Brave New Farm

What rings the loudest alarm bells, of course, is the specter of cloning humans. No sooner had Dolly the sheep emerged from a Scottish lab than authorities scrambled to build legal pinfolds. Fourteen U.S. states introduced bills to regulate cloning, and President Clinton outlawed the use of federal funds for the purpose--although much of bioengineering has long since slipped that leash. Bioethicist Glenn McGee, Magnus' associate at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that with so much research now financed privately, less and less of it "receives any federal scrutiny."

The difficulty for legislatures lies in striking the right balance, weighing public concerns against the principles of free inquiry and market liberties. In fact, genetic modification is very big business today for the U.S., both domestically and as an export earner. That does not necessarily entail greater dangers than usual, but it can--and does--result in confusion between commercial rights and what properly belongs to the personal or public domain.

While society is torn between benefits and risks, commercial scientists have done a bad job of regulating themselves, in Magnus' view. "Testing with breast-cancer genes was offered far too early," he says. "It wasn't even clear what the tests meant." He adds, "We could literally have had women getting double mastectomies because of a positive result on a genetic test, where in fact the test does not mean that they are at increased risk."

Perhaps because of Europe's deeper suspicions of Big Business, the food fight has prompted a regulatory go-slow on the Continent. One factor is the scare that erupted in 1996 over "mad cow" disease in British beef. Though the disease was caused by feeding animal parts to cows, rather than by genetic meddling, the panic left consumers extremely wary about what goes onto the family dinner table. Herbert Krach of the Swiss Small Farmers Union notes, "For years scientists assured us that feeding animal-based feeds to cattle was harmless." But the cautions also owe something to romantic--and perhaps outdated--notions about agriculture. Says population geneticist Brian Johnson of Britain's conservation watchdog English Nature: "Conventional intensive agriculture has done more damage to wildlife than anything else." Anyone who thinks that pesticide spraying is safer than biotech crops, he says, "must be nuts."

Still, critics contend that consumers should at least have the option of refusing bioengineered foods. The European Union recently introduced mildly restrictive labeling requirements, but no such regime exists in the U.S., Canada or the other countries with rapidly expanding fields of modified crops. Tricky ownership questions also arise: Is a bioengineered potato, or any gene sequence mapped in the lab, a patentable property? These threads are increasingly tightly coiled by nature and science, and not easily unraveled.