By Marcus Glassman, Research Associate, Global Agriculture and Food, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs
The use of genetic engineering to create plants and animals, colloquially referred to as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), is among the most powerful—and controversial—technologies available to biological and agricultural science. The debate over the development of GMOs is highly polarized between groups such as biotechnology companies and scientists who support the greater development of GMOs, and advocates and national government bodies that reject or ban the use and development of those technologies. Such conflict is well documented, extensive, and, as some would call it, simply impassible.
But a solution may be at hand: gene editing.
Gene editing has long been a dream of medical and agricultural researchers alike. The principle behind it is simple: a laboratory technique that allows individual genes in a genome to be altered with extreme precision. Medicine has long sought such a process to treat genetic and viral conditions in humans, and a recent breakthrough in the process has opened the flood gates to a new era of plant breeding and medical research opportunities alike.
That breakthrough is CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing. CRISPR/Cas9 is a bacterial enzyme that bacteria use to defend themselves from viruses. In 2012, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley discovered how to harness the enzyme to make extremely precise changes to the genomes of plants and animals.
CRISPR/Cas9 is unique in that it cuts DNA in a single, specific location with the intent to disable or alter a gene—in the case of bacteria, this protects them from viruses, but in the hands of scientists, CRISPR/Cas9 can cut and disable or alter any gene, in any genome. This method is cheaper and less cumbersome than any other available gene editing technique. If CRISPR/Cas9 is used to alter genes in a plant, the resulting plant and its offspring would be indistinguishable from plants descended from one with a naturally occurring mutation. This technology is still in the research phase, but the implications of its capabilities are extremely powerful: the genes responsible for allergens in peanuts, or water loss in crops, for example, could be inactivated once the use of CRISPR/Cas9 becomes commercially available.
Already, biotech companies like DuPont say they will be selling gene edited seeds for commercial use in the next 5-10 years. DuPont has teamed up with Caribou Biosciences, a start-up with its roots in CRISPR/Cas9’s discovery at UC Berkeley, to develop drought-resistant corn and gene edited wheat. DuPont’s plants are already in greenhouse trials with field trials are slated to begin in spring 2016, while academic laboratories have already used CRISPR/Cas9 to create gene edited soybeans, rice, potatoes, and tomatoes.
Although GMOs and gene edited plants are both genetic biotechnologies, there is a fundamental difference between the two: where GMOs, like herbicide-resistant commodity crops, result from the insertion of foreign DNA into the genome of a plant, gene editing introduces no foreign DNA—the source of greatest protest towards GMOs. All gene editing does is disable or alter preexisting genes, resulting in changes that are no more drastic than those that can occur naturally through random mutations. Will this distinction be enough to ease the worries of biotechnology’s critics? Maybe. But it is enough for the US Government to consider gene editing a new field entirely separate from genetic engineering.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulates genetically engineered plants that have had foreign DNA inserted into the plant’s genome. But because gene editing involves only small changes to individual genes within a plant’s genome—and introduces no new DNA—a gene edited plant is not considered genetically engineered by the USDA, and will not be regulated as such. European Union regulatory authorities have yet to decide how they will classify and regulate gene edited plants, but if they land in agreement with the United States on this issue, it will usher in a new era of plant breeding on both sides of the Atlantic.
One major factor contributing to the impasse of the GMO debate is the lack of public transparency associated with the technology. By and large, the development and commercialization of GMOs is dominated by small number of companies, such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta, which does not exactly engender trust in the average consumer. The reason only major biotech companies produce these products is, in large part, because the regulatory hurdles to bringing a GMO to market are so large, and so expensive to navigate legally, that only these major companies can afford to produce them, and even then, they can only afford it if the product will have a high return on investment—like genetically engineered commodity crops. This regulatory environment effectively prevents other smaller, possibly more “trustworthy” actors, like public universities, from bringing other GMO products to market, or less profitable GMOs—like those that would address malnutrition in developing countries—from feasibly getting off the ground.
But gene editing is different. Because it exists outside of the regulatory framework that governs genetic engineering, gene editing is feasibly accessible to companies of all sizes, government, and academic researchers alike.
Does this mean gene editing—accessible to a wide array of researchers, and lacking the controversial genetic engineering process of GMOs—could be the biotechnology that finally breaks the impasse of the GMO debate? That remains to be seen. But what we do know is that the next great chapter in agricultural science is here, if we want it.
Read additional posts in the Science & Our Food series:
- Biofortification and Hidden Hunger, September 29
- Safety and Oversight: How Genetically Engineered Crops are Regulated in the United States, September 1
- Food Security, Climate Change, and Biotechnology: A Look at Bangladesh, July 28
- The Environment and GMOs: Pesticides, Promises, and Squandered Possibilities, July 21
- Golden Rice: Solution or Symbol?, July 14
- Hawaiian Papayas and Florida Oranges: Combating Disease with Genetic Engineering, July 7
- Public Perceptions and Understanding of Genetically Modified Foods and Labeling, June 23
- Scientists and the Public Struggle to See Eye-To-Eye on Science and Technology, June 16