(First published, in slightly different form, in Quadrant, July—August 2000, pages 38—41.)

Some years ago, at the first Anti-genetic engineering forum I attended, Friends of the Earth were selling garish bumper stickers emblazoned with the words "Genetic Engineering: Secret Sinister Science". In fact, there is little that is actually sinister and secret about this science (scientists have to publish to survive, you see, and patents actually force disclosure). All proposals for contentious work have to go through various regulatory watchdogs for approval.

Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja has recently declared "It's essential that the veil of secrecy which shrouds genetically modified crops be lifted. The public must know what science is doing to our crops and our farming" In fact the shroud of secrecy is not so much being used by the scientists, but by anti-Genetic Modification lobby groups.

The real secrecy problem is that the anti-GM activists are extremely economical with the truth, keep many of the good points of GM technology as secret as they can, and use rhetorical bluster to cover up the traces of their secrecy. The scientists and the activists are getting nowhere in debate because they speak different languages. Science values truth, logical consistency and accuracy, while activism prefers pure unadulterated rhetoric. Yes, scientists tend to be a bit narrow, and many of them are, unlike Natasha, politically naive and timid. No wonder the general public are confused and concerned. Mostly, they think the activists are honest good guys.

Yes, Natasha, locations of crop field trials are secret, but the lists of field trials and companies involved are posted over the internet by the government agency involved. Furthermore, detailed lists of Genetic Modification (GM) projects appeared in the journal Australasian Biotechnology in the month that Senator Stott-Despoja made her secrecy claim. Some secrecy! The field trial locations, of course, need to be kept secret to prevent the crops being torn up by Greenshirted eco-stormtroopers, as occurred recently with pineapple crops in a research institute in Queensland.

No, Natasha, it's not the scientists who are keeping secrets about GM-food, it's the anti-GM lobbyists. When they are posed searching questions, the activists' standard response seems to be to avoid the point at issue, so that inconvenient facts can remain secret. When this ploy fails, they fall back to impugning the integrity of the source of inconvenient information, an ad hominem attack pure and simple. I should know. I recently wrote an Op-Ed. piece, which appeared in the Fairfax papers, expressing a dissenting view on GM-food to that held by the charming Natasha. For my pains, I got a bunch of e-mails shouting 'Who is paying you? Gosh you are so narrow minded. I choose to get my facts from scientists who aren't paid by industry'. For the record, I am not being paid by food biotechnology companies and I don't do experimental work on GM-foods.

It's the benefits of genetic modification that the activists are keeping secret. Reduction of persistent synthetic pesticides by providing more environmentally friendly alternatives; fresh choices of herbicides, where the new option is readily degradable agents such as glufosinate (a natural product) or glyphosate, instead of less desirable, persistent herbicides; a range of new options to protect plants from diseases that cause crop failures; improvements in nutrition such as new varieties of rice with vitamin A (which might remedy a leading form of blindness ), and rice with better iron availability (a lack of which causes anaemia in hundreds of millions of people around the world). The potential of genetic technology to improve crop yields has been demonstrated by a recent report that transfer of maize photosynthesis genes into rice can improve rice yields one-third in preliminary greenhouse tests. All these outcomes are secrets that the anti-GM crowd what to cover up , or if they are referred to at all, they are described as "myths".

A few specific examples may convince the casual reader of the deviousness of many anti-technology lobby groups when it comes to dialogue about the issues raised by use of genetic technology in agriculture. If ever there was a major societal and human welfare issue worthy of serious, considered discussion, it's how to feed the world's people. In 1927, there were only two billion of us, and by 1999 we numbered six billion. Despite predictions in the 1960s by famous ecologist Dr Paul Ehrlich that millions would starve in the 1970s due to lack of food, , agricultural technology, aided by synthetic fertilisers, and highly reliant on the efforts of plant breeders such as Dr Norman Borlaug, ensured that this human population growth was fed, with little expansion of farmland. In fact, productivity gains and overall supply improvements have been so good that food prices, in real terms, trended downwards throughout the twentieth century. Plant scientists have received comparatively little praise for this, at least from the social science-based gene critics.

Important questions remain unanswered by critics who focus on social implications of technology, however. There are genuine scientific concerns that conventional crop-breeding technology, which has provided a steady increase in crop productivity for the last fifty years or so, has reached a point of diminishing returns, and that further yield increases from conventional technology will be slow. The crucial agronomic issue is whether a steady increase in food from an essentially constant (or worse, diminishing) arable land area, can be made to cope with an expected population growth to about nine billion by about 2050.

A typical example of how the anti-GM lobby deals with this weighty issue is GM-food critic Mara Bun (then of the Australian Consumers Association, currently PR advisor to Macquarie Bank). In a 1999 debate on the Nine Network programme Sunday, Mara announced that looming food supply problems were essentially non-existent, as we have too much food globally! (1.4-fold according to FAO statistics cited she cited.) According to Mara (and other anti-GM lobbyists such as Margaret Mellon, Luke Anderson and Peter Garrett) the claim that gene technology is needed to feed the world is a furphy. All that is needed is perfect and equitable food distribution channels (utopia, I think she means).

