How a Nobel laureate's quest to make GM crops acceptable took him to God

Genetically modified (GM) food production can address the health needs of 800 million people who do not have the luxury of good healthcare, like those in the West, says Richard J Roberts, the 1993 Nobel laureate for Medicine. He is willing to go to great lengths to get backers for his case.

The atheist has turned to faith in an attempt to gather support for his campaign. Roberts has had meetings with Pope Francis and Buddhist groups to convince them to endorse the safety of GM food and the necessity of the biotech in food production to address the health needs of millions of poor people. "I am an atheist. But if I see someone who has a powerful position and who can and wants to do something good for humanity, why not reach out to them," Roberts tells ET Magazine, while sipping green tea at Lindau, Germany, where he gave a passionate lecture on the benefits of GM food at the 68 th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.

During a short meeting with the Pope in 2017, Roberts handed over a plea with signatures of 133 Nobel laureates endorsing GM tech. He is now seeking a one-on-one meeting with him to convince the religious head the benefits of GM tech. Roberts is also reaching out to political leaders — one of them being Prime Minister Narendra Modi who, according to Roberts, seems to be interested to know more about the tech.

Roberts, like several other Nobel laureates, had stayed away from campaigns of any sort till 2016. At a European Union meeting two years ago on the future of medicine, he decided it was time to gather support for GM food. Roberts changed his mind after listening to many plant scientists talk about how difficult it was for them to do research on GM tech and how they couldn’t even publicly talk about their work because of opposition from so called Green parties and activist groups like Greenpeace. The scientists, Richard recalls, were undermined by the arguments that as some of them were funded by industry, their pro-GM food statements cannot be trusted. "It occurred to me that Nobel laureates are not funded by any big agri business."

About 130 Nobel laureates came together to start a petition asking heads of states and UN ambassadors to reject campaigns against crops and foods improved through biotechnology, and to accelerate the access of farmers to all the tools of modern biology. "Opposition based on emotion and dogma, and contradicted by data, must be stopped," the campaign proclaimed. Roberts argued that food is akin to medicine to many poor people and they should have better access to food. GM tech was the way to improve crops.

What is even more frustrating for biochemists like Roberts is the fierce opposition to Golden Rice, a GM technique that produces beta carotin in rice, which gets converted into Vitamin A. One of the leading causes of blindness among children is lack of Vitamin A. to combat this, scientists from Germany and Britan developed Golden Rice in 1990. But opposition was so fierce that in 2013 a group of green activists destroyed fields of the rice in the Philippines. In May, the USFDA declared Golden Rice fit for consumption. Canada and New Zealand have also given approvals. “I want to know how many children have to go blind before we realise Golden Rice is safe. Not allowing it for consumption is a crime against humanity,” Roberts says.

John Walker, the 2003 Nobel laureate for Chemistry and one of the signatories to the pro-GM food campaign, says opposition to the technology is irrational. What worries him are the commercial aspects of GM seeds. Practices such as selling sterile seeds to farmers or monopolising seeds needs to be examined, Walker says.

The real beneficiaries of GM crops have been small farmers more than agri business, says Roberts.

He refers to Bacillus thuringiensis (BT) cotton, created to give crops resistance to withstand insect attacks. Since its launch in 2002, India has become one of the largest cotton producing countries in the world. Because of regulations against these seeds, he says, farmers have started illegally growing GM crops.

GM tech has been a divisive issue. Popular understanding is that GM tech involves gene altering of plants to enhance resistant to pests or in some cases (such as Golden Rice) improve nutritional capacity. Plant scientists or biologists, however, will say it is impossible to define GM. Gene modification "is the essential feature of all life on earth".

Roberts says in his website: "It is, in fact, a feature of our own, human genetic makeup. We are all GMOs as is every organism on Earth.” It is like shifting a GPS system from one car to

another. “But the anti-GMO groups would like you to believe, that if you put this GPS system of an airplane in a car, your car will start flying or if you put a salmon gene in a plant, the plant will start swimming. Obviously that’s not how it works."