Dr. Bas Walker:

They're not being open to using our money and I think it's quite justified if people break the law to stop these genetic experiments.

Speaker 2:

I guess what you have to do is examine your own conscience and say, am I comfortable to withstand the judgement  of history in 20 years time over the things that we've done right now.

Nandor Tanczos:

The movement to oppose GE is a global movement working largely through the Internet and on the ground through the direct action and grassroots movements around the world, and it's ordinary people who have taken on the might of some of the biggest corporations in the world as well as the might of their own governments and are actually rolling it back.

Speaker 4:

Until recently, most New Zealanders were blissfully unaware of genetic engineering or GE. Nowadays, few who fail to stop and ponder the issue. Intense public debate and political drama has been spawned by the birth of these mutant calves, cloned carves that carry human genes. The drama began with another mysterious birth in Scotland. When Dolly the sheep was first introduced to the media at Edinburgh's Roslyn Institute, her creator, Ian Willmott, was already well advanced with his plans to create genetically modified cloned animals. Since then, biotech companies have been delving into the genetic unknown with experiments mixing human and animal DNA. They want to demonstrate to the world that crossing the species barrier is a good step forward and New Zealand is at the heart of their plans.

David Wells:

Dolly opened the floodgates in terms of what potential opportunities there were for science, what potential applications there were for agriculture and medicine and the enormous controversy of, you know, what was appropriate, where were the boundaries, you know, what was the potential for abuse in humans? So it certainly broadened our perspectives, you know, out of the laboratory into the wider community and to a very much a social context.

Speaker 4:

David Wells is a graduate of Roslyn and one of Ian Willmott's more famous proteges. He's also the architect of New Zealand's notorious mutant cows. Ag research is New Zealand's Agricultural Research Institute with a network of laboratories involved in top secret genetic engineering research. But Dr. Wells is worried that the public controversy over GE is hindering his progress.

David Wells:

Clearly there been concern ear towards a genetic engineering and, you know, certainly that has stymied our ability to put it in place, you know, the research that we have wanted and you know, that is undoubtedly affecting our ability to do science and compete with some North American groups.

Speaker 4:

This is the AG research facility which has been dubbed Frankenstein's Farm, the location where David Wells is already creating what are known as genetically modified organisms or GMO's. The AG research programme has managed to cheat nature and create in a few years what could never be achieved in millions of years of evolution by modifying the genetic material of an animal and then cloning it. In an attempt to treat neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis, scientists copy a human gene called the MBP gene and insert that into the cell of a Friesian cow. This gene enables the human body to manufacture Myelin, the materials surrounding nerve cells, which is lacking in sufferers of multiple sclerosis. The cow's cell with its added human gene is then inserted into an unfertilized cow egg, which has had all of its genetic material removed. With a little help from scientists that cloned and genetically modified egg becomes an embryo. The resulting transgenic calf, should produce milk, which contains human myelin protein, the object of the exercise in the first place.

David Wells:

I feel very comfortable with it because it is in a secure research environment, you know, we have approval from [inaudible] , you know, to, to conduct the experiments in the containment facility. And it is all about basic research, you know, determining whether we can get expression of that human protein in the milk of livestock. That is the first step. So, I see it as, you know, very exciting.

Nandor Tanczos:

The risks are so unknown and in fact, in many ways I think risks are unknowable. We're moving into a territory that is so new that how can we even do the work of evaluating what the risks are? We don't even know. We don't have a clue. We couldn't possibly have a clue.

Richard Long:

A police investigation is underway after a crop of genetically engineered potatoes was destroyed near Christchurch.

Speaker 7:

A potato field uprooted.

Speaker 4:

Nandor Tanczos back to the origins of the anti GE campaign to the attack on the Christchurch GM potato crop.

Speaker 7:

The Greens are calling for ...

