One of the reasons I feel so passionately about the importance of scientific literacy for EVERYBODY is that there are a great many important issues related to science that are impacting our world every single day and affecting our futures, every single day. Some of those issues are relatively small things like, for instance, a new medical study that determines that the amount of sodium a person gets from just eating processed foods is way more sodium than they should have in a whole day. Do you wonder why too much sodium is bad for you, but not enough is even worse? Do you wonder what processed foods are and why they contain so much sodium (and other stuff that is bad for you)? You certainly should wonder about things like that, because they are a major reason our people are unhealthy. Some of the issues are bigger and potentially hugely important to us all—things like global warming, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, fossil fuels, stem cell research, alternative energy sources, and yes, genetically modified organisms (GMOs). These are all issues that affect us all, right now, and they may change the way we live our lives in the future. It is INCREDIBLY important for us, as a society, to understand enough science that we can be part of the conversation on these issues. We cannot leave the decisions on things that are this important to just a few people. We don’t have to be experts—we don’t have to be chemists or physicians or molecular biologists—but we do need to know enough basic science to know when we are being given biased information or when someone with their own agenda is trying to manipulate us. If we don’t understand just that basic amount of science, we really can’t be part of the discussion on these issues of science in our society. If we, as a society, don’t understand and control our science, our science will dang sure end up controlling us. That is why it is just as important for EVERYONE to be scientifically literate as it is for them to be literate in language or math—you can’t fully engage in the world you live in if you aren’t. I can go on about this for days, with examples and everything. I think that learning a little science is so important that I always devoted most of an entire class period to why it was so when I was teaching introductory classes at the university.
Anyway, about GMOs. The reason we hear so much about GMOs is that GMOs are scary, and scary stuff makes people do and say things that end up on the internet and on the news. Just the term “Genetically Modified Organism” is scary. It conjures up visions of Frankenstein’s monster and bad science fiction movies from the sixties. In reality, a GMO is any organism that has been genetically changed in some way from the way it would normally be found in nature if people didn’t mess with it. Practically every living thing that people have anything to do with is a GMO. Do you have a dog? It’s a GMO. Do you ever eat fruits or vegetables? Pretty much all GMOs. Do you like meat? GMOs. How about the flowers you plant out by your sidewalk? Yep. GMOs. Ever since people started growing things and domesticating animals, we have been genetically modifying them. Any time you cross-breed two plants or two animals in the hope of getting offspring with desirable characteristics of both parent organisms, you are genetically modifying them. That’s how a creature as magnificent as a wolf can eventually become something as silly as one of those yappy little lap dogs that looks like a dust mop with feet. No offense to those of you who like yappy little lap dogs. My point is that you find organisms with characteristics that you want, and you breed them together until you get offspring that reliably exhibit those characteristics. That is one way of creating a GMO.
Have you ever seen what a maize (corn) plant in its natural form looks like? It’s a puny little plant with a thin stem that stands just a couple of feet high. It produces an “ear” about three inches long with about 15 wrinkled-up kernels one it. It’s a far cry from all those seven foot-high plants we see growing in the fields with the 12-inch ears of nutrient-, sugar- and oil-rich corn on them. Tomatoes are pretty much the same, as are strawberries, oranges, beans, bananas and most of our other crops. Most of these crops have been modified for so long that very few people alive today have ever even seen what they “normally” are like.
This is a comparison of what corn looks like in its unmodified state, as opposed to more modern corn.
Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation
But these aren’t the GMOs that are causing all the fuss, because they are modified “naturally” by selective breeding and careful husbandry, and everyone thinks that’s fine. No, the GMOs that cause all the fuss are the ones that are modified directly in laboratories. It’s basically the same process and the same result—it’s just done in one step in a lab instead of in a field or a kennel over many generations. Now there are some very important potential differences. The main difference is that a good genetics lab can make entirely new genes that don’t exist in nature and insert them into organisms or they can take genes from one organism and splice them into another organism where they could never be found as a result of breeding. Have you ever seen those pictures of the glow-in-the-dark rabbits, goldfish and mice? If you haven’t, you should Google them, because they are WAY cool. Anyway, the way you get a mouse to glow in the dark is to take a gene from a jellyfish that allows the jellyfish to glow and insert it into the genome of the mouse. The mouse starts to make the protein that glows in the dark and—voila!—glow-in-the-dark mice. Other modifications can have far-reaching economic impact or, possibly, unintended long-term consequences.
The concern about, and in some cases, the backlash against, GMOs tends mostly to center around three topics related to food: food safety, environmental impacts and agricultural economics. The food safety concerns are pretty much unfounded, based on current research. By and large, foods that contain or are derived from GMOs are generally as healthy to consume as non-GMO foods, and in many cases, the genetic modifications make them more nutritious, as well as vastly increasing food yields. We have an incredibly safe food system, in general, although things like contaminated produce do get into the market sometimes. What has never happened (which is certainly not to say it never will) is a food being found to be dangerous because it has been genetically modified. The other two concerns—environmental and agricultural impacts—are, however, quite real.
Historically, most genetic modifications have been done to either increase crop yields, change the ability of organisms to thrive in different environments or make foods look and taste better. That’s how we got the big corn plants, big bananas, most of our livestock and so on. This is actually a hugely important topic that I’ll write about some more in another article. Our abilities to modify crops has vastly increased the amount of food available in the world and prevented millions of deaths from famine. Most people don’t have a problem with these sorts of things. What some people do have a problem with is the artificial modification of organisms to give them characteristics they otherwise couldn’t have. Many agri-business companies have been working on these types of modifications to make plants that are resistant to weed-control chemicals (herbicides) and insects. These types of genetic modifications can have potentially major impacts on the environment, making weeds resistant to herbicides, killing off native plants and other undesirable and, often, unintended consequences.
Finally, there is the economic factor. Many companies that produce crop seeds modify them so that farmers can’t collect some of the seeds from their crops to plant in the next year, forcing farmers to buy new seed from the company each year. For the large-scale farms that are common in the United States and other places, this isn’t really an issue, because in those large operations, it’s cheaper and easier to buy seed every year. For subsistence farmers in most of the developing world, however, buying seed is prohibitively expensive and being able to hold some of the crop back to plant next year may be the difference between providing for a family or not.
These are complex issues. Agriculture companies spend millions and millions of dollars developing these high-yield, low-maintenance crop seeds, so selling them is the only way they get to recoup their investments. Modifying crops to be genetically resistant to herbicides means not only a better yield with less cost, but also less toxic chemical sprayed on the crops. Finding the middle ground between innovation, responsible agriculture, and the economic realities of farming in much of the world is an ongoing process. These, among others, are some very serious, very important issues, both real and potential, associated with certain GMOs, but it is a very bad mistake to conflate all those issues into a single, poorly-thought-out negative response to everything GMO. This is one of those reasons we all need to be scientifically literate. We need to find the workable solutions, not just what is good for one party or another that gets a particular message out to the public to try to manipulate perception. Knowledge is, as always, power.
As is pretty much always the case, being informed is the first and most important step.