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Fine, I’ll say it: Fruit just isn’t what it used to be.
Watermelons, apples and bananas have hardly any seeds anymore. They’re all sweet juice and tasty flesh. And don’t even mention vegetables. Whatever happened to the tough stems, the thin roots, the bitter leaves? After people showed up and started cultivating everything, it seems like plants became such pushovers. Take me back to the good ol’ days of gnawing the seed pods of native grasses, before everything got so complicated.
Food is a lot tastier, and a lot less wild, than it was back then.
If you’ve ever sampled broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower or kale in your Indiana Memorial Union food court salad, surprise! All are the same species, Brassica oleracea. Over thousands of years, humans bred this plant into a family of unique variants. This process of breeding is artificial selection, where humans cross plants with desired traits — a sweeter leaf, for example — to reinforce that trait over many generations.
After selecting plants and animals for favorable traits for more than 10,000 years, we’ve gotten pretty good at it. Look no further than every modern crop and domesticated animal.
But there’s always room for improvement.
In 1950, the world population sat around 2.5 billion people. By 2023, it more than tripled to a smidge over 8 billion, with about one in every 11 people experiencing hunger or chronic undernourishment.
Thanks to a changing climate, droughts, floods and record-breaking temperatures are becoming more frequent. Antibiotic resistance, the evolution of microbial immunity to antibiotics, threatens crops and livestock alike with lethal infection.
Producing nutritious food, more resitant food and just more food around the world is increasingly important — and increasingly challenging.
But we can take a leap forward in our long history of molding the natural world to suit our needs by tinkering with animal, plant and microbe genetics hands-on.
The key to getting under an organism’s hood? Its proteins.
Recall your high school biology: Every lifeform is ingrained with a set of “how-to-exist” instructions called DNA. These instructions are made entirely of four chemical bases — A, T, C and G — in a specific sequence.
To generate its traits, an organism uses a translator called a ribosome to read copies of its DNA. The ribosome conjures a small chemical known as an amino acid from each three-base sequence of DNA and links all these amino acids together to form a functional protein.
An organism’s internal structure, shape, color, taste, behavior and toxicity are all determined by how many and what kinds of proteins it produces. To create broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower, your great-great-grandpappy relied on random genetic mixing between two parent organisms and prayed the offspring cropped up with the best combination of proteins and therefore traits.
But what if we could bypass dumb luck? Genetically modifying organisms lets us skip the guesswork.
There are countless ways to modify an organism’s genetics, but the core concept is always the same: Take a DNA sequence you want and link it with the DNA of the organism you desire to alter.
One way scientists go about doing this is with a gene gun, where they blast tiny gold particles coated with DNA into an organism’s cells using pressurized air. Another method takes advantage of lab-grown bacteria that naturally inject and incorporate a select portion of their DNA into the plants they infect.
However you rework your organism, the result is a nearly identical heir gifted with a genetically-inserted superpower. The corn you probably eat, Bt-corn, was created by adding a sequence to corn DNA for a protein that is naturally produced by the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis — hence the “Bt”. Its added protein happens to be toxic to certain insect larvae (and especially caterpillars), so by incorporating the corresponding DNA instructions into the corn’s genome it can produce its own insecticide.
Bt-corn is one of many genetically modified crops that now reign supreme over United States farmland. In 2020, genetically modified organisms represented 94% of the corn, 97% of the cotton and 96% of the soybeans planted by U.S. farmers. Other GMOs include canola, papayas, potatoes, squash, alfalfa, apples and pineapples.
But GMOs aren’t always plants. The FDA approved the AquAdvantage salmon in November 2015. Edited genetics gave the fish a growth hormone that allows it to attain full size in half the time.
They aren’t always food, either. Ironically, the very first GMO ever approved by the FDA wasn’t even intended to be edible, since the organism in question was a bacteria. By modifying the DNA of E. coli to include a gene for insulin, scientists were able to produce the hormone relatively cheaply and redefine diabetes treatment.
Genetically modified organisms are one thing. Convincing people they are safe to eat or use is something else entirely. Since the 1990s brought the first wave of consumer-available GMOs, people have worried they would develop chronic diseases, acquire cancer or have allergic reactions from them.
Fortunately, the past decade yielded a glut of research and testing that suggests GMOs are just as safe to consume than natural, or artificially selected, foods.
A 2016 study found no difference in allergenicity between GMOs and their counterparts. After decades of study, any health risk GMOs pose remains unseen.
Meanwhile, evidence that GMOs will better the world continues to pile up.
Golden rice, a genetically modified rice plant, could prevent millions of malnutrition-induced deaths. In countries with food scarcity issues, vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of childhood blindness and can even develop into a life-threatening condition. Golden rice has been modified to produce vitamin A, however, giving the staple crop of billions of people a nutritional boost.
The Gal-Safe pig was approved by the FDA in 2020, and has been genetically modified to produce no alpha-gal sugars. These sugars pose a potentially deadly threat to recipients of a pig organ transplant as well as those with alpha-gal syndrome (a food allergy). Creating healthy, modified pigs that don’t produce alpha-gal allows for safer pig-to-human organ transplantation in addition to a dietary alternative.
Fruit isn’t what it used to be. Neither are vegetables. Neither are we. We’ve been manipulating our environment, including its organisms, as long as we have been around: Breeding sweeter fruits, more docile beasts and tastier vegetables, all at the cost of what made them wild.
GMOs are no less natural than any of the green, grain or meat you find in supermarkets today — just less random in the way they’re created and far better equipped to serve our needs.
Don’t let three letters scare you away.
Spencer Schaberg (he/him) is a sophomore studying microbiology.
