THE CASE FOR SCIENCE
Welcome to Animal Farm. In the cages on your left you’ll see
featherless chickens, ready for the pot. On your right goats that have been
genetically altered to produce spiderlike silk in their milk, for use in
parachutes. Up ahead, those rabbits glow in the dark, their luminous cells
to be used in tissue graft research and in the tanks over there salmon that
grow to four times normal size in a year.
It isn’t a real farm, of course. But the animals are and they’re in research
centres and farms all over the world. Animal Farm is a new Channel 4
series that visited these experiments in genetic technology, producing
specially bred animals that will supposedly feed us better, make us
healthier and protect the environment.
Abomination against nature or the key to a healthier global future? Guiding us
through is Dr Olivia Judson, a biological scientist with a hint of Greta
Scacchi, who scoffs at “latterday nature worship” and believes that
anticapitalist conspiracies are behind much of our revulsion at the biotech
revolution. “Every country has its own hysteria,” she says. “Here it’s
genetic manipulation. In America it’s stem cells.”
The broad set-up behind the series is clear. If the pragmatic scientist Dr
Judson is the Daughter of Frankenstein, her co-presenter — the food critic
and organic advocate Giles Coren — is the baying mob with burning torches.
In three programmes, starting on March 19, they try to establish the facts
about the way nature is being manipulated for the sake of food and medicine,
and ask us to make up our own minds about what’s right and wrong.
There’s some unscripted debate between presenters, too: Coren admits to trying
to work Dr Judson into positions where she’d look silly, causing her to
throw a “wobbly” (whether that makes it into the final cut remains to be
seen). Dr Judson, a research fellow at Imperial College London, is a little
concerned about coming across as too earnest in the series, but from what
I’ve seen, she has little reason to worry about looking silly. She managed
to persuade Coren that GM wasn’t as bad as he had originally thought (see
facing page). And she has a gift for drawing you into her fascination with
scientific departures that seem ghoulish at first sight. “Can you really ask
ethical questions about these things, without knowing the issues behind the
questions?” she says. The campaign for “natural” food, for example, begins
to sound a bit ridiculous when she dissects it.
“There’s nothing in this country that’s ‘natural’; Man has shaped it all.
Potatoes in their natural state are very poisonous and it’s only through
selective breeding that we’ve made them edible. Anyone who’s had to wage war
on rabbits in their vegetable patch knows that it’s very difficult to grow
edible food, and we’ve lost sight of how remarkable it is that we can go to
our fridges to eat and don’t have to go hunting.”
That’s why she has no problem with GM; in fact, why she refuses to condemn any
of the food production practices in the programmes “though I don’t
particularly like the intensive farming of animals”. Genes, she points out,
get mixed up in nature anyway, and there are many ways to do it. Some of the
most shocking examples of manipulated animals in the Channel 4 series — the
featherless chickens (bred so that they don’t overheat in hot conditions),
or Belgian steak-producing cows built like Arnold Schwarzenegger — are the
result of old-fashioned selective breeding, the same process that brought us
what we think of as “normal” hens and Friesians.
“It’s very hard to get to the bottom of GM because there’s so much propaganda
and scare-mongering going on,” she says. “It’s clearly not going to solve
world shortages of food by itself, but it can be very useful. For example,
if you can make crops grow using much less water, that’s very good for the
environment. Media coverage here just makes me depressed because there’s so
little science behind it. The evidence is that the risk to the environment
is minimal — genes are moving sideways all the time — and, to be honest, we
have much larger global problems to worry about than whether we create a new
weed.” The words tumble out effortlessly; Dr Judson admits that she can talk
till the genetically enhanced cows come home.
Her cool scientific head, combined with clear communication skills, may have
its origins in her own family genes. Born in England in 1970, she is the
daughter of Horace Freedland Judson, a science historian, journalist and
expert in molecular biology. After a family move to the US, she came back to
England to do postgraduate studies in biological sciences at Oxford
University, specialising in starlings. She started freelancing as a science
journalist and, in 1997, broke the story of Dolly the Sheep, the first
animal clone, in The Economist.
But it’s her bestselling book, Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All
Creation (Vintage, £8.99), that gained her the plaudits. In it, Dr
Judson took the role of agony aunt to spiders who wanted to know why their
partners wouldn’t eat them, or queen bees who wanted to know if it was
normal for sexual partners to drop dead after sex.
Now Animal Farm is giving her the opportunity to learn about subjects
that are outside her comfort zone, and she shows a childlike enthusiasm
about some of the things she has learnt, admitting that the more you know,
the more interesting it is. “I’m very curious,” she adds, endearingly. She
was fascinated to learn, for example, that cows are easy to clone — in fact,
it’s happening in the US all the time — but that it’s virtually impossible
to do the same to dogs. But it was those fluorescent rabbits that really
intrigued her. Researchers have managed to transfer into rabbit embryos a
gene that makes jellyfish glow. This makes all the resulting bunnies
luminous, and by using their cells in grafts of tissue to nonluminous
rabbits, researchers can study the progress of the grafted cells over time.
