The march of thyme

I am most honoured by your invitation to speak at this meeting of the Shanghai Institute of Bio-historiography. As many of you know, I work at the University of San Francisco de Crico, in that remote Pacific province of the Spanish Empire, Hispano-America, and I am interested mainly in the early history of plant genetic engineering, that obscure period covering the end of the 20th century (old style) and the beginning of the following century. You are all familiar with the fact that very little documentary evidence has survived from this pre-electronic period, and that there is considerable confusion about the events that took place in those troubled times. I am happy to announce here that we have recently recovered a remarkable collection of documents from a deep wine cellar of the ancient Napa Institute of Molecular Oenology, now a Benedictine monastery. These throw much light on the history of this period and are the subject of my lecture today. The genetic modification of plants and their introduction into agriculture began with a number of very primitive and crude examples in the last decade of the second millennium. Thus there were crops carrying a gene conferring resistance to a herbicide, a chemical used to kill other competing plants referred to as weeds in the typical derogatory language of those days; and there was an amusing tomato which had a gene modification preventing the softening that accompanies ripening. These products were generally accepted in the country known as America, but this was not to be the case in Europe (now part of Greater Norwegia) or in the large island of Tasmania, then called Australia. Opposition mounted to these Genetically Modified Organisms, or jimmoes, as they later came to be called, and to food manufactured from their products. The foods were called Frankenstein foods, and I have been able to establish that Frankenstein was a very early genetic engineer who worked in the field of human beings but was not very successful as most of his products did not work properly. We have found several illustrations of these inept and unfinished offerings, which were used to inspire fear, especially in small children, and associating these images with bottles of tomato ketchup must have contributed to the terrible events that ensued later. It is important to understand the political background, and the Napa documents are very illuminating in this respect. Political organisations had colour names in those days, and at the time we are discussing, a dominant group, called the Reds, was being replaced by another party, known as the Greens. The Reds were, appropriately, meat-eaters, and their demise can be clearly linked to disease that was called BSE, or, more popularly, mad cow disease. It seems that BSE was caused by an infectious agent that had spread in cattle fed products from infected sheep. The Reds succumbed to this disease through the consumption of various food products made from beef. It seems that the Greens, who replaced the Reds, were vegetable eaters, were opposed in general to unnatural agricultural production and instilled in the public a fear of food made from genetically modified plants. People began to worry about a potential mad potato epidemic, or worse. Some governments banned the growing of genetically modified plants, others the importation of products made from such plants and there was widespread demand that foods made with these products should be labelled as such. The opposition spread and became worldwide. By 2005 in the old calendar there were widespread food shortages, followed by supermarket lootings and social unrest. Government instability led to a second dark age, but this was quite brief and by 2030, most countries had been restored to normal with the rise of the Turquoises, starting first in the Black Sea area. Today, of course, we enjoy the products of a wide variety of sophisticated GE (genetically enhanced) plants, such as selfpeeling oranges, sighing willows and the salad tree, with several varieties of dressings that can be tapped like latex. All of these are the products of a technology that was kept alive during the dark ages by several important organisations. There was one product that apparently escaped the strictures that were imposed on genetically modified food, and that was alcohol. It was not really a food but a kind of drug. Drugs such as insulin had been manufactured from genetically modified organisms for decades and had gained acceptance. As the NAPA Institute documents make very clear, the technology was maintained by companies working in an area that fused wine making and pharmaceuticals. This explains why grapes became the best understood plant of those days. It also explains many of the names of well-known companies in this field such as MonSante, Rhone-Plonk, Briskol-Myers, Roche-Shield-Lafitte and Marc, Sharpe and Dom. Lettuce raise our glasses to them. R267