The Wizard and the Prophet2 Page 18

  Farmers in the U.S. Middle West always had an advantage: uniform, flat terrain with deep topsoil and little climatic variation. The same wheat or maize could be grown anywhere within a thousand miles. Mile after mile after mile could be sown with the same crop, identical stalks waving to the horizon and beyond. Now, in effect, the same would be true for Mexico, or any other nation. A central breeding facility could develop a crop suitable for every region. It would make all the world an Iowa.

  In 1968, the year a U.S. aid official coined the term “Green Revolution” to describe the Rockefeller package, Borlaug gave a victory-lap speech at a wheat meeting in Australia. Twenty years before, he said, Mexican farmers had reaped about 760 pounds of wheat from every acre planted. Now the figure had risen to almost 2,500 pounds per acre—triple the harvest from the same land. The same thing was happening in India, he said. The first Green Revolution wheat had been tested there in the 1964–65 growing season. It had been so successful that the government had tested it on seven thousand acres the next year. Now it was covering almost seven million acres. The same thing was happening in Pakistan. And this didn’t count Green Revolution rice—also short and disease-resistant—which was spreading across Asia.

  It was not all open skies and sunlight. By 1968 the Green Revolution was being criticized as environmentally, culturally, and socially destructive. But Borlaug brushed aside the complaints, as did governments in Asia and Latin America. In Mexico, the Rockefeller program had been revamped into a permanent research agency: the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known as CIMMYT after its Spanish acronym. Wellhausen was its first director-general. CIMMYT joined the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, funded by the Ford Foundation but modeled after Borlaug’s work. Now there are fifteen such centers, linked in an association (CGIAR, an acronym of its former name, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) that is as profoundly important to global agriculture as it is little known.

  Borlaug, too, remained little known, even after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. But he and the Green Revolution had become exemplary to a certain sort of scientist, journalist, and environmentalist. The Borlaug package has become an emblem of the view that the road through humankind’s environmental difficulties lies through the groves of scientifically guided productivity. “Ours is the first civilization based on science and technology,” Borlaug said that day in 1968. “In order to assure continued progress we scientists…must recognize and meet the changing needs and demands of our fellow men.” The future of the world depends on science, he said, and on politicians guided by scientists. This vision of a scientific elite was like Vogt’s vision, in its way, except that Borlaug was possessed by the hope of more, rather than a call for less.

  To the end of his life, he kept his head down and worked ferociously hard. He always believed that hard rational work would lead him to the goal in the end. It was impossible for him to understand that there were people who didn’t want to go there.

  * * *

  *1 Vietmeyer’s book began as a ghostwritten autobiography, then morphed into a three-volume, self-published biography with long quotations supposedly from Borlaug but actually drawn from the initial, ghostwritten manuscript. Although it is unclear whether Borlaug ever spoke the words attributed to him, he exerted so much editorial control that the book is as close to a Borlaug autobiography as we will ever see. I take occasional Borlaug “quotes” from it, believing that readers will understand their uncertain provenance.

  *2 Borlaug was an early tester of the insecticide DDT. According to Vietmeyer, Borlaug said that samples of DDT came to DuPont in 1942 from ICI, the English chemical giant, which had obtained them from the Soviets, who in turn had taken them from captured German soldiers. The Russians noticed that these POWs were not crawling with lice and found that they were carrying a bug-killing powder. The powder was DDT, developed in the 1930s by the Swiss dye firm Geigy and sold to the Nazis. Borlaug tested the powder on garden pests. For years, Borlaug told Vietmeyer, “I had the powder all over my hands and clothes and was as thoroughly exposed as anyone on earth. Yet I had no adverse health consequences then or since. Nor did I ever see evidence of environmental damage….This is why I’ve always been skeptical of the claims of calamity that today surround DDT.” Borlaug’s story about the captured Germans may be wrong; Edmund P. Russell, a Boston University historian who has studied pesticides, told me that he had never heard of it. The standard history, supported by archival evidence, is that Geigy itself sent DDT samples to the U.S. government. At DuPont, Borlaug probably worked with the samples but may have misremembered their origin. If Vietmeyer’s quotation is accurate, Borlaug’s later skepticism about DDT’s impact stemmed from this work. He was a smart man, but claiming that his personal experience demonstrated that DDT poses few risks is like claiming that Cousin Tillie smoked for fifty years and never got sick so therefore smoking does not cause lung cancer.

