The Botany Of Desire Part 6

Admittedly, my experiments in the garden are unscientific and far from foolproof or conclusive. Is it the new neem tree oil I sprayed on the potatoes that's controlling the beetles so well this year, or the fact I planted a pair of tomatillos nearby, the leaves of which the beetles seem to prefer to potatoes? (My scapegoats, I call them.) Ideally, I'd control for every variable but one, but that's hard to do in a garden, a place that, like the rest of nature, seems to consist of nothing but but variables. "Everything affecting everything else" is not a bad description of what happens in a garden or, for that matter, in any ecosystem. variables. "Everything affecting everything else" is not a bad description of what happens in a garden or, for that matter, in any ecosystem.

In spite of these complexities, it is only by trial and error that my garden ever improves, so I continue to experiment. Recently I planted something new-something very new, as a matter of fact-and embarked on my most ambitious experiment to date. I planted a potato called "NewLeaf" that has been genetically engineered (by the Monsanto corporation) to produce its own insecticide. This it does in every cell of every leaf, stem, flower, root, and-this is the unsettling part-every spud.

The scourge of potatoes has always been the Colorado potato beetle, a handsome, voracious insect that can pick a plant clean of its leaves virtually overnight, starving the tubers in the process. Supposedly, any Colorado potato beetle that takes so much as a nibble of a NewLeaf leaf is doomed, its digestive tract pulped, in effect, by the bacterial toxin manufactured in every part of these plants.

I wasn't at all sure I really wanted wanted the NewLeaf potatoes I'd be digging at the end of the season. In this respect my experiment in growing them was very different from anything else I've ever done in my garden-whether growing apples or tulips or even pot. All of those I'd planted because I really wanted what the plants promised. What I wanted here was to gratify not so much a desire as a curiosity: Do they work? Are these genetically modified potatoes a good idea, either to plant or to eat? If not mine, then whose desire the NewLeaf potatoes I'd be digging at the end of the season. In this respect my experiment in growing them was very different from anything else I've ever done in my garden-whether growing apples or tulips or even pot. All of those I'd planted because I really wanted what the plants promised. What I wanted here was to gratify not so much a desire as a curiosity: Do they work? Are these genetically modified potatoes a good idea, either to plant or to eat? If not mine, then whose desire do do they gratify? And finally, what might they have to tell us about the future of the relations.h.i.+p between plants and people? To answer these questions, or at least begin to, would take more than the tools of the gardener (or the eater); I'd need as well the tools of the journalist, without which I couldn't hope to enter the world from which these potatoes had come. So you could say there was something fundamentally artificial about my experiment in growing NewLeaf potatoes. But then, artificiality seems very much to the point. they gratify? And finally, what might they have to tell us about the future of the relations.h.i.+p between plants and people? To answer these questions, or at least begin to, would take more than the tools of the gardener (or the eater); I'd need as well the tools of the journalist, without which I couldn't hope to enter the world from which these potatoes had come. So you could say there was something fundamentally artificial about my experiment in growing NewLeaf potatoes. But then, artificiality seems very much to the point.

Certainly my NewLeafs are aptly named. They're part of a new cla.s.s of crop plant that is transforming the long, complex, and by now largely invisible food chain that links every one of us to the land. By the time I conducted my experiment, more than fifty million acres of American farmland had already been planted to genetically modified crops, most of it corn, soybeans, cotton, and potatoes that have been engineered either to produce their own pesticide or to withstand herbicides. The not-so-distant future will, we're told, bring us potatoes genetically modified to absorb less fat when fried, corn that can withstand drought, lawns that don't ever have to be mowed, "golden rice" rich in Vitamin A, bananas and potatoes that deliver vaccines, tomatoes enhanced with flounder genes (to withstand frost), and cotton that grows in every color of the rainbow.

It's probably not too much to say that this new technology represents the biggest change in the terms of our relations.h.i.+p with plants since people first learned how to cross one plant with another. With genetic engineering, human control of nature is taking a giant step forward. The kind of reordering of nature represented by the rows in a farmer's field can now take place at a whole new level: within the genome of the plants themselves. Truly, we have stepped out onto new ground.

Or have we?

Just how novel these plants really are is in fact one of the biggest questions about them, and the companies that have developed them give contradictory answers. The industry simultaneously depicts these plants as the linchpins of a biological revolution-part of a "paradigm s.h.i.+ft" that will make agriculture more sustainable and feed the world-and, oddly enough, as the same old spuds, corn, and soybeans, at least so far as those of us at the eating end of the food chain should be concerned. The new plants are novel enough to be patented, yet not so novel as to warrant a label telling us what it is we're eating. It would seem they are chimeras: "revolutionary" in the patent office and on the farm, "nothing new" in the supermarket and the environment.

By planting my own crop of NewLeafs, I was hoping to figure out which version of reality to believe, whether these were indeed the same old spuds or something sufficiently novel (in nature, in the diet) to warrant caution and hard questions. As soon as you start looking into the subject, you find that there are many questions about genetically modified plants that, fifty million acres later, remain unanswered and, more remarkable still, unasked-enough to make me think mine might not be the only experiment going on.

May 2. Here at the planter's end of the food chain, where I began my experiment after Monsanto agreed to let me test-drive its NewLeafs, things certainly look new and different. After digging two shallow trenches in my vegetable garden and lining them with compost, I untied the purple mesh bag of seed potatoes Monsanto had sent and opened the grower's guide tied around its neck. Potatoes, you will recall from kindergarten experiments, are grown not from actual seeds but from the eyes of other potatoes, and the dusty, stone-colored chunks of tuber I carefully laid at the bottom of the trench looked much like any other. Yet the grower's guide that comes with them put me in mind not so much of planting vegetables as booting up a new software release. Here at the planter's end of the food chain, where I began my experiment after Monsanto agreed to let me test-drive its NewLeafs, things certainly look new and different. After digging two shallow trenches in my vegetable garden and lining them with compost, I untied the purple mesh bag of seed potatoes Monsanto had sent and opened the grower's guide tied around its neck. Potatoes, you will recall from kindergarten experiments, are grown not from actual seeds but from the eyes of other potatoes, and the dusty, stone-colored chunks of tuber I carefully laid at the bottom of the trench looked much like any other. Yet the grower's guide that comes with them put me in mind not so much of planting vegetables as booting up a new software release.

