Administration's Technology Rhetoric Is Belied By Its Policy Actions

An additional goal is "a stable, science-based regulatory system." The Clinton-Gore report asserts that the administration has "taken significant steps . . . towards accelerating the development of technologies critical for long-term economic growth and for increasing productivity while reducing environmental impact . . . [via] fundamental science." The reality is that at the same time that funding is down, biotechnology regulation, the bte noir of the administration's policies, has become increasingly anti-innovative, unscientific, and focused on negligible-risk activities. "Government officials extol the importance of research to the economy, jobs, and quality of life, while their policies tell a quite different story." "The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has required unnecessary permits for more than 1,400 field trials of genetically modified plants, all of them of negligible risk to public health or the environment. The Food and Drug Ad-ministration (FDA), which has a generally positive 15-year track record on regulating biotech, has been revising its regulatory approach according to instructions from the administration. The agency recently announced that it will soon require food manufacturers to notify FDA before marketing foods made with high-precision recombinant DNA techniques--while exempting those crafted with other techniques, regardless of possible risk. By exposing these biotech techniques alone to public scrutiny--for no scientifically sound reason--FDA is casting suspicion on these products, making them vulnerable to the boycotts, threats, and accusations of anti-technology groups. The biotech regulatory policies of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are the most egregious and arbitrary of all. In early September, EPA published regulations for biotech biocontrol agents. Inexplicably, EPA targets only products made with the most precise and predictable new genetic methodologies, as opposed to products made with older, cruder techniques of genetic manipulation (which, in fact, are more likely to exhibit unexpected traits). The agency also plans to expand its regulatory dominion to a whole new category of products--plants that are made resistant to pests by using the new genetic techniques. These garden and farm plants will be regulated even more stringently than chemicals similar to DDT or parathion. Yet plant breeders have been creating and farmers using genetically improved plant varieties--many with genes moved across species or genus lines--safely for more than a century without government regulation. These rules make neither scientific nor economic sense. USDA, FDA, and EPA regulatory approaches fly in the face of a broad scientific consensus that the new biotechnology is an extension, or refinement, of earlier techniques of genetic manipulation that often have been subject to no regulation at all. Their regulatory policies constitute, in effect, a tax on innovation that uses the new biotechnology. Ineluctably, these anti-innovative policies will discourage research using the newer, more precise techniques, denying consumers more varied and nutritious produce grown with fewer chemicals. One might well wonder about the etiology of such actions by those who extol the importance of technology. The vice president's long-held antagonistic attitudes provide a clue. In a 1991 article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (5:19-30, Fall 1991), Al Gore displayed remarkable lack of appreciation of the historically positive linkage between science and economic development when he disdainfully described investors' eager reception of South San Francisco, Calif.-based Genentech Inc.'s 1980 stock offering as the first sellout of the "tree of knowledge to Wall Street." He went on to deride biotechnology research, claiming that "the decisions to develop ice-minus [bacteria], herbicide-resistant plants, and bovine growth hormone . . . lent credibility to those who argued that biotechnology would make things worse before it made things better" [emphasis added]. Moreover, in Gore's Earth in the Balance (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1992), he uses repeatedly the metaphor that those who believe in technological progress are as sinister as the perpetrators of World War II's Holocaust. These views from the government's technology czar are difficult to reconcile with the recent, upbeat verbiage in the administration's report. Whole emerging industrial sectors--bioremediation, agbiotech, food production, even biopharmaceuticals--have been damaged by regulatory or other disincentives. The bitter irony in the administration's policies is that, under the guise of concern for safety, they have undermined research on precisely the kinds of low-value-added but societally important products--safer and more nutritious foods, improved bioremediation agents, alternatives to chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and other environmentally friendly innovations--that should have universal appeal. The administration's record on biotechnology, including the technology's most environmentally friendly manifestations, has made a shambles of a success story. The new, rosy rhetoric cannot remedy that. Henry I. Miller is the Robert Wesson Fellow of Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at the Hoover Institution and a consulting professor at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies in California.

Administration's Technology Rhetoric Is Belied By Its Policy Actions

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