Terminator Will Never Die 

Jean-Pierre Berlan

The Gardian Weekly (Finance section, October 14-20) explained how Monsanto was convinced that the Terminator gene (to create plants producing biologically sterile seeds) "was technology gone mad". Developed by the US Department of Agriculture and a private company, The Delta and Pine Land Co., it was patented in the US in March 1998 and later in some 87 countries by Monsanto after it announced its purchase of Delta in May. 

Is Terminator "technology gone mad"? Or is it the accomplishment of the political economy of profit into agricultural plants and animals? 

Terminator or the bitter victory of political economy over life 

A seedman has no market as long as the farmer's harvested grain is his next year seeds. To exist a "seed" industry must make it impossible to sow one's harvested grain - the foundation of agriculture and civilisation. "Seeds" has two dimensions not to be confused. The first is physical and refers to the grain - the "diskette", so to speak. The harvested grain must be processed into seed. It requires cleaning, sorting, coating, bagging, storing the physical "seed grain". In present agriculture, it can be cheaper for farmers to have these services performed by specialized enterprises which sell "seeds" in the restricted sense of "seed grain" or diskette on a low profit competitive market. The second is immaterial and refers to the genetic "software". Its market exists in so far that farmers cannot reproduce nor multiply, that is copy, it in the course of growing the crop. Since the food chain depends upon this "seed software", the few self-proclaimed "life science" transnational agro-chemical corporations which have taken over the "seed software" industry will not give up their objective : controlling the world food chain. What Terminator does. 

But this victory of profit over life most fundamental property, re-producing and multiplying, has turned into a bitter one. For it reveals what had to be carefully hidden to stand a chance of success : turning this property into an investor's privilege. Up to now, seed companies were small (except "hybrid" seed companies). Farmers were a powerful social group. Life had a holy dimension. Such a privilege had then to appear as a law of nature. Until Terminator, scientists, from economists to plant geneticists, unaware of the pressure of political economy, have unknowledgedly performed this mystification. Terminator and the following retreat of Monsanto tells us that the "life science" industry felt over-confident enough to reveal its objective, only to realize the devastating blunder to do so when this long awaited goal was within reach. 

Breeding in a historical perspective

 At the beginning of the 19th century, British gentlemen-farmers bent on improving their crops on their own domains realized (rightly) that cereals - wheat, barley, oats - "bred true", that is kept their characteristics from one generation to the next provided that a plant be reproduced and multiplied from a single ear or better, grain. At first, they simply looked for "sports", that is exceptional plants to replace the mixture of plants they were growing. But, in 1836, John Le Couteur codified this practice under the name of the isolation method. It consisted in isolating plants carrying desirable characteristics, multiplying them from a single ear or single grain, testing them and replacing the original mixture by the best "sort" that could be isolated. "...no previous writer, wrote Le Couteur, had yet called the attention of the agricultural world to the cultivation of pure sorts, originating from one single grain or ear" (On the varieties, properties and classification of wheat) 

Yet in the early 1860's, Major Hallett in England improved upon this isolation technique. "Major Hallett, wrote Darwin in 1868 in The variation of animals and plants under domestication, has gone much farther (than Le Couteur) and by continuous selection of plants from the same ear during successive generations, has made his 'pedigree in wheat' (and other cereals) now famous in many quarters of the world." "It is highly important, wrote Hallett in 1887, to purchase fresh seed every year from Brighton where the selection is continued, and without which no 'breed' of anything can be kept up." In Germany and Northern Europe similar views prevailed. 

Why by the 1860's true-breeding species "deteriorated" in the farmer's field? Plant biology changed because profit making seedmen were replacing gentlemen-farmers bent on improvements. It was easy. Knowledge about heredity was scarce. Hallett's discovery of the "Scientific Law of Development of Cereals" published in scientific journals, from the prestigious Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society (1862) to Nature, could not be disproved Only in 1892, H. Nilsson at the Svalof Institute in Sweeden showed experimentally that Hallett's "continuous selection" did not improve anything. In 1903, W. Johannsen gave the theoretical explanation : Hallett and his followers starting from a single grain had eliminated all hereditary variations from the very begining! Briefly stated, a socially useless but profitable breeding technique had replaced a socially useful but unprofitable one. 

The 20th century repeated this scenario on a grand scale with the so-called "hybrid" breeding technique discovered for maize by two US geneticists, G. Shull and E. East in 1908-1909. This revolutionary breeding technique is simply the early nineteenth century isolation technique applied to a cross-bred species, but mystified (as necessary) by decades of esoteric scientific debates.   

In maize, the male flower is on top of the plant and the femade on the stem. At pollination time, wind and insects transport the pollen unto neigbouring plants as far as hundreds meters away. Maize is naturally cross-fertilized or "hybrid". As documented by Darwin in 1876, inbreeding cross-bred organisms (crossing organisms having a common heredity) is detrimental to the offsprings. The greater the common heredity, the greater the damage. The most drastic form of inbreeding is self-fertilization. In the case of maize, it "universally results in deterioration" as Shull observed in 1908. 

The isolation method replaces a mixture of plants by a single model of plant. Applied by English gentlemen-farmers to true-breeding species, it is an improvement technique. Applied by American geneticists to a cross-bred species, it becomes a Terminator technique : all plants in the farmer's field being genetically alike, the cross-fertilisation is a self-fertilisation. The next generation suffers from the most severe form of inbreeding depression and farmers cannot sow their harvested grain as they have always done.   

