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Science

Gene Editing Could Increase Food Security, UK Adviser Says (theguardian.com) 39

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Gene editing could drastically increase global food security and reduce reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides in the coming decade, a scientific adviser to the UK government's environment department has said. From a report: Speaking before the introduction of a bill on genetic technologies to the House of Lords on Wednesday, Prof Gideon Henderson said the legislation aimed to create a simpler regulatory framework that would speed up the development and commercialisation of gene-edited products by allowing them to be treated differently to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which are subject to strict regulation. "We anticipate [the bill] will enable precision-bred crops to navigate the regulatory system much more quickly, in something like one year compared with approximately 10 years under the present regime," Henderson said. This could have numerous benefits, from building crops that are more resistant to the climate crisis, pests and diseases, to increasing crop yields, which could help to combat global hunger, Henderson said. It could also be used to create more nutritious crops, such as vitamin D-enriched tomatoes. The bill will also allow for similar changes for livestock to follow, once a regulatory system has been developed to safeguard animal welfare, for example preventing the creation of fast-growing animals that are unable to stand.
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Gene Editing Could Increase Food Security, UK Adviser Says More

Gene Editing Could Increase Food Security, UK Adviser Says

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  • Hunger...? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @01:30PM (#62565466) Homepage Journal
    Geez, take a look at the average US citizen and I dare say much of UK and rest of Europe and I don't think you'll see many of us are suffering from hunger.

    And it isn't like we're sending all our excess food to Africa, etc....it is just thrown out.

    So, what's the big push for us to start playing God and gene editing our food stuffs....and risking that Pandora's box?

    • Any improvement in farm yield per acre is tremendously useful to humanity and wildlife. Gene editing is much better than the technology that our ancestors used to engineer corn, wheat, and rice. They used cross-species hybridization and artificial selection. Both of those are more haphazard than precisely editing a gene or two. Heck the idea of farming itself is dangerous to the ecosystem. Gene editing can enable smaller farms.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Sorry, but no. Some "improvements" are beneficial to humanity and wildlife, and some are the opposite. And the problem is the second kind are easier to make, and just as profitable.

      • The main issue is greed, typically rather than solving a problem the motivation is profit. So here is your seed that will not reproduce and wipes out the natural variant that would but it produces more and we only have clones. This creates a lack of genetic diversity and a dependance on the one source, also suddenly a bacteria arises that your cloned plant is vunerable too and wipes out the entire crop. Similar to H1-B1 kiwifruit that was cloned and wiped out by some bacteria in many countries (PSA was the

    • Re:Hunger...? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @02:01PM (#62565560)

      It's right there in the summary, if you can develop crops that need less fertilizer, less pesticides, less water and can grow in more demanding environments more people can grow them locally with bigger yields close to where it's needed.

      Feeding the world is a logistics problem, not a production one. Just ask Norman Borlaug who is credited with saving a billion people from starvation [wikipedia.org]

      • Re:Hunger...? (Score:4, Informative)

        by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @02:16PM (#62565592) Homepage Journal

        It's right there in the summary, if you can develop crops that need less fertilizer, less pesticides, less water and can grow in more demanding environments more people can grow them locally with bigger yields close to where it's needed.

        The trouble is, while we have found certain genes and places on DNA that make for certain proteins, etc....we really don't have a grip of the whole picture how things on one part affect multiple other places that express traits, not to mention the potential for how humans will also interact with these new traits and proteins created.

        It could be as simple as less nutrition, or potentially worse....cancers, etc.

        And the trouble is, often with these things, we don't and won't see the problems caused for a generation or two at least.

        I guess if you want to play with this food, go ahead but PLEASE label it clearly so folks like myself can have a choice on whether they want to consume it or not.

        And try to ensure that the human modified ones don't cause mutations in the natural ones we currently have available.

        • I mean I guess that could be possible, but the first GMO tobacco plant was in 1982 with research from the 70's, so we have been doing this type of work for 40-50 years now and there is a lot of commercialization done and many of these items.

          I think any of them should still have to pass an FDA/EFSA testing and approval and so far we have not seen any of the nasty effects you are speaking of.

          I am all in favor of labelling for informed consumer decisions but at the same time i think GMO has been a bit unfairly

        • Re:Hunger...? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Whateverthisis ( 7004192 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @02:52PM (#62565716)
          Sorry but what you just said is complete FUD and misinformation about gene editing technologies.

