Why Bill Nye Condones Genetically Modifying Food | Big Think

In 2005, when I did a show called The Ides of Nye, companies like Monsanto had patents on genes, and people were questioning whether or not that was ethical. Also, there was this overarching idea that we have enough food; we just can’t distribute it properly. The reason people are starving in the world is that there’s enough food. My concern was the ecosystem.

This is to say, you can know each organism very well. By know, I mean you can know the sequence of its genes, and you can grow it in isolation and refuges and see how it performs. This is talking about crops now. So, there would be no need to experiment with the ecosystem. Even though you can know the individual crop plant, you don’t know what it would do when it’s around butterflies or bees or birds or other pollinators or some virus we haven’t discovered yet.

Since then, a couple of things, three things, have happened to my way of thinking. The least significant may be that we can now assay genes ten million. This is to say, no, 100 million; ten to the eighth times faster than we could 15 or 20 years ago. The DNA sequencing machines are so sophisticated. You can actually simulate what would happen if this virus comes in or that gene is introduced from a vector, an insect vector, or what have you.

That’s the first thing: you can make predictions about how plants will grow based on their genes very accurately, much more so than you could a couple of decades ago. The second thing is there are 7.3 billion people in the world right now, early in the twenty-first century. By the middle of the twenty-first century, there’s going to be nine billion. There might even be ten billion people. So, those people are going to have to be fed. And sure enough, the way to do that is almost certainly with genetically modified crops, which are much more productive than they used to be.

From a historic standpoint, humans have always hybridized crops. But now, humans are hybridizing from a genetic standpoint, not just by combining sexually crops of desirable traits. The third thing, which is very compelling to me as a scientist, is we have discovered - and maybe everybody knew this except me, and I’m the first to admit - we’ve discovered that genes are introduced between species naturally.

The paper that really got to me was the one about sweet potatoes. So sweet potatoes became sweet potatoes because something like a virus infected the sweet potatoes and changed their genes. Then, humans cultivated those gene-changed potatoes. Without this introduction of interspecies, between species, genetic transfer, this wouldn’t have happened.

So these three things – the ecosystem concern, the rate at which we can assay genes, the number of people that are going to have to be fed, and the fact that it happens naturally anyway – have changed my point of view about genetically modified foods. The regulations for them are actually quite robust. You can’t just go creating a crop plant that is going to be deleterious to the farming system.

Along with this, everybody, I’m the first to admit, the idea that you can patent genes seems troubling, but there’s a lot to it that’s very reasonable. Companies like Pioneer, the seed company that’s part of DuPont, and the bemixed-feelings Monsanto have spent a lot of money, a huge fraction of their resources, on developing these plants. Recently, the patented soybean patent expired.

So soybeans are out now. So okay, if you want to grow those soybeans, now you can. Farmers do make contracts to grow those plants because they grow better. We can imagine a future where plants are tuned to grow in very moist soils at the bottom of the hill, where the water runs down, very dry soils at the top of the hill, where the water drains away quickly, and in between, the plants that would be planted. The crop plants that would be planted would vary like meter to meter.

Certainly, across the farm field, they would vary from one end to the other. They would be planted electronically using global positioning from outer space. This will enable people to feed the world. I used to be against genetically modified foods just from the cautionary principle: you don’t know what you’re doing to the ecosystem, so be careful.

Now, I am for genetically modified foods because we have so much more science behind it than we did even 20 years ago.