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Environmental ReviewA Monthly Newsletter of Environmental Science and Policy

Volume Ten Number Nine September 2003

CONTENTS:

WHAT ARE THEDANGERS OF

BIOTECH?Steven Strauss

GORILLACONSERVATION

IN WEST AFRICAJohn Oates

What’s Wrong withBiotech?

Introduction:Many people are uneasy about how

biotechnology is being applied andcommercialized, especially when itcomes to food crops. The mostextreme anti-genetically-modified-organism position is that the entire ideaof biotech is wrong. We have nobusiness cutting and pasting genesfrom one organism to another, and onlybad can come of it.

The other side of the divide isrepresented by scientists who work inbiotech and have no idea what all thefuss is about. People have been alteringgenes in plants and animals for thou-sands of years. Today's hybrid cornbears little resemblance to its wildancestors and people don't call it aFrankenfood. Likewise today's dogsdon't look like or act like (thankfully)their wild ancestors.

To people outside the business itmay not be obvious how much molecu-lar biology has influenced the lifesciences, while to scientists in biotechits benefits are so obvious that it is hardfor them to understand the public'sanxieties. Today's scientists havegrown up with molecular biology and ithas become a senior partner in most lifescience disciplines. Since Watson andCrick received the Nobel Prize forworking out the structure of DNA inthe early 1950s, molecular biology hastransformed how every biologicaldiscipline is done, including botany,zoology, genetics, medicine, pharma-cology, and forensics. Molecular

biology has been an academic jugger-naut, rolling over departments, suckingup grant money and appointments, andexplaining everything. Well not quite,but molecular biology has spun off amulti-billion dollar industry, biotechnol-ogy.

The most fervent anti-gmoorganizations tend to play to peoples'ignorance and anxieties. A quickexamination of their Websites showsthe basic propaganda tool kit: scarycatch phrases, screwy logic, using onlyinformation that supports the positionand ignoring the rest. Such behavior isevery bit as dishonest as the mostdespicable right wing ranter's. Lower-ing the debate about these importantissues to the level of propaganda hurtsthe credibility of all environmental

organizations and thus their ability toinfluence events.

The most effective way to protectpeople and the environment fromunintended consequences and/or badeffects of biotech will be based on openand honest evaluations of the pros andcons of the various parts of the biotechenterprise.

We spoke with Steven Straussabout the public perceptions of biotech-nology and how to raise the level of thedebate.

ER: Professor Strauss, what is yourtraining?

SS: I have a Bachelor’s in biology fromCornell in plant and forest ecology; thena Master’s at Yale School of Forestry;and a Ph.D. at Berkeley. Midwaythrough my Ph.D. training I gotinterested in genetics, not biotechnol-ogy, but traditional population geneticsand breeding in trees. It wasn’t until Istarted my faculty position at OregonState University that I started usingDNA methods, and it wasn’t untilseveral years into that that I startedworking in genetic engineering.

At Berkeley I had to have someoneon my committee who was not abiologist or a forester, so I had asociologist on my supervisory commit-tee who made me think about the socialimplications of genetics and technol-ogy. That has helped me as I try toexplain to the public what we’re doingin biotechnology and how to look at it ina broader environmental framework.

Most of my colleagues in biotech-nology majored in biochemistry orsome pretty technical reductionist

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biology and they have a difficult timeeven understanding why there’shostility to biotechnology. So mybackground has been helpful in thatregard. At least I see the problem somepeople have.

ER: What’s yourposition now?

SS: I’m a professor inthe Department of ForestScience at Oregon State,with appointments in theGenetics program andthe Molecular and CellBiology programs.

ER: Where do you get your funding?

SS: All over the place: USDA, Depart-ment of Energy, National ScienceFoundation, Forest Industries, andmany other smaller granting agencies.Those are the main ones. I get somegrant money from industries, aboutone-tenth of our total funding.

ER: What are you thinking about inyour own research?

SS: The core thing my lab has workedon for about ten years now is theproblem of gene flow from geneticallyengineered trees. It was known toscientists as early as the 1980s thatthere are genes that we’d like to usecommercially that we don’t wantwandering around the environmentbecause of their ecological effects, likeexotic pest resistance genes or anherbicide resistance gene. Controllinggene flow is going to be critical if someof these products that we were thinkingabout are ever to be used.

The trees I work with are cotton-woods. We grow them for their wood;we don’t need their seeds or their fruitso making a sterile tree would be aneasy way to control gene flow, and infact it might also make the trees growsomewhat faster. Our focus has been

on how to engineer that andhow to do it in a robust way.

One other thingwe’ve done in conjunctionwith that is some populationgenetics and modeling to seewhat level of sterility youneed to give you sociallyacceptable containment.There are other studies thatgo on in the lab, but that’s

our core focus.

ER: What modifications are you tryingto make to the trees?

SS: It’s the platform of a technologyupon which different variations arebuilt. One of the parts of the platformfor biotechnology is how to put genesin — do they give you healthy trees anddo the genes work in a stable way? —without worrying about what exactlythey’re doing. The guidelines of howyou design a new tree need to includeenvironmental considerations. We’retrying to make a platform in poplars forthis technology. We have been workingon the gene transfer process and testingit to make sure it’s effective, efficient,and gives you a healthy tree. Part ofthat is building in a confinement systemto make gene flow a non-issue so youcan use these things readily in theenvironment, or make gene flow anacceptable issue. As I said, it’s hard toget to absolute zero. Cottonwoods canpropagate in fact vegetatively, so sexualsterility is never going to give you 100

percent containment.

ER: Plant material has a way of gettingspread around.

SS: That’s right, and clones are outthere. People can and do steal plantsand trees. That’s one way cuttingsmove around is illegally. People cantake a branch or a branch can floatdown a stream for that matter. One ofthe issues in the social picture is ifsociety is not ready for biotech thentinkering with reducing environmentaleffects isn’t going to get you any-where.

ER: Many people think that playingwith genetics is wrong. How to yourespond to that?

