Regulatory science in forest biotechnology

It is now 20 years since the production of the firsttransgenic tree (Fillati et al. 1987). Yet in North Americaand Europe, where plant biotechnology was invented anddeveloped, there has been no deployment of transgenictrees. Governmental regulation has been established toallow limited field testing of transgenic trees and to lay theground for deployment, but uncertainty regarding publicacceptance of genetically modified trees has become themajor barrier. In large part, scientific progress has not beenlimiting. Opposition from environmentalists and nongov-ernmental organizations has been raised based uponconcerns regarding the safety of transgenic plant technol-ogy for human health and the environment (Rifkin 1999;FAO/WHO 2000). It has been argued that the technology istoo new and poorly understood and that introduction offoreign genes into the forest environment would bedamaging and irreversible. Opposition has been sufficientto motivate protesters to destroy experimental tree plots(Kaiser 2001) and even laboratories involved in geneticresearch on forest trees (Service 2001).Over the past 20 years, transgenic technology has beenwidely accepted and applied to agriculture (Nelson 2001;Everson and Santianiello 2004;FAO2004). Much of theworld’s cotton, soybeans, and maize are now transgenic,with a total estimated 222 million acres of biotech crops(Gillis 2006). To some extent, transgenic plants haveentered the food chain. Transgenic papaya with viralresistance has rescued that crop from a devastating disease(Ferreira et al. 2002), and new varieties of rice and otherplants, such as “golden rice”, promise to reduce nutritionaldeficiencies in the developing world (Beyer et al. 2002).Even these successes have met with considerable opposi-tion (Pringle 2003), but opposition has declined, as theeconomic and social benefits have become apparent forboth developed and developing countries (NRC 2000;Herrera-Estrella and Alvarez-Morales 2001; Everson andSantianiello 2004). The development of a regulatoryframework in many countries, the absence of evidence ofharm in large numbers of field tests, and increasingfamiliarity has made this level of acceptance possible.On what basis is there a higher level of opposition to thedevelopment and deployment of forest trees than to othersectors of biotechnology? Trees dominate the ecology ofterrestrial ecosystems, and much of our environmentdepends on the health of our ecosystems. People have aspiritual relationship with trees, which is deeply rooted inour history and folklore (Fraser 1922). Trees are consideredto be more than useful crops; they are part of anenvironmental heritage (Leopold 1948).There is an inherent paradox in much of the regulation incurrent practice. Plants, animals, and microbes have longcarried out natural genetic engineering experiments, andevidence for natural DNA transfer abounds, particularly,among microbes (Davison 1999; Bushman 2002). DNAtransfer events have been detected from bacteria into animalcells and from plants to microbes, but the frequency of suchevents is rare (Syvanen 1999). Many microbes can transferDNA into plants (Broothaerts et al. 2005). The one that hasbeen most studied is Agrobacterium tumefaciens (Gelvin2000). It is also the one most widely used to insert modified