The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 by Deborah Blum

subsequent broader use of the chemical—along with a distaste for Monsanto’s aggressive business tactics and a growing suspicion of a food system driven by corporate profits—combined to forge a consumer backlash. Environmental activists vandalized dozens of field trials and protested brands that used Monsanto’s soybeans or corn, introduced soon after, which was engineered to prevent pests from attacking it.
    In response, companies including McDonald’s, Frito-Lay, and Heinz pledged not to use GMO ingredients in certain products, and some European countries prohibited their cultivation.
    Some of Kress’s scientists were still fuming about what they saw as the lost potential for social good hijacked by both the activists who opposed genetic engineering and the corporations that failed to convince consumers of its benefits. In many developing countries, concerns about safety and ownership of seeds led governments to delay or prohibit cultivation of needed crops: Zambia, for instance, declined shipments of GMO corn even during a 2002 famine.
    â€œIt’s easy for someone who can go down to the grocery store and buy anything they need to be against GMOs,” said Jaynes, who faced such barriers with a high-protein sweet potato he had engineered with a synthetic gene.
    To Kress in early 2011, any comparison to Monsanto—whose large blocks of patents he had to work around and whose thousands of employees worldwide dwarfed the 750 he employed in Florida at peak harvest times—seemed far-fetched. If it was successful, Southern Gardens would hope to recoup its investment by charging a royalty for its trees. But its business strategy was aimed at saving the orange crop, whose total acreage was a tiny fraction of the crops the major biotechnology companies had pursued.
    He urged his worried researchers to look at the early success of Flavr Savr tomatoes. Introduced in 1994 and engineered to stay fresh longer than traditional varieties, they proved popular enough that some stores rationed them, before business missteps by their developer ended their production.
    And he was no longer alone in the pursuit of a genetically modified orange. Citrus growers were collectively financing research into a greening-resistant tree, and the Agriculture Department had also assigned a team of scientists to it. Any solution would have satisfied Kress. Almost daily, he could smell the burning of infected trees, which mingled with orange-blossom sweetness in the grove just beyond Southern Gardens’ headquarters.
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    A Growing Urgency
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    In an infection-filled greenhouse where every nontransgenic tree had showed symptoms of disease, Mirkov’s trees with the spinach gene had survived unscathed for more than a year. Kress would soon have three hundred of them planted in a field trial. But in the spring of 2012, he asked the Environmental Protection Agency, the first of three federal agencies that would evaluate his trees, for guidance. The next step was safety testing. And he felt that it could not be started fast enough.
    Mirkov assured him that the agency’s requirements for animal tests to assess the safety of the protein produced by his gene, which bore no resemblance to anything on the list of known allergens and toxins, would be minimal.
    â€œIt’s spinach,” he insisted. “It’s been eaten for centuries.”
    Other concerns weighed on Kress that spring: growers in Florida did not like to talk about it, but the industry’s tripling of pesticide applications to kill the bacteria-carrying psyllid was, while within legal limits, becoming expensive and worrisome. One widely used pesticide had stopped working as the psyllid evolved resistance, and Florida’s citrus growers’ association was petitioning one company to lift the twice-a-season restrictions on spraying young trees—increasingly its only hope for an uninfected harvest.
    Others in the industry who knew of