Making the Earth Say Beans.

Penn State Science journal Spring 2007
Genetically Modified Foods: Making the Earth Say Beans

Nina V. Fedoroff, Evan Pugh Professor and Verne M. Willaman Chair of Life Sciences, Penn State

In chapter seven of his environmental masterpiece Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes about his bean field: “…making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass—this was my daily work.”
B/W line drawing of pea plant

You may wonder why I begin an essay on genetically modified foods with a quote from Thoreau. But to me, environmentalism and plant breeding are inextricably linked. Our civilization rests on our ability to make the earth say beans. Other creatures feed their young, but the adults of most species fend for themselves, spending much of their day doing it. By contrast, we humans have learned to farm. Over the last few centuries, advances in science have let fewer and fewer farmers feed more and more people, freeing the rest of us to make and sell each other hats and houses and computers, to be scientists and politicians, painters, teachers, doctors, spiritual leaders, and talk-show hosts. In some parts of the world, only one person in a hundred grows plants or raises animals for food. Most of us are surprisingly unaware of what it takes to create our bread and breakfast cereal, pasta and rice, those perfect fruits and vegetables, unblemished by insect bites or fungal spots. Free to live our lives with little thought for our food, we ignore the source of the gift.

Our civilization rests, in fact, on a history of tinkering with nature—on making the earth say beans instead of grass. Thoreau’s beans were not wild. The pod of a wild bean bursts when its seed is ripe, flinging the bean far from the parent plant to find a new place to sprout. The pods of those beans we grow for food do not burst. Such beans can no longer seed themselves. Nor can the wild grasses we have changed, over the millennia, into our staple food sources: rice, wheat, and corn. To change a wild plant into a food plant requires changes in the plant’s genes. To boost its yield, to make the earth say more beans, means changing the plant’s genes, as well. For thousands of years, farmers have been picking and choosing plants, propagating those with the genetic changes—mutations—that made them better food plants. Our civilization is the beneficiary of this genetic tinkering...

...In March 2007, researchers from the United States and China reported on how plants respond to the depletion of calcium from the soil, one effect of acid rain. This knowledge is a first step toward developing plant varieties that need less calcium. Other researchers are trying to make crops that are salt-tolerant, drought-tolerant, heat-tolerant, and cold-tolerant. Monsanto has identified genes that enable some plants to withstand drought and has created corn and soybean lines that grow with less water. Drought-tolerant corn is now undergoing field trials.

Researchers also are working on ways to make common foods healthier. Golden Rice, a rice that contains vitamin A, was created by Swiss researchers in 1999. The trait is currently being bred into varieties of rice traditionally grown in regions where vitamin A deficiency leads to high rates of blindness in children. In 2006, researchers in Florida reported they had bred a tomato that contains 20 times the normal amount of folate. A B vitamin, folate is needed to prevent anemia in pregnant women and birth defects in their children; lack of folate also increases the risk of vascular disease and cancer. A goal for future work is to fortify staple crops such as rice, sorghum, maize, or sweet potatoes with folate. Other researchers have made a temperate plant that produces a more-saturated, tropical-like oil which has baking properties like margarine without the transfats; a rice high in cancer-fighting flavonoids; potatoes with zeaxanthin, which wards off eye disease; and soybeans and canola oil that contain heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids...

...In just the last hundred years the population doubled and redoubled. The number of people on Earth reached three billion in 1950, then jumped to six billion in little more than a single human generation. Yet farmers kept pace. Two important inventions early in the 20th century supported an enormous increase in farm productivity. First was the Haber-Bosch process for converting the gaseous nitrogen in the air to a form that plants can use as nitrogen fertilizer. Second was the observation of George Harrison Shull that intercrossing inbred corn varieties produces robust and productive offspring. This is the scientific underpinning of the entire hybrid corn industry.

These inventions initially benefited the developed world. By mid-century, doomsayers were predicting famines in India and China. These famines were averted by plant geneticists, who derived mutant strains of wheat, corn, and rice that were markedly more productive than indigenous strains. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the new crop varieties and expanding fertilizer use—the Green Revolution—continued to meet the world’s food needs. In 1950, 1.7 billion acres of farm land produced 692 million tons of grain. In 1992, with no real change in the number of acres under cultivation, the world’s farmers produced 1.9 billion tons of grain—a 170 percent increase. If India alone had rejected the high-yielding varieties of the Green Revolution, another 100 million acres of farm land—an area the size of California—would need to be plowed to produce the same amount of grain. That unfarmed land now protects the last of the tigers.
But the human population is still expanding. And there remain places in the world where malnutrition persists and hundreds of thousands of people, especially children, die for lack of food. Where will the next increments in food production come from? I believe they will come from genetic modification....

Pdf of full article.

Nina V. Fedoroff, Evan Pugh Professor and Verne M. Willaman Chair of Life Sciences, is one of the nation’s most prominent researchers in the life sciences and biotechnology. Throughout her career, she has distinguished herself as a pioneer in the application of molecular techniques to plants. Her laboratory studies genes that contribute to a plant’s ability to fight off disease, environmental pollutants, and other environmental stresses. The overall goal of her research is to identify important stress-response genes that geneticists can use to strengthen the ability of plants to withstand environmental assaults. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 1995, Fedoroff was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University from 1978 to 1995. She earned a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, at Syracuse University in 1966, and a doctoral degree in molecular biology at The Rockefeller University in 1972.