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Science

FDA Asked to Impose Moratorium on GM Salmon 21

Posted by michael from the tastes-like-chicken dept.
DeepDarkSky writes: "This NYTimes article is saying more than 60 environmental and fishermen group are asking the FDA for a moratorium on approval of genetically-modified salmon until further assessments of the impact can be made. The last paragraph of the article particularly caught my attention: 'Mr. Entis said the salmon his company was developing were not larger than other salmon at sexual maturity, they just grew faster. In addition, he said, the females will be sterile to prevent reproduction.' Elliot Entis is the president of Aqua Bounty Farms, the people who are bringing forth the GM salmon. It seems to me that instead of growth hormones, they are now turning to genetic modification to change attributes of creatures raised for food (perhaps thinking that it's "safer" than the hormones and antibiotics being injected into cows and whatnot). And the last sentence seemed to be directly from out of the first Jurassic Park movie, doesn't it?"
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FDA Asked to Impose Moratorium on GM Salmon More

FDA Asked to Impose Moratorium on GM Salmon

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  • ...but for General Motors to go into the fish business is crazy. :-)

    (Yeah, it's stupid, but that was my first impression of the abbreviation when I saw the headline.)

  • They don't sell males, only sterile females.

    The big hoopla is over them growing the females in ocean farms (a big net). Fish escape from the farms on a regular basis.

    The risk is that one of those escaped fish will be the 1 in a million that wasn't sterile.

    Then you start to ask how they are going to breed. Do salmon ever breed in the open ocean, don't they return to where they were born to lay eggs?

  • Maybe we should curb population growth. How's that for a wild idea. Everyone gets to have two kids, and the population goes down. End result, no more food shortage. And we don't even have to make the Six Million Dollar Sea Bass.
  • if/when these fish-whose-genes-are-intellectual-property reach the wild, they will compete for food and mates against the fish-whose-genes-are-not-intellectual-property

    er.. yes, they'll compete for food. I would estimate that in the ocean where salmon grow up there is at least one US Grade 'A' Shitload of food for all the salmon you care to grow.
    Mates, however, do not matter. Salmon aren't territorial about their women. The females just squirt their eggs (mmm... ikura..) in the sand and males release their sperm. No harems for the fish, here.

    There will just be fewer non-corporate fish on the market for the rest of the world to buy.

    Oh, no! The world gets cheap salmon! Fuck! What are we ever to do? Seriously, if it becomes a problem, we just stop putting them into the ocean. They're sterile, so there's no pollution of the wild genotype. Relax. I bet you eat those nice, vine-ripened tomatoes at the store. They're GM so that they don't rot.
  • Sounding like "the end of Jursassic Park (movie)", I was specifically referring to what I think they were saying, not necessarily what actually happend - that life will always find a way to survive and procreate. I certainly don't mean that these salmons will turn hermaphroditic (though as you pointed out, some species of fish are transsexual - nevermind the fine points between transsexual and hermaphroditic), nor that there will be killer salmon out there eating people. But I think that genetic engineering and modification is still at a stage where people are still not very sure what is going on when they are tinkering with these things. I still think that they are not sure what is going on when they pump the animals with the growth hormones either (besides that they are growing faster/bigger). Certainly, to be reactionary about these things without being informed about the topic is bad, but so is thinking about releasing these salmon without having observed these salmon in controlled and isolated environments.

    Quite frankly, I just didn't realize that they've already gone to the point of genetically modifying animals that they are considering releasing into the environment and possibly for consumption. I thought we still had a ways to go on the GM plants.

    I think that just as you say, we should be more informed about the topic, so too, should the people doing these genetic modification experiments become more knowledgeable about the consequences of what they are doing before they unleash it onto the world. After all, once released, there's no way of catching them again. And even if they are sterile, who knows, maybe nature WILL find a way - like what the end of Jurassic Park was trying to say.

  • Hardly. I'm not comparing genetically modified fish with man-eating dinosaurs. If you think more carefully about the end of Jurassic Park, you'd remember something about how all the dinosaurs were either rendered sterile or all of the same gender (I forget which now, but I think it was more likely the same gender, and it turned out they were able to change their gender).

    But the point of the whole thing was that while it seems innocuous enough to have salmon that merely grow faster because of its genetically modified disposition, it doesn't mean that there aren't any problems we cannot foresee. Just because it seems like there shouldn't be any problems, doesn't mean there won't be. I hardly think it alarmist when people are wanting to release GM salmon into the wild and think that "it's ok, because they are all sterile".

