Warren Porter Interviewed

Wisconsin Public Television 13nov01

Warren Porter, Environmental Toxicologist & Zoologist

Q. Tell me about your background?

Warren Porter: Well I have kind of a broad background. I started out in physiological ecology and got my PhD at UCLA, and then I started working with a physicist turned botanist for post-doc, and then came to the UW-Madison and began taking courses, firstly in mechanical engineering, because I was working on how animals are related to their physical environment, how for example when a lizard changes color, what does that mean to the animal in terms of its heat balance, how much longer can it stay outdoors if it blanches when it gets hot as opposed to staying really dark. So then I began to work with mechanical engineers to figure out how the animals interact with their physical environment, then I got into low level diseases and how does that add to the stress, and John Mitchell in mechanical engineering was my collaborator and Bill Beckman, and then I began to work with Tom Yuill, who's now head of the IES, and Tom was a virologist and really working on disease effects, and he knew Ron Hinsdill in bacteriology. Ron was really just beginning to discover that a lot of environmental chemicals had immune suppression properties. So I started thinking, immune suppression--disease effects, how does that all fit together and how does that also tie in with the physical environment? How does climate impact on this as well? So we started thinking about stacking one stress on top of another, and we began to do research there, got involved with the Center for Environmental Toxicology, and pretty soon we started looking at plant growth regulator compounds, we got a grant from the EPA to look at those, and in the process discovered that another common chemical, aldicarb, was a chemical that could cause immune suppression, and this was being used in the central sands region of Wisconsin on potato crops. So that was sort of the entrée. Here we had an environmental chemical that was touted as being really pretty safe, and yet we were getting indications that at levels 100 times lower than the EPA said was totally safe we were getting immune suppression effects. Moreover, we were seeing things that are not typically seen in toxicology, namely that there was an inverse dose response. That is, the greatest effect was at the lowest does. So all of these things began to come together. Chemical toxicants, disease and climate. And then we began to ask a whole lot of other questions about it as I began to extend my thinking and began to try to understand how genetics fits into all of this, how does it modify hormones, because genes make proteins, and proteins are often times enzymes that are important in producing hormones, because hormones are very essential in terms of developmental processes and all of the other things that really make us what we are.

After we began to understand how hormones and the immune system functions were being modified, one of the things we began to understand was that the nervous, endocrine and immune systems are all connected. We knew that the genes are responsible for producing proteins, and proteins are oftentimes enzymes that code, or that facilitate the production of various kinds of hormones. They're critically important in development. For example, thyroid hormone is crucial for forming the brain. When the brain forms it's a couple of ridges that come up along the whole length of the embryo and these things arch over and they form a tube, and the front end of the tube is a brain, and the back end of the tube is the spinal chord. We began to look through the literature and discovered that a woman named Susan Porterfield down in Georgia was finding that if mom's thyroid level was either too high or too low, when that tube was forming, that you'd get an abnormal brain, and especially the hind brain, and this is the place where all our fine motor coordination is centered, which is our basis for thinking and reasoning and learning. So there was some suspicion that maybe we had some learning disabilities associated with these hormone changes, and so we began to think about how our genes are being modified in a variety of different kinds of ways, possibly even by genetic engineering.

Q. Do you have concerns about the health effects of genetically engineered food?

Warren Porter:I guess one of the things that became clear was that as genetic research has progressed, and especially as new genes have been inserted in crops and those genes have been transferred by pollen, we've begun to understand that what we thought were genes that stay only in a particular species and nobody else gets them, you just transfer them from one individual to another in the same species. Now we're beginning to understand that there's a massive amount of transfer horizontally between species that we never expected. Firstly, we thought well this may just be between some kinds of plants that are more vulnerable. But now we're beginning to understand that when animals eat the plants, that some of that genetic material is actually getting across the gut and into the tissues and cells of some of the species of animals. So all of a sudden, now you're looking at the possibility of introducing a gene and having that transfer across plants, maybe even through soil microorganisms, and then ultimately getting into the body at least of some species and Lord knows what the impacts of that are.

