Biotech on a Fast and Slow Track

March 21, 2000

Biotechnology is going great guns in health care and medicine, but biotech foods are threatened with a much slower process before public acceptance puts such foods on grocery shelves to any great extent. Geneticists may be the world's new explorers, but like the explorers of old food geneticists at least are encountering many skeptics, says the American Farm Bureau Federation.

"Those who think the agricultural world is flat include a number of celebrated chefs," says AFBF's Stewart Truelsen. He cites a WALL STREET JOURNAL report on March 9 that notes, "In some of the country's finest restaurants, they are ridding their larders of biotech ingredients, quizzing suppliers about biotech content and banding together to publicly oppose the proliferation of genetically modified food products."

Julia Child is an exception. The WSJ said she thinks biotechnology is "one of the greatest discoveries of the last century." "Christopher Columbus had trouble convincing Europeans the earth is round," says Truelsen. "His detractors said he would fall off the edge of the world before his ships reached America. This is about where we are right now with biotechnology."

In health care and medicine, however, biotechnology is on a fast track, Truelsen notes. Genomics, the study of genomes, including genome mapping and gene sequencing, "si about to change everything in medicine according to the president of one biopharmaceutical company," Truelsen notes. "It likely will lead to cures for many diseases and physical disabilities that have baffled science until now."

When it comes to medicine, the news about biotech is mostly positive; when it comes to agriculture, the news often is about eliminating biotech products from the food supply. "It doesn't seem to make sense," he says.