Why are people afraid of GMOs?

Most people are afraid of GMO because they have no idea what it is, how it is made and what is so scary about it. It is easy to scare people with an unknown abbreviation such as GMO. It became a great word to scare people that GMO is something dangerous. Everything that is new can be scary. So what is GMO and how is it created? GMO is an organism, usually a plant, that has some genes changed or replaced but it can also be an animal. Such manipulation is called genetic engineering. 

Do you like dogs? Do you know how many species there are? How dog breeds were created? This is exactly what genetic engineering is all about. GMO is not only food. People can manipulate with different genes of plants and animals. Thanks to this we have so many beautiful dogs. It didn’t hurt anybody to create so many breeds so when people repeat without understanding that creation of genetically modified  organisms is problematic, it is good to first look around and check if we already have GMOs around us and if this is really problematic.

Before criticizing GMO we should ask ourselves some questions. Do pills that we buy in the pharmacy are good or bad? They can be good because they can cure you or stop pain but it happens that some people can have an allergy and will have serious health problems after eating a pill. There is always a risk but should we stop selling pills?

An operation can be good because it helps people to cure their health problems but it happens very rarely that something goes wrong and the patient will not survive the operation. Also there can be life threatening complications but should we stop doing operations? It is the same about GMO. It can be good or bad depending on what we do. There are always positive and negative points in everything that we create but it is important to be careful and make careful experiments to check if what we design and create is good or we should stop going further.

How GMO is produced?

Genetic engineering of different organisms is done by inserting a piece of DNA into another organism, usually plants. Each living organism is made of DNA and DNA contains genes. Genes produce proteins and they are responsible for giving plants their characteristics. Inserting a new gene can change the color of flowers, can make plants bigger or smaller, can make them cold or hot resistant, can help them to be more resistant to long time without water or plants can be more resistant to different diseases (The Royal Society, 2016). 

• We could take a gene from a cactus, such a gene that gives to this plant such huge resistance to hot and rainless conditions. By inserting such a gene to a different plant we could make it also more resistant to drought.  Some cacti species can survive even two years without water (Cactusway, online). It would help so many farmers to produce food if they don’t have to worry about water.

• Farmers and gardeners know how difficult it is to grow certain vegetables. Particularly tomatoes get easily affected by a type of fungus and the plant gets rotten. It can happen that after 5 months of growing your tomatoes from the seeds you see already your little developing tomatoes, you hope that in a few days they will be ready to eat and out of nowhere they turn black and the whole plant dies. Many gardeners try natural methods but usually they don’t work. Farmers, however, spray the plants with almost endless amounts of chemicals. And what does it mean for customers? Endless amounts of chemicals enter our body when we eat such vegetables. Is it healthy? Not at all. What if we could make such fragile vegetables and fruit fungus resistant or even virus resistant because they also attack plants? We could make them resistant to many diseases. It is enough to find a plant that is resistant to fungus and check which gene gives this resistance. Then we can copy this gene and place it for example into a tomato plant. It will make tomato plants fungus resistant. However, it is very important if such an extra gene in our food will not have any negative influence on consumers. This is something that many people are afraid of. Maybe a new gene will cause an allergy or maybe nothing will happen. If long laboratory tests show that such a plant is safe then we could grow healthy vegetables without the use of any toxic chemicals.

• There are many other ideas on how we can use genetic engineering. This is not only to produce food but we can make plants more resistant to cold. So many countries in the world have long and cold winters. If we could still use this time to produce some crops or grow palms? There are many plants that survive even the coldest winters. We could take a gene from such a cold resistant plant and introduce it into a sun loving plant. Let’s say a palm would get such a cold resistant gene. Then it would grow happily covered with snow and it would not feel cold. A cold resistant palm would be just for decoration but how about cold resistant potatoes? Potatoes are the fourth most important food crop. However, they are not resistant to freezing temperatures. Cold can either reduce yield or too much cold can totally destroy all potato plants. Therefore development of cold resistant potatoes is quite important for many farmers. There is already a newly developed frost resistant potato called Wiñay. It was genetically engineered in Peru and it can stand cold up to -10 °Celsius. It will help many farmers in Peruvian Andes to grow cold resistant potatoes that so far was not possible. It means more land can be used and more food can be produced (Isaaa, 2007; Schaefer, 2019).

• Another example of genetically modified food is golden rice. It is ordinary rice but with beta-carotene added. Human body converts beta-carotene into vitamin A. One of the symptoms of vitamin A deficiency is blindness. So many people in the world have a limited variety of food and their basic food is plain rice. However, it does not provide vitamins that people need so much for a healthy life. How could we grow rice with vitamins inside? The answer is golden rice. It is rice that behaves a little bit like a carrot (Regis,2019).

• There are also other uses of GMO plants, not for eating but for cleaning soil. There are some parts of the world where soil is contaminated with arsenic. It is toxic for people but due to lack of land for farmers people grow crops on this contaminated soil. What can we do to prevent arsenic from entering the crops? As long as arsenic is in the soil it will get accumulated in crops but we can genetically engineer certain plants and they will remove arsenic from soil. Plants will be disposed and on this clean soil farmers can grow their crops.

• Do you see in supermarkets not ripe fruit and you need to wait for it to ripe at home? They are not so tasty compared to the ones that are fully ripe in nature. Most countries need to import fruit and vegetables. They spend a long time in transportation therefore they are picked up when they are not fully ripe. Thanks to this they are not too soft and can be transported more easily. Unfortunately, they never have such good taste as fully ripe fruit and vegetables when the ripening process occurs naturally in nature. How can we pick up ripe fruit and vegetables but still keep them hard enough for transportation? We can genetically engineer them and design GMO plants. They can have a small change in their DNA and this change will help fruit and vegetables to be more suitable for transportation and yet fully ripe. One such vegetable has already been produced. It is called Flavr Savr tomato. In this GMO scientists inhibited the enzyme that causes a ripe tomato to soften. Thanks to this they can be picked up from the plant when they are fully ripe but they will not get soft so quickly. The shelf life can be 7-10 days longer compared to other types of tomatoes. Flavr savr was developed in the middle of 1990s and was for a short time available to buy in the USA. However, it was discovered that it was too fragile to be transported and it often arrived to shops destroyed. Also it was more prone to diseases. As a result the production was stopped (Barndt, 2008; “Green light for longer lasting tomatoes”, 1994).

References:

• Cactusway, How Long Can A Cactus Survive Without Water?, retrieved 21 Sept 2021 from https://cactusway.com/how-long-can-a-cactus-survive-without-water/ 

• Barndt, D. (2008). Tangled routes women, work, and globalization on the tomato trail (2nd ed.). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Pub.

• Green light for longer lasting tomatoes (1994), Agricultural Outlook, Volumes, 204-214, pp.17 

• Isaaa (2007), GM potatoes with improved freezing tolerance, retrieved 22 Sept 2021 from https://www.isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechupdate/article/default.asp?ID=878

• Regis, E. (2019), Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood,  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Rice-Imperiled-Birth-Superfood/dp/1421433036 

• Schaefer, B. (2019) Ministerio de Agricultura y Riego, Frost-resistant potato developed by Wisconsin, Peruvian researchers retrieved 21 Sept 2021 from https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/274/Bamberg%20Press/SpudmanAugust2019.pdf
  
• The Royal Society (2016), What is genetic modification (GM) of crops and how is it done?, retrieved 21 Sept 2021 from https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/gm-plants/what-is-gm-and-how-is-it-done/