In 2005 when I did a show called The Ides of Nye companies like Monsanto had patents
on genes and people were questioning whether or not that was ethical.
Also there was this overarching idea that we have enough food.
We just can’t distribute it properly.
And the reason people are starving in the world is there’s enough food.
And my concern was the ecosystem.
This is to say you can know each organism very well.
And by know I mean you can know it’s the sequence of its genes and you can grow it
in isolation and refuges and see how it performs.
This is talking about crops now.
So there would be no need to experiment with the ecosystem even though you can know the
individual crop plant, you don’t know what it would do when it’s around butterflies
or bees or birds or other pollinators or some virus we haven’t discovered yet.
Since then a couple of things, three things, have happened to my way of thinking.
The least significant may be that we can now assay genes ten million.
This is to say, no 100 million.
Ten to the eighth times faster than we could 15 or 20 years ago.
The DNA sequencing machines are so sophisticated.
You can actually simulate what would happen if this virus comes in or that gene is introduced
from a vector, an insect vector or what have you.
That’s the first thing that you can make predictions about how plants will grow based
on their genes very accurately.
Much more so than you could a couple of decades ago.
The second thing is there are 7.3 billion people in the world right now early in the
twenty-first century.
By the middle of the twenty-first century there’s going to be nine billion.
There might even be ten billion people.
So those people are going to have to be fed.
And sure enough the way to do that is almost certainly with genetically modified crops
which are much more productive than they used to be.
And then from a historic standpoint humans have always hybridized crops.
But now humans are hybridizing from a genetic standpoint, not just by combining sexually
crops of desirable traits.
And the third thing which is very compelling to me as a scientist is we have discovered
- and maybe everybody knew this except me and I’m the first to admit - we’ve discovered
that genes are introduced between species naturally.
And the paper that really got to me was the one about sweet potatoes.
So sweet potatoes became sweet potatoes because something like a virus infected the sweet
potatoes and changed their genes.
And then humans cultivated those gene changed potatoes.
And so without this introduction of interspecies, between species, genetic transfer this wouldn’t
have happened.
So these three things – the ecosystem concern, the rate at which we can assay genes, the
number of people that are going to have to be fed.
That’s the second one.
And the third one is it happens naturally anyway.
These three things have changed my point of view about genetically modified foods.
And the regulations for them are actually quite robust.
You can’t just go creating a crop plant that going to be deleterious to the farming
system.
Along with this everybody, I’m the first to admit, the idea that you can patent genes
seems troubling but there’s a lot to it that’s very reasonable.
Companies like Pioneer, the seed company that’s part of DuPont, and the bemixed-feelings Monsanto.
They spent a lot of money, a huge fraction of their resources on developing these plants.
And recently the patented soybean, the patent expired.
So soybeans are out now.
So okay.
So if you want to grow those soybeans now you can.
And farmers do make contracts to grow those plants because they grow better.
So we can imagine a future where plants are tuned to grow in very moist soils at the bottom
of the hill where the water runs down, very dry soils at the top of the hill where the
water drains away quickly and in between, in the plants that would be planted.
The crop plants that would be planted would vary like meter to meter.
Certainly across the farm field they would vary from one end to the other.
And they would be planted electronically using global positioning from outer space.
And this will enable people to feed the world.
So I used to be against genetically modified foods just from the cautionary principle.
You don’t know what you’re doing to the ecosystem so be careful.
Now I am for genetically modified foods because we have so much more science behind it than
we did even 20 years ago.