  *3 The wheat was of several types: bread wheat (the most common); durum wheat (used for pasta); and emmer wheat (an older form of wheat also used for bread). Although these are distinct species, I lump them together here for simplicity.

  FOUR ELEMENTS

  [ FOUR ]

  Earth: Food

  “A World Population 50 or 60 Times the Present One”

  One of William Vogt’s readers was a mathematician named Warren Weaver, director of the Division of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. Ambitious and multi-talented, Weaver was convinced that science and technology, carefully used, could improve the lot of humanity—which was why he left academia to join the foundation in 1932. Presciently, he believed that the life sciences were about to take the giant strides summed up by the words “molecular biology”—a term that Weaver himself coined. At Rockefeller, he was like the producer for the movie of molecular biology: the man who chose the scientists and funded the research that led to the main discoveries of DNA and RNA. Between 1954 and 1965, eighteen scientists received Nobel Prizes for molecular biology; fifteen were funded by Weaver at Rockefeller.

  Equally remarkable was his work in field biology. When U.S. vice president Henry Wallace asked the Rockefeller Foundation to improve Mexican agriculture, Weaver urged his superiors to take on the task. As a reward for his advocacy, Weaver was asked to supervise the Mexican Agricultural Program. A small part of that duty was, in theory, overseeing Norman Borlaug.

  In July 1948 the foundation acquired a new president: Chester Barnard, a retired telecommunications executive who had written classic books on management. A few weeks after he came to Rockefeller, Road to Survival appeared. Barnard quickly read it. He scoffed at Vogt’s “vituperative” attacks on “everything from private property to the Pope and Communism.” But he found himself unable to dismiss Vogt’s claim that humankind was overwhelming Earth’s carrying capacity. Could Rockefeller’s efforts to improve health and food supply actually be counterproductive, because they would increase human numbers, hastening the ecological day of reckoning? Fearing that Road could “stir up” what he dryly called “blasphemous criticisms” of the foundation, Bernard asked Weaver to look into the matter. In particular, he asked, “How do we justify the Mexican agricultural program, considering [Vogt’s] strictures?”

  Weaver was a busy man. Even as he was setting up the molecular biology revolution and preparing for the Green Revolution, he was inventing the key concepts of machine translation; co-writing, with Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, the founding document of information theory; establishing the basic ideas of what is now known as complexity theory; and, as a passionate hobby, researching the composition of Alice in Wonderland. Months later, he finally went through Vogt’s book, along with Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet. He summed up his reaction in a confidential, seventeen-page report in July 1949. Informal, even slapdash, it reads more like a long email than a careful corporate memorandum. Nevertheless, it was one of the first—perhaps the first—modern
statements of the Wizardly credo.

  Vogt’s warnings in Road to Survival, Weaver said, were “exaggerations”—“inaccurate, even if timely.” They were mired in “the traditional patterns of the past.” Environmental questions had to be thought about in a new way, he said. And he provided one. It was based on physics and chemistry, rather than biology.

  To survive, Weaver said, humans have a single basic need: “usable energy.” That energy comes in two forms: energy for the body (food and water, in other words), and energy for daily existence (that is, fuel to power vehicles, heat and cool buildings, and make essential materials like cement and steel). “In the United States,” Weaver estimated, “each person uses, on the average, 3,000 calories per day for food, [and] 125,000 calories per day for heat and power.”