SS: We have played with geneticsroutinely for hundreds of years andhave taken it for granted. The mostobvious example is dogs. We love theseincredibly domesticated mutantorganisms that look nothing like theirwolf progenitors. If you look at anydomesticated crop or animal, to variousdegrees — dogs are probably the mostextreme, but broccoli is probably notfar behind — they’re dramaticallychanged, far more so than anythingcontemplated today for commercialgenetic engineering. There’s nothing onthe biotech horizon that’s going tocreate anything as radically different asa new variety of a dog, a chihuahua orterrier or whatever your dog of choiceis.

Genetic tinkering should be familiarto us. We can make radical changes inorganisms through traditional breeding,in fact we do it every day. Breeding is abig part of several important industries.

Volume Ten Number NineSeptember 2003

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We need to be honest about this. Welove genetic manipulation when itcomes to some of these animals that wehave on farms and in our homes. Wedon’t know exactly what the mecha-nisms of genetic changes are in thesebreeding experiments, but we knowthat they are profound. So there’s aprecedent for genetic modification. It’snot new; it’s a question of how you doit.

ER: But biotech is artificial: cutting andpasting pieces of DNA instead of theold-fashioned way.

SS: The old fashioned way alsoinvolves cutting and pasting anddeleting and inserting DNA, it’s justthat we have no say in the matter. Themutants that we select for in traditionalbreeding are not warm and fuzzy whenyou look at what they actually are.Mutations are broken genes and theybreak in strange, random ways.

ER: Darwin understood that mostchanges in an organism would not bebeneficial. This was before geneticswas understood.

SS: That’s right, they’re not. Everynow and then something happens intraditional breeding that’s consideredbeneficial and is selected for furtherpropagation, it’s just that now weknow better what we’re doing. I thinkethically however, when you knowwhat you’re doing it does tend to giveyou more responsibility as well as morechoice. We’ve gotten to a point wherewe can say, Oh, you mean that’s whatinbreeding does? We’re fixing anotherwise deleterious mutant to get thisdwarf dog? What if we did that our-selves with genetic engineering meth-ods? Would that be acceptable? Wedon’t know. The ethical frameworktends to be different when we have so

much more knowledge about theprocess.

Another important thing thatwe need to talk about is that peopleassume genetic engineering is movinggenes betweenorganisms, andthat’s not whatgeneticengineering is.It’s a methodwhereby youcan changegenes withinan organism.It’s possiblesociety mightdecide thereare familiarkinds ofgeneticengineeringand there areunfamiliarkinds thatshould be dealtwith differ-ently.

I hadan essay inSciencemagazine acouple monthsago, and that’s all I was saying: Maybewe can segregate the kinds of geneticengineering that look like domesticationas we’ve known it, using genes that arehomologous, native in function, buttweaking their expression to producedesired traits. That’s different thanmoving a BT gene from a bacteriuminto a plant where there’s no homologand it’s a totally unique gene function.[BT is the bacterial toxin that is used tokill caterpillars. Ed.]

ER: Tweaking the expression of anative gene would be more like conven-tional plant breeding wouldn’t it?

SS: It’s not exactly the same, but it’smuch more similar and in fact maybesafer because we’re putting muchmore intentional design into it. We canbuild in safeguards that we haven’t

been able tobefore, such asgene flowsafeguards in thecase of mytrees.

Wemight considerthese differentways of ad-dressing geneticengineering thatare scientificallymore enlight-ened, whereasnow the contro-versy out thereis more social.It’s beendictated bygroups likeGreenpeace thathave a funda-mental ethicalobjection toplaying withnature. They’lladmit to that.

Once they decide that they’re againstthis, then they employ all the tactics ofpublic relations to scare the hell out ofyou. They’ll admit that too.

ER: How do you respond to that?

SS: That’s difficult. Back when Istarted in this business we knew wehad a challenge to educate the publicabout genetic engineering and what isresponsible use of genetic engineering.That’s a complicated thing to lay outfor scientists to agree on; then tocommunicate that to the public is achallenging task.

Now it’s much more challenging,


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There's nothing on the biotech horizon that's going tocreate anything as radically different as a new variety ofdog...

an order of magnitude more at least,because now we have to do it amidstthis din of gross distortions of scientificinformation and outright fear monger-ing. We know from psychologicalstudies that fear, particularly when itcomes to things like food, can get intoyou. It takes five or ten positivemessages to counterbalance onenegative or scary message, particularlywhen it comes to your health orlivelihood or the quality of your food.

Now we have this incrediblechallenge. We’re on the defensivebecause people look at it and say, Whatare you doing to our food? Of course,there’s also the association withcorporate control and patents thatmodern biotechnology brings you apartfrom the science. One of the distortionsyou see is that biotechis all a corporate plotfor profit. It is true thatcorporations do try tomake profits, but todestroy the wholescience and technol-ogy because of it is tome ethically repugnant and irrespon-sible. But that’s what’s happened andnow we have this incredible challengein communicating to the public that’sbeen scared to death.

In Europe in particular they arefrantic. If you had a discussion withsomeone in Europe in the late 1990s,2000, about genetic engineering, theyhad been convinced it was Hitler allover again. That’s how bad it is overthere. That hasn’t happened in theUnited States, except there is a segmentof the public that does feel that way.

ER: Montesano is probably it’s ownworst enemy. People hear aboutterminator technology and it confirmstheir fears about corporate control.Would it be possible to liberate thetechnology?

SS: I think that’s quite possible. Ipersonally like terminator technology. Ithink it’s good for the environment, Ithink it’s good for business, and I thinkit’s good for consumers. I think themore ability companies have to getrewards for their product, the moretechnology gets developed and themore consumers have choices.

I think the whole argument hasbeen turned on its head due to grossdistortions, but I realize other scientistshave different views. I think it isimportant to get some of the basictechnology out of the control ofcorporations. They’re doing thatslowly. They’re making technologyavailable for the Vitamin A rice, forexample.

ER: Who did that?

SS: Ingo Potrykos from Switzerlandwas the principal investigator, withfunding from Rockefeller Foundation.This was no attempt to do publicrelations for industry and biotech assome people claim; rather it is an honestattempt to reduce blindness andassociated diseases due to Vitamin Adeficiencies in the developing world. Heengineered a pathway using genes frompetunia and bacteria to make theprecursor to Vitamin A in rice grains. Ithad never been there before. The idea isthat even small amounts of this in ricecould reduce blindness in children to aquite large degree. It’s a humanitarianproject and it involves all these genetransfer technologies and pieces ofgenes that had various pathwaysassociated with them.

