Good and bad manipulation

It wasn’t even a decade later that this technology began saving human life on a large scale. Until then, insulin for diabetes patients was extracted from the pancreas of cows and pigs. There were continuous problems, because one building block from the pig insulin deviates from human insulin; with cow insulin, as many as three building blocks differed. These differences led to the fact that quite a few patients – in Germany alone more than 500,000 people suffer from type-1 diabetes – could not tolerate this insulin from the slaughterhouse. However they were reliant on this, because their bodies no longer produced the hormone. Genetic engineers transferred, already in 1979, the genetic information for human insulin to bacteria and yeast, which then produced the hormone. In the year 1987, this human insulin obtained for the first time regulatory approval as a drug.

Further success stories soon followed: in 1991 the human growth hormone Somatatropin arrived on the market, with which 100,000 Germans with underproduction of this substance were able to attain normal body size. The active agent had previously been obtained from the bodies of the deceased; the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was transmitted in a few cases thereby, which destroys the brain of the affected individual. Since 1993, a blood coagulation factor that was produced through genetic modification is available for about 8,000 haemophiliacs in Germany. Human DNAse, approved since 1994, has enabled 6,000 to 8,000 children who suffer from cystic fibrosis to breathe easier. Erythropoetin is helping about 60,000 patients with kidney failure – the list of substances produced through genetic modification is getting longer every year – and not only in the field of medicine. These successes are now so self-evident in our everyday lives that the media hardly reports on them anymore.

But it’s a completely different story when genetic engineering is applied in the field. When the DNA of corn or cotton is modified so that the plants can repel harmful insects, or even more improved, can better deal with herbicides, environmental associations such as Greenpeace and BUND are up in arms against it. They are afraid of incalculable risks. The EU allows cultivation of a few genetically modified plant species. But Member Nations are supposed to be granted the possibility of prohibiting this cultivation by means of a withdrawal clause. Whether in Germany there will be a nation-wide regulation for this, or the Federal Government will leave the decision to the States, is not yet clear. One of the approved transgenic plants is corn; genetic engineers have thus integrated genetic information from a bacterium into corn plants. This causes corn to produce an active substance that destroys the intestinal tract of insects, but does not injure mammals and birds. This helps in the war against a pest named European corn borer, which is an insect. But of course now there is genetic information from a bacterium in corn that doesn’t belong there. “The promises – of obtaining increased yields and decreased chemicals on the field through genetically modified plants – have not been fulfilled”, says Martha Mertens, spokesperson for the genetic engineering work group at ‘BUND’ (Friends of the Earth Germany). Considerably more herbicides would be deployed, and the diversity of species in the agricultural landscape is being reduced further. Mertens: “When all is said and done, they also endanger our health, since, in addition to the planned new characteristics, unexpected effects can appear that compromise the safety of the products fabricated thereby.”

Reinhard Pröls is aware of these arguments. He conducts research at the Technical University of Munich concerning plant diseases. There was a similar form of distrust, he says, in the beginning vis-à-vis genetic engineering in medicine: “For ethical reasons, however, the new products prevailed in the course of time because the patients had obvious advantages.”

Such advantages can also be found with genetically modified plants. “If growers apply biotechnological procedures, they are able to develop new varieties considerably quicker and more purposefully than with conventional methods”, says Pröls. The farmers will also be able to reduce their workload, when, for example, it is not necessary to apply insecticides, because a genetically modified variety defends itself against such pests. But consumers in the supermarket see little of these advantages. Environmental organisations object that genetically modified varieties can definitely harbour risks. However, they are overlooking the fact here that precisely these species boundaries are obviously exceeded not infrequently in nature as well. Thus, about eight percent of the human DNA originally comes from a virus group that includes, for example, the AIDS pathogen HIV.

After a while, on plants with genetically modified pest repellent, pests frequently appear upon which the active substance no longer has an effect. “This occurs not only with genetically modified plants; rather, it also takes place with implementation in conventional agriculture”, says Reinhard Pröls. But why is ‘green’ genetic modification so adamantly rejected? In the context of a larger project dealing with this topic, the researcher had a hunch that different worldviews could be a reason for this: “Many people imagine nature as being intact, and they want to preserve it”, Pröls summarises the worldview of many critics. Natural scientists however know that a farmer who uses a horse and cart to till the soil is by no means working naturally; in reality, a primeval forest should be growing there, which was already cleared by the first farmers many millennia ago. And the DNA of the barley as well, which Reinhard Pröls is researching, has changed considerably in the course of these millennia, in that farmers cultivated today’s grain from natural wild grasses. “Since the time when he invented agriculture, man has severely interfered with nature”, says Reinhard Pröls. Thus, genetic engineering has not really introduced anything new.

This text is an article from our magazine Helmholtz Perspectiven, issue March/April 2015