government in canada. Welcome, gentlemen. [applause]his top this topic isnt controversial or anything. [laughter] we are not here to discuss whether or not there should be gm of. The horses are out of the barn for decades now and so what imm interested in hearing about this evening is more about other technologies because it is such a small part to separate the larger landscape and then of course some issues about ethics and larger cultural questions. If we were to walk through thelh supermarket, what are we likely to put in our cards that might have gm knows sprinkled through them . Depending how you shop and what coke you are, if you are buying processed foods that include different grain thehingh orioles, things that have cornstarch or corn product, the whole box and can part of the supermarket its hard to avoid. If you are buying produce and fresh fruits and vegetables and meat, it is almost impossible to find anything. Theres a few types of zucchini that have been genetically modified, hawaiian papaya. There may be other things coming down the pike but right now i think that its pretty much thee limit of it. Did any of you know that high a is genetically modified plaques if they were not you wouldnt have any. B, so, you are the plants i so tell us a little bit about what gmo is. That is a great question because those of us t that do ts we all think that plants far because theres nothing you buy in your Grocery Store whether it is organic or conventional that hasnt been genetically modified every single broccoli, corn, cauliflower squash, everything was modified meaning manipulating genes and there is no difference between manipulating a gene and theff classical way by greeting because you are directing some change by projecting a trait that you want so in the modern l context or the popular context it means the molecular sent that an individual wasnt born withia and so theres the two extremes and the other is geneticthe ot modification were doing some molecular work so from this day in age its being born with ae gene one didnt have originally and i think most people would be really surprised that this technology is now 40yearsold that is when genetic engineering was invented and you may also be surprised to there are human beings Walking Around that are only alive because they have a gene named them that they didng have when they were born because they were born with a lethal disease. Most of you may be surprised if you use insulin or other kind of drugs they have genes that are engineered and if you are wearing jeans, they have a color so theres a lot of different organisms in which in fact they are a gmo but from the plant point of view for those of us do two things to try to improve agriculture we would consider genetic modification either thee classical way or the modern way of tweaking them and that is what is so exciting abouthem. Everything. I will get back to you about more excitement. [laughter] so the next natural question would be i guess has there been a work and how do we know these things are fake plaques you never know for sure because you cant prove a negative. Science doesnt prove anything and anytime somebody demands a scientific proof of something whether it is scientific proof that human beings are changing the climate for that the gml is safe you know they are using tactics and that isnt something that can ever be provided. But we have an awful lot of evidence. If you think about i find it puzzling what intense controversies there are. It seems to be a strange place for people to have such political controversies but if you think of the narrow way that their concerns are framed, concerns about healthy food and an environmental impact, the fact that genetically modified organisms modified by modern techniques of genetic modification such as the distinction a moment ago the fact that we have 25 or 30 years of the huge scale to experience all over north america of thesee things being planted and cultivated and eaten by essentially everybody and there is no sign of any differential Health Impact on north American Consumers relative to the europeans to provide a natural experiment because they have had very little. Thats an awful lot of basis for the confidence that the narrow framed worries would hurt you and harm your health to eat products genetically modified. We have a lot of content and that is not a problem. How much overall discomfort would this be as a result of its acting like a proxy for pushbacg against an economy that fails to respect the ecological and ecological limits . Is bad to me . I think the short of it is that unfortunately, there is nothing natural about agriculture and so if you thinkk about feeding people at one point in the United States we have the great plains and there were buffaloes and grasses and now theres farms that are making food using corn and soybean and that means the area has been drastically changed the question is can you in fact feed of the 9 billion people will have which is an enormous number of people we have to double the food supply and make more than weve ever made in the human history. How are you going to go about doing that with minimum ecological impact as much as possible and i think the wayay that can be done is by good science and i think some of the gm knows that are out there have actually helped quite a bitent t rather than being negative and it is difficult to do something in an environmentally friendly way. What would you say to the people that for example the New York Times article that came out recently and said that this is the fallacy that they are sold to the public all the time on this promise of higher yield and they did a study covering 30 years comparing