Nandor Tanczos:

It hit headlines in a massive way. And for the first time it was really, it was on the front page of the papers, it was on the news, it was on the current affairs programmes, and it was really the first time that a lot of people in the public had even heard of the issue. And once they heard about it, they were like, whoa, what's going on?

Speaker 4:

He's in his mid thirties, a committed rastafarian, a radical environmental activist and a member of New Zealand's parliament. With skateboards skills, which none of his fellow parliamentarians can match, he's captured public attention and strong support from young disaffected voters.

Nandor Tanczos:

I give greetings to each and everyone in the name of the Creator, the most high, Jar Rastafari.

Speaker 4:

He's managed to create quite a stir in Wellington's parliamentary chamber and he attributes his political success to his fight to keep New Zealand GE free.

Speaker 8:

The Greens embracing success. This is the first time all six greens have metres in [inaudible 00:08:08].

Speaker 4:

During the 1999 election, the Greens adopted the anti GE message as their campaign mantra and the voters rewarded their efforts delivering them six seats and the balance of power in parliament. A frustrating result for Helen Clark's new labour government.

Nandor Tanczos:

Certainly a lot of green party support in the election came from the GE issue because we were the only political party that was prepared to stand up and even speak on the issue. We had other political parties were either totally unsupportive, big business and that whole thing or were wavering. They weren't sure what to do. But the Green party was the only party that was prepared to stand up and say, we don't think it says right. And we demand that the people of this country have a say. I'm absolutely furious that we have to campaign for the right to know what we're eating. It's a fundamental human right.

Speaker 4:

The drama isn't just confined to politics. There's been a big rise in direct action against genetic engineering. In just a few years at least a dozen radical action groups have been established. Today in an Auckland supermarket activists are targeting groceries, relabeling chickens, biscuits and margerine with special stickers, warning customers that their dinner maybe genetically modified. No one here seems to find this at all unusual.

Speaker 10:

See your chicken is one of the key issues is animal feed. Tiegl are the biggest importer of genetically engineered soy and to use young poultry as a collective target for GE feeds and stuff. Let's move on. Consumers are ringing out and saying, hey, I don't want to be eating GE food. I don't want my kids eating GE food, and that's what it all comes back to. There's been no long term health testing of the effects of GE foods on humans or animals, so we're back to the old Guinea pigs in the experiment as to what the effects of what GE are.

Speaker 4:

As direct action goes,pPerhaps it seems a little tame. Other activists have chosen a more violent approach.

Speaker 11:

We've had one of our staff members houses, they had acid poured over their car, their private car in their own drive while at home. Pretty adverse slogans painted on the fence on their private property.

David Wells:

While I was in Scotland, the Animal Liberation Front firebombed the laboratories that, just down the corridor from the one that I was working on, so I guess in the UK I'd been previously exposed to that type of activism.

Mark Eden:

But basically they've denied all their information on, under about 10 different sections of the official information age. So basically they just stalling. They don't want to give us any information.

Speaker 4:

Mark Eden is one of the old guard of animal liberationists. For some years he's been waging a paper war with the country's biotech research companies struggling to learn more about the exact nature of their genetic experiments on animals.

Mark Eden:

But we will win in the end because ... There's laboratories in Tago, Wellington, Hamilton and Aukland all using genetically modified animals and experiments. And it's very hard to find out what they're doing. To find out about one experiment we have to do months and months of paperwork just to get a tiny little bit out. And it's only when people start asking questions. And now that you're kind of coming out with these lies like claiming, oh no, we're actually trying to cure all these horrible diseases at our agricultural meat research institute, which is total rubbish. So, the deception, like it's very hard to get info out and they just straight out light and they will do anything they can to prevent us from getting any information.

Speaker 11:

There is competition globally in these areas. And I would suggest that Ag research is and makes one of the leading groups in that area, and it's our determination to keep at that laeding edge.