    Besides, alarmists' concerns can be very real - remember that just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. :)

    Seriously though, in light of the canola seed lawsuit in Canada where the farmer is being sued for having GM modified seeds created by Monsanto on his farm because it was blown onto his property from his neighbor's farm, the other poster's premise about these salmons being IP and fishermen being sued for having IP without having paid for them will be very possible.

  • Then you start to ask how they are going to breed. Do salmon ever breed in the open ocean, don't they return to where they were born to lay eggs?

    It is my understanding that the farm raised Salmon are still programmed to breed where they hatch, so in this case they will breed in the farm.

    It would be interesting to see what the success rate is. On one hand they have had their instincts blocked, since they can't fight up stream to reach their breeding spot (which likely was a tank near the farm). On the other hand, there is a low mortality rate (or at least there should be) since few die trying to use all of their energy reserves to reach the headwaters of a stream.

  • Do they taste as good?

    I heard the tomatos don't.

    Cheerio,
    Link.
  • Release lots of sterile mosquitos to make it hard for mosquitos to reproduce.

    For salmon there's not much benefit to the public.

    Cheerio,
    Link.
  • Cold water fish don't freeze, so they took some of that stuff and put it into tomatos.

    So I'm not surprised if it tastes fishy.

    The muslims and jews will probably be outraged if bits of pig genes are used next!

    Pisses me off, as the industry really doesn't know what they're doing. Or maybe doesn't really care.

    Take a recent scientific study comparing apples from apple trees grown organically, semiorganically, and "conventionally". It was proven that the organic apples tasted sweeter and better.

    See http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/X4983e.htm
    Search for sweeter.

    If it does matter to the apples what soil they grow on, I can't believe that it doesn't matter to your body which "apple" you eat.

    I believe it makes a very significant difference whether our bodies grow "sweeter and better" or not.

    And I'm willing to bet that "tasting better" is often a good indication on whether the food is actually better for our bodies.

    BTW making something that's bad for you taste good is an even worse idea. The future doesn't look good for any species which modifies their food so that what is bad tastes good. Like driving down a highway by watching MTV.

    Cheerio,
    Link.
  • This country is full of alarmists. How can you compare putting one gene in a fish to the man-eating dinosaurs of Jurassic Park? It seems like being an alarmist has become the number one way to grab attention in this country!
  • ... It basically covered both sides of the argument really well. On one hand, the global population is growing so large that organic farming methods CAN NOT feed the world's population. Since natural fisheries are overfished and farmland is being overfarmed, something must be done. Whether GM foods are the answer is another question entirely. For example is it ok to insert one or two genes into rice so that is produces Vitamin A and prevents blindness in impoverished third world nations? It is extremely unlikely that the Vitamin A gene will lead to a runaway crop that can't be controlled. However, genetically inducing fish to grow four times faster could easily have environmental consequences. In the end, there will have to be reasoned debate and some compromise.

    It is a parallel argument to energy consumption. Fossil fuels are depleting and have negative environmental effects. Are we really willing to go nuclear? There's a big debate in the northwest right now about removing dams from the salmon fisheries. If we want clean power, we're going to have to dam some rivers and rely on some nuclear power.

    We can't have our cake and eat it too.

  • YES! Beware of the alarmists! They are the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world! We can't be paranoid enough about these people! When they finally grab power THE WORLD WILL COME TO AN END!!! AAAAAAA!!!!!!!
  • And how can they create sterile specimen born from these non-sterile parents?

    Just like mules, which were used for ages -- a hybrid of donkey and a horse.

  • Once again, I think people need to stop being ignorant and actually consider what "GM" means.

    For centuries, humans have domesticated almost every animal that they consume for food. Cows, pigs, chickens, etc. How was an improvement in livestock brought about? Through selective breeding programs, because knowledge about genetics was very limited. They knew Mendelian genetics, but they had to figure out which traits were dominant or recessive, etc. Futhermore, the traits they wanted to improve are in the category of not merely controlled by a single gene. Thus, it took years and years to come out with a better animal.

    With GM, we know more about what genes do what in an animal. By using GM, we accelerate the breeding process by years. Instead of waiting for the whole life cycle of the animal (usually only a few times a year), we can produce the final outcome of all that breeding in one step in the lab. The only trick left is to figure out how to get the genes into the animal.

