Wednesday, July 4, 2001
Pity the poor mad scientist

The biotechnology boffins can't understand why everybody seems
out to get them. All they want to do is save the world, reports Gay
Alcorn.

The world's biggest biotechnology convention, in California last
week,  needed a motivational speaker, so organisers hired a Canadian
mountaineer, Alan Hobson, who had been saved from leukaemia last
year by a remarkable procedure called a "stem cell transplant".

Hobson showed his mostly middle-aged audience of scientists and
business executives a video of him on top of Mount Everest,
declaring: "If you persist enough you can do the dreams".

The biotechnologists saw Hobson as a metaphor for their own
struggles. Last year he was told he would shortly die from leukaemia,
but the stem cell transplant has made him a "human hybrid" whose
blood now contains the DNA of his brother, Eric.

Hobson delighted the convention delegates by telling them that
"in the palm of your hands lies the health and welfare of 6 billion
people, the entire world population". They believe it themselves,
firmly convinced that they will shortly be able to cure cancer,
diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and  Alzheimer's and then go ahead
and feed the globe. Despite their optimism, there was a sense of
anxiety among the 14,000 participants at the BIO2001 convention,
and when Hobson repeated his mantra, "Can, Will",  they took it
personally, jumping to their feet for a standing ovation.

Protesters drifted away from the convention in the Californian
beach city of San Diego, but the delegates knew it didn't mean
they had no public relations problem. Surveys released last week
showed a burgeoning consumer revolt, with almost 60 per cent of
 Americans, especially the highly educated, opposing the
introduction of genetically modified (GM) food into supermarkets
(even though more than half of foods in the US already contain
such ingredients).

The Americans dominate the industry and have been mostly
sanguine about genetically modified foods. But that is changing,
with three-quarters wanting what the Europeans and Australians
have - mandatory labelling of food that has been genetically
tampered with. Industry gets excited that salmon  can be grown
twice as big as conventional fish, offering cheaper salmon and
bigger profits. But the vast majority of people don't want it.

The medical stream of  biotechnology, the manipulation of living
organisms for the use of human beings, promises a revolution in
disease prevention and control. Already, the era is upon us,
with 400 genetic tests available to help patients assess their risk
of disease. Since scientists announced this year that there are
30,000 genes in each cell, industries are scouring the keys to
genetic therapies, patents and profits, although cures for major
diseases remain, for now, elusive.

Medical biotechnology's image is threatened by mavericks who
have pledged to clone a human being in the next few years,
despite countries, including Australia, looking to ban human
cloning for reproductive purposes. Ethicists and right-to-life
advocates warn that scientists cannot control what they have
started.

Carl Feldbaum, the president of the convention's host, the
Biotechnology Industry Organisation (BIO), told the delegates
they had to listen to those on the Left and Right who "portray
us as godless or as playing gods", as well as those who warn
that "humans are not morally equipped to use the great power
conferred on them by technology, especially biotechnology".

Despite the sense at the convention that humanity was on the
cusp of a revolutionary golden age, the conference's core was
old-style capitalism, with dreams of big profits as dizzying as
those predicted by the dot com entrepreneurs of the late '90s.
In the US, biotechnology revenues reached $US23 billion last
year, accordingly to BIO, which represents industry, academic
institutes and other groups.

Australia neglected biotech until recently but is aggressively
trying to catch up to countries like Israel and Canada. Canberra
announced this week that biotechnology was now worth $1 billion
a year.

Australia had a contingent of about 300 delegates at the
conference from government, academia and industry, with
Victorian Premier Steve Bracks and his Queensland counterpart,
Peter Beattie, vying for national pre-eminence.

Bill Wickson manned the booth for Biomira, a spin-off company
from the University of Alberta in Canada, that is conducting
clinical trials, including in Australia, for a non-toxic vaccine for
metastatic breast cancer. At an earlier trial, those not using the
treatment survived 9.2 months and those who did survived 26.5
months. With American authorities giving it fast-track status
because of its potential, it could be on the market by 2004.
Wickson said it would eventually be offered to women who have
a high risk of breast cancer, or earlier stages of cancer.

He was blunt about why Biomira was at the convention.
"We have to get out there and get known in the US to have
a better share price for our investors. Some people believe were
about 28 per cent undervalued. You look at companies in the US
who are at phase two  in clinical trials and they're worth more than
we are and we're close to commercialisation." He talks of $US500
million ($975 million) sales a year for the breast cancer treatment
and $1 billion a year for another product for lung cancer, also in
trials.

