Science: Fighting the Biotech Wars

In Farmer Kevin Main's farrowing barn near Altona, Ill., the newborn piglets lay on their sides, their tiny feet paddling frantically in the air. A day later they were dead. "It was not a pleasant thing," Main recalls. "We lost over a hundred." Main's 480-swine herd had been hit by pseudorabies, a disease caused by a herpes virus that attacks the central nervous system of pigs, sheep, cattle and other animals. Nearly always fatal in young pigs, it causes symptoms ranging from disoriented wandering to skin lesions to convulsions, and can lead to reproductive failure in animals that survive. About 10% of the nation's 54 million swine are currently infected with the virus, agriculture officials say, and the cost to the pork industry runs as high as $60 million a year.

Last week Main and other farmers were perplexed when the U.S. Department of Agriculture, under attack by critics, halted the sale of Omnivac-PRV, a new genetically engineered viral vaccine that immunizes swine against pseudorabies and may be the first of a whole generation of better animal vaccines. Main had participated in a field test of the vaccine last year by allowing 250 of his piglets to be inoculated. None of them or of others involved in the test contracted the disease, and in January the USDA licensed Biologics Corp., a vaccine manufacturer in Omaha, to put Omnivac on the market. "It seems to be safe," says Main. "I don't know what all the commotion is about."

The dustup was stirred by Jeremy Rifkin, a Washington-based gadfly and an implacable foe of genetic engineering (see box), who filed a petition with the USDA demanding suspension of Biologics' license. In issuing that license, Rifkin charged, the department had not only failed to follow federal guidelines for releasing live, genetically altered organisms into the environment but also neglected to conduct an environmental assessment of the risks involved. Stung by the petition and aware of Rifkin's uncanny success in obtaining court injunctions to back his demands, the USDA beat a hasty retreat. Bert Hawkins, administrator of the department's animal and plant health inspection service, conceded that the USDA did not "document" its environmental analysis because "we felt the product was not significantly different from products already on the market. In fact, it was a safer product. But we should have documented it for the public perception." That process, he said, should take only two weeks, after which the suspension would be lifted.

Rifkin objected. That the assessment could be done after licensing and in two weeks was "ridiculous," he said. "You can't now put together a hurried little paper and call it an environmental assessment. That's what you call cheating."