“They’re doing genetic engineering in Kearneysville, genetically modified organisms, monster fruit—GMOs,” I had been told. Wait a minute. I’d written countless letters to my U.S. representative about GMOs—demanding labeling laws so that consumers know what they’re eating, encouraging legislation for non-GMO buffer zones to prevent GMO pollen from drifting into non-GMO fields, and others. All to no avail. Now I learn that the epicenter of genetically modified fruit is right here in Jefferson County, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Appalachian Fruit Research Station in Kearneysville.

Occupying about 500 acres near the growing suburban area west of Charles Town and Ranson, there are some 300 acres planted in apples, peaches, pears, nectarines, plums, and other fruit crops. The scene is a reminder that West Virginia, despite the loss of orchards and production in the past decade, still ranks among the nation’s leading apple producers.

And so this devotee of locally, sustainably grown food arranged a visit. The purpose of the trip, ostensibly, was to learn just what sort of science was going on there. The reality, though, was this: I had little idea what genetic engineering is beyond what I had read in farming periodicals that opposed it or in newsletters and websites of consumer groups. Most of what I did know centered on the economics of large corporations using their clout to control the marketplace for corn and soybean, at the expense of farmers. A quick survey of a few organic farmers and organic consumers provided no better understanding than my own.

Like many organic eaters, my first foray into chemical-free food was as an environmentalist. Food is one of our most basic connections with the natural world. At some point I realized that at three meals each day I was encouraging the large-scale broadcast of herbicides and insecticides over a fifth of the world’s land surface. So I started eating organic food, and as the organic food marketplace expanded, I started buying organic versions of the same stuff I had always eaten—snack foods, frozen foods, as well as produce and meat.

Gradually I embraced the notion that in sustainable communities people buy as much of their food as possible from growers and producers they know by name.

Clearly, on this trip to the Appalachian Fruit Research Station (AFRS), I’ve brought along a lot of baggage.

Good Genes

Ralph Scorza, AFRS research horticulturist and lead scientist of the Genetic Improvement of Fruit Crops team, presents me a slide presentation on plant genomics—the study of plant genetic systems. On the age-appropriateness scale, the slide show rates at about the seventh-grade level. This is perfect—it’s slightly higher than my own aptitude for science, but the concepts are within grasp.

Scorza describes three techniques of breeding fruit cultivars for genetic characteristics. The first is classical breeding, encompassing the centuries-old techniques of cross-breeding, or hybridizing plants, usually of the same species, to create new hybrid varieties. For example, the empire apple was created by crossing a macintosh apple with a golden delicious.

“Think of it as two decks of cards, one red and one blue,” said Scorza. “When you shuffle the two decks, there is no way to predict the order of red and blue, or in what sequence the numbers will appear. It’s completely random.”

If you get lucky and develop a good fruit, then you have to propagate it. It takes several years to create a first-generation fruit hybrid and several more to determine whether the results hold true in subsequent generations. In the world of fruit trees, it can take a grower a lifetime to create a new variety. Every variety of cultivar has come about in the same way.

Plants of the same species are often hybridized to capture, say, disease resistance, flavor, or shelf life and shipping hardiness—the case with those tasteless supermarket tomatoes and those huge, beautiful red delicious apples that taste like cardboard. And new  fruits and vegetables have been created by this trial and error technique, from broccoli-cauliflower hybrids to tangelos.

The second technique of hybridization is marker selected breeding, says Scorza. Scientists can speed up hybridization by knowing which genes induce certain traits. Then they breed for those traits. For example, instead of waiting years to see if a new apple variety has the desired traits of hybridization, such as disease resistance or size, you first determine which genes produce the desired traits. Then, you cross-breed the two apples using traditional breeding, checking the DNA of the offspring seed to see if the desired attributes are present. If it is, then you can continue with a field test.

Consider the peach and the decade of attention it has received from Ann Callahan, Ph.D., a geneticist at NFRS. Most of the peaches we eat are of the freestone variety, the kind where the stone, or seed, falls away from the flesh, she explains. “The flesh melts (yes, melts is a technical term), the juice runs down your chin,” she says. That juicy flavor explosion is everything we dream of when we dream of summers.

But the shelf life of a ripe freestone peach is short. Its time of perfection can be counted in hours, not days. That’s why most peaches in supermarkets, and many on farm stands, are not ripe when you buy them. And although they will ripen on the counter, the flesh and flavor is not the same as a tree-ripened freestone peach.

It’s different for the clingstone peach. Most varieties of clingstone peaches can be harvested when ripe. “It’s got a rougher skin and firm flesh; it doesn’t melt,” says Callahan. But because of that rough skin and firm flesh, big clingstone peaches, once the mainstay of American summers, are now largely used for canning. The irony is that the rough skin makes them great for shipping and storing.