Speaker 4:

The birth of Dolly Thrust, British Company, PPl Therapeutics to the leading edge of biotechnology. PPL had backed the Scottish cloning research and earlier this year announced to London financial markets that it was building the world's first medical milk farm, not from cows, but sheep in New Zealand. It's plan is remarkably similar to that of Ag research, but unlike Ag researches cloned cow project PPL's plans are well advanced and the subject of far less public scrutiny.

In the shadow of a remote hydro electric grid near the source of the Waikato River, sheep graze peacefully on PPL's transgenic farm. Nearly 4,000 of them contain human genes. Within 12 months, PPL hopes to have close to 10,000 transgenic sheep on its high tech, high security farm, enabling it to extract massive quantities of protein. Like Ag Research, it's banking it's claims on the theory that the extracted protein could provide relief for sufferers of hereditary emphysema or cystic fibrosis. Curiously enough, the human component of PPL's transgenic farm had its origins many years ago on the other side of the world.

Copenhagen in the mid eighties, at around this time, a young Danish woman, we don't know her name, agreed to donate a blood sample at a medical clinic. The woman who gave that blood sample could hardly have imagined the bizarre experiment nearly two decades on in which her genes would be used to store DNA transported more than halfway across the world and injected into these sheep. Even now that this transgenic farm is reaching the capacity for full commercial production, she's never been informed.

Transgenics is a hit and miss business. For all the healthy shape on this farm. we've been told of an unusually high number of miscarriages, dead shape and those born with genetic weaknesses. But PPL wastes no time disposing of its transgenic mistakes. They've imported the secondhand pitch crematorium from Australia to do the job on site and in quarantine. The company maintains that its research efforts are safe and pose no longterm risk to people or the environment. But for many New Zealanders there is more at stake than just public health.

Jessica Hutchin:

There's a debate that has the potential to disrupt our lineage and genealogy. It's a debate that has the potential to impact on our cultural practises. It's a debate that totally a rejects our Way of knowing or modern way of science and understanding the natural world. So it's hugely important, hugely important.

Speaker 4:

Maori rights activist and expert on indigenous resources Jessica Hutchins believes that Maori people and their lands are seriously threatened by New Zealand's biotech industries meddling with DNA.

Jessica Hutchin:

You know, people might say but they're not modifying human beings, not modifying Maori people, but you're modifying things within our environment and we're connected to that we [inaudible] into that through genealogy. So it's all related. You know, you can't say, well, you know, we're doing a genetic modification on cows and you know, they're not traditional species, but you're doing it on ancestral land.

Speaker 4:

If things go horribly wrong with New Zealand's genetic experimentation, then this organisation will bear the blame, if not the consequences.

Dr. Bas Walker:

[inaudible] makes the authority, ERMA the decision maker in which no one can appeal a decision by the authority. I have to say, that's unusual, that's very strong legislation and it puts a lot of power in the hands of the authority.

Speaker 4:

The environmental risk management authority is one of the first departments of its type in the world. Established to monitor the boundaries of science and industry, to provide a framework and ultimate control of over New Zealand's gene splicing scientists.

Dr. Bas Walker:

I don't think I would have predicted the amount of public debate and controversy that we've created. So I think that was a surprise, but in a sense it was beginning to happen when the authority was set up, so we weren't surprised when it began to happen. It's just that it's grown and snowballed to a greater extent than we thought would be the case.

Speaker 4:

Earlier this year, ERMA found itself being challenged in the courts. Opponents of Ag Researchers transgenic cow plans asked the High Court to overrule ERMA and stop the experiment. The high court decided that ERMA had in fact made errors of law in allowing the experiment to proceed, and they set aside the original approval. Ag Research and it's transgenic progeny were now facing a new threat.

Speaker 13:

By the time these calves are born, they will be illegal genetically modified organisms and under the law in New Zealand, they cannot be allowed to live if they are illegal organisms. What I've been saying ...

Speaker 4:

Amid the rush of emotions and calls for the heavily pregnant cows to be killed, the high court lift of solid escape route.

