AfterTek

Denise Caruso was one of the top technology writers of the 80s and 90s, hanging out with the A-list digerati and penning an influential column for The New York Times. Then in 2000 she dropped out, upset by the excess and bombast of the first Internet boom, to launch a small non-profit group in San Francisco called the Hybrid Vigor Institute. The name reflected Caruso’s belief that the best problem-solving happens when different fields of expertise converge to work together.

That’s exactly the theme she explores in her new book “Intervention: Confronting the Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet” (Hybrid Vigor Press, $17.95), perhaps the most balanced and readable look yet at assessing the risks of genetic engineering. Caruso’s question is simple: how we can continue to advance technology without needlessly subjecting society to more thalidomide babies or Chernobyl melt-downs? The query is made more urgent by the fact that, given the new powers of biotechnology, the next miscalculation may prove to be damaging in ways we can’t presently imagine.

Readers are probably most familiar with the long-running controversy over the safety of genetically modified foods, such as soybeans or corn. (Caruso points out that a more accurate adjective is “transgenic”; food crops have already been genetically modified via traditional breeding techniques for centuries.) It’s a debate that has been troubling and unsatisfying, in large part because neither side seems entirely on-point.

Passionate anti-GM food activists often tend to be careless with basic science. And many scientists are quite intractable in their belief that GM foods must be safe, in a manner that seems more dogmatic than evidentiary. For onlookers who value scientific thought yet still harbor lingering concerns about this powerful new technology, there seems no reasonable middle ground.

“Intervention” assigns this state of affairs directly to the way we assess the risks of new technologies in the first place. Using the example of transgenic crops, Caruso shows how regulators, influenced by both researchers and commercial interests, narrowed the scope of their risk assessment to very specific concerns. Example: soybeans were given genes for herbicide resistance, so that farmers could more easily eradicate weeds without damaging the crop. The primary question that U.S. regulators then studied prior to approving the transgenic plant was whether a soybean produced by the modified plant was “substantially equivalent” to a soybean from a traditional plant.

When the answer turned out to be yes, the crops were approved; transgenic soybeans are now the dominant variety grown in the U.S. Caruso argues that this narrow view distorted the risk assessment. Even if the beans are nutritionally similar, for example, what does the presence of a new herbicide-resistant gene in the plants themselves mean for agriculture

Already the herbicide-resistant gene has “drifted” into other wild plants. And what are the long-term consequences of encouraging farmers to use more herbicides on a regular basis? These are clearly worthwhile questions to ask but in this narrow regulatory framework, Caruso writes, “what doesn’t get measured doesn’t matter.”