GMO China

How Global Debates Transformed China's Agricultural Biotechnology Policies

Cong Cao

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231541091
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In China, as elsewhere, the debate over genetically modified organisms has become polarized into anti- and pro-GMO camps. Given the size of China's population and market, much is at stake in conflicts over regulation for domestic as well as international actors. In this book, Cong Cao provides an even-handed analysis that illuminates the tensions that have shaped China's policy toward agricultural biotechnology in a global perspective.

Cao presents a comprehensive and systematic analysis of how China's policy toward research and commercialization of genetically modified crops has shifted that explains how China's changing GMO stances reflect its evolving position on the world stage. While China's scientific community has set the agenda, it has encountered resistance rooted in concerns over food safety and consumers' rights as well as issues of intellectual property rights and food sovereignty. Although Chinese leaders at first sought to take advantage of the biotech revolution by promoting GMO crop consumption, Cao demonstrates that policy has since become precautionary, as seen in new laws and regulations grounded in concerns over safety and the deferral of commercialization of GM rice. He presents China's policies in light of changing global attitudes toward GM crops: As shifts in China have closely followed global trends, so has domestic activism. Drawing on government and scientific documents as well as interviews with scientists, officials, policy analysts, activists, and journalists, GMO China is an important book for China studies, science and technology studies, policy analysts, and professionals interested in the Chinese biotechnology market.

CHAPTER I

Transgenic Technology and GMO Controversies

If the eighteenth century was the era of steam, the nineteenth century electricity, and the twentieth century information technology, then the twenty-first century is likely to be the era of biotechnology. With the life sciences having seen some of the most exciting developments since the 1950s, life sciences–based innovation—biotechnology—holds enormous promise of providing solutions to some of the most challenging problems in the world, from population and health, to environmental degradation and climate change, to energy and agriculture. Such solutions may come in the form of radical, improved, and personalized drugs and therapies, novel medical devices and diagnostic toolkits, sustainable biofuels, efficient techniques for providing clean water and fighting pollution, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for agriculture.

Agriculture always involves genetic modification of plants, animals, or other organisms. For centuries, through selection, crossbreeding, hybridization, and more recently the use of radiation or chemicals, human beings have been able to induce random mutations to produce crops or livestock with desirable traits. Consequently, major domesticated crops or animals no longer resemble their wild ancestors. However, such a process is complicated, mainly involving the transfer and manipulation of genes between the same or neighboring organisms, as in the case of pollen carrying genes from one strain of rice to another. Traditional genetic modification also is time-consuming in terms of the breeding process, uncertain in terms of controlling the types of genes introduced, and inefficient in terms of a process that is not targeted. In a word, it is largely a process of trial and error. The modern biotechnology used to produce GMOs is distinct from these breeding methods. “Genetic modification”¹ (or similar terms), as used in this book, refers only to the introduction of new genes into crops or plants through recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (rDNA) technology. This chapter starts with a review of the development of transgenic technology, followed by a brief description of controversies around GMOs to set a technical background for discussions in the rest of the book.²

Biotechnology Revolution and the Development of Transgenic Technology

Recombinant DNA Technology

All this began in the middle of the nineteenth century when the Austrian geneticist Gregor Mendel demonstrated that many of the characteristics of a pea were passed from one generation to the next according to predictable rules, thus giving birth to a new discipline of science—genetics.³ A century or so later, in the mid-1950s, the biologists James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the carrier of genetic information within every cell that instructs organisms to function, grow, and reproduce. As a major milestone in the history of science, the finding not only won Watson and Crick, along with Maurice Wilkins, a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material”⁴ but also heralded a new era of biotechnology revolution.⁵ In the next decade, scientists groped their way toward putting the new knowledge into application.

In the early 1970s, Janet E. Mertz, a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Paul Berg (a professor and chair of the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University Medical Center), and Peter Lobban, another Ph.D. student in the same department, independently conceived the ideas for generating rDNA in vitro and using it for cloning, propagating, and expressing genes across organisms.⁶ Meanwhile, Stanley N. Cohen, an assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Medicine, and Herbert W. Boyer, an associate professor of microbiology at the nearby University of California, San Francisco, first published papers describing the successful production and intracellular replication of rDNA. Simply put, rDNA technology uses restriction enzymes or chemical and physical methods as “scissors” to cut DNA fragments of interest from one organism, then uses ligase enzymes as “glues” to connect the fragments containing the desired rDNA to a target organism. The technology revolutionized the way of transferring genes with desired traits at the intracellular level.

In 1974, envisaging rDNA technology’s potential of “genetically programming bacteria to produce in mass quantity fragile proteins hitherto impossible to isolate, let alone manufacture,” Stanford University filed a patent application on behalf of Cohen and Boyer, who were granted the patent in 1980 after a tenacious fight within the academic and legal communities.⁷ In 1976, backed by the venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson, Cohen and Boyer established the first biotechnology company, Genentech, with their propriety technology. Genentech then licensed the technology to Eli Lilly for the development and marketing of human insulin, the first mass-produced drug based on the technology, which became a watershed event in the development of biotechnology as a science-based technology.⁸ The licensing also earned both inventors and Stanford an enormous amount of royalties. However, in October 1980, around the time when Genentech was listed on NASDAQ, half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Berg, the other Stanford scientist, “for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA.”⁹

Early on, some of the scientists involved in rDNA experiments felt the necessity to regulate the technology out of concern that it might be misused for unintended, undesirable, or even unsafe purposes. In January 1973, sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation, scientists gathered at the Asilomar Conference Center in California to assess the risks of working with the technology. Two years later, in February 1975, at the same Asilomar Center, an international conference on rDNA reached a consensus whereby scientists agreed to a voluntary moratorium on rDNA research until NIH formulated formal guidelines, which were put in place in the summer of 1976.¹⁰ Since then, rDNA technology has not only become more sophisticated but has also proliferated, with applications in medicine, the environment, energy, new materials, and agriculture.

The “New” Genetic Engineering and GM Crops

Having benefited significantly from rDNA technology, “new” genetic engineering differs from traditional genetic engineering in “the speed of the development,” in the words of the physicist Freeman Dyson.¹¹ Applying it to crops, agricultural biotechnologists no longer need to wait for nature to come up with a desired trait. Instead, they can speed up the selective breeding process by first producing a DNA with a gene of a novel trait that could not be obtained through conventional breeding. The process requires the help of four other genes—a promoter; a terminator; a regulatory sequence of DNA that determines the location, timing, and quantity of gene expression so as to reliably produce the desired trait; and a marker whose expression signifies the successful transfer of the gene of interest to the plant’s genome. The transgenic DNA can be inserted into the target organism in one of the three ways: Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, gene gun-mediated or particle-bombardment transformation, or pollen-tube pathway transformation. Respectively, these transformations absorb Agrobacteriu...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Transgenic Technology and GMO Controversies
• 2. Global GMO Policy
• 3. Research and Commercialization of GM Crops in China
• 4. Science, Biosafety, and Regulations
• 5. Polarization and Politicization of Transgenic Technology
• 6. The Chinese Media and Changing Policy
• 7. Patents and China’s Bt Rice
• 8. China as a GMO Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index