At Disney’s Epcot, biotech thrives in secret garden

A Disney official says the work there is ‘more than just a show.’

ORLANDO SENTINEL

ORLANDO, Fla. — Deep inside the laboratories of Epcot’s The Land pavilion — beyond the world-record tomato tree or the Mickey Mouse-shaped pumpkins — a tiny part of one of Walt Disney’s dreams is being kept alive in petri dishes.

Visitors’ only brush with science there might involve Epcot’s programs to grow lettuce in water or to shape vegetables like Mickey Mouse. Yet more complex, far-less-known, potentially more practical and possibly controversial work has been going on side by side with those show projects for years.

In some of those tiny dishes, within microbiology laboratories walled off from the public, one of Epcot’s primary missions is being cultivated specimen by specimen, cell by cell, gene by gene.

Real, high-tech science.

Scientists working in The Land labs for Disney and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service are trying to alter nature’s design for the pear tree on a molecular level.

Funded by and operating as a branch laboratory for a research project under way at a federal agriculture laboratory in Kearneysville, W.Va., the Epcot scientists want to create a new rootstock for pear trees that would stunt the growth of the trees, making them shorter and easier to grow and harvest, and therefore more productive and more commercially attractive.

And they are doing so by genetically altering the cells of pear-tree root stock specimens.

“It’s more than just a show,” said Frederick L. Petitt, Walt Disney World’s director of Epcot science. “This is pretty long-term research.”

Risking controversy

But unlike most Epcot research — such as projects involving pest management or dolphin communication — it risks powerful controversy. Genetic engineering of crops draws a high level of public suspicion and has harsh critics who deride the products as “Frankenfoods.”

While the pear-tree work should not affect the genetic makeup of the pears, earlier projects at Epcot have had the goal of designing better food.

“I wouldn’t think Disney would touch this project with a 10-foot Cinderella wand, but Disney isn’t your grandfather’s cartoon company anymore,” said Nancy Allen, an activist with the Green Party.

Her group is part of an environmental coalition campaigning against the creation of genetically engineered trees — though not specifically the Epcot work — arguing that genetic engineering must be slowed so the consequences can be studied more carefully. “There just is no way to know what is going to happen in the long term, even for the growers,” said Anne Petermann, co-director of the Global Justice Ecology Project.

Research-project director Ralph Scorza of the U.S. Agriculture Research Service said he thinks such critics overlook the extreme care taken in the research — and its potential benefits. That’s one reason Epcot’s labs were recruited.