Dr. Henry Miller - Are regulations pushing Florida citrus toward collapse?

Florida’s citrus industry is struggling to survive after years of disease, falling production, and mounting costs. As growers turn to gene edited crops for answers, are outdated regulations slowing down the very technology that could save American agriculture?

Henry Miller is a physician, molecular biologist, and the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar at the Science Literacy Project. He also served as the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. He joins the show to discuss the future of Florida citrus farming, the role of CRISPR and genetic engineering in agriculture, and whether federal regulations are helping or hurting innovation in food production.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to the Lawrence Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you. Florida's citrus industry has kind of collapsed, and red tape may be the final blow. Are the bureaucrats actually killing American farming one arbitrary rule at a time? I thought we'd talk about that with Dr. Henry Miller, medical doctor, molecular biologist, currently at the Science Literacy Project. He was the founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology. Dr. Miller, welcome back.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Good to be with you. Thank you, Lars.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

You've written about this, so would you mind describing for my audience Florida's famous for its citrus industry, and yet you say for the last couple of decades it's been fighting for its very life? What's happening?

SPEAKER_01 0:47

It it has. It's really been near catastrophic. Around 2000, um the Florida was producing something like 250 million 90-pound boxes of citrus. Uh and uh for this year it's predicted to be down to 12.2 million uh at a catastrophic decrease.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

5% of what they used to produce? Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Yes, yes, it's amazing. And uh part of it has been uh hurricanes and shrinking acreage and the slow death of millions of trees has has really been the major cause. And the major uh reason that these trees are dying is a um bacterial disease called um uh citrus green. Is that the citrus greening? Citrus greening, yeah. There's a there's a a complicated um foreign name as well, but citrus greening is the is the common name. Uh and um there are um some approaches to it um of a couple of kinds of genetic engineering that are promising. Uh and the the the um more precise technology is called CRISPR Cas9, um, that does not involve the introduction of any foreign genes from other organisms. And that's the real promise because that one is relatively leniently regulated by uh USDA.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

And by the way, Doctor, that's the one that, you know, you and I have talked about genetic engineering uh GE crops for a while. Uh the ones that I think freak people out the most are the ones where they say, oh yeah, we're taking part of a frog and a tadpole, and we're gonna take part of a, you know, I don't know, alligator or whatever, and we're gonna put those in the citrus. And that one just that just sounds bizarre and potentially dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Uh it it does, but it it needn't be. Because the um the risk of it of an organism to uh the environment or to human contact is a function of two things uh when it's uh been engineered. It's it's the characteristics of the host organism to which you're adding the gene and what the gene, the added gene itself does. And uh the the latter, the function of the added gene, is usually something very technical and arcane and has nothing to do with risk. Uh now, if you're introducing the um the gene for um uh some uh potent toxin, um that would be different, but that's not done, and if it were done, it would be subject justifiably to a lot of uh federal regulation. Um so the um the the CRISPR uh uh has the CRISPR technology has essentially three parts. One is a uh a piece of RNA that recognizes the segment of DNA in the uh trees in the citrus tree's genome that it wants to cut. So that's the first part, recognition of a of a place to cut. And then the second uh introduces a uh a correction, if you will, or a slight change in the uh citrus tree's DNA. And then the uh the third part is that the cell's uh correction mechanism, healing mechanism, seals the DNA and uh to incorporate that change. So uh that's uh that that's the way CRISPR works. The the alternative is uh there's work on the uh rootstocks of the citrus trees.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

That's the HLB or the uh engineer for HLB resistance?

SPEAKER_01 4:54

Uh well the the the what I just described is for HLB or citrus graining resistance. Uh but you but you can do it uh so that it uh that it it in you can introduce it into either the cells of the tree itself or of the root stocks. Uh and and that can be done in two ways, either by uh by CRISPR or by uh the transgenic movement of genes from uh foreign sources that you that you alluded to earlier. Uh and both of those are being done and both are are quite promising.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

How did we get all these decades without this citrus greening disease? Do we have any idea why this bacterial-caused disease popped up all of a sudden?

SPEAKER_01 5:44

That's a very good question, and and I I don't know the answer to that. It may be it may be that the uh organism that causes citrus greening, which is a bacterium, um, mutated to become much more aggressive and much more virulent.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Okay. And then the second question is why does the second solution to this problem, why does it have longer, as you describe it, longer and more burdensome approval pathways? What's the point of that?

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Well, the the regulators for for decades uh have been considering uh transgenic uh genetic engineering, that is the movement of a foreign gene into a product to be uh to be much much more uh uncertain. Uh but as I described, it really needn't be, because we know the function of the uh very clearly and comprehensively of the gene that's introduced, uh and it doesn't modify in any worrisome way the uh the recipient. And uh this has been done now for decades, and one of the um most common is the movement of a gene from uh a bacterium called bacillus therangensis or Bt.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Oh I know BT, right? That's the isn't that stuff that they can use against gypsy moths and that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Yeah, yeah, that it's been uh inserted into uh a large number of of uh crops, important crops, corn, cotton, canola, soybean, potato, uh with tremendous success. And it's a it's a protein, the BT protein is toxic to insects, but not to any higher organism. And so that's a good example of how we we know that there's no uh new inherent significant risk uh of converting the uh those common crops into something that's worrisome, and yet regulators have put them on a uh uh a very strict, very burdensome, very lengthy uh regime, especially the EPA, which which because the the BT protein is an anti-insect, they consider that to be a pesticide and they regulate it the way they would regulate DDT.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Even though it's an all-natural pesticide, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

And you know, exactly what the enviros want.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Right. And and uh uh I fought this for years at when I was at FDA and was constantly at odds with the other regulatory agencies about these irrational, unscientific approaches.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

But that's what it sounds like. Dr. Henry Miller, medical doctor uh uh and molecular biologist, currently at the Science Literacy Project. We'll be back in a moment. I'll get to your calls at 866-H Lars. That's 866-439.