Secrets About Genetically Modified Foods You Ought to Know

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What wouldK you do in the following situations?
You are a tomato farmer whose crops are threatened by a persistent species of beetle. Each year, you spend large sums of money for pesticides to protect your crops.

As a family physician, you often treat children who suffer from infectious diseases that could easily be prevented through vaccination. But the parents of many of your patients cannot afford the cost of vaccinations. You hear of a new approach that would reduce the cost to a fraction of its current price: genetically modified fruits and vegetables that contain various vaccines. By simply eating a banana, a child could be protected against disease—without getting a shot!

You are the leader of a developing nation. Hunger is a problem among your citizens: the salty coastal wetlands of your country can’t support the growth of needed crops, and your slow economy can’t support importing enough food for everyone. A biotechnology company has genetically modified a rice plant that can thrive in salt water, providing your nation with the opportunity to feed its citizens while bolstering its economy.

Our ability to manipulate plants by introducing new genes promises innovative solutions to these and many other real-world problems. Yet there is considerable opposition to the use of genetically modified plants for food production and other uses.

Genetic engineering offers a time-saving method for producing larger, higher-quality crops with less effort and expense. Yet such benefits must be balanced against the risks of changing the genetic makeup of organisms.
What are those risks, and how likely are they to occur? In order to define them, we need to understand the science of plant genetic engineering.
Genetically modified: what exactly are we talking about?
For thousands of years, humans have been genetically enhancing other organisms through the practice of selective breeding. Look around you: the sweet corn and seedless watermelons at the supermarket, the purebred dogs at the park, and your neighbor’s prize rosebush are all examples of how humans have selectively enhanced desirable traits in other living things.

The type of genetic enhancement that generates the most concern goes a step beyond selective breeding, however. Technology now allows us to transfer genes between organisms. For example, the tomato plant’s beetle resistance relies on a gene from a bacterium (Bacillus thuringiensis), which scientists inserted into the tomato plant’s genome. This gene, called cry1Ac, encodes a protein that is poisonous to certain types of insects, including the beetle.

How is this done? Gene transfer technology is simply a sophisticated version of a cut-and-paste operation. Once the desired gene is identified in the native organism’s genome, it can be cut out, transferred to the target plant, and pasted into its genome. (The illustration to the right describes the “gene-gun” approach, which is one of several gene transfer methods.) Once the new gene has been introduced, the plant can be bred to create a new strain that passes the gene from generation to generation.