TOKYO — Pity the "transgenic" tomato. It has become a marketing disaster on both sides of the Pacific, and a cautionary tale for Japanese biotechnology.
It began life in a California laboratory as a miracle product, a tomato bioengineered to be tasty but slow to spoil. It was the first gene-spliced food to win approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And in 1994, when Kirin Brewery Co., Japan's top beer maker, acquired the Japanese rights to the Flavr-Savr tomato from Calgene Inc. of Davis, Calif., it seemed like a sure-fire winner.
Kirin quickly won approval from Japan's Health and Welfare Ministry to market the tomato here, and set to work crossbreeding it with Japanese species to produce the pink color, particular taste and compact growth characteristics that consumers and farmers here prefer.
But before the tomato got near the supermarket shelves, a Japanese consumer group that opposes genetically engineered food threatened to boycott every Kirin product--including its beer--if the company dared to put its brave new product on the market.
Kirin pulled the offending vegetable. In a recent interview, company spokesmen politely avoided comment on the boycott threat, but said Kirin will not try to market its tomato--or any other genetically modified food--until and unless the Japanese public is prepared to accept it.
"Until we resolve the taste, color and growth issues, we can't sell it," explained spokesman Hirotaka Ishikawa. "In addition, we need to have the public's understanding. Right now, people feel resistance even when they hear the words 'genetic engineering.' "
But Kirin has by no means abandoned bioengineering. It is quietly continuing efforts to produce a genetically superior tomato--even though Calgene's Flavr-Savr has been a dud with U.S. shoppers.
Meanwhile, Kirin's "agribio business division" has engineered a virus-resistant chrysanthemum, which is undergoing environmental-safety testing. And its pharmaceutical division is marketing two genetically engineered drugs that are injected rather then ingested and have drawn no protests.
As goes Kirin, so goes Japan. Alarmed that Japan is lagging far behind the U.S. and Europe in biotechnology, and determined to become a world-class competitor in bioscience, the Japanese government is pouring money into research and development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and technologies to improve crops, pharmaceuticals, medicine, environmental protection and industrial processes.