In this worldview, we all become vegetarians, and eat only our standard food ration everyday, and there will be (by edict?) no more dinner parties. And there is one little secret to come, that Senator Stott-Despoja will enjoy breaking to her Democrat friends–food prices are to shoot so far through the roof that the GST debate will seem like a little hiccup at the Mad Hatter's tea party.

More revealing is Mara's response to questioning on this issue: A TV studio audience member at the Sunday programme (one Dr David Tribe, Microbiologist, the TV caption reads) asks Mara "Why do we have so much food?", and Mara refuses to answer the question, put repeatedly, for about 15 minutes. Presumably an airing of the fact that global food sufficiency is crucially dependent on continual and continuing genetic improvement of crops is so damaging to her case that she had to try and keep the concept secret from the viewing audience.

Concealment by anti-GM crusaders of facts about food supply is far more extensive than just this one particular incident. There is extensive debate about third world food issues and the adverse effects of the 'Green Revolution'. Anti-GM writers such as Vandana Shiva and Dr Mae-Wan Ho, highlight the difficulties high intensity agriculture has arguably created for poorer farmers. (It should be noted in following this debate that GM-technology is mainly viewed by these writers as an extension of "high-intensity agriculture". Thus in these discussions, GM-food and "high-intensity agriculture" are in a sense synonymous, as GM-food is seen as the high technology agriculture of the future. Some go as far as saying that GM-food is the ground on which the organic farming and green political movements want to attack conventional, high-intensity farming. A cynic might also observe that the anti-GM movements need (as they do) to keep secret any successes of the food biotechnologists as these achievements would destroy their argument that technology will never provide for sustainable agriculture.)

I am not arguing that poor third world farmers' difficulties should be ignored, but neither should the other sources of food for billions of poor people. What is being kept secret in these discussions of third world food difficulties is statistics on food supply. Simply put, genetically-based high-intensity agriculture is not the exclusive province of the rich western nations, and although not perfect, between 1970 and 1990 it has created extra food for one billion people in the third world, . These people would not have any food had not the "Green Revolution" improved farm output. The failure of Vandana Shiva and like-minded technology critics to duly acknowledge this fact is akin to keeping lives saved by vaccination a secret, while only shouting concerns about rare side-reactions.

Besides feeding people, farm efficiency from better breeds of crops enables us to "tread lightly on the land", which Senator Stott-Despoja's office tell me she is passionately in favour of. India, in fact, provides a good illustration of a smaller footprint made possible by plant breeding. Between 1961 and 1992, plant breeders provided India a threefold increase in wheat yield per hectare, due primarily to the introduction of new wheat varieties. This efficiency increase avoided the need to find some forty million hectares of fresh arable land in India (or elsewhere) for wheat production to feed the growing population. 40,000,000 hectares is a big ecological footprint by any measure.

The mantra of the anti-GM activists is that genetic engineering does things the likes of which have never been seen on this planet. Gene technology is radical because genes are moved between species, which never happens in nature, so the activists say. Random insertion of DNA in new locations within a cell is a source of new risks that we cannot predict the consequences of. The anti-GM activists assert that the global ecological system must be protected from this novel laboratory creation to guard against ecological meltdown.

As an example of this genre, the Australian Conservation Foundation's June 1999 Habitat Australia supplement "Say No! to Gene Tech's Bitter Harvest" starts with the assertion:

The ACF do not seem to realise, or care, that their statement is totally false. There is, in fact, no overarching natural law or scientifically established biological function associated with containment of genes within species. Those barriers that do exist may largely be just accidents of evolution, and there is definitely no absolute genetic barrier between species.

To quote a recent evolution textbook (Evolution: the Four Billion Year War, by Michael Majerus and others) "[The standard defintion of a species, using the concept of reproductive isolation] is one which is very 'animal centred'...many plants do not fit easily into this classification...Amongst plants [cross-species] hybridisation events are not uncommon...most micro-organisms, many invertebrates and all vegetatively reproducing plants are excluded from [this]... species concept."

In fact there is evidence that much horizontal gene between species movement has occurred in nature, and it is a subject of great current scientific interest. For many years now, studies of mobile DNA have revealed the ubiquitous presence of jumping genes or DNA parasites that can insert copies of themselves in random location in chromosomes. These parasitic DNAs are extremely common in nature–for example 37 per cent of human DNA consists of such mobile, parasitic DNA. Movement of these jumping genes is so frequent in nature that they are a common source of natural mutations in many species. Barbara McClintock was able to readily observe such mutations in maize in the 1940s, and studied them because they were inexplicable in the then-conventional genetic theory. She received a Nobel prize for her work.

In his 1993 article "The mariner transposon is widespread in insects" in the journal Nature, which is about a mobile gene called Mariner after the Ancient Mariner, Hugh Robertson has commented that "whatever the mechanism … phylogeny implies that horizontal [DNA] transfers have occurred relatively frequently and over great taxonomic distances." Since then, hundreds of papers have confirmed this judgement. Mariner mobile genes have been found in all animal phyla, and horizontal movement of this gene between different phyla (not just between different species) is well documented. Hugh Robertson has recently also reported that mariner mobile genes invaded the human evolutionary line about fifty million years ago, so that humans are infected with an insect gene that has jumped around to many different locations in our own chromosomes.

