Then we have wes parsons who is the author of the book how to read a french fry, how to pick a peach book. He is a member of the James Beard Foundation and a winner of multiple journalism awards. Most of you probably know him as the former food editor and columnist in the Los Angeles Times which was his home for 25 years. Then we have ted parson. The professor of environmental law and the faculty codirector of the emmitt instustute on Climate Change and climate at ucla. His professional roles including serving as an advisor to institutions including the White House Office of science and Technology Policy and the privy Council Office of the government of canada. Welcome, gentlemen. [applause] so, you know, this topic isnt controversial or anything. But we are not here to discuss whether or not there should be gmos. The horses have been out of the barn for decades now. What i am interested in hearing is is more about other technologies because gmos are such a small part. So the larger landscape and then of course some issues about ethics and larger cultural questions. But first i want to start with rus. If we were to talk to the supermarket, what are we likely to put in our carts that might have the gmos sprinkled through there . Depending on how you shop either everything or nothing. If you are buying processed foods that include different grain oils, things that have cornstarch or Corn Products in them, the box part of the supermarket it is pretty hard to avoid. If you are buying produce and fresh fruits and vegetables and meat it is hard. There are a few kind of zucchini and papaya. I think that is the limit of it. Did any of you know papayas are genetically modified . If they were not you would not have any right . Ok. So, bob, you are the plant guy. Tell us a little bit about what a gmo is and how it is defined in the context of larger Technology Work now with plants. You know that is a really great questions. Those of us who do this think all plants are gmos because there is nothing you buy in the Grocery Stores whether organic or not that hasnt been genetically modified. Everything you buy was modified meaning manipulating genes. And there is no difference between doing it the classical way by breeding because you are directing change by selecting traits you want or by adding a gene. In the modern context, of lets say the poplar context, gmo means having a gene in it that an individual wasnt born with. There are two extremes. Genetic modification by breathing and the other is genetic modification by adding an additional gene or tweaking a gene by doing work in the cells and stuff. From the popularization of gmos in this day and age, it is being born with the gene that one didnt have originally. I think most people would be really surprised that this technology is now 40 years old. You may also be surprised there are human beings Walking Around that are gmos. That is a fact. That are only alive because they have a gene in them that they didnt have when they were born because they were born with a lethal disease. Most of you may be surprised that if you use insulin they are made in bacteria that were engineered in them. If you are wearing genes, the blue color is made in engineer jeans. From a plant point of view, those that try to improve agricultural, we would consider genetic modification the classical way by adding genes or tweaking them. That is what is so exciting. Moderator i will come back about more excitement. So, ted, the next natural question would be, i guess, has there been work and how do we know that these things are safe . Well, you never know for sure because you cant prove the negative. Science doesnt prove anything. And any time somebody demands scientific proof of something whether that is scientific proof humans are changing the climate or scientific proof gmos are safe you know they are using debating tactics and that is not something that can ever be provided. We have an awful lot of evidence if you think about i just have to say, i find it puzzling what intense controversies there are around gmos. It seems to be a strange place for people to have such passionate feelings and such acute political controversies. But if you think of the narrow way they are framed. Concerns about healthy food and environmental impact. The fact that genetically modified organisms by modern techniques such as the distinction you drew nicely a moment ago, the fact we have 2530 years of huge scale experience of things being planted and cultivated and eaten by essentially everybody and that there is no sign of any differen differential Health Impacts on americans relative to the europeans because they have very little that is an awful lot of basis for confidence that the narrow frames it will hurt you, harm your health to eat products from gmos. We have a lot of confidence that is not a problem. How much of a discomfortable with this subject do you think is a result of its acting like a proxy for pushback against an economy knows to respect ecological and ethical limits . Is that one to me . I think the short of it, and speaking about the ecology, unfortunately there is nothing natural about agriculture. So if you think about feeding people at one point in the United States we had the great plains and there were buffalos and grasses and the actual grasses and now there are farms that are making food with corn, soybean and canola and the ecology of the area has been changed. So the question is can you in fact feed the nine billion people we will have have to double the food supply and make more food than ever in the history of mankind how we are going to go about doing that with minimum ecolological impact and i think the way that can be done is by good science. I think some of the gmo out there have helped the environment quite a bit rather than negative. It is very difficult in agricultural to do something in environmentallyfriendly way. Moderator what would you say to people for example, the New York Times article that came out recently and said that this is a fallacy that gmos are sold to the public all the time on this promise of higher yield and they did a study covering 30 years comparing