Genetic Vegomatics Splice and Dice With Weird Results

Consider the Rock Carrots And the Headless Lettuce; The Tomato-Fish Combo 

KEN YAMADA / Wall Street Journal 18apr92

Sometimes, William Belknap admits, a bioengineered potato does funny things. "It doesn't want to behave," he says ominously. It grows curves like eyebrows, knobs like a nose-even arms. But relax, he says, "I'd be more worried about the hole in the ozone layer than about potatoes."

Mr. Belknap is a pioneer in the field of bioengineered food, the burgeoning, industry that asks the question:  What do you get when you cross a tomato with a fish?

The answer, unfortunately, is:  Not always what you expect.

Bioengineered food promises all sorts of major advances. But It's still a hit-or-miss — and miss and miss-business. Scientists combine things they hope will work together, stick the seeds in the ground and see what comes up.s

The Return of Mothra

In some cases. what comes up is not a pretty sight. As Mr. Belknap, an Agriculture Department researcher, puts it: "It's not nice to fool nature. Sometimes you get slapped. And some people get slapped around a lot."

Let's just say it: Sometimes, you get mutants.

Consider the lettuce with no head. Department of Agriculture researchers figured a single-serving, grapefruit-size lettuce would be nice. So first they created a dwarf lettuce plant by altering its DNA with a chemical solution, then crossed it with iceberg lettuce. Bad news: Some came up from the ground in Salinas, Calif., with no center at all, just a bunch of leaves. "It's like throwing dice, but they're slightly loaded," researcher Edward Ryder Says. But eventually, Mr. Ryder says, the effort paid off when a head grew that was "round, firm — no parts were missing or anything like that:" Expect to see mini-lettuce in markets next year, he says.

Plant breeding-crossing naturally occurring strains is a very old way of making better varieties. Bioengineering, in which genes are actually spliced together, is newer, and offers more possibilities. While it wouldn't be possible to cross-breed a live chicken with a potato, for instance, It is possible to bioengineer the match.

No Bruises, No Wings

It sounds like the makings of a '50s sci-fi movie, doesn't it? Godzilla meets the Wolf Man and becomes Mothra. Hooey, say biotech advocates. They insist that the genes they work with are so specialized that only single traits are affected. For instance, they might take a melanin-stifling gene from a moth and a melanin-producing gene from a potato, to get a bruise-resistant potato, but they swear there's no way they'd get a potato with wings.

Some environmental groups are less sanguine. Sierra Magazine once depicted biotech research with an illustration showing potatoes climbing out of the ground with horns and sharp teeth. National Wildlife Federation spokeswoman Jane Rissler says tampering with nature poses risks that aren't fully understood. "I'm not convinced that our food supply needs this tinkering," she says.

One of the tinkerers is Calgene Inc. in Davis, Calif., which hoped to Improve the shelf-life of tomatoes. Its plan: bind a gene triggering spoilage with Its mirror image, so the gene's effectiveness would be turned off. But when an. early tomato prototype grew, some areas of the normally all red fruit ripened very quickly — and others not at all. That left a blotchy skin of "green islands of unripe tissue," says William Hiatt of Calgene. "It looked like a Christmas tree bulb."

Calgene went on to develop a longer-lasting tomato, which is being considered for Federal Drug Administration approval.

In Cinnaminson, N.J., scientists at a biotech company called DNA Plant Technology Corp. nibbled en an idea to package garden variety vegetables as snacks in potato-chip like bags. They began cloning, growing, breeding, testing and tasting, sorting through all kinds of vegetables. Mini-cucumbers looked good in a bag. Then they went mushy.

Even when the researchers thought they got it right, they didn't. They finally developed "Corn Gems," dehydrated corn kernels to munch on like popcorn. They were a big hit in the lab. But then a consumer test group tasted them and decreed them a dud. "We developed a terrific product that nobody like," says David Evans, a DNA Plant vice-president.

DNA Plant also tried to make a sweeter, crunchier carrot. One was created and grown. Then taste-tester Leslie Lipschutz bit into it — or at least tried to, , "I'm surprised I didn't lose any teeth," he says.

In another lab, red hot jalapeno peppers were crossed with sweet green-peppers in search of a small, red, sweet "snacking" pepper. Up sprung plants from which hung one-of-a-kind peppers, looking like shiny red apples or long skinny carrots. Other squat-shaped peppers` grew straight up, perched on stems. "You won't see that anywhere else in the world," a greenhouse manager says. Eventually, the company was rewarded with an almost seedless trophy pepper.

DNA Plant researchers are less further along in a grand experiment to mate an arctic fish gene with a tomato gene. Why? Tomatoes don't freeze well. But a gene in these fish produces a kind of antifreeze protein. So how about mixing them? Executives say lab results look promising. In any case, says Mr. Evans, "As long as we aren't taking the odor gene, we're OK."

That's just the problem with rapeseed — also called canola — a plant used to make a low saturated fat cooking oil: When heated, rapeseed oil smells fishy. So DNA Plant has been breeding out fishiness and improving its cooking qualities. Every day, during a kind of canola oil happy hour, taste testers gather in a room and take small cups of oil, swish them under their noses like fine wines, sip, then spit. But this is not Vieux Chateau Certan '70: Judging categories posted on a wall range from "buttery" to "rusty nails" and "trash bags."

"The worst part of it is the thought of doing it," taste supervisor Mr. Lipschutz says. The search continues.

Potatoes present another big challenge because they have a natural tendency toward wild, variations, diseases, bruises and mutants. The Department of Agriculture's Mr. Belknap thinks he can meet that challenge. "Our mission, our motto," he says of his lab in Albany, Calif., "is to build a better potato." The key, Mr. Belknap believes, is a synthetic gene he named "Mark 1," developed from bits of chicken and moth genes, which he hopes will help make potatoes bruise-resistant.

But it's not a pretty process. Some of Mr. Belknap's experimental efforts end up in the fields of Idaho cultivated by fellow Department of Agriculture researcher Joseph Pavek. He has seen potatoes that sprout purple eyes, alligator-hide-type skin, thumb-like protrusions and eyebrows. Others have noses that look like Pinocchio's. "That's not desirable," Mr. Pavek says, adding, with some understatement: "You wouldn't want to see that in the market."

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