  Ultimately, those 128,000 calories had but one source: “nuclear disintegration.” By this Weaver meant both the nuclear reactions inside the sun that create sunlight and those in atomic power plants. The latter was intriguing, but in 1949 nuclear technology was still so new and secret that Weaver believed “it is at this time not feasible to make any realistic estimates about atomic energy.” For that reason, he ignored nuclear plants, at least for the moment, describing them simply as “potentially important.”

  Weaver could say something about the sun, though. In principle, the sun pours onto Earth enough energy—vastly more than enough—to provide all humanity with the necessary 128,000 calories a day. “If solar energy could be utilized with full efficiency, the United States alone could sustain, energy-wise, a population over 40 times the present total population of the planet.” The global population then being about 2 billion, Weaver was suggesting that in terms of energy the theoretical carrying capacity of the United States was about 80 billion people.

  Warren Weaver, 1963 Credit 32

  The limit of 80 billion would never be reached, because nobody would want to live in such a jam-packed country. But thinking in these terms was clarifying, Weaver thought. It showed that viewing the human dilemma in terms of an ecological carrying capacity was a mistake. The planet’s actual, physical carrying capacity was so large—scores of billions of people—as to be irrelevant. The true problem was not that humankind risked surpassing natural limits, but that our species didn’t know how to tap more than a fraction of the energy provided by nature.

  Harnessing these energy sources would require new technology. But once people learned how to make “direct use” of the sun (or nuclear power), all human needs for heat, air-conditioning, transportation, electricity, steel, cement, and everything else would be satisfied for eons to come. In this respect, Weaver thought, Vogt was flat-out wrong.

  Food energy, the second kind of energy, was a different matter: more complicated, harder to resolve. Here, Weaver conceded, Vogt’s warnings might be borne out. Food energy derives from plants, either directly (when people eat them) or indirectly (when people eat animals that have eaten them). And the energy in plants comes from the sun, captured by photosynthesis.

  Nobody in 1949 knew how photosynthesis worked. Almost two hundred years before, Jan IngenHousz (or Ingen-Housz), a Dutch doctor and biologist working in England, had established that sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide somehow went into a plant and were transformed into roots, leaves, and stems. But after IngenHousz the scientific project had come almost to a stop. For decade after decade, photosynthesis remained a black box. Sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide went in, plant growth came out. What happened inside was unknown.

  By measuring the solar energy falling onto a plant and its associated growth, scientists had roughly calculated how much of that energy the plant actually used. Not very much, was the answer. Photosynthesis, Weaver said, “has an over-all efficiency surely less than 0.00025%”—one-quarter of one-ten-thousandth of one percent! The inefficiency was mind-boggling.

  The bright side was the potential for improvement. In theory, Weaver argued, photosynthetic efficiency could be increased

  by a factor of something like 400,000….If we had a more efficient way of turning solar energy into food—and let us now say, to be more reasonable, a way that had efficiency of only 1 percent—then an area the size of 1/100 the state of Texas would produce food enough to give 3,000 calories per day to a world population 50 or 60 times the present one.

  As Weaver knew, researchers were far from being able to revamp photosynthesis. So he proposed other measures that, while difficult, seemed closer to reality: developing “the food potentialities of the sea,” controlling rainfall on farmland, selecting and modifying bacteria (our “tiny servants,” he called them) “to form the molecular aggregates that man needs as food.” But these ideas, in his view, were placeholders for the real paths to the future: tapping new energy supplies, solar or nuclear, and hacking photosynthesis to grow more food.

  Weaver never published his ideas. His memorandum lay unnoticed in the archives of the foundation, now stored underground on one of the Rockefeller estates. And his dream of reworking photosynthesis would be almost forgotten for sixty years, until it was revived by the descendants of the molecular biologists whom Weaver had funded and the successor to Rockefeller as the world’s biggest charitable foundation.

  When the idea did return, it would be entangled in an argument between Wizards and Prophets over how to feed tomorrow’s world. Because that world will be (almost certainly) more numerous and (probably) more affluent, it is commonly stated that harvests will have to double by 2050. Some researchers believe this figure is overstated—a 50 percent increase would do the trick. In either case, though, how can it be done?