The intellectual propertylawyers at what used to be Zenecahelped him. They said here are thepieces you need, let’s work out a waythat we can get free access to this forsubsistence farmers. They did it andnow the Vitamin A genes are in thehands of breeders in Asia who aretrying to move those genes into eliterice lines that people will grow. We’llknow in a few years if the technology iseffective and if people accept it, andthey probably will if it has the benefitswe think it does.I think those kinds ofthings need to happen more broadly.Several universities recently gottogether and said that all their intellec-tual property is going to be freelyprovided for applications in the devel-oping world. People are working hard

to try to untie thetechnology from bigcorporations.

I have talkedto patent judges aboutthis and a lot of keypatents in biotechnol-ogy are running out,

particularly with trees. By the time a lotof this would come forward commer-cially, the key patents will have lapsed.That whole issue of corporate controlis going away. Having said that, thingslike terminator, things like genetic userestriction technologies, they have a lotof benefits as well.

ER: What is terminator technology?

SS: Terminator technology is likehaving a book you can’t copy. It’s aplant where the seed doesn’t germinateor it produces a plant that a farmerwouldn’t want to save the seed from it.If they want that plant again, they’dneed to go back and buy the seed again.It’s not forcing a farmer to buy seed,but if the seed has some characteristicsthe farmer wants then he has thechoice, if it’s priced reasonably, to buy


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The Environmental Review Website is now located at www.environmentalreview.orgIn the coming months it will contain a complete archive of all back issues

dating back to 1994. The archive is searchable and available free to the public.

If you need evidence that biotech can be useful,farmers have adopted it at an incredible rate.

the seed from this company. That’show hybrid corn works. Hybrid corn iseffectively terminator corn.

ER: But it was achieved throughconventional breeding.

SS: Right. In its heyday hybrids were awild, radical technology and manypeople were against them. A key reasonit’s developed and the hybrids are soproductive these days is becausecompanies had an incentive to producethe top genetic material because theycould sell the seed. It’s the sameprinciple.

Peopleacknowledgeprotection ofintellectual prop-erty for CDs andfor books; andalmost everylandscape plant you buy these days isalso patented. One thing you see interms of these gross distortions by thegroups that are against biotech is thatpatenting life is immoral and weshouldn’t do it. Society had thosediscussions. It’s moved beyond that.We don’t need to discuss every littlething again. We want to rewardinnovators and give them some protec-tion for their intellectual property.

There are many issues aboutgetting the system right so it doesn’thurt people, and so that it’s equitable.What you see out there is this wholenotion that patents are destroying theheritage of life on Earth and the wholesystem is corrupt. It’s nonsense, butthat’s what you see out there. And

many people don’t know any better.Hardly anyone knows that all theirgarden plants are patented. They’re allcloned by the way as well, and no oneseems to know that either. The educa-tional challenge is huge.

ER: Public education is a big part of auniversity's mission.

SS: There’s a program at Oregon Statefor analysis of biology issues — I’venow inherited the directorship for thisprogram — it’s intended to try toprovide sound science to the publicabout crop biotechnology issues. I was

looking at some funding opportunitiesat the National Science Foundationabout education and creating newtechnologies, new materials forteachers, for PBS, and there are allkinds of options that they would fund.The question is how you go about this.

One of the things that’s vexing tome is I’m not sure you can go aboutthis without first discrediting some ofthe fear mongers out there. How doyou do it without first of all calling aspade a spade and then moving on totalk about the scientific complexities?

ER: Have there been debates?

SS: There have been lots of debates.Biotech opponents come to various

public meetings and they’re on scien-tific panels sometimes. One of the keyissues is that scientists assume that ifthey understand how something works— figuring out a pathway, figuring outa production limitation, solving aproblem — the system will then find away to incorporate it. This is more of abottom-up approach: you work withthe science and then the system willincorporate it as it’s appropriate.

But a lot of the anti biotechnologyagenda is top down: it says agricultureshould look a certain way, it’s got to beno GMOs, or no chemicals, or what-ever. The philosophical approach is

radically different, andthey’re going in differentdirections.

If you establish broad,vague criteria at the top,where does a gene fit intothat? If you set up these

ethical criteria that are quite broad — ithas to promote soil conservation forinstance — how do you measure thatdown at the level of the plow and theherbicide and the crop? There is adifferent paradigm in how you ap-proach biotech.

Europe is much more comfortablewith what you might call for lack of abetter word, a more socialistic view.That is, society will dictate how itought to be, and then the economy willbe that way. The United States is morea market of ideas, a market of technol-ogy and innovation. We try to promoteindividual freedom, technologies,entrepreneurs, and scientists, thensociety will let the market decide,assuming they pass some test of basic


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safety. It’s a different philosophy. Butall the details about genetics don’tmatter and all this knowledge that wehave about genes is irrelevant if youstart off thinking it’s all wrong.

ER: What do youthink will be theresult of Europetaking itself out ofthe GMO market-place?

SS: Europe is on thewrong track as faras I’m concerned.They have traceabil-ity rules and regula-tions of GMOs thathave no scientificcredibility. To themevery geneticallymodified organism isdangerous andhorrible and theyshould treat it likenuclear waste. It’s asocial criterion thathas little to do with biology or evencommon sense. I don’t know if it willtake a generation, a decade, or twogenerations, but over time as thescience advances, products will appearthat have obvious benefits. WhateverEurope does and the penalties itimposes will delay things, but theycannot possibly stop it because theneed is too great. Over time, they’regoing to get marginalized. The EU is ahuge trading block with huge culturalinfluence and they have lots of peoplewho are dead set against any of thistechnology, so the inertia is going to beenormous. It is already enormous.

ER: What are some of the projectedbenefits? You were talking about foodsecurity in the Third World.

