Government food safety agencies in many countries are hesitant to approve genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for human consumption. In some cases that hesitancy centers on scientific questions but sometimes reluctance hangs more on public fears. Now a group of scientists think that both concerns can be resolved with specific genetic editing instead of pursuing broader genetic modifications.
What’s the difference between the two genetic tamperings, you ask? It is the difference between a cow that doesn’t grow horns and a cow that produces human breast milk. Let’s take a closer look at both, shall we?
Genetic modification is a broad term referring to genetic alterations in general which also includes mixing genes from different species to lend new traits to an organism that did not previously exist in that organism. That end of the genetic modifications spectrum is called transgenetics.
As an example of this, watch the short video below on China’s effort to feed more starving infants by genetically modifying cows to produce human breast milk.
Starving infants, you see, tend to have starving mothers. Breast milk in starving mothers dries up as the mother’s body shuts down body functions in a desperate attempt to survive. Even so, sometimes the mother does not survive. Either way, the starving baby is on its own unless other humans intervene.
Some of the affected babies can survive on cow’s milk, but some cannot, and all do better when fed human breast milk. Further, there have been issues with synthetic baby formulas, particularly in China, some of which proved toxic. Hence China’s efforts to produce more human breast milk pretty much by any means necessary.
By contrast genetic editing primarily involves altering an animal by either turning off a gene, such as the one that signals horn growth, or adding genes from another breed in the same species to transfer a certain trait, such as hornlessness. To clarify using this same example, genetic editing either turns off the horn-making gene in the cow, or adds a gene from another breed of cow to make this cow also be hornless. Genes from another species are not introduced in this effort.