A recent article on gene movement between species in the journal Science by Elizabeth Pennisi is entitled '"Genome data shake the tree of life", indicating the extent to which extensive new observations based on complete analysis of complete organism gene content (genome analysis), fully confirm and extend the now very well-established concepts of mobile DNA and horizontal gene movement.

More to the point of this article, is how anti-GM lobbyists deal with criticism of their assumption–the starting point of their propaganda campaign–that genetic engineering poses a radical new risk of gene movement never found in nature . In Australia, this is part of the public record. When discussing this recently with me on ABC radio in Melbourne, Australian Conservation Foundation's Bob Phelps abruptly changed the topic when faced with facts on this issue.

Overseas, the activist response to this issue is depressingly similar and even more ethically disturbing. Recently, the prestigious National Academy of Sciences was called upon by President Clinton to re-assess the potential risks posed by GM-food. Among other comments, the Academy judged that GM-foods offer "no strictly distinct risk" from that posed by conventionally bred crops. Plant are riddled with mobile DNA, and almost every seed would be expected to have a mobile DNA in a novel location. According to the rules of the anti-GM activists, we should, therefore, fear every seed. The response of anti-GM lobby groups to the US Academy of Sciences report was to reject the advice on the basis that the Academy was tainted and biased by their connections with the biotechnology industry. Note the response: avoid the main point of the issue being made, and instead impugn the integrity of the source.

In trying to understand why the scientific basis for risk assessment of GM-food has received such intellectually shoddy treatment, I have read widely among anti-GM authors such as Vandana Shiva, Richard Hindmarsh, Luke Anderson and the like. There is very little evidence in most of these publications that mobility of natural DNA is understood as a phenomenon. Two publications are an exception to this rule, one by David Suzuki (assisted by Holly Dressel), Naked Ape to Super Species, and another, by Mae Wan Ho, Genetic Engineering, Dreams or Nightmares?, which is used as a prime source of argument by Suzuki. Even these two books, despite mentioning mobile DNA, are out of touch with the current status of mobile DNA and are seriously misleading on this topic.

Suzuki and Ho assert that genes move around infrequently in nature, but they are very worried about a "recent" upsurge in reports that DNA parasites 'surprisingly' are being spread around many different species in nature. Ho's concern is that this movement has been caused by the carelessness of genetic engineer-scientists accidentally spreading their cloned DNA around. Without offering any critical appraisal, Suzuki repeats Ho's concern that recent infectious disease problems–namely evolution of new antibiotic resistance and virulence in bacterial pathogens–have been caused by carelessness in genetic engineering laboratories. Suzuki and Ho's assertions are unsupported by any experimental observations, and are refuted by numerous scientific reports. They have not been tested through professional scientific publication, and are out of touch with current biology, and especially microbiology.

Mobile DNA specifying bacterial virulence and resistance to antibiotics was widely studied and identified BEFORE genetic engineering was invented around 1975. Genetic studies prove that mobile DNA moved between species millions of years before Suzuki was born. In the last 5 years or so about 100 different organisms have had their genetic contents totally analysed, and these numerous studies reveal many new "cross-species" DNA transfers never previously studied or used by genetic engineers. Because they are completely novel, they couldn't have been spread by the previous carelessness of genetic engineers. (DNA sequence evidence is almost absolutely conclusive on this.) One can only assume that Suzuki and Ho are unfamiliar with microbiology literature from about 1970 onward (despite Suzuki's claim in his book to be an authoritative geneticist with twenty-five years' research experience).

Criticism of this careless avoidance of well-established facts of modern biology is not academic hair-splitting. This propaganda has been the basis of a seemingly successful self-acknowledged putsch by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that has driven GM-food out of European supermarkets. And after this campaign, Australia is a prime target for the anti-GM network. Already they've converted intellectually omniscient heavyweight Philip Adams who wrote recently:

Perhaps Adams should follow his own 'Catechism for atheists'–Worry about something else. Do not be fashionable. Be curious. Be sceptical. Do as little damage as possible–but add in the original commandment 'Do not bear false witness against your neighbour'.

He should temper his anti-American posture with the knowledge that the Peoples Republic of China has a third of its crop plantings as GM-crops. There are even small Australian companies who will suffer collateral damage from Adams' war. Perhaps he could tell us who the scientists are that support the anti-GM case so that we can assess their claims.

Fortunately, in science, its not people's reputations that carry the day, but the quality of their arguments and the reconciliation of those arguments with observations of the real world. But unfortunately, there are a host of relevant observations about how the natural world actually behaves that need to be bought to the attention of everyday Australians, the people who really matter in this argument.

David Tribe teaches Biotechnology at the University of Melbourne. He has previously written 'Myths about Mutants Muddy the Waters', (Agricultural Science, January 1997, pages 32-36) and more recently the Institute of Public Affairs Backgrounder, "Biotechnology and Food: Ten Thousand Years of Sowing Seeds, One Hundred Years of Harvesting Genes" (May 2000).