What’s fascinating, she says, is that for all the 600 million years in
evolution that separates rabbits and jellyfish, they both have the ability
the read off the same bit of genetic messaging.
Is there nothing about interfering with the make-up of plants and animals that
makes her go “ick”, that crosses an invisible line of acceptability? Not
really, she says, it’s for scientists to explain and “society” to make up
its mind. Which points, perhaps, to one of the problems with communicating
science to the public. Scientists such as Dr Judson, good as they are at
debunking the myths and explaining the “how”, are not so good at expressing
a learned opinion on the “why”. Is engineering genes for food, or even for
medicine, something we really want?
“In the real world, if you want some rainforest left [organic crops need four
times the space of GM crops], and if you want any fish left, these things
aren’t bad alternatives. They are unlikely to hurt, and they may help.”
But doesn’t she suspect that some of the GM projects are simply there to make
money for the manufacturers, not for the greater good of mankind? I point
out the scientists in Missouri who have altered the genes in pigs so that
they are high in omega3 oils, which would mean, in theory, that bacon could
be pronounced a “health food”. Isn’t that just an example of scientists
missing the more important question: how to get people to eat a balanced
diet?
“Some projects may fit into that category, and others not,” she says. “I think
there’s an anticapitalist streak to many objections, a belief that it’s only
being done to puff up big companies. I don’t think that’s what motivates
most scientists doing work in the field.”
As we wind up, we talk a bit about the story of Frankenstein and how it has
played to people’s deepest fears for such a long time. The real problem with
Frankenstein, she says, is his revulsion with his own monster, who wanted
only his creator’s company. It’s an interesting interpretation
from a scientist who clearly believes that we must temper our revulsion at
our weird creations. But it’s also interesting how she sees it entirely from
the scientist’s point of view.
I can’t help thinking that Frankenstein’s real problem was that, with his
scientist’s tunnel vision to achieve something, he lost sight of a bigger
picture.
A MATTER OF TASTE
He may joke about Olivia Judson being a “warped, frothing pro-GM nutcase”, but
Giles Coren, a self-confessed member of the “go-backwards school” when it
comes to intensive farming, admits that making the Channel 4 programme Animal
Farm rather changed his view.
“There’s a lot of prejudice and hysteria about genetically modified crops and
cloning,” says Coren, the restaurant critic for The Times'
Magazine. “Before doing the programme I thought I would grow two
heads if I ate GM, but now I understand how a genome works and I know that
if you plant a load of genetically modified crops there’s really no chance
at all of modified genes being transferred to surrounding plants.
“I can see that having GM crops that are resistant to pests is a better way of
farming for people in poor countries, and better for the environment.”
Making the programme, he says, made him realise that Man has actually being
playing with genes for a long time. “Before we made the series I had no idea
that all apple trees are clones and that every one of a certain variety is
genetically identical. And when you know that, and Olivia asks you what’s
the difference between a cloned tree and a cloned sheep . . . I can see her
point.”
And he’s obviously hugely impressed by techniques of introducing
vitamin-producing genes into nutritionally barren crops grown in central
Africa, improving diet and reducing blindness in children at the same time.
That’s not to say that Coren doesn’t live up to his billing as a conservative,
country sceptic, adorned on the series as he is in Hunter wellies and Prince
of Wales check waistcoat. What worries him is that food production is
increasingly being controlled by large corporations, and moving farther and
farther from consumers.
It’s not, he says, that he’s against companies making money. This month Coren
replaced a whitebearded sea captain by becoming the new public face of the
frozen food company Bird’s Eye. His new television advertisements for the
company talk about the nutritional benefits of the food, and the
sustainability of the fish stocks used.
The problem is, he says, that the more complicated food production becomes,
the harder it is for us to understand and to choose what we are eating. He’s
worried about what happens to food quality when production gets complicated,
too. In the first programme of Animal Farm, Coren tastes a steak from
ultra-muscular, selectively bred Belgian Blue cattle, and he can’t believe
how tasteless it is.
“They’ve now developed, through genetic modification, a zebra fish that glows
in the dark; it was originally designed to detect pollution, but now they’ve
found that doesn’t work. So it’s sold as a novelty in pet shops. And I can’t
help thinking that something like that is somehow messing with God’s plan.”
All in all, he says, the programme has left him pulled in two directions. On
the one hand, he feels there is something soul-destroying about the whole
enterprise of intensive farming led by scientists. On the other, he half
suspects that the only way ahead — the way to deal with a world population
that will have exploded to nine billion by 2020 — is to find solutions
through science, and not try to turn back the clock.
