Huntley, Rebecca.The World According to Y: Inside the
New Adult Generation. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen &
Unwin, 2006.
Laurence W. Mazzeno
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Cell phones; Columbine massacre; Education in
the United States; E-mail; Fashions and clothing; In-
ternet; Marriage and divorce; MP3 format; Music;
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Genetic engineering
Definition The modification of organisms by the
transplantation of genes
In the 1990’s, the pioneering work in plant and animal ge-
netic engineering that had been done in the 1980’s was ap-
plied to a wide range of organisms, many of which had im-
mediate commercial applications. Biotechnology of this sort
became big business in the course of the decade; theLos An-
geles Timesreported in April, 1997, that there were 1,300
biotech companies in the United States, with 100,000 em-
ployees and a total annual turnover in excess of $12 bil-
lion.
Although numerous transgenic plants had been pro-
duced in the 1980’s, they had remained largely con-
fined to the laboratory, but their agricultural exploi-
tation made rapid strides in the 1990’s. In 1994,
genetically modified (GM) food made its debut in su-
permarkets in the form of Calgene’s Flavr Savr to-
mato, engineered for slower ripening, and hence for
longer shelf life. Although the product was not a suc-
cess—it was withdrawn in 1997 by Monsanto, which
took over Calgene in that year—it was the vanguard
of a revolution in agriculture that proved highly con-
troversial. In spite of tabloid-encouraged anxieties
about “Frankenfoods,” the first GM food crops were
planted in open field in 1996; the following year,
more than eight million U.S. acres were planted with
GM soybeans and more than three million with GM
corn. The genetic engineering of tobacco and cotton
had already become commonplace; more than three
quarters of Alabama’s cotton crop had been engi-
neered to produce “natural insecticides” by 1997.
Resistance to the consumption of GM foodstuffs
complicated their marketing in Europe but had less
effect in the United States. Anxieties regarding the
possible spread of transplanted genes—especially
those coding for insecticides—by virtue of cross-pol-
lination between GM crops and wild relatives also in-
hibited the planting of GM crops in Europe and else-
where. The development in 1998 of “terminator
technology,” whereby crop plants were genetically
engineered to make them incapable of producing
fertile seeds, was represented as a potential solution
to this problem, although cynics saw it as a means by
which the producers of GM plants could force their
customers to buy new seed every year rather than
simply propagating their initial crop in the conven-
tional way.
Much research was devoted to the possibility of
engineering plants to produce useful animal pro-
teins, especially “plantibodies” useful in the treat-
ment of disease and “plantigens” that might serve as
oral vaccines. Engineered microorganisms had
proved incapable of producing such complex mole-
cules, but various immunoglobulins were produced
in the early 1990’s by GM tobacco, soybean, and
maize, while antigens conferring immunity to hepa-
titis B were produced in GM tobacco, potatoes, and
bananas in the second half of the decade.Transgenic Animals The commercial exploitation
of transgenic animals had begun with the patenting
of the “Harvard oncomouse” in 1988. The 1990’s
saw the production of many more kinds of “knock-
out mice” for use in medical research. Genes analo-
gous to those responsible for various significant hu-
man genetic disorders were deliberately deactivated
in such mice so that the physiological development
of the relevant conditions could be studied in detail
and potential therapies tested. Numerous experi-
ments were conducted on sheep and other animals
with a view to causing them to produce useful pro-
teins in their milk; the first transgenic sheep whose
mammary glands produced a useful additional
product was born in 1995. The first transgenic goat
of a similar sort was produced the following year,
soon followed by pigs and rabbits. The first geneti-
cally engineered animal to be released into the wild
was a predatory mite released in Florida in 1996 to
attack pests responsible for damaging local fruit
crops.
The development of animal genetic engineering
was inhibited by difficulties in the transformation
process; whereas plants could be transformed rela-360 Genetic engineering The Nineties in America