Another thing that has me concerned is what I would call gene culture. I don't mean gene culture in the sense of a petri dish in a laboratory. If I were to, for example, take somebody and fly them up into Alaska and put them down in an Inuit Village. Take them right out of Madison and put them in an Inuit village in Alaska. Say, okay, now you function here. I'm transferring you out of your culture, I'm putting you in a new culture where the rules of operation may or may not be different, but you don't know the rules of that operation, you don't know that language. We're beginning to understand that when you transfer a single gene out of an organism, firstly, it has evolved in the context of the other genes in that organism. And what we have done prior to genetic engineering, is simply to take breeding, which means transferring whole chromosomes, the whole context, from one individual to another. Now what we're doing is basically culture shock, in a sense genetic culture shock. In that we really don't know how genes work with each other. For a while we thought we knew quite a bit about that, but then with the new information that's been coming out now with the sequencing, for example, of the human genome and other species. In humans for example, we have about 30,000 genes. The old theory was that one gene produces one protein, codes to one protein or maybe a couple. But now we're beginning to understand, at least in humans, that we have anywhere from 100 to 300,000 proteins in our body and only 30,000 genes, which is the information to make them. How is this happening, what really is gene culture, what is the culture of genes?

Q. I've been told by other scientists that DNA is very similar whether it's bacteria, animal or human so there is no inherent reason to fear genetically engineered food.

Warren Porter:I don't know for sure the answer to that, absolutely it's a very important point to make that the genes that we have are shared in common with the other species. We talk about this in basic zoology all the time, in fact I've lectured on it and it's an important part of our connection to all the other living things on this planet. But one of the things that has changed in the evolution of higher organisms is the increasing amounts of what have been referred to as junk DNA. One of the things you see in humans is a huge increase in the amount of so called junk DNA. Whatever the function of that material is, it seems likely that people are now beginning to explore the role of this material, because in higher vertebrates, especially in humans, the amount of this has enormously increased. So people are beginning to think, well maybe really this does have some kind of function, which means that there is a culture of genes, a culture of gene function, in a way that, or in a context that we haven't really been able to understand yet. This is going to be the subject of a lot of future research.

Q. Should we be concerned about insect resistance or weeds developing resistance to genetically engineered plants?

Warren Porter:Well, I think there are concerns in both of the arenas, with BT plants, as well as herbicide resistant plants. Firstly, let's take the situation of BT corn. One of the things that we know is that insects that consume this material have a wide genetic diversity in terms of their ability to tolerate or withstand that. We know already that there's some resistance to this, and the problem with genetically engineering it into plants so that no matter when an insect comes along and no matter how much it eats it's always going to get some of this stuff, what you do is you're moving and you're promoting a resistance to that particular toxin. Right now, that's the backbone of the agriculture, globally, that is an organic agriculture. If people depend on this a lot, and by genetically engineering it into crops so that it's always present, it's like taking DDT and just spraying it out so that everything gets exposed. Sooner or later you get resistance developing. This is a primary concern. Also BT corn has shown us that those kinds of genes can be transferred across species. Even into insects and there is some suggestive evidence now that it can show up in the tissues of sheep and in cattle. I believe it's cattle also that have consumed it, but I know it's in some of the domestic animals. So the concept of transferring a gene that you originally planned to have only in plants and having it show up in animals is one of concern. And particularly because some of the other parts of technology, of the genetic technology, can be various kinds of trigger genes that you turn things on and off with.

