THE GENE GENIE
When genetically modified crops first went on trial, one of the greatest worries was that new genes would spread to wild plants, making them resistant to herbicide, poisonous to insects, or God knows what. The chemical companies developing them went to a lot of effort to allay these fears, paying for enormous public relations campaigns to assure us that this could never possibly happen.
It's happened. Pollen from an experimental crop of oilseed rape plants in the UK has managed to fertilize a distant cousin, a weed known as charlock. Now a new strain, invulnerable to a common herbicide, is growing wild in the pleasant English county of Dorset. Not only does this show that their safeguards are worthless, it is an ecological disaster in itself. If it proves to be fertile - and only one or two seeds need to be viable out of perhaps hundreds of thousands that now exist - it is inevitable that almost every charlock plant in the world will one day bear the modified gene. It will be selected for. Weedkiller resistance is, to state the obvious, a beneficial trait for a weed.
Here in Ireland charlock is known as bráiste [brah'shtuh]. It's quite a pretty plant, a bit leggy but with attractive and delicate yellow flowers. Yet my mother loathes it - because she remembers the times before herbicides. Bráiste is a common weed of cereal crops, and back then it had to be picked out at time of harvest, by hand. The children were set to this backbreaking work, gathering it from the mown barley and carrying it to the side of the field, under the sun, hour after hour. No wonder she can't stand the sight of it. So now it's going to be herbicide resistant. Will our children be back in the fields? It is only immune to one chemical so far, but if they keep up these trials other genes for resistance are going to leak into the wild - and inevitably accumulate in the same plant, a 'superweed' that will be nearly impossible to kill chemically. This has already happened in Canada where they have a strain of oilseed rape that is invulnerable to all legal weedkillers. They are now having to use non-selective herbicides that were previously banned for being hideously damaging to the environment.
It's not just the balance of nature these superweeds endanger though, but food production too. There are many grounds to criticize intensive agriculture with herbicides in its current form, but without it food would not be anything like as plentiful. We have more than enough in the world to feed our seven billion people; famines occur not because there isn't enough to eat but because unlike us, poor people cannot afford to have food sent to them from the four corners of the globe. If intensification were to fail this would no longer be true. We would be literally short of food, and millions upon millions of people would starve. The poorest, of course.
The companies that develop them talk about making GM crops infertile. (Not out of environmental concern necessarily. They want to sell farmers new seed every year rather than have them propagating their patented plants) But if they think they can control this they only fool themselves. The infertility is in itself a genetic characteristic, and there is nothing to stop occasional 'sports' deciding that actually they'll be fruitful anyway, thank you very much. Genes are reproduction, and attempting to change them so that they do not recreate themselves is like commanding the tide to stay out.
But this crop wasn't even neutered! British government scientists overseeing the experiment thought that bráiste was too distantly related to oilseed rape for cross-fertilization to take place. They were dead wrong, and now it has jumped this species gap it seems highly likely that the trait will spread to other related plants. So what else is in the family? I'll tell you. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale, turnips, spinach, radishes, turnips, rutabaga, canola, Brussels sprouts, Chinese cabbage, mustard... Or in short most vegetables in the human diet. They make up the brassicas, probably the single most useful group of plants known to mankind. And now we've polluted its genome. Go us.
GM crop trials must stop now, but the damage already done cannot be undone. Spraying with an alternative herbicide will do no good. Bráiste is seeding at this time of year, and its seeds can lie dormant in the ground for twenty years or more. Nothing short of dropping an atomic bomb on Dorset is going to put this gene genie back in the bottle.