SS: Farming is local. It depends onproblems farmers have in certain areas,with certain soils, with certain pests,with certain markets. There’s nomiracle of biotechnology. It’s answersto particular problems. In some areas

farmers needvitamin-enhancedcrops, like poorpeople in develop-ing countries whomainly eat rice. Inother places thatwould be ridicu-lous because youhave vegetablesthat give you yourvitamins.

In someplaces you canhave virusproblems that aredevastating yourcrops. If youhave a biotechsolution that’swonderful, butother places

won’t need it because there’s no virusor there are resistant varieties of thecrop. Farming is local and you can’tunderstand why you’d want somethinguntil you know the details of whatfarmers face.

People in the developed worldwill spend a lot of money on food andthey tend to use price as an importantguide, but if people are scared, thenprice doesn’t matter at all. If youscared them that biotech foods areinherently dangerous, which is non-sense, and then they will make choices.They’ll ask for labeling, for example,because they’re concerned about whohas messed with their food.

It’s hard to sit back and makegrandiose statements about howbiotech is going to change the world. In

aggregate, when you look at thesedifferent products, when you look atvirus-resistance technology, which isnow in the field in papaya and cassava,there are a variety of crops withproblems where genetic engineeringprovides a powerful solution.

ER: Like adding drought resistance orsalt tolerance to a crop.

SS: I’m a little bit more skeptical aboutwhether we’re going to make quantumleaps for traits like drought resistance.Maybe, but drought resistance is acomplex trait. Maybe salt tolerance, butthe way a lot of these genetic changeswork is they’ll expand the range of theplant a little bit or allow you to get aharvestable crop from a soil that beforeyou wouldn’t get anything. It may noteven be a radical change. It may be thatnow you have a variety that gets overthe economic threshold in terms ofproducing enough fruit, whereasbefore it didn’t. I think some things youmentioned will happen, but it’s going totake some time and a lot of field trials.

One of the points I made in myScience essay is that if you can only doa field trial after you’ve done ten yearsof regulatory studies and ecologicalassessments, as is the case in Europe,you’ll never get there with those traits.It requires a more flexible, permissiveregulatory system.

A lot of good things are going tohappen in nutrition, improvements inprotein composition and oil quality forinstance. Pest resistance is big in manyparts of the world already, and there arecertainly many other proteins apartfrom BT that could be used to improvepest resistance. The key question ishow high the regulatory barrier isbefore they are permitted.

ER: I think scientists can be a littlesmug. They just assume peopleapprove of what they're doing.


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SS: Agriculturalists tend to assume thepublic supports what they do becausethey have done so much good: theGreen Revolution, longer life expect-ancy and so on. There have also beenenvironmental negatives with the GreenRevolution, no question about it, butagriculturists assume that the picturehas been so dramatically positive andthat the Green Revolution has beensuch an overall success that the worldought to all love them. Maybe they needto go back to square one and sellthemselves to the public. In terms ofthe public education part of this, maybethat’s the critical thing to do. Some ofthese things like pharmaceutical cropshave huge potentials, and the issue iswhether they’re going to be closeddown by the food industry or byFriends of the Earth, because there willbe some cases of leakage into the foodsupply.

One other difficult thing aboutbiotech is that the regulations we haveare always lagging behind by years.I’ve been amazed seeing this. Youwould think that a smart regulatorysystem would be something that youput in place right away to make sure thetechnology develops appropriately, butthere are so many political forcesimpinging on it, it doesn’t change untilthere’s a crisis.

We also have a smart law in thiscountry that says that food labels can’tbe misleading. You can’t put oninformation that gives people undueconcern about their food or undue easeabout their food. You can’t say thingsare going to extend your life span whenthey won’t, and you can’t say that theyare hazardous when they’re not. I feelthe public does not understand that weactually have a damn good regulatorysystem. But the science has gotten sofar ahead of the ability of the govern-ment to deal with it that certain scienceand technologies that are going no-

where. I came back from this treebiotech meeting. I’ve been in touchwith regulators for years; a BT tree isgoing nowhere.

ER: What do you mean?

SS: The waythings are todaythe things theywant to knowabout it are sostringent thatuntil somebodyhas a watertightgene containmentsystem (and wemay never haveone tight enough)it’s goingnowhere, theeconomicbenefits for thegrowers notwith-standing, untilthere’s someexotic pest wherethis is going tosolve a problem and it’s an overwhelm-ing mandate to do it.

The regulatory system now, whilescientifically imperfect, is rigorous inthe United States. The BT poplar is notgoing to go forward even though weknow it works. My sense of it is thatthe real risk is that the insects are goingto overcome it so quickly you’re notgoing to get many economic benefits.

ER: Is there a problem in poplar withinsect damage?

SS: No question about it. Poplarswould probably be grown much morewidely commercially if when you grewthem you had a fair confidence they’dsurvive and grow well, but they havesome serious insect pests, which areexpensive to treat commercially. The

growers would love to see insect-resistant poplars.

If we ever got around to growingbioenergy crops or product crops withplastic precursors or enzymes in them,then that insect resistance becomes a

bread and butterissue but I don’t seethe EPA approving itunless our gene flowtechnology iseffective and we candemonstrate it prettyquickly.

ER: How does theprecautionaryprinciple apply tobiotech?

SS: Unfortunately totoo many people theprecautionaryprinciple is a way tosay I don’t want thistechnology. Theprecautionaryprinciple could be

taken to mean don’t do anything thefirst time. If you have the philosophythat biotech doesn’t fit your view ofwhat agriculture and sustainabilityshould be, then the precautionaryprinciple is your argument why youcan’t do it. Even doctors use anesthet-ics and drugs and surgical proceduresthat all have real risks attached to thembecause the benefits, in society’sjudgment, outweigh the risks.

Having said that, I think there areplaces where we want to be morecareful with biotech. We shouldn’tmake the mistakes with GMOs wemade with pesticides. DDT wasregistered and used under a totallydifferent regulatory regime and itcaused serious environmental damage,but it also saved millions of peoples’lives, and continues to do so. Theseissues are not black and white.


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The regulations have not kept upwith the science. Companies are scaredto death about these regulations andthey’re stringent enough that there’s aserious question in the United Statesabout whether they’re killing thetechnology. If you use biotech theregulations are going to demandincredible details about all the direct andindirect ecological effects. But if youdid the same thing through traditionalbreeding, they wouldn’t ask you aboutthat at all. It’s stringent but it’s notsmart.

