The horrors of plant-animal hybridization

Xander Bennett says" "I recently stumbled across this fascinating article [by Lily Pepper] about plant-animal hybrids. It discusses a breaking down of traditional taxonomies, and the cultural fear of becoming plant-like."

Somewhere in Kansas, a crop of rice is growing whose DNA includes a couple of genes borrowed from the human genome. These genes make the rice plants produce a protein found in human breast milk. The rice is intended to be used to produce medicines for infants suffering from diorrhea and dehydration resulting from malnutrition. Rice, long a staple food for many, is being tailored to better meet the needs of the human animal in a changing world. Although humans have been modifying plant species for hundreds of years, genetic modification is a relation between human and plant that fills many people with visceral horror, particularly when the result is a hybrid of plant and animal.

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Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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minamisan

i’m about to show my woeful biological ignorance with my next words, but are corals and sea anenomes considered plants or animals?
Takuan

wee beasties o’ tha sea, wi nae backbone
ripley

Famines don’t occur because of lack of nutrients in rice, they occur because of political situations. Not just because of first world attitudes, but also local politics.

focusing on a product that someone has to be transported/given/sold to starving people misses the point, and just exacerbates the power differential between whoever is developing that product and the people who are supposed to receive it.

Who will guarantee that the producers treat the receivers fairly? (no terminator genes, no unfair contracts etc) after all they will have to recoup their investment in this product somehow.. who better to extract it from than a subject, dependent population?

nu-uh. I don’t know enough about the science to know what other dangers (biological or other) could be imported into the food supply, but the politics of this are obvious enough to make this look like a bad deal.
arkizzle

#23
“” Yea, 3 of my kids died of starvation last year, but some Americans saw a few too many scary movies about man playing god and such. So its ok, don’t bother with your plant research. I don’t want anyone to get upset. “”

It’s not a lack of food in the world that keeps 3rd world countries starving. It’s a lack of 1st world motivation.

There is far too much food made and wasted every year in the 1st world, and it isn’t just kids not finishing their dinner to blame. I’m talking about US and European “food mountains” designed to artificially boost prices.

From the TimesOnline.co.uk: “Each year [in the UK] about 700,000 tons of fresh produce is dumped, at a cost of Â£78m, to maintain high prices for farmers. ”

Government subsidies and destruction of good food (like milk, wine, fruit, veg, etc.), as part of the Common Agricultural Policy, is done to affect the artificial market price and is further credited with encouraging environmental damage and massive overproduction (and costs the EU approx 44% of its ENTIRE annual budget, about â‚¬43 billion according to wikipedia).

To say we should forego our responsibilities to nature (and ourselves) by just releasing whatever strain of possibly successful/harmful GM foods we invent, because of otherwise fixable food shortages is retarded.

This is certainly not a diatribe against GM, it’s a response to #23 – GM is incredibly useful technology, but we shouldn’t be rushing to patch up our shortcomings of today with the untested quick-fix of tomorrow.
Apashiol

I’ve never really got this problem with ‘playing god’. I came to the conclusion that there was no god because of the obvious randomness in the world. That said, I think it is a form of moral cowardice not to play god. The difference with us as a species is that we are intentional beings. We direct nature. If I get an illness I go to a doctor and ask him to play god and alter the natural courses of things by helping me overcome my illness. That doctor takes the responsibility on himself when he intervenes. On one level aren’t you being like the Jehovah’s Witness who refuses blood for superstitious reasons.
I’m sure there was the same yeuch factor the first time people allowed themselves to be inoculated with the pus from a Cowpox sore but it was worth it not to get Smallpox. Cartoons of the time showed people growing cows heads after so they obviously had the same visceral fear of human-animal hybridation.
My biggest fear in this is that we leave such decisions up to multi-national corporations whose driving factor is profit above all else.
As far as the cannibalism aspect goes, seeing that we share half our DNA with bananas does that make me a demi-cannibal when I eat one?
Tom

@25: Do IC engines hybridize with naturally occurring engines (say, muscles) and the hybrids continue to evolve in unpredictable ways?

No? Then I think you got a little more work to do.

Good job on answering an argument that no one is making, declaring victory and going home, though.
IWood

#9-
“Yes you’re right, but this thing is not natural. The human parts, organs, cells, whatever, are “injected” intentionally to the rice. It’s just……well, different, at least to me.”

