Go-ahead for pesticide tests

Press, 12 June 1986, Page 32

Go-ahead for pesticide tests

NZPA-AP Washington The United States Environmental Protection Agency has granted a University of California faculty member permission to conduct field tests of what could become America’s first geneti-cally-engineered pesticide. Steven E. Lindow, a pioneering researcher in the field, was granted two experimental use permits for altered strains of the bacterium pseudomonas syringae, which he and others believe can protect plants against frost damage. He was blocked from performing the experiment in 1984 by a Federal Court, which ruled that the United States National

Institutes of Health committee which approved the experiment had failed to first conduct an environmental assessment Although that assessment was performed and concluded there would be no impact, Lindow chose to proceed through E.P.A., whose pesticide approvals do not require environmental impact statements. Lindow, associate professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Berkeley, plans to coat potato seedlings with a solution of the bacteria, and to spray it on potato plant foliage, at the university’s agricultural experiment station at Tulelake, California. Pseudomonas syringae is found by the billions on

many plant leaves. It comes in two varieties, one that produces a protein that provides a nucleus on which ice crytals may form and one, called ice-minus, that does not. Researchers have used gene-splicing techniques to delete the gene responsible for producing the protein and hope this altered, man-made iceminus can colonise the plant leaves, squeezing out the ice-plus form and enabling the plant to survive temperatures as low as minus 5 deg. without damage. Lindow’s experiment is quite similar to one proposed by Advanced Genetic Sciences Incorporated of Oakland, Cali-

fornia, for strawberry plants. That company was granted an experimental use permit which was revoked after E.P.A. discovered it had not complied with plant toxicity testing guidelines. Jack Moore, assistant E.P.A. administrator for pesticides and toxic substances, said he had every confidence that these experiments pose minimal risk to public health or the environment, particularly since E.P.A. staff members visited the Tulelake site and checked Lindow’s experimental records — something it had not done for the Oakland company.

Jeremy Rifkin, the antigenetic engineering activ-

ist who filed the lawsuit that stopped Lindow before, had asked MOore to hold up the permit because, he said, the University of California’s liability insurance was expiring on July 1, and the university so far had not obtained renewed coverage. Moore, however, said Federal pesticide law did not give him any authority to act on those grounds. Rifkin said he would sue E.P.A. to stop the Tulelake experiments. Already, he said, 450 residents — almost every adult — had signed petitions saying they did not want the experiments in their community.