In his first seminal paper (1908), Shull observed that his technique "made it necessary to go back each year to the original combination, instead of selecting from among the hybrid offspring the stock for continued breeding". In the second (1909), he suggested that his method might also improve corn. In other words, he had discovered an expropriation technique while improvement was hypothetical. But in his third paper (end of 1909), he stressed the improvement side : "the production of the highest yield requires simply the finding of the best combination of parents and then repeating this combination year after year". Since "simply finding the best combination of parents" turned out an unfeasible task (one has first to self-fertilize corn for at least 6 generations in order to get "true-breeding" "pure lines" of maize, to cross this astronomic number of lines two by two to get ordinary maize plants which the breeder (and only him) can reproduce and multiply at will since he only has the parents), in 1914 Shull created "out of the blue" a new biological phenomenon, "heterosis", according to which crossing of "unlike gametes" exerted a favorable effect per se. So that only his revolutionary expropriation technique could improve maize. But in these early Mendelian times, Shull's heterosis could not be ruled out. In 1964, American geneticists finally disproved it for yield in maize, but the "hybrid" (proprietary) technique was so well entrenched that there was no serious attempt to develop improvement techniques.   

In November 1910, British geneticists (A. B. Bruce's mathematical considerations and Keeble and Pellew's experiments on Pea), showed that Mendelia  dominance explained inbreeding depression and recovery of vigor in crosses. Improving maize required a mass selection program leading to free varieties and not to proprietary "hybrids". Shull and his rival E. East reacted by a secret agreement (revealed in 1942) "not to enter into any personal controversy about priority, in order not to impede the progress of the hybrid corn program" - i.e., promoting their revolutionary proprietary technique for the emblematic American crop. This implied suppressing the deadly British explanation. Shull and East being the foremost maize geneticists were able to impose their views on the American scene. As to the British geneticists, they had no reason to fight : no maize was grown in England. Up to now, the British school of agricultural genetics sticks to this early view. Rightly so, but with little influence : profit, now more often than ever, prevails over scientific evidence and public welfare.  

The future   

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) risks (a serious concern) and benefits (so far non-existent but for "life science" corporations) is an empty issue. Biological evidence is lacking and will be lacking until it is too late. We should then look at GMOs as the pursuit of the investors's profit, now under the smokescreen of feeding-the-world-and-protecting-the-environment. Terminator contradicted this "life science" propaganda so blatantly so that it was a threat to discrete alternatives.   

Verminator technologies consist in putting for instance desease resistance genes under control of a proprietary chemical. Plants will  get sick unless farmers spray the chemical from the transnational agro-chemical breeder.   

A patent is Terminator by law without its costs. In the US, farmers can be sued if they sow genetically modified patented plants. This inspired the European Directive 98/44 on "Patenting of biotechnological innovations". Article 4(1) states that plants varieties and animal breeds are not patentable, but 4(2) makes it possible to patent them provided they are transgenic. Article 5(1) excludes the discovery of genes from patenting (a disposition common to all patent laws), but 5(2) patents the discovery of genes, including human ones. This incredible directive will accelerate the shift to GMO's - with all their uncertainties - at the expense of safer, more socially efficient, but not patentable conventional methods. If the legal suit of the Dutch, Italian and Norvegian governments before the European Court of Justice on various grounds (in particular its being against human dignity) fails, their failure will be ours. Profits of the "life industry" carry more weight, it seems, than the welfare, health or will of European citizens and farmers.   

There is Terminator by contract : Monsanto requires farmers who buy patented transgenic varieties to sign a contract not to sow their harvested grain. The privatization of public agricultural research all over the world promises a bright future to this form of Terminator. Farmers will "demand" their improved plants and animals from contractually terminated supply of Monsanto, Aventis, Novartis and DuPont.   

The CIMMYT (International Center for Improvement of Maize and Wheat) 1997 symposium "Heterosis in crops" (i.e., "inbreeding depression in crops")  shows that hybridization is not outmoded. CIMMYT is serving Third World farmers but privatization extends now to international agricultural research : the "life science" industry sponsored this symposium. South African hybrid wheat breeders let the cat out of the bag : "This unfortunate situation (the failure of hybrid wheat for 30 years) was mostly caused by highly competitive and successful research in the public sector achieving genetic improvement of wheat at a constant rate by using conventional techniques and procedures." With Monsanto's recent purchase of Plant Breeding International, the British public cereal breeding jewel privatized in 1989, UK farmers may soon enjoy Monsanto's costly "hybrid" wheat genetic improvement instead of the almost free one of public research.  

To conclude, let's make two unlikely assumptions : only GMOs can solve agronomic and food problems ; private investments are necessary to develop GMOs. Does it follow that rewarding private investments requires preventing farmers from sowing their harvested grain? Certainly not as the UPOV breeder's rights system shows. The fact is that investors do not want a "just" reward, they demand a privilege.  

The sun shines. It is most unfortunate for candlemakers. But no one would require that we close our openings so that they can fight the undue competition of the sun.  

Plants and animals re-produce and multiply. It is most unfortunate for "life science" investors. But should this faculty, indeed a common good of Mankind, become the privilege of a few transnational investors?