          Many studies [webmd.com] have been conducted studying the effects of GMO crops on human population, and no medical study has ever shown a correlation to any human health issue and a GMO crop. The WHO agrees [who.int]. These studies are going back several decades, since GMO food was first introduced in 1994.

          Further, ag is not just limited to food. Over 80% of cotton grown in Mexico right now is GMO, made to be resistant to many of the pests there. That has resulted in a significant decrease in pesticide use, which has directly improved the health of farm workers and reducing costs while improving yields, making it much more profitable. Mexico's GMO cotton [frontiersin.org] is a real success story and has nothing to do with food.

          Finally, this discussion isn't even about GMO. They're talking about gene-edited products. GMO regulations typically stipulate that you're introducing foreign DNA, for example putting jellyfish DNA in a pig [theverge.com]. With technologies like CRISPR, all you're doing is knocking out a gene that was pre-existing or changing the expression of one gene to the next, but not introducing any foreign DNA. Genetically that means organisms modified by CRISPR are no different than if you did selective breeding; the only difference is you're engineering the outcome rather than breeding the outcome. Selectively bred foods goes back to the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture; and if you've ever ate literally any type of apple you've eaten a selectively bred food, so we know what it does.

          There is literally no evidence to support that GMO causes any harm, and there is plenty of evidence to show that it does not. If you're looking for 100% assurance about gene-edited or GMO products, then you should be getting in line with the anti-vaxxers because there's an equivalent amount of evidence supporting that position. Meanwhile the benefits of gene edited and GMO products are clear; drought and weather resistant crops will be necessary to keep people from starving as climate change gets worse and worse. The removal of pesticides from agriculture directly improves the health of the consumer, and don't tell me you eat organic and don't deal with that because

      • "Norman Ernest Borlaug (/brl/; March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009)[3] was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution."

        The first sentence of your link says PRODUCTION.

      • If the aim is to feed the third world, then the plan will just defer the problem a few years until we've created a bigger problem. The population will expand to exceed whatever food production capacity we've reached. Maximising the earth's human population is not a worthy goal.
    • You're right. It's not US citizens that are starving, it's people in poor countries. They are the ones who suffer most from the anti GMO scaremongering. Fortunately most people take them less and less seriously these days. Unfortunately, many of the countries who need GMO's the most are still listening to the wacko's.

      • Unfortunately, many of the countries who need GMO's the most are still listening to the wacko's.

        That is exactly what happened in the country of Sri Lanka. The president foolishly banned all synthetic fertilizer and tried to go all in on organic. Somebody forgot to tell him that organic fertilizer yield is terrible, even when you drench it with pesticides (oh yeah, you did know that organic farming uses pesticides right?). The end result of that policy and a few other equally stupid ideas is that the people rioted .. burned down the homes of many politicians including the president's own home and even

    • And the young people of today still wonder why they are worse off than their parents...

    • The world will eventually cut out the middle men and eat the rich.

    • Playing God? We are God.

    • and I dare say much of UK and rest of Europe and I don't think you'll see many of us are suffering from hunger. And it isn't like we're sending all our excess food to Africa, etc

      We aren't sending excess food? You just sit back and watch the shitshow that will happen in MENA region when Ukrainian wheat won't be able to get there in the following year. It just might be 2011 all over again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      The average American eats 3600 calories/day, and generates about 1500 calories worth of food waste for a total calorie consumption 5100/day.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Geez, take a look at the average US citizen and I dare say much of UK and rest of Europe and I don't think you'll see many of us are suffering from hunger.

      And it isn't like we're sending all our excess food to Africa, etc....it is just thrown out.

      So, what's the big push for us to start playing God and gene editing our food stuffs....and risking that Pandora's box?

      It's always been a distribution problem.

      Think about grain - thanks to the Russian invasion, piles of grain are sitting in Ukrainian silos, unable

  • It's never for the benefit of the world. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Stoutlimb ( 143245 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @01:43PM (#62565502)

    In our system it's only one thing: Gene editing for profit. The cost of entry to this game is high, so it's gene editing for profit by large, often public companies where CEO's are law bound to maximize shareholder value. Since moral values have nothing to do with the law or the price of a share, morality and good intentions are absolutely irrelevant to the process. We have engineered a system that minimizes the trustworthiness of our most important corporate institutions that provide to us some of the most necessary services and products. This is a common problem in far too many separate issues today, and practically everyone carries some of the blame. This is the civilization that we have built and now we have to live with it or change it somehow.