ER: It seems like the regulations aremore concerned with the processrather than the result.

SS: They say they’re not, but that’swhere it’s evolved to be, mainlybecause they respond to public contro-versy, they respond to what politicianshear from their constituents. It’s not assimple as all GMOs are bad, or allGMOs are good. We have a regulatorysystem and a social deliberationprocess for helping us decide what wewant to use and we’re going to learn bydoing.

ER: What is the safety record forbiotech so far?

SS: What’s the record from the cropsthat have been deregulated so far?There have been vast reductions inpesticide use and large increases in soilconservation. So far the record isimpressive and an honest evaluation ofbiotech has to take that into consider-ation.

ER: Is that because of no till agricul-ture?

SS: No till, and in the case of Roundup-ready soybeans and in the case of BTcrops, the reductions in pesticide

applications have been dramatic. That’snot to say that every agriculturalpractice doesn’t have some externali-ties, but so far it seems to me that thepositives swamp the negatives. If youneed evidence that biotech can beuseful, farmers have adopted it at anincredible rate. Biotech is delivering realbenefits to them because it makesfarming more reliable, more precise; ittakes less energy, less plowing, lesschemical use.

So far the regulatory system isworking well, I think. We’re trying toimprove it. I know the regulators, forexample, are thinking this Roundup-ready soybean is great, but maybe weshould be a little more demanding inmaking sure farmers rotate differentweed control practices so Roundupresistant weeds don’t evolve any morerapidly than necessary. Resistant pestsare going to evolve, they already have.But they would evolve even if youdidn’t have Roundup-ready crops. Allthe cases we know of did not evolvebecause of Roundup-ready crops at allbut because of Roundup use.

If we make the system better byputting in good management practicesin conjunction with biotech crops, allthe better. That’s what’s happenedwith BT crops, the first pesticidal traitin history where the EPA has said,We’re not going to let you use itoutright but subject to conditions: youmust have intensive stewardship; youmust have refugia; you must test forresistant insects; and if you don’t do allthis we’re going to withdraw theregistration. So biotech has heralded inan era of more precise, more scientifi-cally based farming, which is good.

ER: From that perspective we are inthe middle of a long, drawn-out politicalprocess and scientific process.

SS: That brings us back to where westarted: top-down versus bottom-up.Biotech, by focusing on genes, lets yoube more precise, make more differenti-ated products, do more differentiatedmanagement because you have morefine control of the biological system.

That’s what society should bedoing; that is, getting more sophisti-cated and choosing which parts ofbiotech it likes and doesn’t like and thenhow exactly to use it. Big social-political forces are saying they don’twant that whole broad domain ofapplied science because it doesn’t suittheir view of how agriculture ought tobe. It’s a push of science to diversify,to get more sophisticated, versus thissocial push to be more naturalistic,organic, and don’t do so much of thistechnology that’s not natural, whateverthat means.

I think it comes down to this: it’speople who believe that technology ingeneral leads us to a better place (we’retrading up; there’s trade-offs, but wetrade up with each step) versus thosewho think that the negatives of technol-ogy outweigh the positives so theywant to move away from it, or theywant to be so discriminatory that theyonly use technologies that have beenproven for 50 or 100 years, or theyhave a paradigm which is overlysimplistic. Those two worldviews aregoing head-on and you’ve got to decidewhich one you believe.

Literature Cited:

1) Genomics, Genetic Engineering, andDomestication of Crops. S.H. Strauss2003 Science 300:61-62

2) The Case for Genetic Engineering ofNative and Landscape Trees AgainstIntroduced Pests and Diseases. J.M.Adams et al. 2002 ConservationBiology 16: 874-879


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Protecting the LastPopulations of GreatApes In Africa

Introduction:Gorilla and chimpanzee populations

have been eliminated from most of Eastand West Africa and the relatively intactforests of western equatorial Africa areconsidered the last stronghold forAfrican apes. Gabon and the Republicof Congo retain much of their nativeforests, and they account for 80percent of the world's remaining wildgorillas and most of the remaining wildchimpanzees.

In a recent letter to Nature, Walshet. al. reported that ape populations inGabon declined by more than halfbetween 1983 and 20001. The maincause of this decline was commercialhunting for the bush meat trade, whichhas been facilitated by rapidly expandedlogging operations. Furthermore anepidemic of Ebola haemorrhagic feveris spreading through these isolated apepopulations and may well rival huntingas a threat to their survival. The authorscall for these apes to be elevated tocritically endangered status to helpprevent their extinction.

We spoke with John Oates abouthis work on the ecology and on theconservation of monkeys and apes inAfrica, and his thoughts on the bestway to protect them.

ER: Professor Oates, what is yourtraining?

JO: I was trained as a zoologist atUniversity College, London. That’swhere I did my undergraduate work

and was then registered for a Ph.D. Ibegan doctoral research studies in WestAfrica in Nigeria on small mammals,including some of the smaller nocturnalprimates. That project was brought toan end by the outbreak of the Nigeriancivil war, the Biafran war, and eventu-ally I ended up working in Uganda andstudying the ecology of colobusmonkeys to finish up my doctoralwork.

That led to postdoctoral studies onsome related forest monkeys, langurs,in India. Inthat work Iwas attachedtoRockefellerUniversity inNew York.In both ofthese studiesin Ugandaand India Ifound myselfdealing withpeople inwhat wasthen the NewYorkZoologicalSociety andis now theWildlifeConservationSociety.

After thepostdoctoral work I got a teachingposition here at Hunter College at CityUniversity of New York and developeda program of primate field studies inSierra Leone in West Africa at a sitecalled Tiwai Island looking at basicecology of a community of rainforestmonkeys and one ape, the chimpanzee.I got heavily involved in conservationissues there. We worked with localpeople and the government to set up awildlife sanctuary.

Along the way I was made amember of IUCN [IUCN is the WorldConservation Union. Ed.] SpeciesSurvival Commission’s PrimateSpecialist Group and by the eightieswas working with them to draw up aconservation action plan for all ofAfrica’s primates. I compiled this withmuch input from other members of thegroup with knowledge of Africanprimates. This action plan was pub-lished in 1986, and a revised editionwas published in 1996.

