[LINK] "In a First, the FDA Clears Genetically Modified Salmon for Eating—It Just Took 20 Years"

[rfmcdonald]

Nick Stockton of Wired notes the approval, after decades, by the FDA of a genetically-modified fish for human consumption. What did it take? A lot.

From their birth in freshwater lakes to getting caught in a fisherman’s net, it can take years for a wild salmon to wind up filleted and garnished with a lemon on your dinner plate. But for the Frankenfish that the FDA approved yesterday—the very first genetically modified organism declared safe to eat—the journey took more than 20 years.

It didn’t take that long because the science was hard. Researchers had already nailed down the genetic tweaks to bulk up the fish—technically called the AquAdvantage salmon—by the early 1990s. Starting with the genome of the Atlantic salmon, a heavily farmed species that’s nearly extinct in the wild, scientists made two changes. They took the gene for a growth hormone from the Chinook (or king) salmon, the largest of the Pacific salmon species, and kicked that hormone into overdrive with a promoter gene taken from ocean pout, an eel-like fish that can survive and grow in near-freezing waters. “Usually the salmon’s growth hormone gets turned off during colder months,” says Eric Hallerman, fish conservation scientist at Virginia Tech University. The pout’s promoter gene basically makes sure the Chinook growth gene never gets shut off. Voila: a mega-fish.

So why did AquAdvantage take so long getting to market? In part, because the government didn’t have a regulatory pathway for GM animals to become food at that time. Fish become food, which goes in your mouth, and the Reagan administration decided that modified animal foods fall under the FDA. That makes sense, because a modified animal could trigger some peoples’ allergies, and there have also been (mostly debunked) claims about GM organisms causing cancer. Those concerns have all been cleared up to the FDA’s satisfaction.

But the AquAdvantage also stoked environmental worries. For instance, what if this super fast-growing, fast-eating fish escapes and starts competing for resources with its wild cousins? Do you want extinction? Because that’s how you get extinction. You also don’t want GM fish and wild fish interbreeding, polluting the wild genomes with engineered sequences.