Increasing genetic diversity

The exodus of rural farmers to cities is occurring at a rapid pace around the world – not just in Mexico. So the genetic diversity of more crops than corn is at stake.

At the same time, a growing world population, coupled with increased urbanization and higher incomes, is creating a greater demand for food. The United Nations predicts that the global population will increase to 8.9 billion by 2050 – a 40 percent increase over the 6.3 billion people on Earth today.

By helping farmers produce greater yields, biotechnology can play a part in making farms of all sizes more viable, which in turn could help reduce the pressure on remaining wilderness areas.

Currently, about 38 percent of the Earth's land area is cropland or pasture. To keep pace with growing food demand, the increase in natural land converted to cropland or pasture has been about 0.3 percent – about the size of Greece or Nicaragua – every year. By one estimate, an additional 4 billion acres of arable land will need to come under the plow by 2050 if there are no increases in farm productivity. That's more than twice the size of the continental United States (about 3 million square miles).

Experts fear that in the coming decades, half of the world's remaining 6 billion acres of forests will be lost to agricultural expansion. If forests continue to disappear at the current rate, as many as 20 percent of all tropical forest species of plants and animals could become extinct in 30 years.

An August 2002 United Nations report predicted that agricultural and urban expansion will threaten biodiversity on 72 percent of the global land area by 2032. The "World Atlas of Biodiversity: Earth's Living Resources for the 21st Century" report said that as much as 48 percent of these areas will become converted to agricultural land, plantations and urban areas, compared with 22 percent today.

"By slowing the rate at which natural habitats are destroyed, GM crops and other technologies that increase agricultural productivity can help to preserve natural biodiversity," said Ammann of the University of Bern.

Bioethics: the future from a test-tube

More than forty years have elapsed since the discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick of a "double spiral" – the DNA molecule. Considerable headway has been made in the field of biology and gene engineering since then, but there are a number of reasons holding back the advance of these research studies. "Today we are in a position to cure Alzheimer disease, but just one injection from a course costs about a million French francs. Methods do exist, but all of them are linked to either economic or ethical problems," admitted one participant in the session, the Secretary-General of the Stockholm International Research Organization.

Laws on bioethics have been passed recently in several countries to somehow adjust the problems that keep arising and to fix the framework which research and practice must not transcend. But these laws vary from country to country. For example, while laboratory tests on the human embryo have been banned with rare exceptions in Germany, such operations can be carried out in Britain but on the condition that the embryo's age does not exceed two weeks.

It is obvious that the research studies being carried out in the field of genetics cannot be halted – for their results will enable mankind to rid itself of such diseases as haemophilia or inherited infantile paralysis. In the view of Prof. Osuntokun of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, the methods of gene engineering will make it possible to wage an effective struggle against tropical diseases which now plague the population of Third World countries.

But, on the other hand, there is quite a number of warranted and unwarranted apprehensions and questions. How should the law treat the creation of chimeras and cloning? If impregnation "in vitro" exists, is there moral justification for the bearing of the human foetus not by its natural mother and even not by a human? Can use be made for such impregnation of the frozen gene material of a deceased person? Is it possible to demand and issue a patent for the human gene?

This is a far from complete list of questions now facing medics and biologists, sociologists and jurists, philosophers and theologians. The International Committee on Bioethics, whose first session took place in Paris, was created under UNESCO's aegis precisely for the purpose of elaborating a universal approach for different cultures and peoples towards the problem of the human genome. The list of participants in this committee is too long. Suffice to say that it includes three Nobel laureates (Sydney Altman, Christian de Duve and Jean Dausset), also represented on it, besides biologists and medics, are jurists, economists, sociologists, writers and even a spokesman for the Vatican. The principles on which it is going to build its activities were expressed most aptly, perhaps, by Dr. Michel Renel of the world-famous Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel which uses genetic means to combat cancer: "Man is not a creature which is determined merely by a collection of genes, it is impossible to see this alone and forget that first and foremost he is determined by culture."