For example, antibiotic resistance, which is used to turn certain genes on or off, the last thing we want to do is genetically engineer ourselves to be resistant to antibiotics. That may never happen, but, this is one of the possible concerns there. In the context of herbicide resistance, unfortunately what's happened there in the case of Roundup ready products, we have a situation where people are using an excessive amount of this herbicide. The consequence of that is that these herbicide mixtures are designed to get into the material, the plant, to kill the plant. In the case of a resistant plant, it still dissolves in the tissues of the plant, so we have soybeans right now, for example, that are being produced that are allowed to have 2 to 3 parts per million of this compound in the tissues. This is the material that goes into our baby foods, it's the material that's the basis for all of our processed foods, and it's also the primary food source, soy products, for vegetarian type of diets. So you have now all of a sudden an herbicide plus the organic soaps and surfactants that allow it to get into these plants that are present in the food crops that are genetically designed to be resistant to this compound. That's a tremendous problem because the research that we have done on other mixtures of herbicides are showing that concentrations at those levels are sufficient to induce changes in the neurological, endocrine and immune systems of the animals that we are studying. If that kind of thing is also happening when people consume these materials, and there also happens to be some indication that this particular chemical is not broken down by cooking, then you have the process of very subtle long term, low-level contamination of the entire population.

And if some of this neurological deficit is impacting on learning abilities, or aggression levels, or immune system functions, we're seeing enormous rises in these kinds of categories in the general population. Not only in the U.S., but globally, there is cause for concern, precaution.

Q. Do you think that scientists can be sure there will be no long term negative impacts with genetically engineered crops?

Warren Porter:Well in 1900 they buried a time capsule, and in it they put their predictions for what the 20th century was going to be like. And when they dug that time capsule up and began to go down the list, every single one of the predictions was wrong. One of the predictions was that we would have essentially free electricity because the atom would be so powerful and would provide us with so much energy that we would have it essentially free. At one point we thought that tobacco was really pretty safe. Tobacco was a social kind of thing, it was used in peace pipes between the Indians and the early settlers. Later on we found out that that's not quite right. Then we had the advent of pesticides, we had DDT, which was advertised as being totally safe. In fact, I have a slide, 1945 Jones Beach State Park, a truck with three men on it, they're fogging the whole beach and little boys and girls are running through this fog, and the sign on the truck says, "DDT Powerful Insecticide, Harmless to Humans." Now we're hearing stories about other compounds that are advertised to be safe as water to drink, and we're finding out, by golly, that they have a lot of biological impacts too. So the history there is not so good in terms of our ability to predict. We humans appear to be really, exceptionally poor at predicting the future, and here I am standing trying to predict the future I guess, and I'm probably really poor at it too, so how do you know?

Q. I've heard this technology compared to the risks we took when electricity was first made available to consumers.

Warren Porter:That's right, we do choose to take risks, but we also have the obligation to make an intelligent decision. I mean if you're going to take a risk, then you should have the option to decide for yourself if you want to take that risk. That means that you have to have information available that allows you to choose. We have many rules about taking care of our animals in research, we have to go through all kinds of processes, protocols that we have to write, to say okay, there's no risk here, there's no risk there, if there's a risk here, here's how we're going to deal with it, but in the case of genetically engineered food, if that is not labeled, for example, then you don't have information for yourself, to make your own decision. You know you can put ten people on a railroad track, between the rails, and have a train coming down the track at 40 mph. Some of those people are going to decide to jump really early and get out of the way, somebody else in there who's feeling particularly athletic might decide you know to wait until it's five or ten yards away before they jump, that's their option. But they are getting information all along the way, until something happens. They need to know whether or not that food was grown without chemicals or not, I mean without pesticides. They need to know whether or not there are genetically engineered products in that food, partly because of the possibility of allergic reactions to unusual proteins. Partly because there might be a possibility of transfer to them of some gene that might actually get into their systems or their offspring's systems. They should have that option. Those are some of the things I think that have to be on that. I'm sure that there's going to be a lot of discussion about what should be on those labels. But already Europe has engineered warnings for genetically engineered food, and that seems to be a feasible kind of thing to do.

