PT: Hi - I am Paul Thompson. I teach at philosophy Purdue University and I have been doing research and teaching on social and ethical issues in food and agricultural biotechnology for almost twenty years. I served for a number of years at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Biotechnology Research Advisory Committee, and I currently serve on the National Research Counsel's Biotechnology Advisory Committee, and have written a number of articles and a book on ethical issues on biotech, and am happy to be here to answer a few questions on some of the social and ethical issues associated with food and Ag biotech.

What does transgenic mean to you?

PT: The first thing I think to consider is what transgenic means - I generally answer this question by saying that, to me, transgenic means the use of some of the new recombinant DNA techniques to insert genes into an agricultural plant or animal. I know that the course has covered a lot of these techniques, and that the ways to do that are growing. In a sense though, from the standpoint of social and ethical issues, it is probably better to be a little broader and maybe looser in the definition. Because people that are not scientists tend to lump a number of things together that involves, I think, very different scientific techniques. For example, cloning is often thought of as an example of biotechnology and included along with transgenics in terms of what's controversial about biotechnology, but cloning technology does not involve the transfer of genes and, from a scientific standpoint, it is really a wholly different set of issues.

What is a controversial issue/example? How does it relate to transgenics? What is the potential impact on society?

PT: I do think though, from a social and ethical standpoint, what makes biotechnology or transgenics controversial has to do with a certain amount of nervousness people feel about this technology and a certain amount of confusion and worry that they have about the possible directions it might take. To some extent, that worry is based on the idea that we are doing something totally unprecedented and something terrible might go wrong. And I think to some extent that concern is also based on the feeling that the people doing this work, the scientists and companies, are not being properly cautious, and that perhaps governments are not regulating or supervising the work as closely as it could be. Certainly when we look at the European case, and much of the controversy over food and agricultural biotechnology has originated in Europe, it's a concern about the motive of the companies, and the oversight of the government that is really at the heart of the of a lot of concern. Europeans have experienced a number of scares associated with their food, the most dramatic of course was the mad cow disease that struck in the UK and has now spread across a number of European countries. I think that many people look at this incident and what they want is some assurance that when new technology is being introduced into the food system, that all the issues are being looked at, and it is being done in a responsible manner. Again, mad cow is not associated with transgenics. Here is the case where you have some issues that from a scientific standpoint, from the standpoint of somebody who does transgenic work, they don't have anything to do with the technology that they are working on. But from the standpoint of someone who looks at this from the outside, there's not such a clear understanding that we are really dealing with a really different set of scientific issues

What role do transgenic plants have in the environment?

PT: An issue that is interestingly controversial, I think, with respect to genuine transgenics, has to do with the environmental impact of transgenic work with plants. Recently, there has been a controversy over the discovery that some transgenic corn, transgenic maize, has been discovered in Mexico. It is useful, I think, to look at this and try to understand why it has been controversial, and what has been controversial about it. It is actually a very complicated story, and I really can't go into all the details - some of the controversy just has to do with the story was reported in the scientific literature, and whether or not the results that were reported were sufficiently scientific. Although recent work has tended to confirm some of the original reports, but I think what's most interesting about this is to ask ourselves, why is the discovery of transgenic corn in Mexico a significant environmental impact, and this is partly a scientific question, but it is partly an ethical question, partly a question in environmental ethics, a question of what it is that we value about our environment. I think for many people the idea that a gene which wasn't present in the environment, gets into the environment, gets released and is discovered growing on it's own, not necessarily in crops where it was intended to be grown, is in itself considered to be a negative environmental impact. Many of the ecologists who study the impact of agriculture, including transgenic agriculture on the environment, are much more concerned about the way that agricultural plants, whether they are transgenic or not, would affect the surrounding environment, and in the case of this emergence of a transgenic corn plant in Mexico, the thing that they are concerned about is the possibility that the genetic diversity in these wild plants that are relatively close relatives of corn that grow in Mexico, might be affected by the presence of this new variety. And this is a concern that might have been associated with a plant that was developed without using biotechnology. It's really just the concern that you have a very sensitive ecosystem, and putting a plant into it that can become invasive, that can start to take over, will have a disruptive effect on the broader ecosystem is a concern, without regard to whether biotech has been used or not. In this case, the fact that biotech was used shows that a plant that was not intended to be grown in that ecosystem is being grown in that ecosystem; it's still not clear whether it is being grown by Mexican farmers who aren't supposed to be growing it, or whether or not it actually escaped and is sort of growing on it's own. So these are some of the questions that will continue to be asked and answered with respect to that.

What other ethical questions are there relative to transgenics?

PT: I think that some of the other important ethical questions related to transgenics have to do with the way that individuals can and can't make choices that are important to them with respect to what they eat in the food system. And let me back up and talk about something that again is far distant from transgenics for a second - we know that many people have strong religious and cultural beliefs about what is appropriate to eat. Many of the world's religions have specific dietary restrictions that are based upon species lines - certain foods, pork, beef, can't be eaten for religious reasons. It's important for people who hold these religious beliefs to be able to maintain a diet that's pure in the sense of maintaining to their conceptions of what appropriate food is. One of the things that has been happening to the food system before transgenics came along has been a tendency for it to become harder and harder for people who have these religious and culturally based beliefs to have control over what they eat. Similarly, some people are reacting to the result of transgenics in a way that is if not explicitly religious at least very similar to religion in that they don't want to have any part of this food. They don't want to eat transgenic crops and they might have a religious or quasi-religious reason for that. They might say, "It's crossing species boundaries, and I don't want to eat crops that cross species boundaries or foods that cross species boundaries." Or, they might have a concern that they might articulate by saying that it's unnatural or possibly "I'm concerned about what we don't know about this concern." In all of these cases, we have a situation in which we have to ask ourselves "Do these people have a legitimate right to choose not to eat transgenic foods?" And, I'll tell you that my own view on this is that you don't need to have a good reason, at least a reason in scientific terms to decide that you want to eat non-transgenic foods, just as you don't need to have a good scientific reason to choose that you don't want to eat pork or you don't want to eat beef or, for that matter, that you don't want to eat cats and dogs. We have very strong culturally based beliefs in the United States that certain kinds of animals, cats and dogs being the examples, shouldn't be eaten as food. Yet there are places in the world where cat and dog are eaten as food, and we've actually built these cultural beliefs into our regulatory system. You can't include cat or dog meat in the American food system. We're protected against that. Is there a good scientific reason for that? Really, there's not. There's no reason why you can't eat cat and dog. This is just an example of a strong culturally based belief that probably couldn't be defended on scientific grounds. So, if we're going to have these kinds of rules that protect culturally based beliefs or religiously based beliefs in one area, on what ground could we deny people who want to hold similar kinds of beliefs when they apply to transgenic foods. So, I think that there are some important social and ethical questions about the way we address this kind of challenge in our food system, and I think that this set of issues really goes to the heart of the debate about labels for transgenic foods. The argument against labels is that these foods are, from a scientific standpoint, from a standpoint of their helpfulness, they are equivalent to regular kinds of foods. So if you put a label on them, it might stigmatize the food and might make people who don't have these culturally based concerns think there's something wrong with the food and I think that's an important and valid argument. On the other hand, if you don't provide some way for people that do have non-scientific reasons for not wanting to eat transgenic food with an exit, a kind of opt-out clause, a way of avoiding it if they want to, then you effectively are closing down the food system and you are really eliminating the role that these important cultural and historical values can play in what people eat. Again, this I think plays a significant role in international trade. There are, as you start to cross national boundaries, you have more and more of these kinds of cultural considerations coming into play, and I don't think we want to get ourselves in a position where we say that you have to have a scientific reason for deciding what you can and can't eat. Otherwise, we'll be in a position where we don't have any ethical basis for saying that we don't want to eat cats and dogs.