Science: Coming of the Super Crop

Bug-killing cotton. Tomatoes that ripen late. Genetically engineered plants could transform Indian agriculture.

The vault-like door clangs shut and a shiver creeps up your spine. It's just three degrees above zero in this ice-box of a room, home to a handful of green, baby tomato plants. They look nondescript, but these scraggly shoots have sprung from the seeds of a revolution that could potentially transform an agricultural system ridden with chemical-resistant pests and plateauing yields.

Two minutes have passed and the shivers are now uncontrollable. It is freezing. This is a venalisation room and the plants are getting a chilling shock. In plain English, the tomato plants are being fooled into believing it is winter -- a time to grow -- when a warm September sun is blazing away outside the state-of-the-art laboratories of multinational biotech company Proagro-PGs in rural Haryana. Though they don't look it, these are killer tomatoes. In the invisible molecular wilderness of their DNA lies a toxin-producing gene of a common soil microbe called Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt. From this molecular surgery has sprung a generation of genetically engineered or transgenic super tomatoes, capable of their own defence without the help of toxic pesticides. When a borer eats this super tomato, the protein produced by the new gene paralyses the insect's gut. The hapless borer starves to death.

Every year, nearly half of India's tomato crop is lost to the fruit borer, a wriggly, green caterpillar no thicker than a heavy needle. Borers are cannibals, eating other borers that enter their tomato. So billions of pesticide-resistant borers spread themselves far and wide, each one capable of damaging nine to 10 tomatoes. The result: less tomatoes in the market, one of the prime reasons for soaring prices. The transgenic super tomato could change all that. In trials last year, Proagro scientists got 20 kg of tomatoes from transgenic plants infested with the borer; less than a kilogram from similarly infected normal plants. Proagro is likewise readying a host of genetically altered vegetables infused with the insect-defying Bt gene: brinjal, cabbage and cauliflower. Similarly the US multinational Monsanto, one of the world's largest biotech giants, hopes for a 2000 launch of Bollguard -- cotton resistant to a hugely damaging pest called the boll worm. About 60 per cent of India's total insecticide spray is used on cotton; of that 75 per cent is targeted at the boll worm.

Proagro and Monsanto are closest to launching India's first genetically engineered crops. They use genes developed in laboratories abroad and modify them to suit Indian conditions and the strict testing regime imposed by the Government. But indigenous efforts in this frontier science flourish in a clutch of government and university laboratories. Consider:

Greenhouse and field tests on insect-resistant brinjal, cabbage, rice, cauliflower and tomatoes are underway at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), Delhi. So also preliminary research on delayed ripening of tomatoes and bananas to extend their shelf life.

Pest-resistant tobacco is ready for field trials at the Central Tobacco Research Institute, Rajamundhry, Andhra Pradesh. Pest-resistant potatoes sprout in greenhouses at the Central Potato Research Institute, Shimla. Cotton resistant to moths and worms grows at the National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow.

A more nutritious potato has been genetically engineered at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. At Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science (IIS), scientists are trying to accelerate the growth of sandalwood trees and increase their yield of oil and wood by changing DNA.

Pests and pesticides used against them have badly shaken up agriculture. Integrated pest management techniques, which advocate a mixture of traditional practices and limited pesticides, are failing all over the country, warns a report released last month by the Ministry of Agriculture. Insects eat nearly Rs 6,800 crore worth of crops and that results in a 20 per cent shortfall in total agricultural production. Moreover, pesticide poisoning is rampant in India. Many export shipments are rejected because of an overdose of pesticides. Numerous studies show how more than 70 per cent of vegetables and crops are soaked in poison.

But the consumption of chemicals only grows by the year. The result is a massive resistance to pesticides. "Insects have developed resistance to all known pesticides in the world," says R.P. Sharma, project director at the National Research Centre for Plant Biotechnology, Delhi. The pesticide apocalypse came home in horrific fashion when 200 farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra committed suicide between December and June, their fields literally eaten by armies of super pests. Against super pests like these, transgenic crops are a great hope.

"We expect a cleaner crop, a drastic fall in pesticide use and an increase in yield by 15 to 20 per cent," says P.K. Ghosh, adviser in the Department of Biotechnology (DBT). "Without transgenics, we cannot hope to increase food production."