canada and europe and in fact they hired you. I think it is technically complicated to go into here but i could give you an example based on hawaiian papaya that was essentially being wiped out. Theres nothing more in agriculture the drops more than viruses and bacteria. This goes very deep and essentially 20 years ago it was immunized by the geneticrus an engineering technique thatbu prevent it from infecting the papaya which means if you didnt genetically engineered he would have zero yield and if you engineered it now you have a very viable population which means that did increase the yield because it went from zero to essentially 100 . Its a complicated thing that thats lets grow more with less space. It doesnt mean we can do this with pesticides or plowing thisl whale. That is the classic example of increasing the yield by taking two different varieties and v bringing them together with stronger better than the parents and so if we could learn what those mechanisms are, we would be able to do that in the laboratory then be able to think about increasing the yield on a scale that we cannot even dream of today. In a different way i would like to take on the broad implications because it strikes me that very often when people expressed concern about gmo dearmond vetoed by a broad concern than the character of the agricultural system so lets backup a little and ask what would you want out of anag agricultural Food Production system . It seems you might want healthy seafood produced in quantities to feed people in an environmentally sustainable waya and in a way that is consistent with safety and sustainable livelihood for the people in the production process. Anybody that turns their attention to thinking that thean food system will come up with similar things. Doing all of those are challenging and theres a lot o concerns about the current way of organizing and producing food that implicate all of those. Maybe the environmental ones more than the health and safety ones. Ha if you think that way, you will be concerned about things likeke agricultural practices. You will be concerned about the scale and uniformity of Agricultural Production and youre going to be concerned about the concentration of ownership and also the concentration of ownership and intellectual property and the conditions of the safe employment and now those are all important and legitimate. Concerns but what puzzles me about the debate is that focusing on gmos is a lousy proxy for the concern. A Regulatory Initiative that ret focuses to merrily on gmos iss liable to be missed targeted. You will begin to think that other dimensions of the policy in things like antitrust, things like the duration of intellectual property protection. Youre going to think about environmental regulations and the whole sweep of mechanisms we try to put in place for the other enterprises to work with sustainability because it is like feeding 7 billion people safely and sustainably is going to be really hard. Its going to be harder than getting off fossil fuels. Its just coming down the pike i slower so we have not fully embraced how severe it is. Youre going to think aboutut Worker Health and safety regulations. The concerns are important and they implicate public policies, but the gm now is a place imco not saying that there is no connection, but it is a thin connection and a strange place to have intensity of conflict. Dont you think it is natural given the introduction to most of us with these products in this process was from a company who was often known for agent orange, not months and tol monsf the others and [laughter] one of the others but a lot of these companies are chemical and Seed Companies and are becoming sort of life intellectual property owners, so it would be great also talk about that. I think those issues are issues that make having this discussion much more difficult because with all that comes with that idea makes having a discussion about the safety of this technique much more lead and then if it had come to us through another way. Heres the irony. And he wont raise lets just say in the biotechnology because exactly what you said applies in the industry as well as it does with agriculture. Similar can turn u to in terms f the corporations. An it is stressed in a parallel world. But the irony is back in the 80s when the plant genetic engineering was invented. There were scores of companies that were just very entrepreneurial going down different areas and exploring different niches that was extremely exciting. And then the regulatory arm dropped for better or worse. Im not going to take up that discussion right now. And what happened is the coststs of getting the peace throughon regulation became now hundreds of millions of dollars and so it he irony is although the original discoveries and genetic engineering as word on my tiny little private companies, not by monsanto or dupont, tiny companies. They didnt have enough resources or money to get through the regulatory like getting a drug through stage one anand stage two, speech three clinical trials. So in some respects, we created these monsters because there is no place in our agricultural economy for the little startups now because they wont have the capital to get through the whole thing because as i said, agriculture is very big so it isnt so much about making it in the lab, its making the billions of c. With different geographies and climates thatrm then go to the farmers and that is to cost plus the regulatory cost so it is a very challenging issue. Do you want to talk a little bit about intellectual property and patents . That is a great topic. Theres a lot of intellectuae property in agriculture but it didnt