The Luddites are at it again. They are picketing supermarkets, pouring milk onto sidewalks and generally trying to scare the hell out of people about the newest menace to society: “Genetic milk.”
Sounds scary, doesn’t it? In fact, it is perfectly normal milk, so identical to ordinary milk that no test can distinguish between them. But it comes from cows that have been induced to produce up to 20 percent more milk by injection of bovine growth hormone (BGH). What’s wrong with that? This hormone is “genetically engineered,” meaning that it is made in vats by genetically altered bacteria.
That makes it “genetic.” The fact that the synthetic hormone is practically identical to the original and poses no threat to human health has not calmed the panic.
The campaign is led by Jeremy Rifkin, leading American Luddite, tireless crusader against biotechnology, “the Stephen King of food horror tales,” as he has been aptly called. He is, among other things, anti-cow. His epic, “Beyond Beef,” is a 353-page polemic about the havoc wreaked by these flatulent, environmentally insensitive grass guzzlers.
His chief political ally on BGH is Russ Feingold, freshman senator from Wisconsin (state beverage: milk). Feingold is pro-cow. His opposition to BGH is not metaphysical but political.
Feingold’s is a classic case of what Kevin Phillips calls reactionary liberalism: He opposes BGH because it increases productivity and makes milk cheaper. That threatens to drive marginal producers-Feingold voters-out of business.
The critics claim that some BGH cows have more udder infections and the resulting antibiotics would find their way into the milk. But the government already tests milk for antibiotics. It screens out high antibiotic milk, whether BGHed or not.
But the anti-BGH scare does not rest on argument. It is just the latest in a long line of technological panics. (Remember Alar?) These are easily triggered, as Rifkin has discovered, by scary-sounding code words that carry dark science-fiction associations. Genetically engineered, for example.
Or radiation. Consider the most recent scientific mini-panic: the revelations about secret radiation experiments conducted decades ago.
Now, there is no doubt that in some of the radiation experiments consent was not obtained from the subjects. That was a clear and serious violation of medical ethics. But was there real physical harm?
Tuesday, a panel of experts on nuclear medicine testified in Congress that the experiments performed at veterans’ hospitals were at doses too low to cause injury. And what about the single most publicized experiment, the one at the Fernald School for the retarded in Massachusetts, the one that afforded Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Markey the setting for well-publicized hearings?
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It turns out the Fernald studies had no military application. They were studies of ordinary metabolism using minute amounts of a radioactively tagged food.
How much was given? One study involved trace amounts of radioactive iron. The children in a second study (of calcium) received the same dose of radiation that you get on one round-trip flight from Washington to Los Angeles.
Yet the word radiation is so fraught with deadly associations that the mere mention induces fear. Scientific sounding words have that effect.
This fear feeds outbreaks of Luddism that are more than just annoyances. They have serious consequences. In 1988, anti-nuclear hysteria led to the abandonment of the fully operational $5.5 billion Shoreham nuclear power plant. If successful, the campaign against BGH will have two effects: preventing a significant productivity advance for American agriculture and preventing a major commercial breakthrough for biotechnology.