The field Ihave beenprofession-ally mostinvolved inhas beenstudies of theecology ofrainforestprimates, notespecially thegreat apes. Inrecent yearssome of mystudents havebegun studiesof great apesin WestAfrica, butmy owndirectfieldwork inthe past wason other

kinds of primates such as colobusmonkeys and guenon monkeys, lookingat basic ecology.

I think almost any ecologiststudying any larger mammal in thetropics these days almost inevitablygets drawn into conservation issuesbecause almost all these animals are tosome extent threatened.


10


ER: Civil war adds a layer of difficultyto doing this kind of work.

JO: Sierra Leone, like Nigeria before it,then had its own problems of civilwarfare with a rebel insurgencysponsored from Liberia. The Tiwaiprogram could not continue; theresearch site became part of a warzone. I started to refocus on someprimate ecology and conservationquestions in Nigeria, a place I had keptin touch with since my early doctoralresearch days.

ER: Has Nigeria calmed down enoughto go back to work?

JO: The original problems that led tome having to leave Nigeriawere back in the sixtiesduring the civil war. Thatconflict came to a close in1970. Nigeria has had itsown problems since then,but no outright civil war.

ER: Not enough to stop you fromworking there?

JO: No. At least since 1990 I haveconcentrated my work in the part ofNigeria closest to Cameroon, wherethere is the most westerly population ofgorillas in Africa. One of my graduatestudents, Kelley McFarland, embarkedon an ecological study of one of thesehighly endangered populations.

Another student has looked at thegenetics of chimpanzees in Nigeria,trying to figure out their evolutionaryrelationships. It turns out that they aremore closely related to chimpanzeesfarther west in West Africa than hadbeen expected.

In the last three years my fieldworkhas swung much more fully towardsconservation and away from basic

ecological research on primates. I’vebeen undertaking surveys in the generalNigeria-Cameroon border area, whichis a region with many unique endemicspecies and subspecies, high speciesrichness, and many threats to itsecological systems.

I’ve conducted surveys in Nigeriaand Cameroon and, with support fromConservation International and theWildlife Conservation Society, helpeddevelop a biodiversity research andconservation program in Nigeria incollaboration with the Nigerian Conser-vation Foundation. That is ongoing.Meanwhile, I’m still employed on thefaculty at Hunter College, where I’m aProfessor of Anthropology.

ER: Why have you moved more intoconservation issues?

JO: Conservation has always been ofinterest to me personally. From theearly days when I was doing fieldworkI saw threats to wild animal populationsand their environments which con-cerned me. I found myself workingwith mentors who had a very stronginterest in conservation. As my workhas continued, the animals that I workwith and their environments have comeunder more and more pressure, sogiven that I had a natural early interestand this was nurtured by variousmentors it was almost inevitable that Iwould pay more and more attention inmy research to conservation issues asopposed to pure academic biology.

In my case I think conservationwas always a part of my career, so it’sjust become stronger. I wasn’t a purescientist studying monkey feedingbehavior. I and the people I workedwith, from a very early point back inthe 1960s when I started this, wereinterested and concerned with conser-vation issues.

The parts of the world I’ve workedin are ones with particularly high levelsof threat to their wildlife and its envi-ronments. In Nigeria we are talkingabout a country with 130 millionpeople, so it’s hard to avoid theseissues. In such an environment yourstudy populations are often hovering onthe brink of extinction, and practicallyand ethically you can’t avoid conserva-

tion concerns.A good example is the

study of one of these endan-gered gorilla populations inNigeria where my graduatestudent, Kelley McFarland,worked for her doctoral

dissertation. This is a site called AfiMountain in Nigeria in Cross RiverState. It’s the most westerly gorillapopulation in Africa, now isolated on asmall mountain range, a mountain withits surrounding forest covering about100 square kilometers.

Kelley did a study spanning at leasttwo years of the ecology of theseanimals by tracking their nest sites,which allowed her to figure out howmany gorillas were in a group. Fromcollecting dung samples deposited bynight nests, she was able to study diets,and by looking at separation of nestsites, to study ranging patterns and soon.

This area is under such pressurefrom habitat disturbance and huntingthat from the beginning of our researchwe were working with other groupslooking at ways to give it better protec-tion. These other groups included non-

Gorillas throughout their range in westernAfrica are hunted for their meat as part ofthe bush meat trade...


11


governmental organizations, and thelocal forestry department, now calledForestry Commission. Workingtogether we managed to get the areadeclared a wildlife sanctuary, and weare now working together to establishmore effective management of AfiMountain. This effort includes recruit-ing a ranger force, equipping them,building ranger stations, and workingwith local communities to try and getthem on board andunderstanding therationale for the sanctu-ary. Although this areahad long been a so-calledforest reserve, localpeople had been huntingand farming in thereserve for a long time.

ER: Hunting gorillas aswell?

JO: Gorillas have beenhunted in small numbers,and one of Kelley’s studygroup was killed duringthe course of her study.Gorillas there andthroughout their range inwestern Africa arehunted for their meat aspart of the bush meat trade, which ispart of what Peter Walsh and othershave been talking about.

So Afi is one particular site wherewe got involved to learn more about thebasic ecology of the animals, but fromthe beginning were concerned alsoabout trying to protect the animals inthe long term. The Afi gorillas belong toa subspecies called the Cross Rivergorilla, which we estimate has onlysome 250-300 individuals remaining inthe Nigeria-Cameroon border region.They’re fragmented into about tensubpopulations which are only tenu-

ously in contact with each other, andthey are being hunted, so their survivalprospects are very bleak. We are tryingto learn more about them to assess howviable the whole population is, as wellas particular subpopulations, and toassess what the most effective long-term conservation strategies might be.

ER: Of these 250 individuals, certainlythey’re not all in this 100-square

kilometer reserve.

JO: No.

ER: How many are you trying tosupport in what is basically six miles ona side?

JO: Something of that order. It’sactually a more rectangular area. Itwould be more like eight by four or so.It’s a tiny area.