come anew. They have been patented for many years. Patents on life forms were l formed in 1980 at the Supreme Court so there is an intellectual property. Patents dont last forever so there are limits to the systems of intellectual property, and im not sure that it makes sense to think about the intellectual property as the problems in the food and agricultural system any more than it makes sense too think about gmos as the unique big complicated system that has the diversity of the societal and its a very complicated to move in that direction. I have to say i find your observation fascinating that there is a sort of pathological part or ship between the drive for the very effective care for greg duration of the health andd safety of this new technology and the concentration of ownership necessary to live with that system but also elicits the suspicion. It sounds like vicious circle. I would ask consumers what is ironic is that the gmos out there, lets say that you have as the processed food in corn or some soybean products. Those have gone through 1015 years of testing before approved by the epa and usda. Great. But there is not one conventional variety of a crop. New varieties, new things made conventionally. There is a lot which kwlou you buy in the Grocery Store that is going through no regulatory. And an example, in my lab and this is the irony. In two weeks i would engineer a hypoallergenic peanut. People have done this. That is going to go through 1015 years of testing before it is approved if it ever is. In another part of my laboratory, i could use classical breeding to breed a peanut with ten times the concentration and i could give it to the farmers without any regulation. In the panels i have been on in the National Academy says you have are thinking about the final project and whether it is safe with respect to allergens and toxicity and we should focus on the product and now how it is made. I think from the consumers point of view, i think a lot of the opposition i hear that becomes the vocal point, harkin back to an uneasy relationship with modernity. One of the reassuring things that happened in food and you know, farmers markets and all of that, and it kind of reinforces this idea of romantic we imagined happened to our parents and grandparents and that is just a romantic image. I think people who live on farms when you talk to them they could not it leaves everything to nature to take its course and it is the worst thing you could ever do. Dying of small pox and it is natural. The interventions we tonight like i think they hold a mirror up to things we dont like about selves or our society. I think you have a very middle ground. You know, 25 years at the times covering what i covered along with the conjunction of agricultural and food. Spent a lot of time talking to farmers and agriculture scientists. As a journalist when i publish a story two things i try to keep in mind and how do i think i know what i know and the other is what does the other side say and that doesnt mean what the other side says is right but it does mean i need to fully investigate that and find out whether what is valid and for me the journey started back in the 80s with organic movement. And the organic philosophy which seemed like such a wonderful thing but then again when the regulatory arms stepped in became a checklist of things that needed to be done and the flus philosophy went away and it got set in stone at the time that it was legislated. I would talk to people and i would go out and the image was either you were like buying stuff from baby jesus or you might as well be insecting or main lining agent orange. The reason all kinds of very organic techniques but because they were too ornery to go through the certification or because they reserve the right, they believed it was better to use some of these things that were outlawed and organic. And there are plenty of paradoxes and in the organic, chemicals that are derived in one way or are fine if they are derived in another way they are not. But generally, the needle has moved toward the middle on that. For example according to the last pesticide report, this will probably shock people, 50 percent by weight of all the pesticides used in california last year were organically approved. [laughter] people think organic means no chemicals. So anyway, questioning that led to questioning when gmo started coming up and it led me to have a think a little bit more of an open mind or more of a questioning mind. And the things i would hear, arguments against and i would begin to investigate them, they seemed to be made out of, they seemed to be fairly flimsy. One of the things that is really fascinating to me is, do you, inattentive research that you do, do you also interact with people who are doing research on is not even how to describe it at this point. But on fertility of the soil. Things that we might think of as being more quote confessional. Are there as much resources being poured into the other time, the more traditional kind of farming. Because it seems like the people any more than one magic bullet. You need a million, right . And to think of this as political, do you remain on different sides of the aisle or do those of you who are in plant science but not in the genetic modification part of it, do you interact with one another . There is no question about that. I can give you an example. Im on the board of agriculture and the National Advisory of science which advises the president on policies. We get together five times a year in washington. And we have traditional, agricultural economists, you name it, people who are involved in the whole system of agriculture. We are always interacting and try