The Worries Build Over the Release of Bacteria Altered in the Laboratory : Some townspeople worry about the potential for danger, others about the effects on the local potato crop.

At the University of California Agricultural Field Station on dusty old Havlina Street, the state’s distinctive bear flag was flying upside-down the other day.

That common symbol of distress, it turned out, was only an error by an absent-minded new employee at the laboratory, which wants to test the ability of a genetically altered bacteria to protect potatoes from frost. Such an experiment would constitute the first authorized release into the environment of a genetically altered life form.

But the upside-down flag also symbolized the anxiety of many of the 1,000 or so residents of Tulelake as they wait to see if their remote potato-farming town will become what one activist described as the “Alamogordo of the Genetics Age,” a reference to the New Mexico site where the first atomic bomb was detonated.

Whether the experiment is allowed to proceed may be decided as soon as Friday, when Sacramento Superior Court Judge A. Richard Backus is scheduled to reconsider his Aug. 4 temporary restraining order that blocked the test just two days before it was to have begun.

As the lawyers and scientists prepare for the next court skirmish, people in this slightly down-at-the-heels community say they just wish the whole controversy would go away.

Concerns About Health

Some worry about the potential for danger--to their own health or the health of their children or the ducks, geese and other waterfowl roosting at the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge along the border of Modoc and Siskiyou counties.

Others worry that publicity surrounding such an experiment might make consumers jittery of all the region’s potatoes, which are sold chiefly in California--already for less than the cost of production.

The proposed test may not always dominate the conversation at Mike and Wanda’s Steakhouse or the nearby Yukon bar, but there is hardly a soul in town who hasn’t heard of the experiment--and formed an opinion about it.

“You basically have two groups--the farmers who are worried about how it’ll affect the economics of the area, and the non-farmers who are worried about the non-economic, safety part of it,” said James Massey Jr., an agronomist and farm adviser in the Siskiyou County agriculture commissioner’s office.

Massey remains publicly neutral, saying he will enforce whatever the court orders.

Several growers, pinched between bumper crops and declining demand, have asked whether there is any need for a product that could mean even larger potato harvests in the future, particularly if it alienates consumers.

“I don’t mind the experiment; I just don’t want them to gamble with us in the marketplace,” said Lowell Kenyon, president of L. K. Produce and a former president of the National Potato Promotion Board. “I know this area cannot handle anything that would cut further into our marketing efforts.”

Despite strong assurances from the university that the experiment is safe, some residents remain worried.

“You don’t have to be a scientist to see they’re so vague about everything, and they want to spray it in my town? Uh-uh,” said Ava Edgar, one of the two principal members of Concerned Citizens of Tulelake, an informal ad hoc group that is fighting the experiment in court.

Specifically, opponents allege that the university’s plans to intermittently monitor the off-site spread of the altered bacteria are inadequate. They also point to a lack of toxicity and pathogenicity tests to determine whether the altered microorganism might be harmful to plants or people.

“I don’t think they know what the hell they are doing,” said Djuanna Anderson, Edgar’s partner. “When you look at what they are proposing, you see how little they really know. . . . There hasn’t even been a study that meets CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) standards.”

State Court Action

It was the proposed experiment’s apparent non-compliance with certain CEQA requirements that resulted in the court order temporarily halting the test earlier this month.

That order was the first time a state judge, using state law, had acted on a genetic engineering issue, said Jeremy Rifkin, a leading foe of genetic engineering. In the past, such proposals, including a plan to conduct the same experiment here in 1984, have been challenged in federal courts.

The university proposes to plant a small plot of potatoes that are coated with a solution that includes genetically altered strains of pseudomonas bacteria, which are commonly found on leafy plants.

About three weeks later, when the plants have sprouted, they would be sprayed with the same solution.

The bacteria have had small parts of their genetic code removed to prevent them from oozing a certain protein that ordinarily encourages dew to freeze at temperatures between 25 degrees and 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

By coating young potato plants with these so-called “ice minus” bacteria, scientists hope to essentially crowd out natural bacteria, thus giving treated plants an extra measure of frost protection.

Although the test would be the first one authorized to release genetically altered microorganisms freely into the environment, it would not be the first experiment with genetically altered bacteria outside a laboratory.

In February, 1985, some trees in Oakland were injected with a version of the frost-fighting bacteria, and eight months later 500 piglets in Illinois were inoculated with a pseudorabies vaccine made from an altered form of the pseudorabies virus. A genetically altered animal vaccine also has been tested at Texas A&M.;

Those tests have been criticized for being either inadequately supervised or unauthorized.