Callahan is trying to isolate the genes that give clingstone peaches their more durable qualities. The idea is to give the great-tasting, melt-in-your-mouth freestone peaches some of the more durable traits of clingstone peaches. After years of research, they now know there is a protein responsible for this durability. They have isolated the genetic sequences that induce these qualities, but they don’t know which “sequence” of appearance on the peach DNA is the one that gives the clingstone its desirable qualities. “There are 35 places the gene can be, but only one is responsible,” she said.

Then comes genetic engineering, the third technique in Scorza’s presention. If Callahan and company can figure out the genetic marker, they can conventionally breed for it, hoping to induce similar characteristics in the freestone peach without losing its better qualities. If they can use genetic studies to isolate the genes, they use genetic engineering—literally inserting certain genes of one fruit into the DNA of another—to test the results. They can insert the “durability genes” into the DNA of the freestone, field test the peach, and, they hope, confirm that the new hybrid will have the desired qualities. If it does, they will know that conventional breeding can give the desired, albeit long-term results.

And that, says Chris Dardick, Ph.D., a plant pathologist focused on fruit viruses at AFRS, is the primary use of genetic engineering at AFRS. “Our main use of genetic engineering is to verify laboratory results,” he said.

Science writer Glenn Scherer calls this GMO-assisted breeding. “Genetic engineering to confirm a hypothesis as a research tool,” he said.

But that’s not the case with AFRS research on plum pox, a disease that has ravaged European plum orchards and is beginning to appear in the United States. With no effective treatment in sight, scientists surveyed the globe looking for a plum that was naturally resistant to plum pox in the hope of using marker assisted breeding to create pox-resistant hybrids. Finding no such plum, scientists at AFRS focused on genetic engineering. They isolated the virus that causes plum pox and devised a way to insert antibody triggering genes from the virus into the DNA of a plum seed.

“In effect, it acts like a vaccine,” said Scorza. What’s more, the effect has been demonstrated in subsequent generations of plums. The plum pox-resistant plum is slogging it’s way through the regulatory process in the United States.

The prospect of virus-implanted plums sprouting in orchards nationwide would surely alarm anti-GMO consumers—even if the universe of plants susceptible to the virus is small. It does sound scary. But to a person, scientists at AFRS are puzzled by the concern.

“It’s still a plum,” said Scorza, insisting that, with the exception of an antibody against plum pox, everything else about the plum is still the same. “It poses no risk to human health or the health of other cultivars.”

“It still has 99.999 (keep adding nines) percent of its original DNA,” Dardick concurs. “If a human being has an antibody to a disease, the person is still a person.”

And what about concerns that the genetically modified plum could unleash unintended consequences once it is planted into orchards around the world? Considering the regulatory hurdles to get the plum approved—a process already several years in the making, Scorza thinks it will be among the safest hybrids ever created. “It’s been studied far more and we know much more about it than any fruit that has been conventionally bred.”

At this point it’s hard not to think of Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser and the environmental effects of GMO plants. In a highly publicized case, Schmeiser’s canola fields were found to contain Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene. This is a huge deal for non-GMO farmers who plan to sell their harvest to non-GMO markets. For organic growers it’s even worse because GMO foods cannot be certified as organic under any country’s definition.

Considering that most of the corn grown in the United States goes to feed livestock and make corn sweetener for soda pop and other junk foods, it’s hard for many people, including the farmers who don’t use it, to see the benefit of genetically modified corn—except to the bottom line of the companies that market the regimen.

Monsanto’s “Round Up Ready” corn is genetically engineered so that the seed will germinate after being blasted by the herbicide Round Up, also sold by Monsanto. According to Monsanto, Round Up’s active ingredient, glyphosphate, disrupts plant enzymes involved in the production of amino acids that are essential to plant growth. Round Up Ready corn has been genetically engineered to ignore glyphosphate. Critics know the process by such euphemisms as “nuke and sow” and the harvest by names like “fallout corn.”

 “It’s a solution looking for a problem in the U.S. because corn is not an important food staple here,” said Attila Agoston, a Loudoun County, Va., farmer who, with his fiancée, Shawna DeWitt, runs a vegetable and poultry operation using no chemical inputs or insecticides.

Most sensible people would assume Monsanto would have to pay Schmeiser for his trouble. Instead, Monsanto sued him, claiming a licensing violation for the use of its patented seed. Schmeiser had been a longtime seed saver, taking seed from the best and hardiest plants each year for use the following year. Despite his efforts to raise plants from his own seed, he was now being sued for the cost of planting 20 square kilometers of Monsanto seed, plus damages.