It seems like you’re afraid of something about which you know very little. “Human parts, organs, cells, whatever?” “Injected?” Come on. Ignorance of the science involved is what fuels the fear-mongering “Frankenfood” movement.

You might feel better about it if you found out what’s actually involved. Or, you might feel worse. But at least you’ll have something more substantial to base your acceptance or rejection on than the equivalent of a gap-toothed, “That thar ain’t natural!”
arkizzle

#29
beat me to it :)
MrsBug

Let me ask a couple questions.

1. Will this plant come true from seed – as in, with the same genetic structure its forebearers had with the human gene – or will African farmers need to buy seed from the seed companies every year?

If it doesn’t come true from seed, aren’t we putting them in the same Catch-22 position many third-world farmers are already in, beholden to Industrial Ag because of Terminator Technology?

2. Will it grow without a huge amount of chemical inputs and special fertilizers?

I ask because I’d be curious if the human gene might switch off some of the plant’s naturally occurring defenses against predators and disease. Or would having a human gene open it up to a whole new host of disease possibilities, like (tongue in cheek) chicken pox?
Jeff

I guess the best way to go about this is to simulate the results with a computer model. We won’t be able to resist the temptations of creating new forms of life. Our desire to create “new” is part of our species core programming. I want a lawn that has a gene taken from mint, just so it will smell nice when you walk on it, and so the dog (who eats grass like a cow), will have minty fresh breath.
Gregory Bloom

Hmmm…until lately, we’ve all been perfectly content to simply roll the dice and accept random mutations as our method of coming up with useful new plants. No guarantees that a random mutation doesn’t make a previously innocuous protein into a slow poison or carcinogen.

Now that we’re able to work deterministically, at the level of the individual nuts and bolts of DNA, to incorporate tried-and-true desirable features from other species, folks are suddenly getting skittish? What’s up with that?
markpopham

Hello BoingBoing’ers! My name is Mark, I’m a co-editor at STEPS, which is an undergraduate publication at McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec! Not half an hour ago Lily and I were wrapping up a bake sale to sponsor a color cover for our last issue of the year. In any case, I don’t think Lily thought of the article as anything more than an amusing essay on the differentiations in taxonomies- certainly not as a scientific warning against biotech! Our magazine tends to the facetious- if you’re interested in further reading, please explore the site! Thanks so much for your interest!
Apashiol

@#32
Or would having a human gene open it up to a whole new host of disease possibilities, like (tongue in cheek) chicken pox?

I’d imagine that they are trying to change the amino acid profile of the protein in rice to be like that of the protein in breast milk without going so far as growing the breasts.
Slepi

Freaky….I’d feel like a cannibal to eat that kind of rice.
Lone

That slig meat will be delicious I tell you.
Art

Kind of like “Triffids” -only really tasty!
twig

genetic modification is a relation between human and plant that fills many people with visceral horror.

Buh? Not really. People would be much better if we were photosynthetic.
MarlboroTestMonkey7

Call it a gut feeling. I’ve been taught to heed it.
Trent Hawkins

To #3: We share a lot of DNA with the food we eat already, so why would you suddenly feel like a cannibal when you eat rice that has … well, a grain of human DNA in it.

I wouldn’t feel cannibalistic unless it was a significant percentage of human DNA involved, or if it’s cultured human tissue.

But I guess it would vary from person to person ; )
hellhead

@ #37 Honestly “Mark” this thread is about rice, not your magazine. We don’t need your bake sales, unless of course you’re selling genetically altered rice. Then it’s cool.

Kudos for going to school though. We need to encourage more people to do that.

Cool magazine though, wish it had more articles re: rice though.
Slepi

@Trent:
Yes you’re right, but this thing is not natural. The human parts, organs, cells, whatever, are “injected” intentionally to the rice. It’s just……well, different, at least to me. :)
Art

Good point, #8

Imagine the marketing potential if they used “Celebrity” DNA?
Landowner

They want to treat infants suffering from diorrhea and dehydration? */slams fist onto desk/* NOOOOOOOOOOO!
Apashiol

I’m with #34 GUIDODAVID on this. We have to try a variety of avenues to solve the world’s problems. It’s all well and good to say let’s change social and economic policy so the poorest in the world get a fair deal. I won’t be holding my breath for it to happen any time soon. It’s not an either/or choice. So, at the same time as we fight for social justice we have to keep looking at alternative solutions.
Sure there are potential risks with GM and we’re bound to make mistakes along the way. That’s life.
Just as some people thought scientists might blow the Earth up when they built the first particle colliders(and the same fears are being expressed over the Large Hadron Collider due to open this spring) the probability is the worst fears will be unfounded. If we let fear of the unknown paralyse us we might as well just curl up and die now.
Johan Larson

I’m OK with plant-animal hybrids, as long as no one tries to make me into a plant.
hellhead

If a plant doesn’t do what you want it to, and you can make it, do it. There are always countries in Africa to test this stuff on before we expose people to it. I don’t know what you people are so upset about, all the wrinkles have been removed before we even get to read these articles.

