In the old days, many of us used to applaud the activities of Greenpeace. Their passive and sometimes active resistance to environmental atrocities such as the illegal killing of whales by nations who defied international conventions was seen as laudable and we cheered their successes. In recent years, however, Greenpeace appears to have become, like some aging humans, rigid and ossified. Its tone has become increasingly shrill and its positions on environmental matters reflect a kind of blind ideology rather than thoughtful responses to a problem based on good science.

A case in point is the shameful example of “Golden Rice.” Developed after seven years of effort by a Swiss and a German plant scientist, golden rice contains the genes for provitamin A, giving it a yellow color. As described in a recent article in Science (vol. 320, pp 468-471 April, 2008), roughly 250,000 children around the world have diets deficient in vitamin A resulting in damage to the retina and cornea and increased susceptibility to measles and other infectious diseases. The World Health Organization estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 children go blind every year as a result and that half of those die within 12 months. Rice is the principal component of the diets of most of these children.

No known variety of rice makes vitamin A in its endosperm (the main tissue of seeds) so conventional plant breeding was not a possibility for introducing this trait. The scientists, therefore, turned to genetic engineering and finally succeeded in creating vitamin A-containing rice grains by splicing two daffodil genes and a bacterial gene into the rice genome. With the birth of this new variety, the prospect of saving the lives of millions of children and improving the health of countless others opened up.

Greenpeace, however, opposes all forms of genetic engineering no matter what the benefit in a kind of mindless paean to “natural.” So it was not a surprise to see them launch an aggressive campaign against golden rice. They argued that this was simply an industry PR ploy (a seed company would be needed to grow up the seed for distribution) to open up the door for further genetically modified (GM) crops. Further in what has to be one of the greatest nonsequiturs of all times, they noted that golden rice did nothing to solve the underlying problem of poverty. And Greenpeace said that golden rice would not help much since its output of vitamin A was low and people would have to consume an unrealistic amount to completely supply the need for this vitamin. As one scientist noted, the invention of golden rice was an initial proof of concept and the criticism of Greenpeace was like expecting the Wright brothers’ first airplane to have the capabilities of modern jets. Subsequently, strains of rice with a much higher output of Vitamin A have been developed, but this makes no difference to Greenpeace showing that their objections are simply a smokescreen for a knee-jerk ideological stance.

The golden rice case is bad enough, but Greenpeace has consistently opposed every instance of GM crops. The list includes a new variety of papaya resistant to ringspot virus, a disease which has devastated the crops of poor farmers around the world. Another example is a transgenic carrot which produces very cheaply an enzyme desperately needed for the treatment of Gaucher disease and which currently costs the average patient $200,000/year. There are numerous similar examples.

The sad part to all of this is that the Greenpeace opposition is totally flawed on a scientific basis. There is nothing “natural” about many of our crop plants and farm animals and most of them could not survive in the wild just as a Chihuahua dog would not last long among the wolves from which it was derived by a kind of genetic engineering. The corn plant for example has no counterpart in the wild and was developed from a tiny plant called teosinte over many centuries by the unconscious application of genetic selection by American Indians. The corn plant as we know it cannot even seed itself and depends upon man for its very existence.

Greenpeace is not only misguided in its policies, it is anti-human. With the increasingly high cost of food and recent food riots around the world, we need all the help we can get from plant breeders and genetic engineers. I have no doubt but that future generations will look back upon the Greenpeace of today very much as we see the Luddites of the 19th century who destroyed machines in the industrial revolution in a misguided effort to preserve jobs for humans.

<i>J. Eugene Fox is a retired professor of biochemistry and a medical scientist, who spent two years in Washington, D.C., as director of the cell biology program for the National Science Foundation. The Grand Junction resident writes a column twice a month for the Grand Junction Free Press.</i>