Risks and Benefits of Gene-Altered Bugs Merit Thorough Study, Report Says

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Making Way for Designer Insects Risks and Benefits of Gene-Altered Bugs Merit Thorough Study, Report Says By Justin GillisWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, January 22, 2004; Page A01 The insect world could shortly undergo a genetic makeover in the laboratory. Scientists are at work developing silkworms that produce pharmaceuticals instead of silk, honeybees resilient enough to resist pesticides and even mosquitoes capable of delivering vaccines, instead of disease, with every bite.Researchers are tinkering with insect genes to develop more than a dozen new varieties, offering potentially broad social benefits while posing complicated new health and environmental risks. Though most of the designer insects are at least five to 10 years away from reality, concern is growing that government agencies have yet to think about how to oversee the research.A new report scheduled for release this morning warns that the issues posed by gene-altered insects are so complex that unless federal agencies begin now to design methods of oversight, the necessary rules may not be in place when scientists are ready to start releasing insects into the environment.The report by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a think tank in Washington, outlined laboratory work of astonishing ambition, with goals that go far beyond the relatively limited uses to which genetic engineering has been put to date.Research is already underway, for instance, to create mosquitoes with genes that render them incapable of transmitting malaria, with the idea that the souped-up mosquitoes would be released into the environment to spread their new genes into every type of mosquito capable of carrying the disease.Malaria sickens more than 300 million people a year and kills more than a million, many of them babies in Africa, so any technology that brought it under control would be a milestone in social history. Yet, in one example of the complicated questions society will have to confront, it's theoretically possible that rendering mosquitoes immune to malaria will make them ecologically fitter, and therefore more likely to transmit other diseases, some of which are fatal.Mosquito researchers have said they are well aware of the potential risks and have pledged caution in moving forward with their experiments.The Pew report noted that someone is going to have to decide what kind of research is needed to estimate the likely effects, and then decide whether the benefits of releasing the designer mosquitoes are worth the risks. And that decision will have to be made in a complex international environment: Many African and Asian countries are ill-equipped to assess elaborate genetic technologies, and their citizens are sometimes suspicious even of simple technologies designed in the West. Just recently, resistance to polio vaccination in some Muslim communities in Africa led to an upsurge of that disease.American regulatory agencies are likely to play a key role in overseeing the insect research, since much of the laboratory work will be conducted in the United States, the Pew report said. Yet only the Agriculture Department has moved to assert jurisdiction, and only over a relatively limited group of gene-altered insects, namely those that could become plant pests. The few gene-altered insects likely to be ready for commercialization in the next five years would probably be covered under those rules, including an altered variety of pink bollworm meant to help control that pest in cotton. But the majority of insects on the drawing board would not be covered, the Pew report said.The Agriculture Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration all have congressional authority that might give them some oversight power, but the agencies have yet to stake out whether, or how, they will use their authority to oversee the full range of gene-altered insects. "We look forward to reviewing the Pew report," said Alisa Harrison, spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department, adding that her agency was already studying whether to broaden its regulations to include engineered insects that might affect the health of animals.Pew administrators said all three agencies know the new insects are coming and have expressed interest in holding a large national conference that would begin to tackle the issues."What we're hoping to do with this report is give the discussion a little kick-start," said Michael Rodemeyer, executive director of the Pew Initiative, a think tank set up by the Pew Charitable Trusts to study genetic technologies. "The history of biotechnology is that the regulatory system is always playing catch-up. The question here is whether the regulatory system can begin now to think about who's in charge. What kind of questions are we going to need to ask? What kind of tools are we going to need to put in place to make sure the environment is protected?"Some of the research programs under way have much more modest goals than eliminating an entire human disease. In fact, some of the new insects are likely to be commercial products of relatively limited scope, designed, for instance, to control plant pests in a given crop grown in a region of the United States. The genetic modifications in those insects would not be much different, in principle, than techniques already widely deployed. Control programs have sometimes released millions of male insects sterilized by radiation, for instance, as a way of limiting population growth in pests. One idea scientists are pursuing is to release millions of male insects with altered genes that always cause their offspring to die.Other programs are designed to improve, or even to save, beneficial insects. For instance, silkworms are being engineered to produce not silk, but pharmaceutical or industrial proteins of various kinds. And researchers are trying to design honeybees resistant to pesticides, diseases and parasites, which have severely cut down the population of beneficial bees in the United States.But malaria researchers are not alone in their ambition. Some bugs on the drawing board would be designed to control other human diseases such as dengue fever, Chagas' disease and sleeping sickness. There's even a research program that would use mosquito bites to deliver vaccines to entire human populations, eliminating the need for doctors and nurses to round up patients and use needles.So far, consumer groups have cast a wary eye on the notion of genetically altered insects, but they have not ruled out supporting some modifications. Some farm groups have been supportive, seeing a chance to control major crop pests. Most environmental groups have been categorically opposed to the research, saying the effects of such large-scale genetic tinkering would be impossible to predict in advance.http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36943-2004Jan21?language=printer