It’s safe, really.

Would be cool to make an Ent. Now that’s some bio-engineering I could get behind.
Brian Carnell

Yeah, it fills people with revulsion..its just wrong…like using anesthesia during childbirth, artificial insemination, and autopsies once filled people with revulsion.

It’s just not natural!
dculberson

@MarlboroTestMonkey7: My gut instinct was to not jump out of that plane at 12,000 feet. But it was a ton of fun!

Gut feelings aren’t rational: they’re just reactions. They are an important point of input. But think it through thoroughly before actually “trusting” it.
MarlboroTestMonkey7

Soylent Rice is yummy!
pfh

Let us not forget that plants are already terrifyingly weird eukaryote-prokaryote hybrids.

The great tree of life isn’t actually strictly speaking a tree…
http://www.tolweb.org/tree/
Halloween Jack

The question is, when can I buy a seed to grow the perfect girlfriend out of the Burpee catalog?
trimeta

I’m honestly impressed by the dearth of anti-biology screed in this thread. Good job, guys.

Also, while hybridization of GMO and normal crops is really shitty from a intellectual property point of view (the fact that you can grow your own crops, hybridize with your neighbor’s GMO unintentionally, and get sued for patent violations is a major problem with our patent system), I’ve yet to see any evidence that these hybrid crops are bad health-wise. I suppose there could possibly be some risks, but if the normal plant is fine, and the GMO plant is fine, why should one halfway in-between kill you? (I don’t think GMO crops often do the “gene A has nutrients but kills you, gene B keeps gene A from killing you” thing; evidence for this would invalidate my claim.)
malcolmkass

#2

News Flash, you have been eating genetically modified food for, oh, the last 30 years or so. And you comment about how things have been going swimmingly naturally, tell that to the, oh I don’t know, the Irish in the 1700s or the Ethopians of the 1980s how well natural food worked for them when they were staving to death.

Natural does not equal healthly.
Tom

I don’t know what you people are so upset about, all the wrinkles have been removed before we even get to read these articles.

Although this is a type of genetically engineered food that I can get behind, there are still legitimate concerns and risks. In this case, the benefit outweighs them.

The first concern is that genetic engineering, unlike selective breeding and ordinary hybridization, produces outcomes that could not ever be seen in nature.

Evolution by variation and selection can be viewed as an optimization problem. Each individual exists on an abstract landscape where height above sea level represents the probability of having viable offspring. Species tend to cluster around the peaks. Different peaks represent different optima.

Every one in a while there are earthquakes or landslides and a peak falls or rises, or a pass gets filled in. This changes the landscape and creates new species while wiping out old ones. But life as a whole is confined to one particular range of mountains. There is simply no way for any form of variation and selection, natural or unnatural, to access the Alps when we’re all living in the Rockies.

Genetic engineering changes all that. It has the power to transfer living things to completely different sets of optima, where evolution, being a necessary truth, will continue. While it’s nice that you feel “all the wrinkles have been removed”, it is unfortunately true that no one knows what the wrinkles are, because the evolutionary landscape we are transferring these creatures to is unmapped.

Which brings me to the second area of concern: natural hybridization is extremely common in plants, to the extent that the whole idea of a plant species has at times been challenged. So it is an absolute certainty that the genes will get loose, and no one can predict what will happen.

When this genetically engineered rice comes in contact with other varieties of rice, they will hybridize. Are you, or is anyone else, certain that the enzymes these new genes code for will not have any deleterious effect on the broader ecosystem when they start showing up in different plant species thousands of kilometres away from the original plantings?

Like I said, this kind of modest modification of plant species for great human benefit undertaken by non-commercial organisations is worth the risk. But it would be foolish to pretend that the risk is not there, and incorrect to claim that the risks entailed by genetic engineering are the same as those entailed by selective breeding and ordinary hybridization.
foobar

Smash the looms, before they take our jeorbs!
dr.psilo

“I’m a plant.”

