The Suicide Seeds

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Opponents don't care who made Terminator. To them the idea is Frankensteinian on its face. After tweezing out a toxin-producing stretch of DNA from a noncrop plant, gene scientists managed to knit the lethal genetic material into the genome of commercial plants. They also inserted two other bits of coding that would keep the killer gene dormant until late in the crop's development, when the toxin would affect only the seed and not the plant. But because the seed company needs to generate enough product to sell in the first place, the scientists included one more DNA sequence--one that repressed all the sterilizing genes they had just inserted. Once they had grown all the seeds they needed, they would soak them in an antibiotic bath that neutralized the genetic repressor--rendering them infertile. "This is the most intricate application of genetic engineering to date," says Margaret Mellon, a senior scientist at the Union for Concerned Scientists.

But clever science isn't necessarily popular science, and Terminator has made a lot of enemies, particularly in the developing world. The USDA and Delta and Pine Land have filed Terminator patent applications in dozens of countries. In many of those countries farmers can't afford to buy top-of-the-line seeds every year and must rely on saving a portion of each crop in order to plant their fields the following year. Monsanto insists that weak patent protection in many of these countries makes a technology like Terminator especially important. But that argument carries little weight in parts of the world where food bowls are going empty. "This technology brings no benefit to farmers," says Hope Shand, research director of RAFI.

Monsanto disagrees--and not without reason. Say what they will about Terminator, even some detractors admit that the company designs a hell of a seed. The maker of one of the world's most popular herbicides, Monsanto has created crops that are resistant to the toxin. With it, farmers can spray away weeds without spraying away their harvest. The company has also developed plants with a built-in toxin that is harmless to humans but lethal to insects. If farmers in the developing world use these muscled-up crops--even with Terminator genes--their harvests might increase enough to cover the cost of buying seeds each spring. Says Delta and Pine Land vice president Harry Collins: "It will help them become more production-oriented rather than remaining subsistence farmers."

Despite the doomsday alarms being sounded by environmentalists, genetic engineers at Monsanto argue that there is no real risk of pollen from Terminator plants causing widespread sterilization in other plants--and they're probably right. Gene drift does occur, but nature doesn't make it easy. Many crops, like rice, are mostly self-pollinated. As for crops that are pollinated by wind or insects, precautions like planting border fields to keep crops isolated help confine genes. What's more, crops tend to mature at the same time--sending out a great puff of pollen all at once--while wild plants reproduce over a longer period. During the brief time Terminator pollen is in the air, relatively few wild plants would notice. "The concern over widespread escape is overblown," insists Toenniessen.