If you’ve become worried about our food after watching Food, Inc. or reading Michael Pollan, or our planet after watching An Inconvenient Truth or the natural disaster du jour on the evening news, then like me you might have thought you had your biohazard bases covered. After accounting for these looming issues I was happy to relegate the risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to the dusty corner where I pile up my back issues of National Geographic and Scientific American…

Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet

Then (belatedly) I read Denise Caruso’s book, Intervention. I’ve known Denise for a long time and knew she’d become an expert on social risks but perhaps the titles on her website didn’t scream out “This means you!” loudly enough for me to pay close attention until now. I figured that if I stuck with eating wild fish and meat from cows with only two horns I could outlive any problems caused by GMOs in general and specifically transgenics (where scientists start fiddling with multiple species and transferring genetic material between them). Now I’m not so sure.

Like most laymen I assumed the process of genetic modification was simple and orderly, no worse than taking some software code from one web page and pasting it into another (come to think of it, that’s not as harmless as it looks either). But her descriptions make it clear that there are literally innumerable side effects, both known and unknown. Some of these are relatively simple to characterize but hard to measure, like the problem that breeding crops with a “RoundUp resistant gene” will inevitably cause some of that gene to wind up pollinating weeds and creating a class of Superweeds. Everyone agrees that more weeds are becoming RoundUp resistant, but there isn’t any consensus on how much of that is due to extensive use of the pesticide and how much is due to genetic transfer from crop to weed.

Even though I hadn’t thought through all the issues with transgenics related to the food supply, I was pretty confident that the issues began and ended there. Turns out even that is a false security. Some of the scariest scenarios Denise points out involve the transfer of diseases or other genetic problems from food crops to food animals and then to people. I won’t try and recap the dozens of illustrations Denise uses in Intervention (you need to read it yourself), but they range from scary stuff that has already happened mostly in small scale, to studies showing a lot worse could happen, to plausible scenarios which get really ugly.

All that said, Denise is the first to applaud the benefits of genetic fiddling, particularly in medicine. The point of the book isn’t (just) to scare us, but to make society as a whole sit up, take notice, and have educated conversations between all the stake holders about the potential risks and rewards to all of us of these technologies and products. Like with factory farming, offshore oil drilling and many other technology areas we have plunged ahead based on the financial interests of a few and the short term good to many without really honest discussions of the potential downsides.

A major portion of the book is devoted to showing how the system is stacked against the greater good as special interest economics and a revolving door regulatory environment conspire to make it easy to put blinders on and get approval for crops and animals which are guaranteed to have unintended consequences often of unforeseen magnitude. To those who’ve read Pollan on the corn industry this will sound very familiar. Denise is hardly a luddite, having spent her career in high-tech and been the digital commerce writer for the New York Times for years. So she isn’t arguing we should go back to growing penicillin on bread but she does make a convincing case we need a better system for getting issues out in the open.

As a process for working through these types of risks and rewards systemically, Denise leads us through an entirely rational workshop model that frankly would be equally valid for working through immigration, health care or mid-east peace. But like those issues the challenge will be having a truly open and rational discussion where there is more light than heat. I’d certainly encourage you to read Intervention for yourself, although perhaps not right before bedtime.—David Cardinal