But don't expect to see super tomatoes at your vegetable vendor until 2000 at least. Research on any kind of transgenic crops, despite their potential to dramatically transform India's beleaguered agriculture, is closely regulated and monitored by the Government. "We have permission to grow tomato plants in the field only until they flower," explains Arvind Kapoor, director at Proagro. "And we have to put up nets around them or keep a one kilometre isolation distance from other crops. Upscaling (from lab to market) is a long, hard route." These are just a few of the precautions that transgenic crops must undergo in India. That isn't surprising. The world has a mixed response: while China has gone ahead full steam since 1992 the US (which has field tested 48 transgenic crops since 1987) acreage is set to double this year. Opposition is strong in Europe though. Austria, for instance, does not allow import of transgenic foods. Critics contend that genetically engineered seeds are a vast, uncontrolled experiment whose long-term impacts are unclear. Playing around with the very blueprint of life, DNA, has led to two sharply differing schools of thought (see box) -- one which says genetic engineering heralds a new human era, another which says it could be the genesis of a perverted evolution. Super crops, some say, could lead to super weeds if the two cross. Others say the long-term effect of these crops on human health just isn't known. More problematic is the risk that widespread use of transgenics will create bugs resistant to Bt. The danger is real.

Conscious of this worldwide debate, the DBT has instituted one of the world's most exhaustive regulatory procedures. Even a government agency like IARI was last year forced to destroy a transgenic brinjal crop that did not conform to safety procedure. Proagro, despite getting the gene from abroad, has been running hundreds of tests for nearly five years. The testing requirements range from proving no ill-effects on animals, on their potential for human allergies, their potential to change the ecosystems in which they grow and even tests to see if their seed cakes are chemically any different from normal plants.

Little wonder then that Proagro hopes to have the first genetically engineered mustard crop ready for government clearance by May 1999 and large-scale launch only by 2000. Yet, mindful of the controversy over transgenic crops, no one is really complaining. "We can strongly say the Indian biotechnology regulatory system is one of the best in the world," says Monsanto's Communications Manager Meena V.

Mandatory tests apart, creating the super crops is no easy job. IARI scientists have only just reached the field-testing stage after starting from scratch four years ago. It is incredibly difficult to splice an infinitesimally small stretch of DNA from one living thing and paste it into the DNA of another -- a molecular jigsaw puzzle. Even if the cell with the new DNA grows from a petri dish to a plant that can be put in the soil there is no guarantee that the new trait -- insect resistance or delayed ripening -- will manifest itself in the new plant. The success rates vary from one in 100 to one in a lakh -- or more.

There is also the critical question of cost. It is clear transgenics will be costly, but their benefits are only just being worked out. IARI begins tests for economic viability only next year. Though seed cost for a hectare of Proagro's transgenic mustard will be six times more than normal mustard, the yield increase will be eight times the order of increased seed cost, says a cost-benefit analysis by company regulatory officer Ellora Mubashir.

These are still early days. Researchers hope to create crops that can grow in salty wastelands, resist viruses and bacteria, even drought. "There is a tremendous need for these traits," confirms Ghosh. If the super crops hold on to the promise they show, India's agriculture could face an age of renewal.

GENES AND SUPER BEINGS
Paradise or peril? Genetic engineering is a rocky path.

Vaccines from plants. Biodegradable plastics from green pond slime. Silk worms that glow in the dark. The first is still a dream. The second a research project underway at Pune's National Chemical Laboratory. And the glowing silk worms -- the end result of a firefly gene grafted into a silkworm -- produced by K. Gopinathan at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, are biological oddities, much like a lab rat in a western laboratory that grew a human ear on its back.

But these wild products of jumping genes hide their true aims: the glowing silk worms indicate how the genome (the sum total of genes) of the silk worm can be manipulated to create a better, more productive silk worm. This year India launched a national project to study the silk worm genome and create more and better silk. In the West, scientists raising successors to Dolly the sheep hope to eventually convert animals into living factories -- their milk producing medicines; their bodies growing human organs.

Genetic engineering, the manipulation of life at its most basic level, is a breakthrough on a par with the splitting of the atom, the discovery of fire. As fire enabled man to melt down metals and reform them into new materials, so too will genetic engineering allow us to take apart DNA, the building blocks of life, and refashion them to our needs. Yet, many are fearful. As the manipulation of the atom uncorked the genie of the atom bomb, tinkering with the process of evolution could unleash biological mayhem. Parents trying to engineer perfect children. Uncontrollable super weeds born after mating with genetically engineered super crops. "We take on the task of creating a second genesis, this time a synthetic one geared to the requisites of efficiency and productivity," says Jeremy Rifkin, an anti-biotech crusader in his new book The Biotech Century. His vision of genetic armageddon may be an extreme one but some dangers do exist. The realisation of biotechnology's promises will depend on how well we manage them.