In a few, the new viral gene appeared to be working.
Now came the moment of truth.
Would genetically modified papaya plants be killed by the ring spot virus or would they resist?
Carol Gonsalves: The real severe and the best test is after the gene is in.
You rub the plants with an isolate of the virus to see if it actually indeed withstands infection.
Dennis Gonsalves: This here is a virus-infected plant.
The effect of the virus is on the leaves and also the fruit.
On the leaves- the leaves, instead of being full, are narrow,
and they also show this yellowing here, as opposed to the genetically engineered papaya here.
This leaf is a normal-looking papaya leaf.
It's fully green, and the growth is very good.
Now, the only difference here is that this one plant has the one gene making it resistant to the virus.
Narrator: A decade of work had produced a breakthrough and perhaps saved an industry.
If genetic engineering could protect a papaya from a lethal virus,
why stop there?
At Cornell, a world center of agricultural science,
researchers were hard at work genetically engineering crops.
Some were working on getting medicines into plants.
Others were striving to make crops like rice more nutritious.
But the early '90s was also a time when scientists speculated about
exotic possibilities which might never make it into commercial products.
For example, by splicing a gene from a firefly into a tobacco seed,
scientists could produce tobacco plants that would glow whenever they needed watering.
Another idea was to splice a gene
that enables an Arctic flounder to tolerate cold into a strawberry to protect it from frost damage.
While such speculations did not turn into commercial products,
the new science of agricultural biotechnology had attracted the attention of some large corporations.
Monsanto, an agro-chemical company,
realized that biotechnology might offer a way out of the pesticide business,
which had become increasingly unprofitable.
Hugh Grant: Further development of pesticides was no longer a viable business opportunity and,
from an environmental point of view,
didn't really make sense, either.
So we stopped all chemical investment
and really redirected our energy towards biotech.
Narrator: Hiring hundreds of researchers,
Monsanto set out to build a new industry.
The first products were aimed squarely at their traditional customers,
the same farmers who had bought their herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers.
Farmers like Gerald Tumbleson, who farms in southern Minnesota.
Eighty-five percent of the food we eat comes from large farms like this.
On 2,700 acres, Gerald Tumbleson grows only two crops, corn and soy.
Americans have come to expect cheap food,
so to stay in business, Tumbleson is continually looking to technology to cut his costs.
Satellite navigation, the latest combine harvesters, and heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers.
He was hoping that Monsanto's genetic technology
could help him get rid of a big pest, the European corn borer caterpillar.
Gerald Tumbleson: They burrow into the stalk, and then it rots the inside of the stalk.
They burrow into the shank that holds the ear, and it rots that,
and the wind comes up and the corn falls off.
Now, to keep that from happening,
we spray our field with an insecticide, but we can't get selective.
We spray for an insect, and we might get four or five that we don't want dead, and we've killed them.
Narrator: Monsanto had a solution to sell, corn which made its own pesticide.
Scientists had long known that a humble soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt,
produced toxins that killed caterpillars.
Monsanto scientists spliced the bacterial gene that made the toxin into corn.
Now every cell of the modified corn makes its own pesticide,
a chemical protein harmless to most insects and to humans,
whose bodies rapidly break it down, but lethal to the corn borer caterpillar.
In Monsanto's greenhouses, scientists put Bt genes into other crops:
soy, potatoes, and into the most intensively sprayed crop of all, cotton.
Because Bt crops replace pesticides,
many scientists believed genetic engineering could help save the environment.
Susan McCouch: Cotton is the world's number-one user of pesticides.
It is ironic to me that we think of cotton as a natural fiber,
and we don't understand that it is a major pollutant environmentally.
And Bt cotton presents us with an opportunity
to reduce the amount of pesticides that we're spraying on our crops.
That not only has an environmental implication,
but it has a major implication for the people
who actually have to handle the pesticides and do the spraying.
Gerald Tumbleson: If you've ever been around here when you've sprayed an insecticide,
if you've ever used that- we put it on- we put, you know, leather gloves on
and coveralls on so it doesn't get on us.
That is not a fun thing.
That is not something I even want to dream about.
I don't even want the thing in my machine shed when my grandkids are around.
But those are the types of things we don't have to have with this Bt corn.
Narrator: Along with soybeans, which were genetically modified
to manage weeds with much less herbicide,
the Bt crops were received enthusiastically.
Within a couple of years, the majority of soy and cotton
and a third of all corn were genetically modified.
Farmers like Gerald Tumbleson were convinced that biotechnology had the power to transform agriculture.
Gerald Tumbleson: We're going to be raising things on this land,
on this soil, that we haven't even dreamt of in 10 to 15 years.
I envy my sons because they're just getting started in a time which, I think, to me is very important.
Narrator: By 1996, grain handlers were treating GM crops like any other grain.
They mixed them in with non-GM crops and shipped them to food processors all over America.
Because corn and soy are used in hundreds of products,
these genetically modified organisms, or GMOs,
rapidly found their way into everything from cereals to sodas,
and into the stomachs of millions of Americans.
Consumers had no idea this had been happening to their food.
Even environmental groups had said little about the issue.
One exception was Jeremy Rifkin, a long-time critic of biotechnology.
For two decades he had tried to get the public interested.
Jeremy Rifkin: It seemed to me we needed to have
a thorough and thoughtful global discussion on the potential environmental implications
of reseeding the earth with genetically modified organisms.
Narrator: Rifkin would get his debate,
but only when GM food left the U.S. loaded on ships bound for other nations,
like Japan, and the countries of the European Union.
Within months of arriving in Europe, it was clear that the fortunes of GM food were about to change.
David Bowe: You started to see it, first of all, in Germany and Austria,
where there was almost a paranoia about anything to do with genetic modification.
Eugenics as an issue is a very, very sensitive one because of recent history in Germany,
and I think it was there that you first started too see real public concern.
It was from Germany and Austria that the ball really started to roll, and it didn't stop there.
Narrator: Environmental groups - like Greenpeace International -
staged demonstrations in country after country,
even dumping GM soy in front of the British prime minister's residence.
Doug Parr: The public are becoming quite skeptical
about the ability of scientific evidence to tell us all we need to know
about potentially irreversible innovations.
And genetic engineering seems to be crossing those boundaries of what we can know and should do.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community
