For the past year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been juggling a political hot potato: whether to pursue commercialization of a controversial biotech discovery that can render seeds sterile. A diverse group of opponents, including some scientific groups and companies, have disavowed this so-called "terminator" technology as an unconscionable threat to poor farmers. But last week USDA officials announced they will move ahead with the technology because of its scientific promise--albeit with conditions negotiated with its industry partner to guard against it being used in harmful ways. Antibiotech activists adamantly oppose the decision, which runs counter to the intentions even of biotech giant Monsanto.

At issue is what is formally called a "technology protection system," developed by USDA and Delta & Pine Land Co. (DPL) of Scott, Mississippi, which are co-inventors on related patents. The intended application is to protect a company's investment in developing genetically engineered plants by preventing farmers from using their seeds for the next year's planting. This is done by adding three genes to a plant. If the seeds from the modified plants are treated with an antibiotic, the plants that grow from those seeds will produce a toxin that renders their seeds sterile. So far, the technology has been tried only in an experimental tobacco plant at a USDA lab in Lubbock, Texas.

When word got out about the first patent in 1998, the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) and others launched a highly visible campaign against the technology (Science, 30 October 1998, p. 850). Critics charged that it would prevent subsistence farmers from saving seeds and that pollen from the plants might sterilize neighboring fields as well. Soon after, the world's largest nonprofit agricultural research group, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, pledged never to use the technology in its crops. Faced with heated opposition, Monsanto (now part of Pharmacia) also declared a moratorium on using the technology last October when it was considering buying DPL.

Meanwhile, away from the fray, some scientists inside and outside USDA have been arguing that the technology is too promising for the department to abandon. "There's so much good science to come from it," says James Cook, a plant pathologist at Washington State University in Pullman. The patent could be used to turn any gene on and off--"a goal of all plant breeding," said USDA tech transfer official Richard M. Parry Jr. at a meeting last week of USDA's new biotech advisory panel. He adds that "there are many other beneficial applications," including preventing the spread of genes from genetically modified crops to wild plants. These benefits persuaded USDA to pursue its patent and its agreement with DPL, despite vociferous opposition.

The opponents were well represented at the panel meeting, where USDA sought advice on what conditions it should include in the licensing agreement with DPL--not, as some expected, on whether it should proceed with the agreement at all. The diverse panelists offered several, such as making DPL legally liable should the plants damage a neighbor's field; removing USDA from the controversy by transferring its patent rights to a trust; and not licensing it to companies that own more than 40% of the market for a seed. "I still think it's a bad idea. I'm signing on to something that would make it a tiny bit better," said Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

By the meeting's end, the panelists had reached consensus on just one recommendation: USDA should ban the technology's use on existing varieties and on all plants that aren't highly self-pollinating--which, critics note, is what DPL plans to do anyway.

USDA's decision--it expects to finalize the agreement with DPL in the next few months--is unlikely to satisfy groups such as RAFI, which issued a press release calling the advisory board discussion "a giant charade." But in the larger scheme, what USDA does will not determine the fate of "terminator" technology; several companies are pursuing patents on similar technologies--and they will probably not be inviting

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