Leonardo and GMO

What would Leonardo da Vinci have to say about GMO?

At our recent Washington Academy of Family Physicians Public Health meeting we debated GMO foods, specifically, “Yes” or “No” on 522, the Initiative to label GMO. The question had been raised no less than 4 months earlier. Though against GMO (and thus in favor of the public’s right to know), I had managed little in the way of objective research. Then, during the 5-hour Omak-Olympia drive, I listened to a compelling audiobook build the case against one specific GMO crop, wheat. I used this example, in the broader context of human-manipulated food, to argue for “Yes” on 522. Our Board ended up deciding not to be “neutral”, which would have implied that both sides were equally compelling; our position of “no position” suggested insufficient evidence for either. Or that we hadn’t taken the step of due diligence to ferret out what evidence there might be.

The whole affair left me unsettled. Not because I disagreed with our decision or the process by which we’d reached it. I agreed with both. Nor because my arguments weren’t given a fair hearing. At the time of our meeting, I had not yet synthesized my thoughts into a coherent argument, yet my fellow physicians graciously heard me out. In the 72 hours after the meeting I scrambled together a position statement for our online journal. I regretted not having invested the effort months earlier, which might have allowed me to state my case more effectively and respected my colleagues’ time by letting them ponder it pre-meeting.

Only a few weeks later was I further able to put a finger on the pulse of my disquiet. Ironically the insight came while while relaxing on a family vacation in Port Townsend, from a book my father-in-law had left on the coffee table: Fritjof Capra’s “The Science of Leonardo”.

What could the 15th-century “Genius of the Renaissance” have to say about 21st-century GMOs, due diligence, and disquiet of the heart?

Quite a lot, as it happens. From Capra’s careful examination of previous biographies plus thousands of pages of da Vinci’s notebooks, what emerges is a man who above all took a holistic view of nature. Capra argues that Leonardo was centuries ahead of his contemporaries in his use of what would become the scientific method. Even more than that, Leonardo was far ahead of outstanding 16th-through-20th-century figures such as Bacon, Descartes, and Darwin, who, in Capra’s eyes, introduced an artificial and even destructive split that has permeated Western scientific thought ever since. This paradigm would separate mind from body, human from nature, the art of medicine from the science.

“Leonardo’s synthesis of art and science,” writes Capra, “is infused with a deep awareness of ecology and systems thinking.” He quotes Leonardo on “the so-called ‘abbreviators’, the reductionists of his time: ‘The abbreviators of works do injury to knowledge and to love…of what value is he who, in order to abbreviate the parts of those things of which he professes to give complete knowledge, leaves out the greater part of the things of which the whole is composed?’” Capra goes on, “Our sciences and technologies have become increasingly narrow… We urgently need a science that honors and respects the unity of all life, that recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all natural phenomena, and reconnects us with the living earth.”

Whatever Leonardo da Vinci’s vote on I-522, I am inclined to believe that he would see our modern industrial food production, including but not limited to GMO, within the context of the fossil fuel it consumes, the chemicals it unleashes into the environment, the inequality in distribution of our surplus of food (only surplus can result in population growth), and the idea that we can change the genetic code of our own food supply without consequence. This is not to say that Leonardo, the engineer and scientist, wouldn’t be busy designing better irrigation systems, tractor mechanics, and perhaps even techniques of gene splicing. But Leonardo the humanist, the ecologist, and the scientist—the systems thinker—would advocate that we step back and think carefully before each step of change. This step has been grossly lacking in the last 50 years of change to our food technology, not to mention the last 500 years of technologic change overall.

To the question of due diligence, one of the qualities I admire most about our WAFP: just as Leonardo spent hours in dissecting the shoulder muscles of a cadaver and making preliminary sketches of an arm in motion before ever putting paintbrush to easel, so it is our responsibility as physicians and scientists to assemble the best available evidence and share it with our peers for an informed discussion. In reading Capra’s book, I also appreciate differences between myself in 2013 as a physician with a family of my own, and da Vinci in 1490. As far as we know da Vinci had no family to which to devote his energy. He was able to secure positions that let him delve without distraction into his studies, his brilliance allowing him to work as few as two hours daily on actual commissions. While highly regarded by his few peers, Leonardo also seems to have led a highly secretive and even solitary life, so devoted was he to work that went largely unknown for centuries. Reading this, I’m able to forgive myself for balancing my time between personal research projects and my roles as a doctor and father.

At the same time, there are luxuries we enjoy and situations we face in 2013 that should also urge us to act, even when we do not have something like, in this case, hard evidence of direct human harm of GMOs. We enjoy the luxury of free and open exchange of ideas without fear of censure or death. And we have the situation of a world in such rapid flux, and in peril of ecologic and human catastrophe on such a massive scale, that we might recognize a larger systems problem. We might do well to recognize that our food supply has already been radically changed in the last 50 years without any safety trials having been conducted, and that ours is the first generation in history to face higher morbidity and mortality than our parents’.

Because we have the luxury of freely discussing such things—and perhaps, using our leverage as family physicians, the ability to change the broader course of human and global health for the better—we also should seize that chance. Specialists have their place within medicine. Our role, the one role we can fulfill better than almost any other profession on the planet inside or outside of medicine, is to be systems thinkers. We have the chance to be the Leonardos of our time, minus the secrecy and isolation.

This is what makes me proud to be part of an Academy that holds me accountable for reviewing what evidence is available (which I had not done in this case) and still tolerates, in fact encourages, broader thinking and exchange of ideas.

Indeed, if our individual limitations of family and work make it impossible for any one of us to paint a Mona Lisa, we should remember that our strength is in our collaboration, that together we might do work that would make even the Genius of the Renaissance proud.