The proposed Tulelake test would be different because of its open-air spraying, making the potential for spreading altered bacteria much greater and resulting in a corresponding increase in calls for caution.

Bacteria Called Safe

The university and its chief project scientist, Steven E. Lindow, a plant pathologist, have repeatedly insisted that the test would be inherently safe because it would involve only a benignly altered version of a common, non-pathogenic bacterium in small doses on a remote, well-monitored test plot.

“Neither the commonly occurring bacteria ( Pseudomonas syringae ) , nor the modified ones, are harmful to humans or animals,” the university stated in a background report.

“The modified bacteria are nearly identical to the strains found on crops and other plants everywhere. The only difference is that they lack the single gene (out of about 3,000) that allows ice to form on plant leaves,” it added. “Such variations occur in nature, so the strain being tested is ‘new’ only in the technique used to make the change. No new traits have been added.”

In addition, potatoes grown in the test would be destroyed, not sold.

Opponents of the test, including Scott R. Keene, an attorney for the Sacramento-based environmental group Californians for Responsible Toxics Management, say the reassurances are not supported by standard testing.

“The parent strain of (ice) minus genetically altered mutant, Pseudomonas fluorescens, although of low virulence, is known to be pathogenic to patients with impaired immuno-defense response systems,” he wrote in one court brief, without elaboration.

‘Contradictory’ Assumption

In addition, Keene argued, the long-term effects of altering genetic coding is “unknown but could be uncontrollably devastating.”

“The assumption that removal of the gene involved in ice nucleation is simple, safe and predictable is contradictory to all that is known in the fields of genetics and microbiology,” he wrote.

Keene also raised the possibility of a consumer boycott and other economic burdens on farmers in the Klamath River and Tulelake basins along the Oregon-California border, about 400 miles north of Sacramento.

Any such boycott would be particularly damaging to the area, which has been battered by a confluence of troubles in three of its main industries: Farming, timber and tourism.

For example, potatoes sold for $5 per 100-pound sack in 1984 but only $2.50 a hundredweight last year, and as little as $2 this year. Production costs average $4.50 per hundredweight, said Norma Frey, a Siskiyou County supervisor and wife of a potato grower.

“I really question the need for the product,” Frey said. “Agriculture is already in such a backslide, we don’t need something else . . . to give us even bigger crops.

“With something like this, it means more farmers going out of business.”

Marketing Questions

These marketing questions are the chief concern of most people in Tulelake, which saw its last farm-implement dealer and its only weekly newspaper go out of business last month. Long gone are the fine hotels that once catered to duck hunters and the two automobile dealers that kept most everyone in pickups.

Although frost is a year-round threat near Tulelake, which sits 4,031 feet above sea level, growers here say it is not a severe problem. Spraying the fields with water has been effective in protecting crops from the cold, they said.

“I just have the feeling that this experiment is being done for some other product (grown) somewhere else,” said Kenyon. “I can’t see that I would ever use it.”

That idea is supported by an attempt earlier this year to test a virtually identical frost inhibitor on Monterey County strawberry plants. That test was blocked when county supervisors passed a zoning ordinance strictly regulating the location and conditions of genetic engineering tests.

The company seeking to conduct the test, Advanced Genetic Sciences, later lost its experimental use permit when federal officials learned that the company had earlier conducted unauthorized experiments at its Oakland headquarters. Last week, the firm said it has abandoned plans to conduct the test in Monterey County and instead will search for another site next spring.

Restrictive zoning was not an option to stop the university’s test because the university, a state agency, is not bound by local land-use laws.

Supervisors Opposed

Supervisors in both counties, however, have unanimously approved identical resolutions opposing the proposed test in the arid, ash-gray volcanic soil of the university’s Modoc County facility a few miles south of town.

Frey said the university has not acknowledged the resolutions, but she added that the university has kept county officials up to date on test developments. She noted that most residents seem to trust the university not to expose them to an unreasonable health risk and that a few are resigned to a test eventually.

Still, there are residents such as Anderson and Edgar who are put off by what they regard as the university’s indifference to local concerns, and who pledge to continue opposing the test regardless of the outcome on Friday.

“We can read and we’re not stupid, even though that is the way that they (university officials) have been treating us,” Edgar said. “We live here; this is our town. . . . We’re going to try to protect what we’ve got.”