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Reviewed by Syd Baumel

LIKE IT OR NOT, the biotech revolution is upon us, breathing down our necks, inciting corporate greed and societal suspicions with its bewildering brew of promise and peril.

In Unnatural Harvest, seasoned Winnipeg journalist Ingeborg Boyens ("Country Canada," "The Journal") focuses on the hottest flash point—the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on our farms and in our grocery stores—while shedding light on genetic engineering in medicine and other areas too.

"Already, sixty percent of processed or manufactured foods—everything from cookies to ice cream to baby formula—contains genetically engineered soybeans."

Boyens' book reads very much like a series of upscale magazine articles in which related issues such as the bovine growth hormone fiasco, biotech for greed rather than social good, and the tryptophan supplement disaster of 1989 (very likely the result of genetic engineering gone afoul) are told mostly through the words and stories of farmers, biotech scientists and entrepreneurs, and other key players.

Although the subtitle suggests a muckraking conspiracy theorist's slant, Boyens never quite takes the gloves off, Jeremy Rifkin-style. Her jaundiced view of the industry is more of a slow Canadian boil. The disquieting facts (the cover-ups and obfuscations, the slapdash science, the revolving door between government, academia, and the biotech industry . . .) are there in abundance. Most worrying are the facts that aren't: the unknown consequences of the crapshoot of mixing the decks of complex genomes—consequences that even the most sagacious experts cannot foresee. These uncertainties are reason enough to justify the so-called precautionary principle that most anyone not out to get rich from the biotech revolution is coming to embrace. It's a principle, as Boyens points out, that was first voiced as early as the 1970s by such elders of science as the pioneering molecular biologist, Erwin Chargaff, and the Nobel Laureate (medicine), George Wald.

Did GMOs cause the tryptophan-EMS disaster of 1989?
Read an excerpt from Unnatural Harvest:.

The reason for the sea change, Boyens observes, is that "biotechnological progress . . . . is being managed now by a new corporate world order. The ability of science to move DNA from one species to another is being rushed from the hands of lab-coated researchers to those of product-oriented profiteers." The conservative scientist's discipline of erring on the side of caution has been replaced by the eager entrepreneur's haste to throw caution to the wind. And most frighteningly, institutions like universities and governments that should be pumping the brakes are jumping to the pump, eager to cash in on the windfall.

"Biotechnology would only be useful in feeding the extra two billion mouths expected in developing countries if access to it were free and democratic, much like agricultural research used to be."

Thankfully, the world is waking up to the need for truly independent watchdogs and regulators to restrain this juggernaut. Unnatural Harvest is a sober, well-reported contribution to the wakeup call.