There were dollar signs in the eyes of delegates. There was also
fear that public enthusiasm for new treatments could be slowed,
if not halted, by libertarian scientists unwilling to accept limits.
This year, a Kentucky fertility doctor, Panayiotis Zavos,
announced that he and a team of foreign scientists were
fast-tracking cloning to help infertile couples. That would mean
offspring would have the genes of only one adult, rather than
a mixture of a mother and father. In animals, cloning has proved
extremely difficult, with most resulting in deformities and early
death, but Zavos says science cannot be halted.  "This country
was built on cowboys," he said. "Cowboys are the guys that get
the job done."

A more immediate threat to the industry is President George
Bush's pending decision on whether to allow federal funds
to be used in research on embryonic stem cells. These are cells
from days-old embryos which have the ability to grow into healthy
cells and tissues and which scientists believe hold the best hope
for cures for ailments  from Parkinson's to paralysis.

Australian governments are grappling with this issue, and Bush
is being pressured by anti-abortion groups to ban federal funding
outright because it destroys the embryo (even if the cells come
from IVF embryos that would otherwise be destroyed).  The
moratorium on funds is holding up two applications for funding
from America's National Institutes of Health, one of which is from
Melbourne researchers Alan Trouson and Martin Pera. Yet another
complication is that scientists, while supporting a ban on human
cloning for reproduction, support therapeutic cloning. That would
allow cloning a patient's own tissue for use in treatment, but
politicians and the public don't seem to understand the distinction.

Craig Venter, whose company Celera was, with a public venture,
the first to break the human genetic code, told the convention
about Pennsylvania lawmakers who were asked where the human
genome resides. One third said the brain, one third said the gonads
and the rest didn't know. It exists in every cell. "It is important that
we don't go too far with the legislation if we don't understand the
issues," said Venter.

While the public sees clear benefits in medical biotechnology,
even if it fears its excesses, it is deeply sceptical of inserting
genes of one plant or animal organism into another to make food
more pest resistant, more hardy, or more nutritious. There is no
evidence that the foods are unsafe for human consumption, but
critics fear that the long-term health consequences are unknown
and that escape of the foreign products could irreversibly
contaminate traditional crops.

Critics such as Greenpeace also believe biotech companies have
a strategy to flood the market with GM foods so that they are so
prevalent it would be impossible to halt or reverse their growth.
For instance, about 90 per cent of the world's corn and soya beans
are grown in the US, Argentina and Brazil, with only Brazil resisting
GM food. If it succumbs, then the already growing problem of
stopping food companies getting GM-free food would be almost
insurmountable.

The biotech industries, including the world's largest agribusiness
company Monsanto, have joined forces to form the Council for
Biotechnology Information. The PR initiative last year spent
$US30 million in advertising to extol the benefits of  "genetically
enhanced" food. The companies say such food could eradicate
malnutrition in Africa, Asia and South America through pest and
drought resistant food, as well as products such as the
well-publicised Golden Rice. The rice, still at the greenhouse stage,
is infused with daffodil genes and a bacteria gene to add vitamin A,
and its developers say it has the potential to dramatically reduce
malnutrition and blindness in Third World children.

Florence Wambugu, a Kenyan scientist and former employee of
Monsanto, released a book during the convention extolling the
potential of genetically engineered food for developing nations.
Those who "reject biotechnology do so on full stomachs",
she wrote. Maize crops can be devastated by an insect pest,
she said. Banana farmers can lose their entire harvest to a disease
called black sigatoka.

Wambugu does not deny the risk of  "gene escape", where genes
introduced to GM crops can be transferred to other organisms via
the wind or insects, but says such problems can be managed.
"Far from making us prey to global capitalistic forces that are
beyond our control, biotechnology will empower us to shape the
future of our continent.''

Greeenpeace rejects the suggestion that its concern is middle-class,
arguing that the industry uses products like Golden Rice as a public
relations smokescreen. There was a growing backlash, said
Greenpeace genetic spokesman Craig Culp, because the technology
was new, relatively untested, and because the industry failed to
engage in debate when the technology was being developed.

"Their hope was that it would become so widespread that it would
be a fait accompli by the time people became knowledgeable,"
he said..


http://www.smh.com.au/news/0107/04/features/features1.html

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