Even after Monsanto dropped its claim that Schmeiser had done this intentionally, it still was able to persuade the Canadian supreme court that Schmeiser had infringed on its patent.

When asked about the Schmeiser case, the AFRS scientists acknowledge the possibility of GMO plants contaminating non-GMO plants. “Yes, there are economic and societal issues,” said Scorza, “but we can’t lump them all together with the technological issues.” If the technology offers promise, in other words, that’s a separate issue than the behavior of multinational corporations. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

And of the other environmental impacts? Genetically modified corn contains insecticides to destroy pests, but the insecticides also impact the birds and wildlife that feed on these insects. There is evidence that their populations are being reduced by GMO food crops.

Another concern is biodiversity of the food supply. The Irish potato famine came about because the Irish diet centered on one type of potato. If it’s so expensive to breed one new variety of plum, there is a danger that other plum varieties will be replaced with the one bred with the plum pox resistance. Goodbye, food biodiversity, right? And this is what makes them all smile in that way that only scientists smile. It’s that “Can’t see the possibilities?” smile.

Exactly the opposite, according to Scorza. “It’s possible we can even increase biodiversity in our food supply,” he says, if more varieties of a cultivar can flourish against their traditional nemeses. To Scorza, the goal would be to make all plum varieties resistant to the pox, allowing growers worldwide to grow the plums appropriate to their climates, tastes, and cultures.

That sure sounds like music. But I’m one of those people who is skeptical of government—not because of the people who work in government but because of the politicians who control it. The U.S. eugenics movement of the early 1900s was a government-sanctioned attempt to breed a perfect race. Thirty-one states had eugenics programs and laws about who could marry whom and who should not be allowed to procreate. In the mid 1900s, drugs were tested on African American men without their knowledge. Even kudzu was a government program; it was promoted by the U.S.D.A. as a forage crop.

Beyond GE

At AFRS, there appears to be a sense that scientists from many disciplines are collaborating on big problems, and that no one answer is the only answer. That may be what sets AFRS apart from university research institutes, which increasingly get the majority of their research funding from industry. Despite explosive consumer interest in locally sustainable agriculture, most university programs pay it only passing interest. At AFRS, you hear scientists talk about integrated pest management, bio-insecticides, beneficial insects—the kind of stuff you hear at organic farming and environmental conferences.

Plant pathologist Dr. Jay Norelli has a Jesuit’s way of reflecting big questions and acknowledging that the complete picture is more than any of us can see. Norelli is an expert on fire blight, an apple-tree killer first described by Hudson Valley settlers. Nearly 200 years later, in the 1870s, fire blight was the first plant disease attributed to bacterial infection. Over 125 years later, it’s still killing apple trees and destroying commercial orchards.

Norelli pioneered genetic engineering in apples, but you won’t hear him talk about genetic modification as a silver bullet for fire blight—or improving other cultivars for that matter. “I no longer do genetic engineering for cultivar improvement,” he said. Norelli’s interest lies in understanding all the natural systems at work in the orchard. He talks about keeping pathogens out of the orchard, interrupting infection by using antibiotics, and developing plant resistance through breeding and the use of hormones—more sustainable agriculture talk. “One huge benefit of organic farming is the emphasis organic farmers place on soil health,” he adds.

Still, the GMO pioneer has not rejected genetic engineering; it’s just that he sees genetic engineering as one tool in a comprehensive system. “We now understand biology at a whole other level. We can use this knowledge responsibly to improve food security. We’d be remiss if we didn’t.”

He does, though, acknowledge that a lot of what they study remains a mystery. “We don’t yet understand why a plant is susceptible or resistant to a disease,” he said. Says Dardick, we also don’t know what makes something get better, even when we know how to cure it.

In the end, that’s what so many anti-GMO activists are worried about. It’s not knowing what we don’t know. And while it seems logical to separate the technology from how it gets used by multinational corporations, the legacy of industrial corporate agriculture since World War II is one of steadily rising costs for small farmers and steadily dwindling revenue, of increasing concentration of the food supply into fewer and fewer large companies, of chemicals that pollute soil and water.

I am more ambivalent now than before about the public health implications of GMOs; I want to learn more. But I insist I have a right to know what I’m eating, so I want GMO food labeled as such.

For now, I’ll continue to look for the non-GMO label when I buy supermarket food and I’ll continue to buy food grown right here in Jefferson County or nearby, and whenever possible, directly from the people who grow it or from grocers who are committed to the same principles. And in winter, when the last of what of we’ve canned and frozen of the local harvest is gone from the pantry, I guess I’ll continue to buy that non-GMO organic stuff shipped from 3,000 miles away.