“I thought they called your kind a fruit?”

(couldn’t resist, sorry)
GuidoDavid

I really do not like the article. It is too simplistic, full with fear mongering and its science is just not right. We are not that separated from other beings, there is horizontal gene transfer (a rare event, but it does happen) between species, it is very well documented. Besides there are relations between animals and bacteria not as shocking as the caterpillar-fungus relationship. We have more bacterial cells inside us than mammalian cells (being bacteria so tiny, there many of them in very little space).

Concerning the comment about “Soylent rice”, do insulin-dependent diabetics get shots of “soylentsulin”? Are they cannibals or just junkies of human proteins? Should they feel revolted because they need human proteins from non human sources to live?

As a citizen from an underdeveloped country I think that the problem is that it is very difficult to change the state of things concerning agricultural subsidies, tariffs and other stuff. However, given that we have the tools for growing our own food, improving our yields and adapting the crops to our particular environmental conditions, we could improve our situations, as has happened before, in Mexico with new and better maize crops and in India and Pakistan with better wheat. Population has increased a lot since the 60′s yet the world wide famines feared by many didn’t happen.

The big problem here is not just the lack of innovation from the first world, but the kind of attitude that bases policy making on shock factor, that sends the message that innovation is dangerous and science not necessary for developing and better life standards. This is dangerous for us. You in the developed world can afford to say “this is enough”, we just cannot.

I agree that both sides of the debate should be listened, so I would like to see here in Boing Boing the case of the farmers from Gujarat, who, took cotton seeds Monsanto, made hybrid crops that outperformed them and ignored bans from the government and lawsuits from Monsanto and now have much better yields than with their old seeds:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/02/08/gujarat/index.html

After all, this story has all the elements that are typical of Boing Boing: Copyfighting, DIY, funny aesthetic (look this seed bag, as they can not advertise directly that they have the BT gene, they do a great working depicting indirectly the fact that it is a hybrid (F1 in Mendelian genetics) http://www.indiatogether.org/opinions/psainath/images/2005/psa-seeds.jpg)

I really think that this is a case where people is empowered by technology and a taste of the times to come.
csbmonkey

I swear, it’s like no one even LISTENED to the warnings from the 70s: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xq0Mni2KOu0

“Not satisfied with the pace of natural selection in driving evolution, Noller wants to push things further by creating his own genetically engineered creations. Having already created some amazing specimins by mixing the DNA of plants and animals, the doctor has now set his sights higher, and want to work on modifying humans, as well.”

Donald Pleasence and Tom Baker! How can you go wrong?
mrfitz

I don’t feel horrified at all. It seems a little unreal, but that’s normal.
Landowner

Yea, 3 of my kids died of starvation last year, but some Americans saw a few too many scary movies about man playing god and such. So its ok, don’t bother with your plant research. I don’t want anyone to get upset.
jtf

I don’t feel bad about eating GMO foods in general, as long as they are kept the way they were intended. That last caveat is important, since real practice and studies suggest other things happen.

In particular, you have to remember that natural reproduction of plants still occurs with GMO foods, which means that if a farmer chooses to reuse some of his or her crop as seed, or if the crop’s product carries characteristics of its parents (i.e. corn maize), then there’s a high likelihood that some gene scrambling happened. In particular, say two farmers have neighboring plots, and one of them is using GMO corn to say, produce pharmaceuticals (Greenpeace went nuts over a place like this), and another is just trying to bring fresh crops to market. Natural hybridization of GMO and non-GMO crops has been found to occur between neighboring 1-acre fields with a near 70% rate.

Corn on drugs!
Daemon

Day of the triffids anyone?
Ian70

Ignorance of science is the biggest barrier to the progress of science. Splicing a novel gene into rice is un-natural, certainly, but so is burning fuel in an internal-combustion engine. Internal-combustion engines DO NOT EXIST IN NATURE! So, by equivalent non-scientific reasoning, auto racing goes against God.

My work here is done.
magicbean

Maybe if we cross enough plants and animals, humans will get enough plant genes to learn how to sit still and stop screwing things up, and plants will develop free will and start messing with us instead.

Can’t you just see it? Plants will start breeding us as fertilizer in diabolical and misguided hopes of dominating the planet. Torture ensues!