canada and europe and in fact showed no higher yields. So, i think it is a little too technically complicated to go into the but an example based on the hawaiiian papaya. It was being wiped out because it was susceptible to a virus. The yield was dropping and Nothing Drops the yield more than insects, fungi, bacteria, viruses that wipe out crops. Think about the irish famine that wiped out potatoes. Think about locusts in the bible this goes deep because these things are at war with the plants they eat. So the hawaiian papaya was acceptable by a virus and was immunized by a slick technique i will not describe but it prevented the virus from infecting the papaya meaning if you had not genetically engineered it would not have been around. That genetic engineering increased the yield of the papaya. Yield means grow more on less space. That is what yield means in agricultural sense. There is really no one gene that would be the yield gene and i dont think the gmos were sold on it basis of yield but sold more on the basis of we can do this without pesticides, we can do this without plowing the soil over. They were more an efficiency and economic point of view. In terms of increasing yield, we have not even packed the potential of what genetic modification can do in the molecular sense. But in the classical sense, think hybrid corn. That is the classical example. Taking two different varieties of corn, growing them together and much taller and heartier and much better than the parents. If we can learn what those mechanisms are we can do that in the laboratory and then by able to think about increasing yield on a scale which you cannot even dream of today. I can see ted sitting on his hands. I would like to take on the broader implications. It strikes me when people express concern about opposition to gmos they are more motivated by a set of broader concerns about the character of the food and agricultural system. So, they are concerned about things lets back up a little and ask what kinds of things would you want out of an agriculture and Food Production system . It seems you might want healthy, good food, healthy safe food, produced in quantities enough to meet the needs of feeding people, in an environmentally sustainable way, and in a way that is consistent with safety and sustainable livelihood through the people involved in the production process. Anybody woo turns attention to thinking about food and agricultural system is coming up with a similar thing. Doing all those is really challenging and there a lot of concerns about our current way of organize and producing food that implicate all of those maybe the environmental ones more than the health and safety in terms of food. If you think that way, you are going to be concerned about things like agricultural practice broadly, you are going to be concerned about the scale and uniformity of agricultural production, you are going to be concerned about the concentration of ownership and enterprises involved and in intellectual property. You are going to be concerned about the conditions of safe employment. Are all really important and legitimate concerns. Is a lousy gmos proxy for those concerns. Is a lousy proxy for any of them. A Regulatory Initiative that focus primarily on gmos is likely to be mistargeted. You will think about other dimensions of policy and regulation and antitrust and things like the breadth and cope and duration of intellectual property protection. You are going to think about environmental regulations and sort of the whole sweep of mechanisms we put in place to push agricultural and other enterprises. Feeding seven billion people safely and sustainably is going to be hard. It is going to be hard than getting off fossil fuel. It is coming down the pipe slower so i dont think we have fully embraced how severe it is. You are going to think about all the health and safety regulations. These concerns are porpt and indicate areas of Public Policy and gmos are a weird place to focus concern and attention and opposition. I am not saying there is no connection. But i am saying it is a thin connection. It as a strange place to have such intensity of conflict. Dont you think it is kind of natural given the introduction to most of us with these products, this process, was from a company who is a Chemical Company often known for, you know, agent orange, not monstano but one of the others, dow. One of them . A lot of these companies are chemical and feed companies and becoming intellectual property owners. It would be great to talk about. I think those issues are issues that make having this discussion much more difficult because the corporate with all that comes with that idea that makes this safety and if it came to him another way. Here is the irony of that. In the beginning of bio technology, exactly what you said applies to the farming industry as well as agricultural. It is a similar kind of concern in terms of corporations, and patents. It is a parallel world. But the irony of it is back in the 80s in the old days, when plant genetic engineering was invented, there were scores of Tiny Companies that were just entrepreneurial and going around on different areas and exploring different niches. It was extremely exciting. And then the regulatory arm just dropped for better or worse. I will not take up that discussion right now. And what happened was is is that costs of getting these regulations became now hundreds of millions. So the irony of this is that although all of the original discoveries and plant engineering in the first gmos were done by private companies. Not by the monsanto or dows or duponts. Tiny. Tay didnt have enough resources to get through the regulatory. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to get drugs through the Clinical Trials. So in some respects we created these monsters because there is no place in our agricultural and biotechnology economy for little tiny startups because they wont have the capital to get through these monsters because there is geographic to the farmers and that is go and where the cost is plus the regulatory costs. It is a very challenging issue. Do you want to talk a little bit about intellectual property and patents . That is a great topic. It is a great topic. There is a lot of intellectual but ity in agriculture didnt come anew with gmos. Seeds have been patented for many years. Patents on life forms were affirmed in the 1980s. There is intellectual property. Patents dont last forever so there are limits to the system of intellectual property. I am not sure it makes sense to thing of intellectual property as the unique locus of the problems in the food and agricultural system anymore than it does to think about gmos being in the locus of i mean it is big complicated system that has to serve a diversity of societal ends. And that is very complicated. I have to say i found your observations fascinating there is a Large Partnership between the drive for very effective and careful regulations and regulation of the health and safety of this new technology and the concentration of ownership necessary to live with that system that elicits the suspicion even identified. It sounds like vicious circle. I would ask consumers what is ironic is that the gmos out there, lets say that you have as the processed food in corn or some soybean products. Those have gone through 1015 years of testing before approved by the epa and usda. Great. But there is not one conventional variety of a crop. New varieties, new things made conventionally. There is a lot which kwlou you buy in the Grocery Store that is going through no regulatory. And an example, in my lab and this is the irony. In two weeks i would engineer a hypoallergenic peanut. People have done this. That is going to go through 1015 years of testing before it is approved if it ever is. In another part of my laboratory, i could use classical breeding to breed a peanut with ten times the concentration of allergen in the seed and i could give it to the farmers without any regulation. That is where the system is sort of screwed up to a certain extent. In the panels i have been on in the National Academy says you have are thinking about the final project and whether it is safe with respect to allergens and toxicity and we should focus on the product and now how it is made. I think from the consumers point of view, i think a lot of the opposition i hear that point, kind ofal harkens back to an uneasy relationship with modernity. This has become a standin for that. I think we have one of the really reassuring things that happened in food and you know, farmers markets and all of that, and it kind of reinforces this idea of romantic we imagined happened to our parents and grandparents and that is just a romantic image. I think people who live on farms when you talk to them they could not it leaves everything to nature to take its course and it is the worst thing you could ever do. Dying of small pox and it is natural. The interventions we tonight like i think they hold a mirror up to things we dont like about selves or our society. I think you have a very big picture viewpoint and they middle ground you have staked out. My journey to a apostasy . It has been painted with that brush from time to time. You know, 25 years at the times covering what i covered along with the conjunction of ag agricultural and food. Spent a lot of time talking to farmers and agriculture scientists. As a journalist when i publish a story two things i try to keep in mind and how do i think i know what i know and the other is what does the other side say and that doesnt mean what the other side says is right but it does mean i need to fully investigate that and find out whether what is valid and for me the journey started back in the 80s with organic movement. And the organic philosophy which seemed like such a wonderful thing but then again when the regulatory arms stepped in became a checklist of things that needed to be done and the flus philosophy went away and it got set in stone at the time that it was legislated. I would talk to people and i would go out and the image was either you were like buying stuff from baby jesus or you might as well be insecting or main lining agent orange. [laughter] i knew those farmers who had walked their fields. The pictures that were eating painted did not comport with the reality that i saw. Kindi started looking at of the arguments that were being made and pulling them apart, i realized that what was being painted in the organic world and some of my best friends are organic farmers, dont get me wrong. It was this black and white world of two extremes and the reality of the agriculture was in this gray area in the middle where conventional farmers were management,crops, integrated management. Techniques. Organic either because they were too ornery to go through the theyfications or because reserved the right, they believed it was better to use some of the things that were outlawed and organic. And there are plenty of paradoxes and in the organic, chemicals that are derived in one way or are fine if they are derived in another way they are not. But generally, the needle has moved toward the middle on that. For example according to the last pesticide report, this will probably shock people, 50 percent by weight of all the pesticides used in california last year were organically approved. [laughter] people think organic means no chemicals. So anyway, questioning that led to questioning when gmo started coming up and it led me to have a think a little bit more of an open mind or more of a questioning mind. And the things i would hear, arguments against and i would begin to investigate them, they seemed to be made out of, they seemed to be fairly flimsy. One of the things that is really fascinating to me is, do you, inattentive research that you do, do you also interact with people who are doing research on is not even how to describe it at this point. But on fertility of the soil. Things that we might think of as being more quote confessional. Are there as much resources being poured into the other time, the more traditional kind of farming. Because it seems like the people any more than one magic bullet. You need a million, right . And to think of this as political, do you remain on different sides of the aisle or do those of you who a