    For most cases, this is what GM is about. There are some exceptions (putting a fish gene into a cow), but for the purpose of this discussion we are dealing with merely making salmon bigger upon maturity, which we could have done with selective breeding but would have taken another 20 years, instead of 5.

    Peter C. Lai
    Univ. of Connecticut
    (the first college in america to teach agricultural genetics.)
  • It seems like being an alarmist has become the number one way to grab attention in this country!
    And on this website.
  • In the article they mention that the females of the new species are sterile. What about the males? If they are not, they can mate with female of that "standard" species and create hybrids.
    And how do they reproduce them in the farms? They must have functionnal males and females. What if one of them escapes? And how can they create sterile specimen born from these non-sterile parents?
  • Since I refuse to eat them, I really can't say how they taste. What I can say (and this was substantiated by none other than my girlfriends seven-year-old), is that they smell like fish! Pretty bad idea that - eating tomatoes that smell like fish. It was only later that I was told that the GM tomatoes actually do contain some fish chromosomes. No thanks.
  • I just hope that this doesn't lead to some of the same type of problems we've been seeing when a non-native species is introduced to an ecosystem.

    For example, I live in Michigan, and we've been having huge problems with the introduction of zebra mussels into the Great Lakes ecosystem. The zebra mussels came in as passengers on ships coming in through the St. Lawrence Seaway. The zebra mussels are not the only problem either -- this quote from The Wisconsin Sea Grant website [wisc.edu] gives some examples:

    While the zebra mussel invasion and its immense impact on the Great Lakes ecosystem has focused attention on the issue, the introduction of nonindigenous (exotic) species is not a new problem. An estimated 130 nonindigenous species have been introduced to the Great Lakes, most of them arriving since the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959. Several of these species -- including the sea lamprey, alewife, smelt, carp and milfoil -- have contributed to massive changes in Great Lakes fish and plant communities.

    I'm sure that nobody thought that there would be this much ecological impacts from opening a passageway for transportation into the Great Lakes.

    I'm not saying that GM salmon are a non-native species exactly, or that the problems we may see will be the same as when non-native species are introduced into an ecosystem (check out www.invasivespecies.gov [invasivespecies.gov] to see what other problems that has caused). I'm just saying that we've already seen unexpected problems that occur from playing with the environment, and in most cases, we end up with serious problems.

    Just because the FDA hasn't found any problems with this yet doesn't mean it's safe. Genetic engineering is a fairly new science, and I don't believe that we've seen all the possible consequences that may come from it yet. I really think we need to spend more time studying the environment and possible interactions before we do anything which can't be undone.

  • It makes me ill reading things like this. I can't believe people are so ignorant about such simple things. Maybe it's just because I grew up in a family of biologists (though I'm not one myself). Yes, it sounds like Jurassic Park, though I'll refer to the book instead of the movie, which was a terrible bastardization of the book. Remeber, the book was science fiction. It was based on fact: yes, there's probably an evolutionary link between dinosaurs and amphibians (IIRC, that was the rationale given in the book). And yes, amphibians are hermaphroditic in some cases. And yes, it has been documented that some fish can change sexes (though I don't know all that much about it). But this doesn't mean that a school of killer salmon are going to get loose and destroy the planet. This modification that they've done is just a more direct form of something we've been doing for ages. Look at modern domestic cows and pigs. Those animals are gross exaggerations of what they were before we started breeding them. Sure, we're pumpin' 'em up with horomones. The FDA looked into it, just as they will with this. They decided that the people breeding these animals aren't doing anything dangerous, just as they probably will with the salmon.

    On a side note, it's interesting that the FDA is regulating the fish because "it considers the added gene to be an animal drug". While I suppose that's true, I certainly hope that isn't the official phrasing. Apparently "the agency does not have deep experience in assessing environmental consequences". That's where your concern should be. Yes, people should be concerned about these issues, but you've got to be informed before you start reacting, dammit! The problem is that the government doesn't seem to be much more informed than the general populace on this topic. Isn't it about time for an agency that's actually knowledgeable on these topics?

  • So let's see...if/when these fish-whose-genes-are-intellectual-property reach the wild, they will compete for food and mates against the fish-whose-genes-are-not-intellectual-property. There will just be fewer non-corporate fish on the market for the rest of the world to buy. Sort of like DuP0nt's crops blowing their pollen onto--and contaminating the yield of--the fields of farmers who aren't DuP0nt customers. So, like, there's no problem, right? Unless they start busting innocent fishermen for 'possession of a controlled phenotype'...

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