  Wizards see an essential part of the answer in a new technology: genetic engineering. Hacking photosynthesis exemplifies its potential—reaching into the heart of life to ensure a better existence for millions of our fellows. By contrast, Prophets view reworking photosynthesis as embodying an ecologically foolish mania for growth and accumulation that will lead to destruction. At bottom, in their view, genetic engineering has the same fundamental fault as Weaver’s memo: imagining that the world in all its complexity can be boiled down to a small number of physical parts that can be freely measured and manipulated.

  “Reductionism” is the term of art for this idea, and agriculture is but one focus of a broader disagreement over its place. In this section of the book, I look at how Vogtians and Borlaugians view four great, oncoming challenges—food, water, energy supply, and climate change—each represented as one of Plato’s four elements. The subjects greatly differ, but in every one Wizards and Prophets have taken up old quarrels and transformed them. In agriculture, for instance, the fight over genetic engineering represents the extension of a dispute, surprisingly heated and now almost a century old, over a seemingly arcane question: the proper manner of providing nutrients, especially nitrogen, to plants. And this, in turn, is related to an even older struggle—a quarrel over the nature of life itself.

  The Story of N (Natural Version)

  Then, what is life?

  So reads the last line of “The Triumph of Life,” the last poem that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote before his death in 1822. Because Shelley died before completing it, we cannot know whether the surviving draft embodies his final intentions. But the version we have seems both elegantly assembled and intellectually muddled—life is at the same time a numinous, uplifting spirit and a crushing destroyer of that spirit. As a college student, assigned the poem in class, I was baffled by its inconsistency. Later I realized that Shelley’s confusion was widely shared. He was writing just as scientists had begun a tussle over the definition of life.

  In ancient times, life was typically viewed as a principle or essence: qi in China, ase in Nigeria, mana in Polynesia, manitou in the Algonkian cultures of North America, pneuma to the Greeks, the Force in a galaxy far, far away. Living creatures and non-living things are both made of matter, long-ago thinkers said. But the former eat, reproduce, act with intent, and do a hundred other things that seem beyond the capacities of the non-liv
ing. It was easy for the ancients to explain the gulf between life and non-life by imagining that a special kind of immaterial energy flows through and sustains living tissues. Without this essence, a live body would be a mere mechanism, not an organism.

  For Aristotle, plants were a special case. Intrigued by how they grow despite lacking any visible mechanism for taking in food, he proposed that they obtain their nourishment by drawing in humus—decayed plant and animal matter—through their roots. Humus could nourish plants because it, like them, was charged with pneuma. Although Aristotle’s hypotheses had what seem today like obvious problems—humus doesn’t disappear into roots, for one—his ideas continued to be accepted in the West well into the eighteenth century, where they were promulgated by Johan Gottschalk Wallerius, a Swedish chemist who became the founder of agricultural chemistry. In his Agriculturae fundamenta chemica (1761), the first important treatise on the subject, Wallerius proclaimed that living creatures are driven by an internal energy unique to life. He called this energy the “spirit of the world.” Other thinkers used different names: vivifying fire, active principle, vital force (or vis vitalis—the term was often left in Latin). Whatever the title, it was also characteristic of humus, which had once been alive, and still retained this animating drive.

  Big breaks with the past are rare, but one was initiated by Carl Sprengel. Born in Germany in 1787, Sprengel was something of a prodigy, beginning his agronomy studies at the age of fifteen. As a professor at the University of Göttingen, he analyzed the chemical constituents of humus in a series of careful experiments in the 1820s. He concluded that everyone from Aristotle to Wallerius had it wrong: plants fed on the individual nutrients in humus, not on humus as a whole. Which meant that humus wasn’t imbued with some unique life-spirit. It was just a stockpile of minerals and salts, some of them essential for plant growth. To promote these discoveries Sprengel wrote five textbooks in the 1830s.