Calling Poirot: bizarre case of cross-border 'super corn'

It's a border crossing of the worst kind. US biotechnology has spread southward to Mexico, its effects showing up in the native corn of remote southern villages. The high-tech invasion may threaten the birthplace of corn, which is also a key center of biodiversity.

That's the contention, anyway, of two scientists in the United States who have touched off a firestorm.

Scientists around the globe are trading increasingly vitriolic charges over the scientists' findings. Mexican activists claim biotechnology has violated their natural heritage. And an international research center in Mexico faces the unsavory possibility of spending its entire biotech research budget to test its gene banks for the offending material.

Can corn really be so controversial? Apparently so, when the subject is bioengineering. The current corn clash shows how quickly and unexpectedly genetically altered DNA can hop over national borders. It also poses a new question for biotech crops: If the new genetics invades its own cradle, will it weaken the old genetics? Or will it, oddly, enhance it?

No one knows the answer yet.

The skirmish had its beginnings last September, when Mexico's Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources announced it had found native corn contaminated with bioengineered DNA. The findings seemed to confirm what the two scientists had already discovered in two remote locations of southern Mexico.

But when the scientists – microbial ecologist Ignacio Chapela and graduate student David Quist, both of the University of California at Berkeley – published their findings in the journal Nature in November, the fireworks began.

One Greenpeace activist reportedly called the biotech invasion a worse cultural attack than tearing down Oaxaca's cathedral to build a McDonald's. Last month, the Mexican government enacted a law threatening up to nine years in prison for anyone who commercializes, stores, transports, or releases into the environment a genetically modified organism.

Particularly surprising in the Berkeley study were the remote locations where the altered DNA purportedly appeared. Not only had Mexico banned the planting of such bioengineered corn in 1998, but the affected native corn was growing many miles away from commercial varieties.

How it got there – if it indeed did – remains a mystery. In fact, many crop geneticists doubt it has. They don't like the testing methodology that authors Quist and Chapela used. "Poor experimental design and practices," Transgenic Research, a scientific journal, editorialized.

"Clearly, what they were picking up were false positives," says C.S. Prakash, professor of agricultural biotechnology at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Ala.

Page: 1 | 2