Wednesday, July 21, 2010

By Lulu Liu

And you may soon be calling it dinner.

After a decade of deliberation, the federal government is considering giving its seal of approval to a genetically engineered salmon made by a Massachusetts biotech company.

It would look, taste and smell no different from ordinary salmon. But will restaurants serve it? Will markets sell it? More important, will we eat it?

This novel organism, which has an "all-fish" modified genetic code, matures at twice the rate of conventional salmon but is in other ways indistinguishable from its wild counterparts. Before the year is up, it may become the first genetically modified animal to be approved for human consumption.

Scientists created the first of these fast-growing fish in 1992 by inserting the growth hormone gene of a chinook salmon into the DNA sequence of newly fertilized Atlantic salmon eggs. To activate the gene, they tacked on a "switch" from a fish called the ocean pout, which, unlike the natural growth hormone regulator of the salmon, stays on all year long.

These fish grew quickly. Though their mature size did not differ from those of conventional salmon, they reached it in half the time. Scientists saw the potential in these fish immediately.

"If you can get an animal to grow twice as fast, you'll save on maintenance, and you'll save on feed," said Alison van Eenennaam of the University of California, Davis, a specialist in animal biotechnology. For farmers, the ability to produce more fish with a smaller environmental footprint can only be a good thing, she said. It's a sustainable choice many are expected to make.

But they've had to wait for the fish to be approved for human consumption. Not until 1998 did the Food and Drug Administration draft a framework for the regulation of genetically modified animals.

"Interestingly, with transgenic animals, the decision was to treat them like new drugs," said UC Davis professor and biotechnology program director Martina Newell-McGloughlin.

Under the drug provisions, the FDA must assess the health of the animals in question, characterize the nutritional content of their consumer products (meat or milk, for example), rule out the potential for an allergic or toxic reaction in humans, and evaluate environmental risks. The FDA has been reviewing the AquAdvantage salmon for 13 years.

On the other hand, we've been eating genetically engineered plants since 1994. So why is it taking so long with the fish?

"Animals are a whole other level of complexity," said Newell-McGloughlin.

Certainly, with animals, the "eek"-factor goes way up, she said.

"When you modify an organism, that's very different from modifying a plant – you're modifying a sentient being," said Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America.

Consumers suspicious

Sacramento resident Matthew Christy is a regular at the Natural Foods Co-op on Alhambra Boulevard and was picking up groceries recently around lunch time. He admits that biotech products might hold some promise, but he's wary of the technology and said, "it would take a lot" before he'd eat genetically modified fish.

"I've got a lot of suspicion of corporations and their practices," he said.

Stacie Traylor, assistant marketing manager of the co-op, said the store will not stock AquAdvantage salmon.

"We wouldn't even consider it," she said. "It goes against the grain of what we're all about, which is natural foods and products."

Really, said van Eenennaam, the expert in animal biotechnology, agriculture stopped being natural centuries ago. Since Roman times, farmers have bred plants and animals to maximize desirable traits – and minimize other characteristics.

"If you let a dairy cow go up (on) Mount Shasta, she'd last about two minutes," she said. "That's not what she's optimized for."

A long history of tweaking the things we eat using conventional methods like selective breeding and crop irradiation to generate random mutations has brought us the seedless watermelon and the Belgian Blue cow, an animal bred for a mutation that results in extra-lean meat.

All change brings risk

Van Eenennaam argues that conventional methods and genetic engineering both carry certain amounts of risk.

"When you're a fish farmer doing conventional breeding," van Eenennaam said. "You have 3 billion base-pairs of DNA and you're selecting for 'big.' You don't care how you get there … so you might bring along other genes."

These other genes might cause us harm, but foods produced by these methods are unregulated by the FDA.

"If the salmon were just bred conventionally for increased hormone production, they'd be on your plate already," Newell- McGloughlin said.

But when scientists move genes from one animal into another, she said, we get the willies.

David Ropeik is an instructor at Harvard University and author of "How Risky Is It Really? Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts" (McGraw-Hill, $24.95, 288 pages). He said he believes skepticism toward genetic engineering has an emotional root.

"The perception of risk is not strictly based on the facts. It's based on how those facts feel to us," he said.

Rarely do we have all the data before we need to make a judgment, so we use what he calls "psychological patterns" to evaluate risk.

Natural vs. man-made is one of those patterns. There's also distrust ("Is the FDA keeping us safe?"), loss-aversion ("Is it worth it?") and voluntary vs. involuntary risk ("Do I get to choose?").

Traditionally, the FDA has resisted requiring mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods if nutritional content is unaltered. Ropeik believes that for consumers to accept these products, they need a choice.

Longtime Sacramento resident and former chef Mike Campo said he has no problem with genetically engineered fish, but he's happy that there are options.

"It's a personal choice," he said. "I'm not against it myself. I think it will help feed a lot of hungry people."

Indeed, the promise of genetically altered salmon is sustainability. Ninety percent of the oceans' large fish are gone, said Neil Sims, co-founder of Kona Blue Water Farms in Hawaii.

"It's what we've done with most of our seafood," he said. "We've simply loved it to death."

Modifying our food and fiber

AquaBounty Technologies based in Waltham, Mass., has created a genetically modified salmon that grows twice as fast as conventional salmon. The FDA is considering approving it for human consumption.

It would be the first genetically engineered animal approved as food.

Some of the modified products that have previously received the OK from the FDA:
Genetically engineered

• Alfalfa (no longer grown)
• Canola (rapeseed)
• Cantaloupe
• Corn
• Cotton
• Flax
• Hawaiian papaya
• Potato
• Radish
• Rice
• Soybeans
• Sugar beet
• Sugar cane
• Squash
• Tomato (no longer sold)

Radiation-mutated

• Apples
• Bananas
• Barley
• Chocolate
• Citrus
• Cotton
• Ruby red grapefruit
• Rice
• Peaches
• Pears
• Peas
• Peanuts
• Potatoes
• Quinoa
• Sesame
• Soybean
• Wheat
• Yams

What's next?
Animals in line for FDA approval:

• Enviropigs able to digest plant phosphorus, for more environmentally friendly manure
• Cows resistant to mad cow disease
• Cows resistant to mastitis
• Pork with omega-3 fatty acids

What the terms mean

• Genetic engineering/modification: Direct manipulation of an organism's genome by insertion, deletion, or relocation of pieces of DNA.
• Transgenic organism: An organism with an altered DNA that incorporates genes from other species.
• Radiation-induced mutations: Random changes in an organism's DNA caused by exposure to high-energy X-rays or gamma rays. Radiation breeding uses this technique to generate desirable traits in crops.

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