Wacky baccy, but no supper: Why did scientists create stronger tobacco, not crops to feed the poor? Susan Watts explains

CIGARETTE companies in the US stand accused by the Clinton administration of using tobacco genetically altered to have twice the nicotine content. Today, the chairman of Brown and Williamson, America's third largest tobacco company, will answer the allegations.

He will deny that B&W (owned by British American Tobacco) secretly grew the tobacco in South America. Its biological research on tobacco was aimed at producing low-tar cigarettes, the company never told its researchers to lie about their work, and the plant is not even genetically engineered - it is cross-bred, he will testify.

It doesn't much matter if this latest tobacco is genetically engineered in the strictest sense of having extra genes inserted into its genetic blueprint. If the plant was cross-bred and developed, as claimed, by DNA Plant Technology, the Californian biotechnology company, it was almost certainly produced using the advanced cloning techniques of biotechnology.

This latest row is publicity of a kind the biotechnology industry can well do without. In both the US and Europe the industry is waging a subtle but ferocious campaign aimed at watering down safety regulations that it says are holding the technology back.

Biotechnology has sold itself as the sunrise industry with the promise that it will revolutionise agriculture. But it was not double-strength cigarettes it talked about in the early propaganda.

During the Eighties, when the industry was trying to persuade the regulators not to be too tough, its publicity managers conjured up some very different emotive images. This new science, allowing researchers to slip genes not normally found naturally into, say, wheat or maize or rice, was going to produce more bountiful plants better suited to inhospitable environments. Agricultural biotechnologists would feed the world with crops that could grow in drought-prone or salty soils.

The hi-tech plants would be more nutritious, too, with extra protein and amino acids for people in the developing world with poor diets. They would place less of a burden on the environment because they would be engineered to be disease-free, so requiring fewer chemical treatments.

A decade on from these optimistic promises, tobacco seems to be stubbornly prominent in the list of achievements. Two weeks ago, the french company that makes Gauloises and Gitanes cigarettes was granted the first commercial licence by the European Union for a 'transgenic' organism, allowing it to go on the market.

The company, called Seita, has developed a tobacco plant with an extra gene that makes it resistant to herbicide. Seita can now happily spray fields of this plant safe in the knowledge that only the tobacco will survive. Environmentalists don't like this, because they fear the genes for resistance could be passed to weeds, rendering these herbicide-resistant and uncontrollable. They say the approach also encourages the use of chemical sprays, when agriculture should be cutting down.

But there have been other gains. The blue rose, for instance. A few weeks ago, scientists announced that they are within months of producing the first blue rose, with an extra gene taken from petunias. This is a joint Australian-American project. The US team is from DNA Plant Technology - the same Californian company alleged to have carried out the work on nicotine-rich tobacco plants. And the scientist who led the Australian team is not stopping here. He dreams of engineering the black rose.

So where are the environmentally benign, valuable crop alternatives we were promised? Research on staple crops has not ceased, but is proving more difficult than first thought. And the innocent observer might question the relative effort and funding being directed to the various sectors of research in agricultural biotechnology.

It is powerful fodder to the cynic that the public's first brush with the biotechnology industry is in watching it cash in on industries whose products are of dubious benefit to society, yet which command huge markets. The tobacco industry is worth at least dollars 40bn a year in the US alone. Even the cut rose market, at dollars 5bn a year, is not to be sniffed at.

In a market-oriented world it is not fashionable to ask if we really need nicotine-enhanced cigarettes, and blue or even black roses. Orthodoxy suggests we should not question whether a new product is necessary, so long as it will sell.

Biotechnology itself stands as testimony to this. During the recent debate over bovine somatotropin (BST), the genetically engineered drug that increases milk yield in cows, opponents tried to play the 'need' card. They argued that milk production was already in excess of requirements so the drug was not necessary.

But regulators were not swayed. Clearance of the drug stalled on arguments over its health implications for animals and people but won the go- ahead in the US at the end of last year and will reach the end of a four-year moratorium in Europe at the end of this year.

It may be naive to expect that biotechnology companies would do anything other than go for a fast buck in established markets, even if this clashes with early promises. Society must decide what it wants of its new technologies. Sadly, the chances of this happening are slim. The gap between science and the public looms large, and public understanding of biotechnology in particular is stunningly limited.

The Science Museum in London has recognised this, and is proposing a unique experiment to test public opinion on plant biotechnology. This month it launched an appeal for 'ordinary people' to take part in a forum on the new technology, discussing its scope - from engineered tomatoes to insect-resistant apples - and its wider moral and political implications.

The initiative should be welcomed. People cannot ask for what they need without knowing the powers and limitations of science and technology. Genetic engineering is in danger of becoming dominated by serendipity, with technologists pursuing what works, then seeking a market for it, rather than striving to plug genuine gaps.

We can fully expect more oddly coloured flowers before the arrival of drought-resistant maize.

(Photograph omitted)