    Personally, I like many newly discovered solutions to humanity's problems. There are precious few institutions or individuals I would trust to execute any plan to help humanity without completely screwing everything up simply because our society makes it near impossible to do otherwise.

    • The same could be said about the companies who created the COVID vaccine. And yet, in the risk/benefit analysis we came out way ahead. You might not be starving, but there are countries where the distaste for evil capitalist corporations is overshadowed by hunger. Additionally, genetic techniques are being democratized by the rapidly lowering cost. The barriers to entry are much lower now than ever. So It's not necessarily the big corporations keeping food biotech from the starving masses with their confisc

    • There are precious few institutions or individuals I would trust to execute any plan to help humanity without completely screwing everything up simply because our society makes it near impossible to do otherwise.

      Sure, nothing is perfect, but despite its problems, life in virtually all of the world is far better off than just a few decades ago. Contrary to much of the prevalent fear narrative, the improvements in the human condition are accelerating. Those corporate institutions you deride have to take a big part of the blame for the fact there has never been a better time to be alive on this earth than now. In fact it is the places where such institutions are lacking that make up what we call the third world, bu

      • I wholeheartedly agree with you. Despite the awfulness of this system we have invented, it's clearly far ahead of every other systems we've tried in the past. Considering the price of failure, it's difficult to experiment with untried ideas, and the idea of trying old failed ideas such as communism is a non-starter. I don't pretend to know what the solution is, but I know I don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. I would rather the existing system be tweaked with as little interference as

  • The semantic difference escapes me. Is there something about biology that makes these terms have different meanings?

    • From the article:

      Crucially, it makes a distinction between genetic modification, which involves introducing genes from other species, and so-called "precision breeding" to create desirable traits. The latter uses gene editing to make changes that mimic the process of selective breeding, only more precisely and far more rapidly than traditional breeding would allow.

      They're making a distinction between "things rich people want done to their babies" and "how to make catgirls."

  • Misanthropes have seized the narrative on gene editing and GMOs. They hate anything humans do. These are the type of people who, 10,000 years ago, would have killed farmers for doing "crazy things" like hybridizing two different strains of crop, artificially selecting the strains to grow thereby ultimately producing plants that would have never come about in the wild, and farming itself which is the destruction of an ecosystem. Oryza sativa, the most commonly eaten rice would go extinct very quickly if huma

    • > Misanthropes have seized the narrative on gene editing and GMOs ..

      Can a farmer sell his own seeds. If not then the GMO companies own them!

  • They've said this before. (Score:3)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @05:57PM (#62566232) Homepage

    This has always been the apology for GMOs: That they had the potential to drastically improve yield while reducing the need for pesticides and fertilizers (chemicals).

    And that's true. The problem is that the people who had the power to do it just didn't do it. Instead, they engineered GMOs to be RoundUp-Ready, so we ended up dumping even more chemicals into the soil. Then they patented their GMOs and started suing farms that accidentally got cross-pollinated. They said they owned the rights to the actual organisms and that if you even saved any of your GMO corn to plant yourself next season, you would be sued.

    The problem isn't the GMOs. It's the rapacious business models that the companies in control of GMOs use to keep whole populations enslaved to the GMO food supply.

    • Don't forget the kill gene that is being included too so that farmers can't gather and use the seeds for next year's crops and therefore have to buy the seeds again and again and again.

      It's also been proven that GMO crops have lower per bushel yields than non-GMO varieties. They also cost more per bushel to produce but subsidies from tax dollars make them cheaper to plant and grow. So the claim that gene editing will increase food security is false - higher cost, lower yields, and less flavor have been th

      • No it's not proven. Some GMO modifications have a specified purpose other than high-yield such as enabling the tomato to last longer or resist pests, rather than grow faster. The GMo vs non-GMO studies I have seen usually were unfairly comparing against traits that were not meant to increase yield in the tested environment anyway.

        For example, this misleading article on Google is a prime example of the using the misdirection methods I specified. Note that many GMO varieties actually did outperform the non-G

  • There's really no surprise in this article. Of course genetic modification leads to superior crops and reduced reliance on fertilization, irrigation, and other energy-intensive processes. For whatever reason, it seems to scare the uneducated, which will remain the biggest hurdle to adoption.

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