CRISPR-Altered Plants Are Not Going To Be Regulated (For Now) (fastcompany.com)

Good news for people who like genetically altered tomatoes and other plants. The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will no longer regulate them. From a report: The USDA not only rolled back Obama-era rules regulating genetically edited plants, but now it claims that plants whose genomes have been altered using gene-editing technology (read: CRISPR) pose "no risk," MIT's Technology Review reports. While CRISPR engineering is still a relatively new science whose full impact is not yet known, the USDA has decided that it is merely an innovative shortcut to the age-old practice of plant breeding.

Comments

Re:What's the big deal with the anti-GMO movement.

[spth]

Spider or goat dna is apple would mean transgenic plants. Those are still regulated.

The deregulation only applies to using CRISPR to create plants that could also have been created using traditional breeding.

The main advantage of using CRISPR that way is that it saves a lot of time and effort. Instead of doing a large number of breeding experiments and then selecting those that happen to have the desired comibination of genes one can now directly go for the desired result.

Re: CRISPR-ed

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't. There are a lot of changes which are difficult or impossible to make with more traditional selective breeding methods. But that's missing the point entirely.

The problem is that people either fear or praise the tool, not the result. Saying "GMO are dangerous" is just as wrong as saying "GMO are safe."