By "opening and using this product," the card informed me, I was now "licensed" to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would water and tend and harvest was mine, yet also not mine. That is, the potatoes I would dig come September would be mine to eat or sell, but their genes would remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under several U.S. patents, including 5,196,525; 5,164,316; 5,322,938; and 5,352,605. Were I to save even one of these spuds to plant next year-something I've routinely done with my potatoes in the past-I would be breaking federal law. (I had to wonder, what would be the legal status of any "volunteers"-those plants that, with no prompting from the gardener, sprout each spring from tubers overlooked during the previous harvest?) The small print on the label also brought the disconcerting news that my potato plants were themselves themselves registered as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Administration (U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474). registered as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Administration (U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474).

If proof were needed that the food chain that begins with seeds and ends on our dinner plates is in the midst of revolutionary change, the small print that accompanied my NewLeafs will do. That food chain has been unrivaled for its productivity: on average, an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement-that power over nature-has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quant.i.ties of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of "inputs," as they're called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus the gain in the farmer's power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities.

All this I'd heard before, of course, but always from environmentalists or organic farmers. What is new is to hear the same critique from industrial farmers, government officials, and the agribusiness companies that sold farmers on all those expensive inputs in the first place. Taking a page from Wendell Berry, of all people, Monsanto declared in a recent annual report that "current agricultural technology is unsustainable."

What is to rescue the American food chain is a new kind of plant. Genetic engineering promises to replace expensive and toxic chemicals with expensive but apparently benign genetic information: crops that, like my NewLeafs, can protect themselves from insects and diseases without the help of pesticides. In the case of the NewLeaf, a gene borrowed from one strain of a common bacterium found in the soil-Bacillus thuringiensis, or "Bt" for short-gives the potato plant's cells the information they need to manufacture a toxin lethal to the Colorado potato beetle. This gene is now Monsanto's intellectual property. With genetic engineering, agriculture has entered the information age, and Monsanto's aim, it would appear, is to become its Microsoft, supplying the proprietary "operating systems"-the metaphor is theirs-to run this new generation of plants. or "Bt" for short-gives the potato plant's cells the information they need to manufacture a toxin lethal to the Colorado potato beetle. This gene is now Monsanto's intellectual property. With genetic engineering, agriculture has entered the information age, and Monsanto's aim, it would appear, is to become its Microsoft, supplying the proprietary "operating systems"-the metaphor is theirs-to run this new generation of plants.

The metaphors we use to describe the natural world strongly influence the way we approach it, the style and extent of our attempts at control. It makes all the difference in (and to) the world if one conceives of a farm as a factory or a forest as a farm. Now we're about to find out what happens when people begin approaching the genes of our food plants as software.

The Andes, 1532. The patented potatoes I was planting are descended from wild ancestors growing on the Andean altiplano, the potato's "center of diversity." It was here that The patented potatoes I was planting are descended from wild ancestors growing on the Andean altiplano, the potato's "center of diversity." It was here that Solanum tuberosum Solanum tuberosum was first domesticated more than seven thousand years ago by ancestors of the Incas. Actually, some of the potatoes in my garden are closely related to those ancient potatoes. Among the half-dozen or so different varieties I grow are a couple of ancient heirlooms, including the Peruvian blue potato. This starchy spud is about the size of a golf ball; when you slice it through the middle the flesh looks as though it has been tie-dyed the most gorgeous shade of blue. was first domesticated more than seven thousand years ago by ancestors of the Incas. Actually, some of the potatoes in my garden are closely related to those ancient potatoes. Among the half-dozen or so different varieties I grow are a couple of ancient heirlooms, including the Peruvian blue potato. This starchy spud is about the size of a golf ball; when you slice it through the middle the flesh looks as though it has been tie-dyed the most gorgeous shade of blue.

My blue potato is part of the cornucopia of potatoes developed by the Incas along with their ancestors and descendants. In addition to the blue potato, the Incas grew reds, pinks, yellows, and oranges; all manner of skinnies and fatties, smooth-skinneds and russets, short-season spuds and long, drought-tolerant and water-loving, sweet tubers and bitter ones (good for forage), starchy potatoes and others almost b.u.t.tery in texture-some three thousand different spuds in all. This extravagant flowering of potato diversity owes partly to the Incas' desire for variety, partly to their flair for experimentation, and partly to the intricacy of their agriculture, the most sophisticated in the world at the time of the Spanish conquest. While I was waiting for my potatoes to come up that May, I began reading about theirs (and then those of the Irish), hoping to get a clearer picture of the relations.h.i.+p between people and potatoes, and how that relations.h.i.+p had changed both the plant and ourselves.

The Incas figured out how to grow impressive yields of potatoes under the most inauspicious conditions, developing an approach that is still in use in parts of the Andes today. A more or less vertical habitat presents special challenges to both plants and their cultivators, because the microclimate changes dramatically with every change in alt.i.tude or orientation to the sun and wind. A potato that thrives on one side of a ridge at one alt.i.tude will languish in another plot only a few steps away. No monoculture could succeed under such circ.u.mstances, so the Incas developed a method of farming that is monoculture's exact opposite. Instead of betting the farm on a single cultivar, the Andean farmer, then as now, made a great many bets, at least one for every ecological niche. Instead of attempting, as most farmers do, to change the environment to suit a single optimal spud-the Russet Burbank, say-the Incas developed a different spud for every environment.

To Western eyes, the resulting farms look patchy and chaotic; the plots are discontinuous (a little of this growing here, a little of that over there), offering none of the familiar, Apollonian satisfactions of an explicitly ordered landscape. Yet the Andean potato farm represented an intricate ordering of nature that, unlike Versailles in 1999, say, or Ireland in 1845, can withstand virtually anything nature is apt to throw at it.

Since the margins and hedgerows of the Andean farm were, and still are, populated by weedy wild potatoes, the farmer's cultivated varieties have regularly crossed with their wild relatives, in the process refres.h.i.+ng the gene pool and producing new hybrids. Whenever one of these new potatoes proves its worth-surviving a drought or storm, say, or winning praise at the dinner table-it is promoted from the margins to the fields and, in time, to the neighbors' fields as well. Artificial selection is thus a continual local process, each new potato the product of an ongoing back-and-forth between the land and its cultivators, mediated by the universe of all possible potatoes: the species' genome.

The genetic diversity cultivated by the Incas and their descendants is an extraordinary cultural achievement and a gift of incalculable value to the rest of the world. A free and unenc.u.mbered gift, one might add, quite unlike my patented and trademarked NewLeafs. "Intellectual property" is a recent, Western concept that means nothing to a Peruvian farmer, then or now.* Of course, Francisco Pizarro was looking for neither plants nor intellectual property when he conquered the Incas; he had eyes only for gold. None of the conquistadores could have imagined it, but the funny-looking tubers they encountered high in the Andes would prove to be the single most important treasure they would bring back from the New World. Of course, Francisco Pizarro was looking for neither plants nor intellectual property when he conquered the Incas; he had eyes only for gold. None of the conquistadores could have imagined it, but the funny-looking tubers they encountered high in the Andes would prove to be the single most important treasure they would bring back from the New World.

May 15. After several days of drenching rain, the sun appeared this week, and so did my NewLeafs: a dozen deep green shoots pushed up out of the soil and commenced to grow-faster and more robustly than any of my other potatoes. Apart from their vigor, though, my NewLeafs looked perfectly normal-they certainly didn't beep or glow, as a few visitors to my garden jokingly inquired. (Not that the glowing notion is so far-fetched: I've read that plant breeders have developed a luminescent tobacco plant by inserting a gene from a firefly. I've yet to read After several days of drenching rain, the sun appeared this week, and so did my NewLeafs: a dozen deep green shoots pushed up out of the soil and commenced to grow-faster and more robustly than any of my other potatoes. Apart from their vigor, though, my NewLeafs looked perfectly normal-they certainly didn't beep or glow, as a few visitors to my garden jokingly inquired. (Not that the glowing notion is so far-fetched: I've read that plant breeders have developed a luminescent tobacco plant by inserting a gene from a firefly. I've yet to read why why they would do this, except perhaps to prove it could be done: a demonstration of power.) Yet as I watched my NewLeafs multiply their l.u.s.trous, dark green leaves those first few days, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first unwitting beetle, I couldn't help thinking of them as existentially different from the rest of my plants. they would do this, except perhaps to prove it could be done: a demonstration of power.) Yet as I watched my NewLeafs multiply their l.u.s.trous, dark green leaves those first few days, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first unwitting beetle, I couldn't help thinking of them as existentially different from the rest of my plants.

All domesticated plants are in some sense artificial, living archives of both cultural and natural information that people have helped to "design." Any given type of potato reflects the human desires that have been bred into it. One that's been selected to yield long, handsome french fries or unblemished, round potato chips is the expression of a national food chain and a culture that likes its potatoes highly processed. At the same time, some of the more delicate European fingerlings growing beside my NewLeafs imply an economy of small-market growers and a cultural taste for eating potatoes fresh-for none of these varieties can endure much travel or time in storage. I'm not sure exactly what cultural values to ascribe to my Peruvian blues; perhaps nothing more than a craving for variety among a people who ate potatoes morning, noon, and night.

"Tell me what you eat," Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously claimed, and "I will tell you what you are." The qualities of a potato-as of any domesticated plant or animal-are a fair reflection of the values of the people who grow and eat it. Yet all these qualities already existed in the potato, somewhere within the universe of genetic possibilities presented by the species Solanum tuberosum. Solanum tuberosum. And though that universe may be vast, it is not infinite. Since unrelated species in nature cannot be crossed, the breeder's art has always run up against a natural limit of what a potato is willing, or able, to do-that species' essential ident.i.ty. Nature has always exercised a kind of veto over what culture can do with a potato. And though that universe may be vast, it is not infinite. Since unrelated species in nature cannot be crossed, the breeder's art has always run up against a natural limit of what a potato is willing, or able, to do-that species' essential ident.i.ty. Nature has always exercised a kind of veto over what culture can do with a potato.

Until now. The NewLeaf is the first potato to override that veto. Monsanto likes to depict genetic engineering as just one more chapter in the ancient history of human modifications of nature, a story going back to the discovery of fermentation. The company defines the word biotechnology biotechnology so broadly as to take in the brewing of beer, cheese making, and selective breeding: all are "technologies" that involve the manipulation of life-forms. so broadly as to take in the brewing of beer, cheese making, and selective breeding: all are "technologies" that involve the manipulation of life-forms.

Yet this new biotechnology has overthrown the old rules governing the relations.h.i.+p of nature and culture in a plant. Domestication has never been a simple one-way process in which our species has controlled others; other species partic.i.p.ate only so far as their interests are served, and many plants (such as the oak) simply sit the whole game out. That game is the one Darwin called "artificial selection," and its rules have never been any different from the rules that govern natural selection. The plant in its wildness proposes new qualities, and then man (or, in the case of natural selection, nature) selects which of those qualities will survive and prosper. But about one rule Darwin was emphatic; as he wrote in The Origin of Species, The Origin of Species, "Man does not actually produce variability." "Man does not actually produce variability."

Now he does. For the first time, breeders can bring qualities at will from anywhere in nature into the genome of a plant: from fireflies (the quality of luminescence), from flounders (frost tolerance), from viruses (disease resistance), and, in the case of my potatoes, from the soil bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis. Bacillus thuringiensis. Never in a million years of natural or artificial selection would these species have proposed those qualities. "Modification by descent" has been replaced by ... something else. Never in a million years of natural or artificial selection would these species have proposed those qualities. "Modification by descent" has been replaced by ... something else.

Now, it is true that genes occasionally move between species; the genome of many species appears to be somewhat more fluid than scientists used to think. Yet for reasons we don't completely understand, distinct species do exist in nature, and they exhibit a certain genetic integrity-s.e.x between them, when it does occur, doesn't produce fertile offspring. Nature presumably has some reason for erecting these walls, even if they are permeable on occasion. Perhaps, as some biologists believe, the purpose of keeping species separate is to put barriers in the path of pathogens, to contain their damage so that a single germ can't wipe out life on Earth at a stroke.

The deliberate introduction into a plant of genes transported not only across species but across whole phyla means that the wall of that plant's essential ident.i.ty-its irreducible wildness, you might say-has been breached, not by a virus, as sometimes happens in nature, but by humans wielding powerful new tools.

For the first time the genome itself is being domesticated-brought under the roof of human culture. This made the potato I was growing slightly different from the other plants in this book, all of which had been both the subjects and the objects of domestication. While the other plants coevolved in a kind of conversational give-and-take with people, the NewLeaf potato has really only taken, only listened. It may or may not profit from the gift of its new genes; we can't yet say. What we can say, though, is that this potato is not the hero of its own story in quite the same way the apple has been. It didn't come up with this Bt scheme all on its evolutionary own. No, the heroes of the NewLeaf story are scientists working for Monsanto. Certainly the scientists in the lab coats have something in common with the fellow in the coffee sack: both work, or worked, at disseminating plant genes around the world. Yet although Johnny Appleseed and the brewers of beer and makers of cheese, the high-tech pot growers and all the other "biotechnologists" manipulated, selected, forced, cloned, and otherwise altered the species they worked with, the species themselves never lost their evolutionary say in the matter-never became solely the objects of our desires. Now the once irreducible wildness of these plants has been ... reduced. Whether this is a good or bad thing for the plants (or for us), it is unquestionably a new new thing. thing.

What is perhaps most striking about the NewLeafs coming up in my garden is the added human intelligence that the insertion of the Bacillus thuringiensis Bacillus thuringiensis gene represents. In the past that intelligence resided outside the plant, in the minds of the organic farmers and gardeners (myself included) who used Bt, commonly in the form of a spray, to manipulate the ecological relations.h.i.+p between certain insects and a certain bacterium in order to foil those insects. The irony about the new Bt crops (a similar gene has been inserted into corn plants) is that the cultural information they encode happens to be knowledge that's always resided in the heads of the very sorts of people-that is, organic growers-who most distrust high technology. Most of the other biotech crops-such as the ones Monsanto has engineered to withstand Roundup, the company's patented herbicide-encode a very different, more industrial sort of intelligence. gene represents. In the past that intelligence resided outside the plant, in the minds of the organic farmers and gardeners (myself included) who used Bt, commonly in the form of a spray, to manipulate the ecological relations.h.i.+p between certain insects and a certain bacterium in order to foil those insects. The irony about the new Bt crops (a similar gene has been inserted into corn plants) is that the cultural information they encode happens to be knowledge that's always resided in the heads of the very sorts of people-that is, organic growers-who most distrust high technology. Most of the other biotech crops-such as the ones Monsanto has engineered to withstand Roundup, the company's patented herbicide-encode a very different, more industrial sort of intelligence.

One way to look at genetic engineering is that it allows a larger portion of human culture and intelligence to be incorporated into the plants themselves. From this perspective, my NewLeafs are just plain smarter than the rest of my potatoes. The others will depend on my knowledge and experience when the Colorado potato beetles strike. The NewLeafs, already knowing what I know about bugs and Bt, will take care of themselves. So while my genetically engineered plants might at first seem like alien beings, that's not quite right; they're more like us than other plants because there's more of us in them.

Ireland, 1588. Like an alien species introduced into an established ecosystem, the potato had trouble finding a foothold when it first arrived in Europe toward the end of the sixteenth century, probably as an afterthought in the hold of a Spanish s.h.i.+p. The problem was not with the European soil or climate, which would prove very much to the potato's liking (in the north anyway), but with the European mind. Even after people recognized that this peculiar new plant could produce more food on less land than any other crop, most of European culture remained inhospitable to the potato. Why? Europeans hadn't eaten tubers before; the potato was a member of the nightshade family (along with the equally disreputable tomato); potatoes were thought to cause leprosy and immorality; potatoes were mentioned nowhere in the Bible; potatoes came from America, where they were the staple of an uncivilized and conquered race. The justifications given for refusing to eat potatoes were many and diverse, but in the end most of them came down to this: the new plant-and in this respect it was quite unlike my NewLeaf-seemed to contain in its being too little of human culture and rather too much unreconstructed nature. Like an alien species introduced into an established ecosystem, the potato had trouble finding a foothold when it first arrived in Europe toward the end of the sixteenth century, probably as an afterthought in the hold of a Spanish s.h.i.+p. The problem was not with the European soil or climate, which would prove very much to the potato's liking (in the north anyway), but with the European mind. Even after people recognized that this peculiar new plant could produce more food on less land than any other crop, most of European culture remained inhospitable to the potato. Why? Europeans hadn't eaten tubers before; the potato was a member of the nightshade family (along with the equally disreputable tomato); potatoes were thought to cause leprosy and immorality; potatoes were mentioned nowhere in the Bible; potatoes came from America, where they were the staple of an uncivilized and conquered race. The justifications given for refusing to eat potatoes were many and diverse, but in the end most of them came down to this: the new plant-and in this respect it was quite unlike my NewLeaf-seemed to contain in its being too little of human culture and rather too much unreconstructed nature.

Oh, but what about Ireland? Ireland was the exception that proved the rule-indeed, the exception that largely wrote the rule, since that country's extraordinary relations.h.i.+p to the potato consolidated its dubious ident.i.ty in the English mind. Ireland embraced the potato very soon after its introduction, a fateful event sometimes credited to Sir Walter Raleigh, sometimes to the s.h.i.+pwreck of a Spanish galleon off the Irish coast in 1588. As it happened, the cultural, political, and biological environment of Ireland could not have better suited the new plant. Cereal grains grow poorly on the island (wheat hardly at all), and, in the seventeenth century, Cromwell's Roundheads seized what little arable land there was for English landowners, forcing the Irish peasantry to eke out a subsistence from soil so rain-soaked and stingy that virtually nothing would grow in it. The potato, miraculously, would, managing to extract prodigious amounts of food from the very land the colonial English had given up on. And so, by the end of the seventeenth century, the plant had made a beachhead in the Old World; within two centuries it would overrun northern Europe, in the process substantially remaking its new habitat.

The Irish discovered that a few acres of marginal land could produce enough potatoes to feed a large family and its livestock. The Irish also found they could grow these potatoes with a bare minimum of labor or tools, in something called a "lazy bed." The spuds were simply laid out in a rectangle on the ground; then, with a spade, the farmer would dig a drainage trench on either side of his potato bed, covering the tubers with whatever soil, sod, or peat came out of the trench. No plowed earth, no rows, and certainly no Agricultural Sublime-a d.a.m.nable defect in English eyes. Potato growing looked nothing like agriculture, provided none of the Apollonian satisfactions of an orderly field of grain, no martial ranks of golden wheat ripening in the sun. Wheat pointed up, to the sun and civilization; the potato pointed down. Potatoes were chthonic, forming their undifferentiated brown tubers unseen beneath the ground, throwing a slovenly flop of vines above.

The Irish were too hungry to worry about agricultural aesthetics. The potato might not have presented a picture of order or control in the field, yet it gave the Irish a welcome measure of control over their lives. Now they could feed themselves off the economic grid ruled by the English and not have to worry so much about the price of bread or the going wage. For the Irish had discovered that a diet of potatoes supplemented with cow's milk was nutritionally complete. In addition to energy in the form of carbohydrates, potatoes supplied considerable amounts of protein and vitamins B and C (the spud would eventually put an end to scurvy in Europe); all that was missing was vitamin A, and that a bit of milk could make up. (So it turns out that mashed potatoes are not only the ultimate comfort food but all a body really needs.) And as easy as they were to grow, potatoes were even easier to prepare: dig, heat-by either boiling them in a pot or simply dropping them into a fire-and eat.

Eventually the potato's undeniable advantages over grain would convert all of northern Europe, but outside Ireland the process was never anything less than a struggle. In Germany, Frederick the Great had to force peasants to plant potatoes; so did Catherine the Great in Russia. Louis XVI took a subtler tack, reasoning that if he could just lend the humble spud a measure of royal prestige, peasants would experiment with it and discover its virtues. So Marie Antoinette took to wearing potato flowers in her hair, and Louis hatched an ingenious promotional scheme. He ordered a field of potatoes planted on the royal grounds and then posted his most elite guard to protect the crop during the day. He sent the guards home at midnight, however, and in due course the local peasants, suddenly convinced of the crop's value, made off in the night with the royal tubers.

In time, all three nations would grow powerful on potatoes, which put an end to malnutrition and periodic famine in northern Europe and allowed the land to support a much larger population than it ever could have planted in grain. Since fewer hands were needed to farm it, the potato also allowed the countryside to feed northern Europe's growing and industrializing cities. Europe's center of political gravity had always been anch.o.r.ed firmly in the hot, sunny south, where wheat grew reliably; without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

The last redoubt of antipotato prejudice was in England, and there it was not confined to a hidebound or superst.i.tious peasantry. Well into the nineteenth century, a significant portion of elite opinion in London regarded the potato as nothing more or less than a threat to civilization. Proof? All one had to do was point in the direction of Ireland.

England, 1794. The wheat harvest in the British Isles failed in 1794, sending the price of white bread beyond the reach of England's poor. Food riots broke out, and with them a great debate over the potato that would rage, on and off, for half a century. (The potato debate is recounted in Redcliffe Salaman's definitive 1949 volume, The wheat harvest in the British Isles failed in 1794, sending the price of white bread beyond the reach of England's poor. Food riots broke out, and with them a great debate over the potato that would rage, on and off, for half a century. (The potato debate is recounted in Redcliffe Salaman's definitive 1949 volume, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, and its rhetoric is brilliantly dissected in "The Potato in the Materialist Imagination," an essay by the literary critic Catherine Gallagher.) Engaging the energies of the country's leading journalists, agronomists, and political economists, the potato debate brought to the surface predictable English anxieties about cla.s.s conflict and the "Irish problem." But it also threw into sharp relief people's deepest feelings about their food plants and the ways they root us, for better and worse, in nature. Do we control these plants? Or do they control us? and its rhetoric is brilliantly dissected in "The Potato in the Materialist Imagination," an essay by the literary critic Catherine Gallagher.) Engaging the energies of the country's leading journalists, agronomists, and political economists, the potato debate brought to the surface predictable English anxieties about cla.s.s conflict and the "Irish problem." But it also threw into sharp relief people's deepest feelings about their food plants and the ways they root us, for better and worse, in nature. Do we control these plants? Or do they control us?

The debate was kicked off by the potato's advocates, who argued that introducing a second staple would be a boon to England, a way to feed the poor when bread was dear and keep wages-which tended to track the price of bread-from rising. Arthur Young, a respected agronomist, had traveled to Ireland and returned convinced that the potato was "a root of plenty" that could protect England's poor from hunger and give farmers more control over their circ.u.mstances at a time when the enclosure movement was undermining their traditional way of life.

The radical journalist William Cobbett also traveled to Ireland, yet he returned with a very different picture of the potato eaters. Whereas Young had seen self-reliance in the Irishman's potato patch, Cobbett saw only abject subsistence and dependence. Cobbett argued that while it was true that the potato fed the Irish, it also impoverished them, by driving up the country's population-from three million to eight million in less than a century-and driving down its wages. The prolific potato allowed young Irishmen to marry earlier and support a larger family; as the labor supply increased, wages fell. The bounty of the potato was its curse.

In his articles Cobbett depicted "this d.a.m.ned root" as a kind of gravitational force, pulling the Irishman out of civilization and back down into the earth, gradually muddying the distinctions between man and beast, even man and root. This is how he described the potato eater's mud hut: "no windows at all; ... the floor nothing but the bare earth; no chimney, but a hole at one end ... surrounded by a few stones." In Cobbett's grim imagery, the Irish had themselves moved underground, joining their tubers in the mud. Once cooked, the potatoes "are taken up and turned into a great dish," Cobbett wrote. "The family squat round this basket and take out the potatoes with their hands; the pig stands and is helped by some one, and sometimes he eats out of the pot. He goes in and out and about the hole, like one of the family." The potato had single-handedly unraveled civilization, putting nature back in control of man.

"Bread root" was what the English sometimes called the potato, and the symbolic contrast between the two foods loomed large in the debate, never to the spud's advantage. Catherine Gallagher points out that the English usually depicted the potato as mere food, primitive, unreconstructed, and lacking in any cultural resonance. In time, that lack would itself become precisely the potato's cultural resonance: the potato came to signify the end of food being anything more than food-animal fuel. Bread, on the other hand, was as leavened with meaning as it was with air.

Like the potato, wheat begins in nature, but it is then transformed by culture. While the potato is simply thrown into a pot or fire, wheat must be harvested, threshed, milled, mixed, kneaded, shaped, baked, and then, in a final miracle of transubstantiation, the doughy lump of formless matter rises to become bread. This elaborate process, with its division of labor and suggestion of transcendence, symbolized civilization's mastery of raw nature. A mere food thus became the substance of human and even spiritual communion, for there was also the old identification of bread with the body of Christ. If the lumpish potato was base matter, bread in the Christian mind was its very opposite: antimatter, even spirit.

The political economists also weighed in on the potato debate, and though they framed their arguments in somewhat more scientific terms, their rhetoric too betrays deep anxieties about nature's threat to civilization's control. Malthusian logic started from the premise that people are driven by the desires for food and s.e.x; only the threat of starvation keeps the population from exploding. The danger of the potato, Malthus believed, was that it removed the economic constraints that ordinarily kept the population in check. This in a nutsh.e.l.l was Ireland's problem: "the indolent and turbulent habits of the lower Irish can never be corrected while the potato system enables them to increase so much beyond the regular demand for labour."

In the same way that the potato exempts the potato eater from the civilizing processes of bread making, it also exempts him from the discipline of the economy. Political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo regarded the market as a sensitive mechanism for adjusting the size of the population to the demand for labor, and the price of bread was that mechanism's regulator. When the price of wheat rose, people had to curb both of their animal appet.i.tes and so produced fewer babies. The problem with "the potato system" is that, under it, the h.o.m.o economicus h.o.m.o economicus who adjusts his behavior to the algebra of need is replaced by a far less rational actor- who adjusts his behavior to the algebra of need is replaced by a far less rational actor-h.o.m.o appet.i.tus, as Gallagher calls him. If Economic Man operated under the coolly rational sign of Apollo, Appet.i.te Man was in thrall to earthy, fecund, amoral Dionysus. Since the Irishman grew and ate his own potatoes, and since his potatoes (unlike wheat flour) could not easily be stored or traded, they never became commodities and were therefore, like him, subject to no authority but nature's own. as Gallagher calls him. If Economic Man operated under the coolly rational sign of Apollo, Appet.i.te Man was in thrall to earthy, fecund, amoral Dionysus. Since the Irishman grew and ate his own potatoes, and since his potatoes (unlike wheat flour) could not easily be stored or traded, they never became commodities and were therefore, like him, subject to no authority but nature's own.

In the eyes of the political economists, capitalist exchange was a lot like baking, since it represented a way of civilizing anarchic nature-the anarchic nature, that is, of both plants and people. Without the discipline of commodity markets, man is thrown back on his instincts: unlimited food and s.e.x leading inexorably to overpopulation and misery. David Ricardo was convinced that the potato was both the cause and symbol of this regression, this surrender of control to nature. As long as humans need to eat, we can never completely insulate ourselves from the vicissitudes of nature; the best we can do, Ricardo believed, was to rely on a staple that, like wheat, can be stored against storms and droughts and readily converted into money to buy other foods. The potato offered no such security. By refusing to transcend its own nature and become a commodity, the potato threatened, in Gallagher's words, to "wipe out the progress an advanced economy has made in liberating humankind from dependence on s.h.i.+fty nature."

About this much, at least, history would prove the political economists terribly correct. The control with which the potato appeared to have blessed the Irish would turn out to be a cruel illusion. Dependence on the potato had in fact made the Irish exquisitely vulnerable, not to the vicissitudes of the economy so much as to those of nature. This they would abruptly discover late in the summer of 1845, when Phytophthora infestans Phytophthora infestans arrived in Europe, probably on a s.h.i.+p from America. Within weeks the spores of this savage fungus, borne on the wind, overspread the continent, dooming potatoes and potato eaters alike. arrived in Europe, probably on a s.h.i.+p from America. Within weeks the spores of this savage fungus, borne on the wind, overspread the continent, dooming potatoes and potato eaters alike.

St. Louis, June 23. While my NewLeafs were bus.h.i.+ng up nicely during a spell of hot early-summer weather, I traveled to Monsanto's headquarters in St. Louis, where the ancient, n.o.ble dream of control of nature is in full and extravagant flower. If the place to go to understand the relations.h.i.+p of people and potato was a mountainside farm in South America in 1532 or a lazy bed near Dublin in 1845, today it is just as surely a research greenhouse on a corporate campus outside St. Louis. While my NewLeafs were bus.h.i.+ng up nicely during a spell of hot early-summer weather, I traveled to Monsanto's headquarters in St. Louis, where the ancient, n.o.ble dream of control of nature is in full and extravagant flower. If the place to go to understand the relations.h.i.+p of people and potato was a mountainside farm in South America in 1532 or a lazy bed near Dublin in 1845, today it is just as surely a research greenhouse on a corporate campus outside St. Louis.

My NewLeafs are clones of clones of plants that were first engineered more than a decade ago in a long, low-slung brick build-ing on the bank of the Missouri that would look like any other corporate complex if not for its stunning roofline. What appear from a distance to be s.h.i.+mmering crenellations of gla.s.s turn out to be the twenty-six greenhouses that crown the building in a dramatic sequence of triangular peaks. The first generation of genetically altered plants-of which the NewLeaf potato is one-has been grown under this roof, in these greenhouses, since 1984; especially in the early days of biotechnology, no one knew for sure if it was safe to grow these plants outdoors, in nature. Today this research and development facility is one of a small handful of such places-Monsanto has only two or three compet.i.tors in the world-where the world's crop plants are being redesigned.

Dave Starck, one of Monsanto's senior potato people, escorted me through the clean rooms where potatoes are genetically engineered. He explained that there are two ways of splicing foreign genes into a plant: by infecting it with agrobacterium, a pathogen whose modus operandi is to break into a plant cell's nucleus and replace its DNA with some of its own, or by shooting it with a gene gun. For reasons not yet understood, the agrobacterium method seems to work best on broadleaf species such as the potato, the gene gun better on gra.s.ses, such as corn and wheat.

The gene gun is a strangely high-low piece of technology, but the main thing you need to know about it is that the gun here is not a metaphor: a .22 sh.e.l.l is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells' nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance. If the new DNA happens to land in the right place-and no one yet knows what, or where, that place is-the plant grown from that cell will express the new gene. That's it? That's it? That's it. That's it.

Apart from its slightly more debonair means of entry, the agrobacterium works in much the same way. In the clean rooms, where the air pressure is kept artificially high to prevent errant microbes from wandering in, technicians sit at lab benches before petri dishes in which fingernail-sized sections of potato stem have been placed in a clear nutrient jelly. Into this medium they squirt a solution of agrobacteria, which have already had their genes swapped with the ones Monsanto wants to insert (specific enzymes can be used to cut and paste precise sequences of DNA). In addition to the Bt gene being spliced, a "marker" gene is also included-typically this is a gene conferring resistance to a specific antibiotic. This way, the technicians can later flood the dish with the antibiotic to see which cells have taken up the new DNA; any that haven't simply die. The marker gene can also serve as a kind of DNA fingerprint, allowing Monsanto to identify its plants and their descendants long after they've left the lab. By performing a simple test on any potato leaf in my garden, a Monsanto agent can prove whether or not the plant is the company's intellectual property. I realized that, whatever else it is, genetic engineering is also a powerful technique for transforming plants into private property, by giving every one of them what amounts to its own Universal Product Code.

After several hours the surviving slips of potato stem begin to put down roots; a few days later, these plantlets are moved upstairs to the potato greenhouse on the roof. Here I met Glenda Debrecht, a cheerful staff horticulturist, who invited me to don latex gloves and help her transplant pinkie-sized plantlets from their petri dishes to small pots filled with customized soil. After the abstractions of the laboratory, I felt back on quasi-familiar ground, in a greenhouse handling actual plants.

The whole operation, from petri dish to transplant to greenhouse, is performed thousands of times, Glenda explained as we worked across a wheeled potting bench from each other, largely because there is so much uncertainty about the outcome, even after the DNA is accepted. If the new DNA winds up in the wrong place in the genome, for example, the new gene won't be expressed, or it will be expressed only poorly. In nature-that is, in s.e.xual reproduction-genes move not one by one but in the company of a.s.sociated genes that regulate their expression, turning them on and off. The transfer of genetic material is also much more orderly in s.e.x, the process somehow ensuring that every gene ends up in its proper neighborhood and doesn't trip over other genes in the process, inadvertently affecting their function. "Genetic instability" is the catchall term used to describe the various unexpected effects that misplaced or unregulated foreign genes can have on their new environment. These can range from the subtle and invisible (a particular protein is over- or underexpressed in the new plant, say) to the manifestly outlandish: Glenda sees a great many freaky potato plants.

Starck told me that the gene transfer "takes" anywhere between 10 percent and 90 percent of the time-an eyebrow-raising statistic. For some unknown reason (genetic instability?), the process produces a great deal of variability, even though it begins with a single, known, cloned strain of potato. "So we grow out thousands of different plants," Glenda explained, "and then look for the best." The result is often a potato that is superior in ways the presence of the new gene can't explain. This would certainly explain the vigor of my NewLeafs.

I was struck by the uncertainty surrounding the process, how this technology is at the same time both astoundingly sophisticated yet still a shot in the genetic dark. Throw a bunch of DNA against the wall and see what sticks; do this enough times, and you're bound to get what you're looking for. Transplanting potatoes with Glenda also made me realize that it may be impossible ever to conclude once and for all that this technology is intrinsically intrinsically sound or dangerous. For every new genetically engineered plant is a unique event in nature, bringing its own set of genetic contingencies. This means that the reliability or safety of one genetically modified plant doesn't necessarily guarantee the reliability or safety of the next. sound or dangerous. For every new genetically engineered plant is a unique event in nature, bringing its own set of genetic contingencies. This means that the reliability or safety of one genetically modified plant doesn't necessarily guarantee the reliability or safety of the next.

"There's still a lot we don't understand about gene expression," Starck acknowledged. A great many factors, including the environment, influence whether, and to what extent, an introduced gene will do what it's supposed to do. In one early experiment, scientists succeeded in splicing a gene for redness into petunias. In the field everything went according to plan, until the temperature hit 90 degrees and an entire planting of red petunias suddenly and inexplicably turned white. Wouldn't this sort of thing-these Dionysian jokers rearing up in the ordered Apollonian fields-rattle one's faith in genetic determinism a little little? It's obviously not quite as simple as putting a software program into a computer.

July 1. When I got home from St. Louis, my potato crop was thriving. It was time to hill up the plants, so, with a hoe, I pulled the rich soil from the lips of the trenches down around the stems to protect the developing tubers from the light. I also dressed the plants with a few shovelfuls of old cow manure: potatoes seem to love the stuff. The best, sweetest potatoes I ever tasted were ones that, as a teenager, I helped a neighbor dig out of the pile of pure horse manure he'd planted them in. I sometimes think it must have been this dazzling example of alchemy that sold me-not just on potato growing but on gardening as a quasi-magical, quasi-sacramental thing to do. When I got home from St. Louis, my potato crop was thriving. It was time to hill up the plants, so, with a hoe, I pulled the rich soil from the lips of the trenches down around the stems to protect the developing tubers from the light. I also dressed the plants with a few shovelfuls of old cow manure: potatoes seem to love the stuff. The best, sweetest potatoes I ever tasted were ones that, as a teenager, I helped a neighbor dig out of the pile of pure horse manure he'd planted them in. I sometimes think it must have been this dazzling example of alchemy that sold me-not just on potato growing but on gardening as a quasi-magical, quasi-sacramental thing to do.

My NewLeafs were big as shrubs now, and crowned with slender flower stalks. Potato flowers are actually quite pretty, at least by the standards of a vegetable: five-petaled lavender stars with yellow centers that give off a faint roselike perfume. One sultry afternoon I watched the b.u.mblebees making their rounds of my potato blossoms, thoughtlessly chalking themselves with yellow pollen grains before lumbering off to appointments with other blossoms, other species.

Uncertainty is the theme that unifies most of the questions now being raised about agricultural biotechnology by environmentalists and scientists. By planting millions of acres of genetically altered plants, we're introducing something novel into the environment and the food chain, the consequences of which are not completely understood. Several of these uncertainties have to do with the fate of the grains of pollen these b.u.mblebees are carting off from my potatoes. is the theme that unifies most of the questions now being raised about agricultural biotechnology by environmentalists and scientists. By planting millions of acres of genetically altered plants, we're introducing something novel into the environment and the food chain, the consequences of which are not completely understood. Several of these uncertainties have to do with the fate of the grains of pollen these b.u.mblebees are carting off from my potatoes.

For one thing, that pollen, like every other part of the plant, contains Bt toxin. The toxin, which is produced by a bacterium that occurs naturally in the soil, is generally thought to be safe for humans, yet the Bt in genetically modified crops is behaving a little differently from the ordinary Bt that farmers have been spraying on their crops for years. Instead of quickly breaking down in nature, as it usually does, genetically modified Bt toxin seems to be building up in the soil. This may be insignificant; we don't know. (We don't really know what Bt is doing in soil in the first place.) We also don't know what effect all this new Bt in the environment may have on the insects we don't don't want to kill, though there are reasons to be concerned. In laboratory experiments scientists have found that the pollen from Bt corn is lethal to monarch b.u.t.terflies. Monarchs don't eat corn pollen, but they do eat, exclusively, the leaves of milkweed ( want to kill, though there are reasons to be concerned. In laboratory experiments scientists have found that the pollen from Bt corn is lethal to monarch b.u.t.terflies. Monarchs don't eat corn pollen, but they do eat, exclusively, the leaves of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), a weed that is common in American cornfields. When monarch caterpillars eat milkweed leaves dusted with Bt corn pollen, they sicken and die. Will this happen in the field? And how serious will the problem be if it does? We don't know.

What is remarkable is that someone thought to ask the question in the first place. As we learned during the glory days of the chemical paradigm, the ecological effects of changes to the environment often show up where we least expect to find them. DDT in its time was thoroughly tested and found to be safe and effective-until it was discovered that this unusually long-lived chemical travels through the food chain and happens to thin out the sh.e.l.ls of birds' eggs. The question that led scientists to this discovery wasn't even a question about DDT, it was a question about birds: Why is the world's population of raptors suddenly collapsing? DDT was the answer. Hoping not to encounter that sort of surprise again, scientists are busy trying to imagine the sorts of questions to which Bt or Roundup Ready crops might someday prove to be the unexpected answer.

One of those questions has to do with "gene flow": What might happen to the Bt genes in the pollen my b.u.mblebees are moving from blossom to blossom around my garden? Through cross-pollination those genes can wind up in other plants, possibly conferring a new evolutionary advantage on that species. Most domesticated plants do poorly in the wild; the traits we breed them for-fruit that ripens all at once, say-often render them less fit for life in the wild. But biotech plants have been given traits, such as insect or pesticide resistance, that render them more more fit in nature. fit in nature.

Gene flow ordinarily occurs only between closely related species, and since the potato evolved in South America, the chances are slim that my Bt genes will escape into the wilds of Connecticut to sp.a.w.n some kind of superweed. That's Monsanto's contention, and there's no reason to doubt it. But it is interesting to note that while genetic engineering depends for its power on the ability to break down the genetic walls between species and even phyla in order to freely move genes among them, the environmental safety of the technology depends on precisely the opposite phenomenon: on the integrity of species in nature and their tendency to reject alien genetic material.

Yet what will happen if Peruvian farmers plant Bt potatoes? Or if I plant a biotech crop that does have local relatives? Scientists have already proved that the Roundup Ready gene can migrate in a single generation from a field of rapeseed oil plants to a related weed in the mustard family, which then exhibits tolerance to the herbicide; the same has happened with genetically modified beets. This came as no great surprise; what did is the discovery, in one experiment, that transgenes migrate more readily than ordinary ones; no one knows why, but these well-traveled genes may prove to be especially jumpy.

Jumping genes and superweeds point to a new kind of environmental problem: "biological pollution," which some environmentalists believe will be the unhappy legacy of agriculture's s.h.i.+ft from a chemical to a biological paradigm. (We're already familiar with one form of biological pollution: invasive exotic species such as kudzu, zebra mussels, and Dutch elm disease.) Harmful as chemical pollution can be, it eventually disperses and fades, but biological pollution is self-replicating. Think of it as the difference between an oil spill and a disease. Once a transgene introduces a new weed or a resistant pest into the environment, it can't very well be cleaned up: it will already have become part of nature.

In the case of the NewLeaf potato, the most likely form of biological pollution is the evolution of insects resistant to Bt, a development that would ruin one of the safest insecticides we have and do great harm to the organic farmers who depend on it.* The phenomenon of insect resistance offers an object lesson in the difficulties of controlling nature, as well as the problem with using a linear machine metaphor to deal with a process as complex and nonlinear as evolution. For this is a case where the more thorough our control of nature is, the sooner natural selection will overthrow it. The phenomenon of insect resistance offers an object lesson in the difficulties of controlling nature, as well as the problem with using a linear machine metaphor to deal with a process as complex and nonlinear as evolution. For this is a case where the more thorough our control of nature is, the sooner natural selection will overthrow it.

According to the theory, which is based on cla.s.sical Darwinism, the new Bt crops add so much Bt toxin to the environment on such a continuous basis that the target pests will evolve resistance to it; the only real question is how long this will take to happen. Before now resistance hasn't been a worry, because conventional Bt sprays break down quickly in sunlight and farmers spray only when confronted with a serious infestation. Resistance is essentially a form of coevolution that occurs when a given population is threatened with extinction. That pressure quickly selects for whatever chance mutation will allow the species to change and survive. Through natural selection, then, one species' attempt at total control can engender its own nemesis.

I was surprised to learn that the specter of Bt resistance has forced Monsanto to temporarily lay aside its mechanistic habits of thought and approach the problem more like, well, a Darwinian. Working with government regulators, the company has developed a "Resistance Management Plan" to postpone Bt resistance. Farmers who plant Bt crops must leave a certain portion of their land planted in non-Bt crops in order to create "refuges" for the targeted bugs. The goal is to prevent the first Bt-resistant Colorado potato beetle from mating with a second resistant bug and thereby launching a new race of superbugs. The theory is that when that first Bt-resistant insect does show up, it can be induced to mate with a susceptible bug living on the refuge side of the tracks, thereby diluting the new gene for resistance. The plan implicitly acknowledges that if this new control of nature is to last, a certain amount of no-control, or wildness, will have to be deliberately cultivated. The thinking may be sound, but an awful lot has to go right for Mr. Wrong to meet Miss Right. No one can be sure how big the refuges have to be, where they should be located, and whether farmers will cooperate (creating safe havens for your most destructive pests is counterintuitive, after all)-not to mention the bugs.

Monsanto executives voice confidence that the plan will work, though their definition of success will come as small comfort to organic farmers: the company's scientists say that, if all goes well, resistance can be postponed for thirty years. After that? Dave Hjelle, the company's director of regulatory affairs, told me over lunch in St. Louis that Bt resistance shouldn't overly concern us since "there are a thousand other Bts out there"-that is, other proteins with insecticidal properties. "We can handle this problem with new products. The critics don't know what we have in the pipeline." This is, of course, how chemical companies have always handled the problem of pest resistance: by simply introducing a new and improved pesticide every few years. With any luck, the effectiveness of the last one will expire around the same time its patent does.

Behind the bland corporate a.s.surances, though, stands a fairly startling admission. Monsanto is acknowledging that, in the case of Bt, it plans on simply using up not just another patented synthetic chemical but a natural r