ER: How many animals are in there?

JO: We estimate there may be on the

order of twenty-five individuals leftthere. This is why this gorilla is in suchtrouble. There are, as I say, about tensurviving subpopulations, each ofwhich have somewhere betweenfifteen and thirty individuals. They areall separated from each other but mosthave some lowland forest or lowlandforest and farmland still connectingthem. One of the things some of mycolleagues have been trying to figure

out is to what extentindividual animals may stilloccasionally migratebetween these populationsand therefore maintainsome gene flow.

The remaining CrossRiver gorilla habitats arealmost all hill areas and thelowlands have most of thepeople. Inevitably humanpopulation growth anddevelopment are occurring,so between the Afi popula-tion and the nearest gorillapopulation there’s a roadwhich is about to beimproved by the federalgovernment of Nigeria,making it even less likelythat individuals can movefrom one site to another.

ER: They’re rather secretive aren’tthey?

JO: Yes. And they’re intelligent; that isprobably one reason why they’vepersisted as long as they have. Thisspecific case then does come back tothe generalities that Peter Walsh andothers have been talking about. Thesegorillas have been rare for a very longtime. The gorillas in Nigeria onlybecame known to people outside thatpart of Nigeria in the 1930s. From thebeginning the foreign naturalists andother foresters who went into the area

Kelley McFarland did her doctoral work studyingthe Cross River gorillas in Nigeria.


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expressed concern that these animalswere headed for extinction, but they’restill there. These are long-lived animals,and they are clever and they aresometimes rather more adaptable thanwe perhaps give them credit for.

If gorillas in such perilous circum-stances can hold on for decades(although I have to agree that the CrossRiver gorilla subspecies itself iscritically endangered, and if we donothing they seem to be on an inevitablepath to extinction), the fact that they’vepersisted so long in these circum-stances makes me think that gorillasand chimpanzees as a whole in Africaare not all going to be gone within a fewyears, as some people suggest. Chim-panzees are much more widespreadthan gorillas both geographically and interms of habitat range.

This comes to my main bone ofcontention with the Walsh et al. paper:the suggestion that we should reclas-sify all the African great apes ascritically endangered, a particular IUCNcategory which really does suggestthey are in imminent danger of goingextinct. I don’t think that’s the case,and I fear that by perhaps exaggeratingthe threats to various animals we mayas conservationists lose credibilitybecause people will say, You’re tellingus every year that everything is about togo down the tubes,and here they are allstill in front of us.Should we take youseriously?

One can hardlysay that any rainforestorganisms around the planet, especiallylarge ones, are completely safe fromthe threat of extinction. But what arethe most seriously endangered species?What are the most dire circumstanceswe should pay attention to? Probablythe status of chimpanzees right across

Africa in my view is not one of those. Ifyou consider chimpanzee conservationin the perspective of primate conserva-tion generally, there are other kinds ofprimate that get less attention that are inmore trouble, especially various kindsof colobus monkeys, which is wherewe come back to another of myparticular interests. Some of us havebeen very concerned about certainforms of red colobus monkeys, whichare going extinct in front of our eyes.

One can understand why peopleare concerned about great apes: theyare our closest relatives, we have manybehavioral features in common, and soon; they’re emotive in that they arouseour emotions because of our similaritiesto them, and so it’s easy to give thempress coverage which attracts atten-tion. But as scientists we have tocontinually guard against saying thingsfor more subjective than objectivereasons.

ER: Getting back to the plight of redcolobus...

JO: With colleagues ThomasStruhsaker, George Whitesides andScott McGraw I was involved insurveys a few years back in Ghana andIvory Coast of rare forest primates,especially three monkeys unique to that

area, a red colobus monkey, amangabey, and a local form of a Dianamonkey called the Roloway monkey.After a great deal of searching in bothcountries with various teams of peoplewe could find no direct evidence for thesurvival of the red colobus monkey, the

so-called Miss Waldron’s red colobus.We eventually published a paper in

the journal Conservation Biologysaying that in our view Miss Waldron’scolobus was probably extinct, and if afew individuals or a small numbersurvived their populations wereprobably not viable3. Since then, in onearea on the border of Ivory Coast andGhana, one tail and one skin have beenfound recently, apparently killed by

hunters. So Certainly a fewanimals did persist untilvery recently, but still noneof us, or our associates, orteams sent out by Conser-vation International havemanaged to see one ofthese monkeys alive. I

think we would still support our originalconclusion that they are probablyextinct, or if some survive they may notbe viable any longer.

That report did receive quite a bitof attention at the time, but since thenthe attention has subsided and not

The Cross River gorilla, a distinct sub species, hasonly 250 to 300 individuals remaining in the Nigeria-Camaroon border area... their survival prospects arevery bleak.


13


much more has been done. There areother red colobus monkey populationsin Africa that are probably getting closeto the edge, but a red colobus monkeydoesn’t attract as much popularconcern — perhaps understandably —as a chimpanzee or gorilla.

ER: What is the main reason for theirdecline?

JO: Again, it’shunting almostentirely for the bushmeat trade, huntingnot for subsistencebut as part of acommercial trade inmeat. Colobusmonkeys seem to beparticularly sensitiveto this hunting,especially redcolobus. They are inmany places quiterestricted in theirrange. They seem tobe habitat specialists.They live high in theforest canopy. Theyare rather clumsymovers, they havebright colors, theymake a lot of noise,so they’re rathereasy to hunt. Some people would saythey also seem to be a little dim-witted.

ER: Top predators are frequently notafraid of things that they need to beafraid of.

JO: These are leaf eaters, but chimpan-zees actually are one of the mainpredators of the red colobus in IvoryCoast and in Kibale Forest in Uganda.One of the factors possibly threateningred colobus monkeys is therefore

chimpanzee predation. They particu-larly like eating these especially threat-ened monkeys.

ER: What was your concern with theWalsh et al paper?

JO: Walsh et al were arguing that allgorillas and chimpanzees in Africashould be regarded as critically endan-

gered. That caught my attentionbecause I have been involved in the pastin helping the IUCN and SpeciesSurvival Commission come up withthreat ratings of African primates. Myconcern was that these authors wereextrapolating too far from a compre-hensive but still limited data set. Thatwas my concern.