Q. Do you think these products will reduce pesticide use and therefore benefit the environment and our helath?

Warren Porter:So far the efforts to make these kinds of things resistant to pests, in some very limited cases, it's been successful, in the short term. We also have to be looking long term. If I were in a position where I was going to have to put something like this into an organism, a genetically engineered product, one of the things I would want would be something that does not release the product until the organism is already under detectable attack, rather than just a few nips here and there, which is the kind of feeding that could potentiate resistance. I think we're going to have to be a lot more sophisticated in the way we look at things. You cannot afford to be just a chemist, or just a biochemist, or just a genetic engineer. You really need to understand a good deal about the physiology and the ecology of what you're doing, and that isn't present right now.

I know that there's a tremendous pressure in business these days to get something on the market right away. But I think we also have to ask is it right to test our children without their consent.

Q. Is the type of chemical used on herbicide resistant crops less toxic that what was used before?

Warren Porter:That may be because we just really haven't done very much testing. There is a lot of evidence now, a recent paper that's come out showing for example that Roundup can interfere with steroid hormone production. Our steroids are the hormones that are all of our sex hormones, they're also the hormones that are emergency kinds of hormones that are how we respond to various kinds of stress. So if we're messing with the hormones that protect us against stress, or the hormones that allow us to reproduce, and we're putting that in all the foods that people eat are we really doing something that's wise? Some people may want to say, hey, that's not going to affect me, and you know, it may be right.

One of the difficult things here is that we understand now that there is somewhere between 30 and 40% of the population that seems to be more genetically at risk. So we might feed this stuff to the general population, and 30% or 40% of the population might begin to show some kind of symptom and the rest shows no problem, and so how do you decide?

There are data in the literature now showing that at least in some circumstances Roundup can be around for as much as three years in the forest, for example, where it's been applied. The decay rate on it is much longer in some circumstances than originally had been expected. Also we're finding, not we, but the scientific literature is showing, things like the impacts of Roundup on the ability to maintain defensive enzymes in the body against other toxins. It's lowering those defensive enzymes. Another concern is that it's been shown recently that it's involved in modifying certain kinds of steroid hormone production. Our steroid hormones are the hormones that protect us from stress, and they're also the hormones that allow us to reproduce. So are we messing with some of our fundamental capacities, so respond to stress, and to maintain our species. I don't know the answer to that, but these are questions that need to be addressed.

I think it's important to realize that there is always more than one solution. We have actually two or three or four or five solutions available to us right now. There's a tremendous amount of effort going in now to a variety of different kinds of alternatives for controlling pests. And some of these we've known about since before the '40s, since before nerve gas was created, and used subsequently in pesticides.

Even just getting on the web these days and doing a search. For example, about six months ago I got on the web and I wanted to know about organic apples. I had 1600 hits for alternative ways to grow apples. One of the things we have not done, and one of the reasons that we don't have more choices is that the application of money for research at the federal level is almost exclusively for chemical alternatives or for genetic engineering. Less than 1% of the total agriculture budget goes for alternative agriculture kinds of research. Now when all of the ag colleges across this country are being funded from that agriculture budget, and 99% or more are being funded for work with chemicals, you know where the information is going to be, and you also know where the information is not. If we could get a bit of a change in the proportion of that budget into alternative agriculture, we would see a lot more options available to us.

In fact, because the organic industry has been growing at about 20% a year, we are seeing in fact, private companies that are now coming out with lots of new opportunities for control of weeds, for better plants that are bred in more conventional ways. I'm not saying that genetic engineering is not something that should be done. I think what I am trying to say is that genetic engineering has to be done in a broader context. You cannot do it just in the context of individual genes just because they match one gene against the other. You've got to have a view of what is the culture of the gene? What is the culture of how the genes work in the cell? We don't know the answer to that yet.

Q. Do you think publicly funded universities should do research funded and directed by private industry?

Warren Porter:That's I guess, that's a very difficult question. Because you see there's so much pressure to narrow your focus, these days, especially, when you're a scientist. The pressure is get it done, get it out, make the money, and then move on to the next thing. We've sort of in some areas because that pressure is so great, people just don't have the time, for whatever reason. I mean if you want to get a PhD from the University of Wisconsin you've got 3-5 years to get the PhD and get out. You can't just stay here for 10 years, nobody is going to fund you for that, and people want to see you produce. So really, everything is interconnected again. I don't have an easy solution for that question. It's important that we use science not only for basic research, but also to try to use it in constructive ways to help society which is funding it. I see no problem with doing both. We certainly are pressured more and more to use and apply things immediately and directly, rather than have the luxury of thinking about it and exploring possible problems with that technology.

