So how do we form a judgement about GM food? Can we get beyond the fundamentalism of ‘thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled [hybrid?] seed’ (Lev. 19:19) and ‘Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with diverse seeds: lest the fruit of thy seed which thou has sown, and the fruit of thy vineyard, be defiled.’ (Deut. 22:9)? When those words were written, wheat and maize, which are artificial monstrosities compared with their ‘natural’ relatives, had long since existed.

In a paper by Christine Karutz currently being translated⁶ the author surveys for the lay reader breeding methods from the most traditional to the most transgenic – including selecting characteristics; crossing with a specific aim in view; exposing plants to disease and breeding from the survivors; F₁ hybrids; crossing distantly related plants (often requiring ‘embryo rescue’ to get viable offspring); treating with chemicals which double chromosome numbers;⁷ increasing new mutations and therefore new characteristics with radiation or chemical mutagens; culture of anthers followed by chromosome doubling;⁸ selection of viable plant tissue in the ‘test tube’ after exposure to fungal toxin; somatic hybridisation (i.e. fusing cells that are neither eggs nor pollen); DNA-marker assisted selection in laboratory tissue culture and finally transgenesis (e.g snowdrop lectin potatoes) by a variety of transfer methods involving thousands of possible synthetic gene constructs. Exactly where on this ‘slippery slope’ should a biodynamicist draw the line between what is acceptable and what is not? And this is the big question facing the organic movement at the present time. Karutz examines the possibilities e.g. no using isolated DNA, tissue culture or crossing species/family boundaries. Each possibility is not without its problems. For instance triticale, a cereal produced with laboratory techniques, has properties useful in organic agriculture. Karutz points out that any breeding method which takes plants out of their natural context for part of their life cycles, i.e. into the laboratory, might end up with plants improperly adapted to the farm environment and therefore weakened, unhealthy.

Snail geneticist Professor Steve Jones – a leading media spokesman for science – said, “science itself has no ethical dimension. What you do with science has an extremely powerful ethical dimension. DNA, for example, is just a molecule. It doesn’t have a soul or a mind. What you do with the results is important. Science itself has to be value free.”⁹ Here I think Jones displays crass naïveté. We do not have space here fully to deconstruct his statement, so a few comments will have suffice.¹⁰

The scientist is already steeped in personal and social preconceptions before he/she sets foot in the laboratory. Making these preconceptions conscious would be a major step towards healing science, but scientists hardly ever attempt it – it’s too philosophical they say. But if one sets out on the quest for knowledge with the prejudice that only those explanations are valid that are based on the view that everything in the living world is caused by matter behaving according to the laws of physics and

chemistry then the kind of science one ends up with, and worse still the technology based on it, will no doubt ‘work’ but it will be deeply coloured by that initial value-judgement. Science cannot exist independently of the scientist and the scientist is just another human being like the rest of us. In Jones’ terms, the deed has already been done with science before any so-called facts, e.g. ‘DNA is just a molecule’, have been discovered, nay invented. Why ‘invented’? Because, as scientists we carve out of the seemingly jumbled world of phenomena a subset to which we restrict our gaze, and subsume it under the term DNA. We do it, and it works! But it also means that other ways of doing science are possible. Indeed, they exist and are practised albeit by a minority of scientists. They complement the useful but one-sided method of reductionism. So we, as scientists, cannot shift the blame to technologists or some other element of society. Scientists need to become far more conscious of their own preconceptions than they have hitherto.

Foods adulterated by GM are not a logical conclusion from the way the world is made up. And that is why many spokespersons for the organic/biodynamic agriculture movement are now saying that we need as a society to decide whether we want to make use of GM food technology at all. This may seem at first like fundamentalism, but it arises from the sure knowledge that the science behind genetic engineering is not value-free and that there are other perfectly viable alternative ways of growing our food.

And if it is not already bad enough having a questionable basis to the prevalent science, it is somewhat more disturbing to hear that even its intellectual integrity is in question as shown by the following recent comment by Dr Richard North: ‘I’ve seen some incredibly bad science go straight through the peer review system. The peer review system is not functioning properly in the UK, so you cannot rely on the scientific community to vet properly its own members.’¹¹ Fortunately, a UK committee, which will report in May/June 1999, is looking into how the government gets its biotechnology advice.¹² But a re-examination of whether genetic engineering should be applied in agriculture at all still seems a long way off.