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57   Meeting Nutritional Needs
     The Washington Post, Saturday, August 12, 1967

     A large part of the world's agricultural economy must be devoted
to practical solutions to the problem of diets that are deficient in
amino acids.  How can we enable every person to consume about two
pounds a year of some special nutrients not readily available in
existing diets?

     If it were enough to manufacture these essential amino acids, I
have no doubt that industrial synthesis would be the preferred route.
But they must also be distributed, paid for and consumed.  These
requirements make indigenous agriculture the closest short-range
solution.

     Meeting immediate nutritional needs is analogous to meeting
problems of public health.  The existing human emergency must be met
even if it means creating eventual secondary problems that may become
even more grievous.  Thus the reduction of child mortality bequeathed
us the population explosion.  Similarly, expansion of world
agriculture to meet contemporary needs may delay equally important
industrial development and plant the seeds for a pernicious form of
technological unemployment.

     Agricultural self-sufficiency is essential to a developing
country.  A country that cannot produce enough food must divert its
other production, potential capital savings, to survive.  In under-
developed countries, agriculture is the most competitive, rapidly
expandable form of production.  The markets are built in, as are
the major resources of land, sunlight, sometimes water and always
an excess of labor.

     It is unrealistic for any country to skip over the stage of
agricultural sufficiency as part of its development, unless it starts
out blessed with unusual capital resources like petroleum or a 
pre-educated immigrant population.

     The planning for long-range development must, however, take
account of some likely technological innovations.  The peril is that
both the scope and quality of agricultural investment may become
suddenly obsolete in the future.

     The worst hazard is insufficient education.  Then a country's
agriculture may become too specialized and be displaced by synthetic
or competing agricultural products, as happened with rubber in
Malaysia and butterfat in Wisconsin.

     We may hope, rather than fear, that industrial synthesis of amino
acids will alleviate a general shortage of these substances from
crops. But such developments are bound to have a disturbing economic
impact on markets for new foodstuffs in coming years.  It is crucial
to rational planning, therefore, that we have a clear outlook on such
expectations.

     Much discussion of world agriculture focuses on the next 20
years.  On one hand, it seems barely possible to keep up with the
expected population growth over that interval.  On the other, that is
quite a long time for scientific innovation; unfortunately it is hard
to rely on specific expectations in making important policies.


     Essential amino acid (animal protein) requirements can be
formulated as a biological problem, a genetic deficiency blocking
internal synthesis of these compounds.  It may then have a biological
solution: the reimplantation of the requisite genes to rebuild the
biosynthetic capacity of the human.

     Analogous experiments have been done with bacteria, using
bacterial viruses to transfer the new genes.  It will be surprising
if similar augmentation of the human genotype cannot be accomplished
within the next few years.

     From this standpoint, amino acid deficiency is a genetic disease
that we now treat by dietary replacement.  An alternative solution
would be a vaccine-like inoculation to take the place of the genes
that normal men never had.

     Such proposals have until now been directed at repairing rare
genetic metabolic defects like phenylketonuria.  They may be even more
cogent for some of the most prevalent disorders of contemporary man.

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