The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 by Deborah Blum Page A

Kress’s project were turning to him. He agreed to speak at the fall meeting of citrus growers in California, where the greening disease had just been detected. “We need to hear about the transgenic solution,” said Ted Batkin, the association’s director. But Kress worried that he had nothing to calm their fears.
    And an increasingly vocal movement to require any food with genetically engineered ingredients to carry a “GMO” label had made him uneasy.
    Supporters of one hotly contested California ballot initiative argued for labeling as a matter of consumer rights and transparency—but their advertisements often implied that the crops were a hazard: one pictured a child about to take a joyful bite of a pest-resistant cob of corn, on which was emblazoned a question mark and the caption “Corn, engineered to grow its own pesticide.”
    Yet the gene that makes corn insect-resistant, he knew, came from the same soil bacterium long used by organic food growers as a natural insecticide.
    Arguing that the Food and Drug Administration should require labels on food containing GMOs, one leader of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group, cited “pink slime, deadly melons, tainted turkeys and BPA in our soup.”
    Kress attributed the labeling campaigns to the kind of tactic any industry might use to gain a competitive edge: they were financed largely by companies that sell organic products, which stood to gain if packaging implying a hazard drove customers to their own non-GMO alternatives. He did not aim to hide anything from consumers, but he would want them to understand how and why his oranges were genetically engineered. What bothered him was that a label seemed to lump all GMOs into one stigmatized category.
    And when the EPA informed him in June 2012 that it would need to see test results for how large quantities of spinach protein affected honeybees and mice, he gladly wrote out the $300,000 check to have the protein made.
    It was the largest single expense yet in a project that had so far cost more than $5 million. If these tests raised no red flags, he would need to test the protein as it appears in the pollen of transgenic orange blossoms. Then the agency would want to test the juice.
    â€œSeems excessive,” Mirkov said.
    But Kress and Irey shared a sense of celebration. The path ahead was starting to clear.
    Rather than wait for Mirkov’s three hundred trees to flower, which could take several years, they agreed to try to graft his spinach-gene shoots to mature trees to hasten the production of pollen—and, finally, their first fruit—for testing.
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    Wall of Opposition
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    Early one morning a year ago, Kress checked the Agriculture Department’s web site from home. The agency had opened its sixty-day public comment period on the trees modified to produce “Arctic apples” that did not brown.
    His own application, he imagined, would take a similar form.
    He skimmed through the company’s 163-page petition, showing how the apples are equivalent in nutritional content to normal apples, how remote was the likelihood of cross-pollination with other apple varieties, and the potentially bigger market for a healthful fruit.
    Then he turned to the comments. There were hundreds. And they were almost universally negative. Some were from parents, voicing concerns that the nonbrowning trait would disguise a rotten apple—though transgenic apples rotten from infection would still turn brown. Many wrote as part of a petition drive by the Center for Food Safety, a group that opposes biotechnology.
    â€œApples are supposed to be a natural, healthy snack,” it warned. “Genetically engineered apples are neither.”
    Others voiced a general distrust of scientists’ guarantees: “Too many things were presented to us as innocuous and years later we discovered it was untrue,” wrote one woman. “After two cancers I