Part of it has been the steady decline in federal support, the steady decline in state support. When I came here in 1968 about 50% of our budget was funded by the state, now less than 22% is funded by the state. That's an enormous decline. In the same time the federal grant monies have shrunk. There are some areas that are being funded very heavily, like genetics, neurophysiology, and certain areas of study like lead and mercury and that kind of thing. The broad opportunities for people to get money to do research aren't there anymore.

Q. Is the federal government handling the new technology in a balanced way?

Warren Porter:I think if the federal government is to handle this technology, there has to be a lot of input from many different stakeholders. Right now that isn't happening, pretty much money talks as far as I can see in terms of what is happening. The people, one thing that is happening that I think is very, very useful is the internet, access to internet by people. The senators and congressman are receiving enormous numbers of email from people who are concerned about various kinds of problems. But the funding decisions are really the critical thing. It's the subcommittees and the congress that are making those decisions, and somehow or other the public has to have input and I think the whole business of making sure that the people who are on those committees are not funded by the various agencies or individual corporations that are going to benefit from how they make their decisions. We have to figure out a way to get around that, because I really think it is ruining some of the things that ought to be happening in congress that aren't yet.

Q. What about labeling genetically engineered food?

Warren Porter:I have private feelings about that, but there certainly are strong financial interests that would be compromised if there were labeling, it would cost them additional monies. One of the interesting things about that question, though, is that historically every time that new labeling has been requested, and then there's been a great outcry that this would cost way too much money. In fact, retrospectively, when it was implemented, those kind of costs haven't been there, not anywhere near the level that people were asserting. So I think that we can do it, I think it needs discussion, and I think all the stakeholders ought to be involved in making those decisions, but the American public, which is funding the government, has the right to know. I cannot recall any specific ones right now. Well certainly the question of labeling of organic foods is a good example. The very first proposals for what constitutes organic food were way down low, that was the original proposal by the Department of Agriculture. But, the internet responded, the people on the internet responded, and there was a massive outpouring, and as a consequence of that, the standards were raised very significantly. To a point where people I think now are really pretty comfortable with where those organic labels are.

One of the things that we don't do is test foods that have been genetically engineered on people before we release these things. Should we do that? That's a really strong, important ethical question. But if we don't, then what we're doing is doing it anyway without consent if you don't have labels. So there's a real ethical problem here and I guess we could feed it to primates, who are the closest to us. But then there are a whole lot of ethical questions there, and a whole lot of animal rights people say, hey we don't want to feed this to our monkeys, we love our monkeys, we love our chimpanzees. So, then the question becomes, do we love our chimpanzees more than we love our children.

Sometimes I feel a great sadness that we're in the process of experimenting with ourselves, especially with our children. I don't know whether we are in the process of raising a generation of children who are learning disabled and hyper-aggressive. But there are increasingly evidences out there, even right here in Madison, in the Madison school district. From 1990 to 1995, the increases in learning disabilities, in orthopedic anomalies at birth, in emotion disorders, has almost doubled in a five year period, according to US Federal Child Count data. Whatever is causing that is something that gives me a great concern. We have national schools of excellence, a lot of them in Madison, and yet, these things are happening to our children. And not just here in Madison, they're happening in Chicago, they're happening in Philadelphia, they're happening in Iran, in Australia. What are we doing to our children? I think we really are in a very precarious situation in some respects, and if we're in the process of getting ready to add to that load of stresses. You know I started with climate, and then disease, and then environmental contaminants, are we going to be talking about genetically engineered foods, or some kinds of them? How do we protect ourselves?

Thank you very much for your time.