Dr. Bas Walker:

the task that we then had to tackle was if you'd like to reconsider the application, this time being much more careful to follow the decision making methodology that was done and the result of doing that was to reapprove the application.

Speaker 4:

For those who had appealed against the ERMA approval, the high court's judgement  represented little more than a rap on the knuckles for ERMA rather than any victory against GE scientists.

Jacki Amohanga:

One of the crucial questions for me was has the human donor, if she'd given permission for the DNA or the copy of the DNA to be used for this type of experiments. Because for us, you know it has the potential to cause a structural imbalance.

Speaker 4:

On the banks of the Waikato River in Hamilton, the local Wairari people have been replanting native trees which they use in traditional medicine. Alarmed by the Ag Research plan to clone animals containing human DNA on their traditional land, local Wairari elders called on Jackie Amohanga to help them take on the scientists.

Jacki Amohanga:

The problem that I had with that is that we were dealing with genetically modified materials that we didn't know what type of bacteria or viruses could be created as a result of, you know, the scientific research. And so I was pretty concerned about them reaching into the underground water table and the underground water table feeds into the Waikato River where we get out drinking water.

Speaker 4:

But despite the local Maori objections, ERMA judged the Ag Research experiment as safe and not likely to pose any risk of contamination. Being within Hamilton city boundaries, the A Research scientists have to carefully consider how to dispose of their transgenic mistakes and their dead cows. Like the PPL transgenic sheep farm further south, scientists had also planned to cremate the remains, but the Wairari people said no.

Jacki Amohanga:

They had a human DNA component with that. And for us, it's like eating the [inaudible 00:22:17], the deceased remains of a human by the mere fact that the particulars been discharged to air in a residential area. We had people in that residential area can breathe it on. So it's like eating those deceased people.

Dr. Bas Walker:

The view that's been taken by some Maori at any rate has been that they simply don't like the technology at all. They object on spiritual grounds to the whole notion of genetic modification. Now, that makes decision making extraordinarily difficult because you're dealing with a very strongly held views, which can't really be reconciled.

Speaker 15:

Three new controversial calves are under tight security at Waikato's [inaudible] research centre. They've just been born to parents who won a permanent stay of execution last month.

Speaker 4:

Few recent human births in New Zealand have provoked as much interest as the birth of this trio. It took 48 miscarriages before scientists finally produced these cloned Friesian calves with human genes. According to the ERMA rules, they'll live out their entire life on the clone farm, but they won't be alone for long. Ag Research is already busy creating hundreds of new clones just like them. Opponents of the clone farm are concerned that the experiment is simply a pretext for creating designer milks and dairy products.

At Victoria University in Wellington, the Anti GE roadshow has been gathering pace as the royal commission on genetic modification prepares its findings. These enthusiastic young campaigners are hoping that public pressure will eventually force out the gene fusing scientists.

Just down the hill from the university in New Zealand's parliament building, the mood is more reserved. Most political analysts here are certain that in the short term, the scientists will win with the Royal Commission, likely to favour a continuation of New Zealand's foray into the genetic unknown. That's likely to relieve many of the big biotech companies and foreign governments, but those opposed to the experiments have warned the biotech industry that such a result will lead to a rise in anti GE sabotage and other direct action.

Mark Eden:

The Royal Commission is going to bring its, announce its results to the public and I think people are going to be a hippie. I mean, people really haven't got any faith that the world commission is going to come out and say, well, we're going to stop GE. They're not. I mean it will be good if they were, but they're not. So people are going to have to stop it themselves and I think we'll see a big increase in direct action crops that we sabotage and laboratories with animals are need to lose money.

Nandor Tanczos:

For me, the reality is if there are no legitimate channels, then people are going to take illegal action because it's the only thing available to them. People must have a voice and they will, if they're not given a voice, they'll take it. And I support that because for me, the right of people to participate in what's going on in their country is paramount.