Time Magazine Feb. 1, 1999 "The Suicide Seeds"
TIME Magazine

ENVIRONMENT
FEBRUARY 1, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 4
The Suicide Seeds
Terminator genes could mean big biotech bucks--but big trouble too, as a
grass-roots protest breaks out on the Net
BY JEFFREY KLUGER

For farmers hoping for a healthy harvest, the best place to turn for
help these days is the Monsanto Corp. One of the world's leading
biotechnology companies--and lately a pioneer in genetically engineered
seeds--Monsanto has been incorporating flashy traits like herbicide and
pest resistance into everything from canola to corn. But such supercrops
don't come cheap. Farmers pay a premium for Monsanto seeds, and to make
sure they keep paying, the company requires them to sign an agreement
promising not to plant seeds their crops produce. If farmers want the
same bountiful harvest next year, they must return to the company for a
new load of seeds.

While this arrangement makes sense for Monsanto, it works only if
farmers honor it--something that's difficult to police in the U.S. and
almost impossible in the developing world. Now, however, Monsanto hopes
to enforce biologically what it can't enforce contractually. With the
help of clever genes currently in development, future Monsanto crops may
be designed with a new feature in mind: sterility. No sooner will the
company's plants mature than the seeds they carry will lose the ability
to reproduce.

From Monsanto's point of view, the set of new genes--which others have
dubbed Terminator--is a perfectly legitimate way to protect their
intellectual-property rights. Not everybody agrees. And in the 10 months
since the patent for the seed-sterilizing technology was issued,
Terminator has become the focus of a grass-roots protest that is
spreading through the Internet like, well, wildfire.

Let the new science take hold, opponents warn darkly, and farmers could
find themselves coming to Monsanto, seed cup in hand, paying whatever
the company demands before they can plant that season's crop. Worse
still, some doomsday scenarios suggest, pollen from Terminator plants
could drift with the wind like a toxic cloud, cross with ordinary crops
or wild plants, and spread from species to species until flora all
around the world had been suddenly and irreversibly sterilized.

No serious scientist thinks anything so dire will come to pass. For
Monsanto, however, with a technology in its pocket and a fight on its
hands, the situation is about as grim as it can get--at least in terms
of public relations. "From a marketing perspective, the technology is
brilliant," says biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin. "From a social
perspective, it's pathological. This is a question of who controls the
seeds of life."

To get a feel for the p.r. beating Monsanto is taking, check out the
Web. Activist groups like Rural Advancement Foundation International are
using the Net to rally Terminator opponents, urging them to flood the
U.S. Department of Agriculture with letters of protest. At least 4,000
people from 62 countries have responded--an anti-Monsanto army raised by
the electronic vox pop alone. "The group R.A.F.I. masterfully called
this Terminator," says Gary Toenniessen, deputy director for
agricultural science at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City.
"It's not what Monsanto would call it."

For all the heat Monsanto is taking, the company did not create
Terminator. The technology was developed by the USDA and a Mississippi
seed company known as Delta and Pine Land, and the patent was awarded to
both of them. Monsanto later made a $1 billion-plus offer to buy
Delta--an offer that was quickly accepted.

Opponents don't care who made Terminator. To them the idea is
Frankensteinian on its face. After tweezing out a toxin-producing
stretch of DNA from a noncrop plant, gene scientists managed to knit the
lethal genetic material into the genome of commercial plants. They also
inserted two other bits of coding that would keep the killer gene
dormant until late in the crop's development, when the toxin would
affect only the seed and not the plant. But because the seed company
needs to generate enough product to sell in the first place, the
scientists included one more DNA sequence--one that repressed all the
sterilizing genes they had just inserted. Once they had grown all the
seeds they needed, they would soak them in an antibiotic bath that
neutralized the genetic repressor--rendering them infertile. "This is
the most intricate application of genetic engineering to date," says
Margaret Mellon, a senior scientist at the Union for Concerned
Scientists.

But clever science isn't necessarily popular science, and Terminator has
made a lot of enemies, particularly in the developing world. The USDA
and Delta and Pine Land have filed Terminator patent applications in
dozens of countries. In many of those countries farmers can't afford to
buy top-of-the-line seeds every year and must rely on saving a portion
of each crop in order to plant their fields the following year. Monsanto
insists that weak patent protection in many of these countries makes a
technology like Terminator especially important. But that argument
carries little weight in parts of the world where food bowls are going
empty. "This technology brings no benefit to farmers," says Hope Shand,
research director of RAFI.

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ENVIRONMENT
FEBRUARY 1, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 4
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Monsanto disagrees--and not without reason. Say what they will about
Terminator, even some detractors admit that the company designs a hell
of a seed. The maker of one of the world's most popular herbicides,
Monsanto has created crops that are resistant to the toxin. With it,
farmers can spray away weeds without spraying away their harvest. The
company has also developed plants with a built-in toxin that is harmless
to humans but lethal to insects. If farmers in the developing world use
these muscled-up crops--even with Terminator genes--their harvests might
increase enough to cover the cost of buying seeds each spring. Says
Delta and Pine Land vice president Harry Collins: "It will help them
become more production-oriented rather than remaining subsistence
farmers."

Despite the doomsday alarms being sounded by environmentalists, genetic
engineers at Monsanto argue that there is no real risk of pollen from
Terminator plants causing widespread sterilization in other plants--and
they're probably right. Gene drift does occur, but nature doesn't make
it easy. Many crops, like rice, are mostly self-pollinated. As for crops
that are pollinated by wind or insects, precautions like planting border
fields to keep crops isolated help confine genes. What's more, crops
tend to mature at the same time--sending out a great puff of pollen all
at once--while wild plants reproduce over a longer period. During the
brief time Terminator pollen is in the air, relatively few wild plants
would notice. "The concern over widespread escape is overblown," insists
Toenniessen.

None of this has deterred Monsanto's detractors. Activists are turning
up the pressure on the Internet--supporting the "Cremate Monsanto"
campaign in which protesters in India have set fire to company test
fields. At the same time, a lawsuit is set to be filed charging that the
USDA, by supporting Terminator technology, has violated its mandate to
help American farmers. Monsanto will probably respond that without
Terminator genes to guarantee seed sales, the company has no incentive
to develop better crops. But while such a stop-me-before-I-kill-again
argument may work in a business seminar, it may not play well before a
jury.

For the next few years, things should remain unsettled. Although genetic
technology is progressing rapidly, it could be years before a seed
containing Terminator genes is ready for market. Lawsuits challenging
the technology are likely to advance more slowly still. All this gives
Monsanto a chance to rethink its marketing strategy. It may decide to
limit the number of Terminator crops it develops or sell supercrops to
the developing world without Terminator genes. Says Terminator critic
Mellon: "There are many, many opportunities for this thing not to work."
What worries critics is what happens if it does.

--REPORTED BY DAVID BJERKLIE/NEW YORK, MEENAKSHI GANGULY/NEW DELHI AND
DICK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON