By Janet Wright
It was a classic face-off. On one side were the advocates of technological progress: intense, tie-clad, a bit arrogant. Against them, sporting symbolic butterfly wings, stood the environmentalists: fervent, indignant, a little rowdy.
The scene could have been an international conference or an experimental field plot, but in fact it was a Dickinson College classroom. My fall 2001 ecology class was capping its semester with a team debate on the ecological impact of genetically modified (GM) crops. Three robed justices (in real life, mild-mannered biology professors) sat to judge how well each side mustered scientific evidence to make its argument.
Genetic engineering promises a world with higher yield, greater nutrition and less need for pesticides and fertilizers, as well as novel vaccines, chemicals and food products. "Transgenic" crops now cover a hundred million acres of land worldwide, three-quarters of it in the United States, but is the promise really a threat?
Skeptics have always existed, but a crystallizing moment occurred in 1999 when Cornell entomologists fed leaves dusted with pollen from genetically modified corn to Monarch butterfly caterpillars and found that the caterpillars died or became stunted. The implied menace to what The Washington Post calls "the Bambi of insects" became the focus for organized protest against all genetic engineering in agriculture. A campaign for the Environmental Defense Fund, for instance, urged support for its efforts to curb GM crops "before the Monarch butterfly ends up on the Endangered Species list."
A dire prediction: but, is it true? If true, is it important? My students figured that the intervening two years would have produced enough evidence to answer those questions for their debate, but to get that evidence they would have to extract it from a morass of technical jargon, impassioned rhetoric and misinformation. What they had in store exemplifies my candidate for the biggest challenge we face in the coming century: filtering a tidal wave of "information," good and bad, to make decisions of global import.
Caterpillars and corn were the debate teams' starting points, but they quickly turned up other lines of investigation. News reports and Internet sites alleged that GM crops pollute soils, encourage resistant pests, foster superweeds, deplete biodiversity, threaten forest wildlife and contaminate native gene pools. There were dozens of such claims, each magnified many times over in the popular press. If the issue were to be decided by weight of words, it would be no contest.
Things were looking bad for the "pro-biotech" team. Before long, though, both groups began to eye the claims more critically, as their e-mail comments to me showed: "Many of the sources weren't peer reviewed and had a lot of opinion and speculation in them," one noted, and another found the news reports "shoddy work." "I read one web page and article after another and thought I was accumulating a lot of evidence, and then I realized they were all talking about the same study." The first hurdle, then, was to look beyond quantity for quality. In a world where a virus or an urban legend can spread to a billion sites in a day, we can't afford to mistake frequency for validity.
Since this was a science class, my students knew to turn to the scientific literature next. Drawing conclusions from research wasn't simple, however. Science progresses in very small steps. A study of the effect of one pollen strain on one butterfly species might yield a definitive answer, but how that answer generalizes to other situations is unclear until a large body of work accumulates. Like a puzzle with most of the pieces missing, the information the students found did not fit together nicely.
Especially troubling was a body of work that documented no detrimental effects from GM crops. Should "negative results" count? One summarized, "There's a lot of information out there, and most of it conflicts." Welcome to the real world. Increasingly, decisions with big consequences will need to be made on the basis of fragmentary evidence. A new discipline of "meta-analysis" seeks to meld disparate data into a whole bigger than the parts, but so far that approach is tedious, esoteric and mostly untested. Can it mature fast enough?
Of course, an even more obvious roadblock to science literature is its incomprehensibility to nonspecialists. Few readers have the breadth of expertise to decipher the genetic-engineering techniques, microbial biochemistry, Latin names, ecological interactions and arcane statistical analyses that characterize the studies relevant to GM agriculture.
Even this group of science-savvy students admitted that "without a news report, I wouldn't have known what the scientists found." Of all the challenges, this is the least excusable. In the new century, data from genetics, geology, pharmacology and physics will be the stuff on which major policy decisions are made. Scientists simply must be trained and motivated to communicate their findings to those outside their field. If scientist/authors don't offer any interpretive help, decision-makers will be at the mercy of whatever interest group puts its own spin on the result, as my students found, to their frustration.
Despite the obstacles, there's nothing like a contest to galvanize team effort. A favorite part of the debate teams' preparation was strategizing about how to blow holes in the other side's argument. (And we educators ponder how to teach critical thinking!) By the day of the debate, the teams were primed, everyone was an expert, and the future of the biosphere was at stake.
The "biotech" team argued forcefully that the benefits of GM crops would be huge, and the risks could be contained. The "green" team built on the original butterfly study to argue that the short history of GM agriculture was a sorry saga of unanticipated risks and potential disaster. Both sides afterwards said they had come to appreciate that logic and passion were effective rhetorical tools but, for a valid conclusion, they needed data.
And the winner? A tie, said the judges. How could it be otherwise? As one student observed, "I was frustrated that we couldn't get a clear answer, and then it hit me, this is real."
Real, and scary: the list of issues for the new century includes genetically modified organisms, stem-cell research, bioterrorism, an aging population, global climate change--and, beyond science, questions of cultural identity, economic management and social justice. As never before, the actions we take will unalterably affect the future of our species and our planet. As never before, we are awash in information to make those decisions. Being able to distill the valid information and interpret it may be the most important skills we can give our students. It will be their call.