I’m certainly concerned about thesurvival of African forest primates,including apes, and I would not at alldisagree that we should be concernedabout the status of many wild chimpan-

zee and gorilla populations. I was a littleconcerned about some of the method-ology in the Walsh et al. paper, but theywere working in an area that I have notworked in and were using modelingtechniques that I am not familiar with.But until I have had a chance to study alot more carefully more of the details ofthat paper I am a little reluctant to giveextensive comments about method-

ological issues. Myparticular concern wasmore the extrapolationfrom one study inGabon, one that had tomake a good number ofassumptions to reachits conclusions aboutlocal ape populations,to a statement thatchimpanzees shouldnow be reclassified as acritically endangeredspecies across Africa.

ER: Why do you thinkthey conflated the twospecies?

JO: They conflated thechimps and gorillas inthe Gabon study, as Iunderstand it, becauseof the difficulty ofreliably distinguishing

chimpanzee and gorilla nests in thefield, especially during rapid censuses.To collect much of their data theyemployed what Peter Walsh refers to asa reconnaissance survey technique,which means moving relatively quicklyalong existing paths and noting whatyou see.

The original ape censuses inGabon, with which Walsh et al.compare their data, distinguish chim-panzee and gorilla nests particularlybased on height in the trees. Since thenwe have learned that this can result in a

The Cross River gorilla sub species is reduced to about300 individuals living in ten isolated patches of forest.


14


high level of misclassification. If you’redoing a rather rapid assessment andyou don’t want to make too manyerrors, I guess it’s sensible to poolthose data.

So having pooled all the nestdata they then cannot really say forsure, when they appear to find a declinein the numbers of chimps and gorillas,whether there’s been a larger decline inone species or the other. They have ageneral estimated ape decline in Gabonbased on the techniques they used, thenfrom that they extrapolate to the twoapes together across Africa.

ER: Why are theestimates so shaky?

JO: Peter Walsh’sstrength is mathemati-cal modeling and mineis not. These are verydifficult animals tostudy, and manypopulation assessmentsrely on a good deal ofestimation and extrapo-lation. There isn’t ahuge amount of pastdata, and the originalcensus data from Gabon have beenlost.

ER: Did they ground-truth to checktheir modeling data to see how well itdescribed field conditions?

JO:I’m not aware that since they didthe estimation somebody then wentback to the field to use a differenttechnique to check how robust some ofthe estimates might be. What they diddo was have a measure of ground-truthing, if you like, or calibration ofsome of the recce [recce is the termPeter and others use] sampling by usingthe traditional line-transect sampling.As I understand it they conducted line

transect censusing in certain places, sothat from a technique generally re-garded as pretty accurate they werethen able to get a calibration point forlocal recce work which they thenconducted over a much larger area inwhich they did not perform transectcensusing.

ER: I’m sure Peter has given consider-able thought to these difficulties.

JO: He has.

ER: My point in asking is that modelingis a favoritetarget ofpeople withanti-conserva-tionagendas ofvarioussorts.

JO: Likeglobalwarmingand so on.

ER: Right.And the way scientists deal with thesedifficulties is more transparent andhonest than how it’s often presented inthe media.

JO: I agree, and I’d like to emphasizethat I’m not one with an anti-conserva-tion agenda, and I’m not against doingall we can for great apes. In this case itwas really more some specific extrapo-lations from a local study that gave meconcern.

Just to criticize my own position abit here, in the interests of transpar-ency, it would be worth pointing outthat the IUCN category of criticallyendangered relies on making a number

of measurements or estimates of apopulation and its rate of decline, andthese can be related to generation times.

Because the great apes are suchlong-lived animals, if you’re talkingabout a reduction of at least 80 percentwithin the next three generations (oneof IUCN criteria for critical endanger-ment), that can be on the order of atleast sixty years for great apes.

There are many factors that couldpotentially lead to chimpanzees allacross Africa declining by 80 percent inthe next sixty years. A categorization ofcritically endangered then isn’t so hardto justify, although I think when IUCNdrew up these categorizations in thefirst place they weren’t really thinkingso much about the problems of apply-ing the categories to animals with verydifferent generation times. The sameIUCN system is applied to a nematodeworm as to a gorilla here, despite thevery different generation times in-volved. I think ordinary members of thepublic thinking about endangerment arethinking about things likely to happen inthe next few years rather than aboutwhat may happen in 60 to 100 years,where of course the whole planet maywell change vastly, with vast numbersof species presumably facing a prettygood threat of having their populationsreduced by 80 percent in the next sixtyyears.

Yet most people would probablynot be comfortable regarding all suchspecies as critically endangered. So thatgets us into a rather philosophical area.Being my own critic here, I can see thatif one does stick by the IUCN rule andincorporate generation time, then it ishard not to argue that all great apeseverywhere are likely to declinesignificantly in numbers in the next 60to 100 years, and therefore couldjustifiably be regarded by that criterionas critically endangered.

Miss Waldrons red colobushas recently gone extinct.


15


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ER: But gorillas more than chimps?

JO: I think that from what we know oftheir current distribution and numbers,gorillas would have to be regarded as inmore trouble than chimpanzees. Theyseem to be able to occupy a smallerrange of habitats. They occur in amuch smaller geographical area andtherefore, starting from today, theywould be more likely if current pres-sures continue, to go extinct in theforeseeable future than chimpanzees.

If you’re taking a period of 60 to100 years then everything is in trouble,but from what I’ve seen of the Africanapes the common chimpanzee isprobably the species that holds up bestto the pressures of habitat change anddestruction, and hunting.

Literature Cited:

1) Catastrophic Ape Decline in WesternEquatorial Africa. P.D. Walsh et al.2003 Nature 422:611-614

2) 2000. Extinction of a West Africanred colobus monkey.Ed. J.F. Oates, M.Abedi-Lartey, W.S. McGraw, T.T.

Struhsaker, G.H. Whitesides. Conser-vation Biology 14: 1526-1532

More information on the GuineanForests of West Africa can be found atwww.cepf.net/xp/cepf

The IUCN action plan for Africanprimates is online at www.redlist.org


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