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Genetically Engineered Seafood Coming To a Restaurant Near You (indianapublicmedia.org)
"The first genetically-modified animal for human consumption could be arriving in grocery stores across the United States as early as next year." Long-time Slashdot reader tomhath tipped us off to Indiana Public Media's report on AquaBounty Technologies:
AquaBounty will produce a GMO salmon that CEO Ron Stotish says will grow faster than freshwater-raised fish. "It does so because we've given it the ability, using the same biological process that regulates growth in the unmodified salmon, to grow about twice as fast reaching market rate about half the time," Stotish says. The technology has been around since the 1990s, but it took until 2015 to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, due to concerns about people eating genetically-modified animals. The genetic makeup of the biotech fish takes a growth-hormone regulatory gene from the Pacific Chinook salmon with a promoter gene from an ocean pout and puts it into the genome of an Atlantic salmon. The result causes for the growth hormone to remain on leading to faster growth rate than non GMO salmon.
The modified fish is able to grow to market size using 25 percent less feed than the traditional salmon, increasing cost efficiency... Stotish says his operation causes less harm than traditional fish farming. "We're not using coastal waterways, we're not putting antibiotics and medications into the water," Stotish says. "Our fish are in a controlled environment, we don't need antibiotics, we don't have to treat for sea lice."
The company says that every year Americans consume about 350,000 tons of Atlantic salmon -- more than 95% of which has to be imported.
The modified fish is able to grow to market size using 25 percent less feed than the traditional salmon, increasing cost efficiency... Stotish says his operation causes less harm than traditional fish farming. "We're not using coastal waterways, we're not putting antibiotics and medications into the water," Stotish says. "Our fish are in a controlled environment, we don't need antibiotics, we don't have to treat for sea lice."
The company says that every year Americans consume about 350,000 tons of Atlantic salmon -- more than 95% of which has to be imported.
Seriously, tuna and salmon are the 2 most eaten fish in world. Tuna should also be farmed, so fast growth is useful.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies has developed a biotech salmon that it plans to grow near no major body of water, in a production facility in the small town of Albany, Indiana. The company producing the breed of high-tech fish hopes to change the aquaculture industry."
Not seafood.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
All the fools speaking against GMO have no idea where the real issues are. The objection to gmo in plants has been about increased use of pesticide, namely Roundup, which IS a concern. But the actual GMO is not the real issue other than Gene transfer to weeds, which is happening. But corn made drought-resistant is useful. Or plants made to resist certain pests by transferring genes from other edible plants(iow, we already eat that protein) ARE useful. Now, we are looking at seafood that is being destroyed in the oceans and now we have the ability to farm these economically and stop depleting our salmon. Ideally, we would do the same for tuna, and soon. This would also allow us to stop the massive commercial fishing going on by other nations, who are depleting these fish.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
as long as it is clearly labeled so that I can make an informed choice.
The salmon's orange color comes from the caroteniods in its food, and has nothing to do with GMOs. Wild salmon *tends* to pick up an orange color if it has eaten a lot of krill and shrimp, while farmed salmon almost always is orange because carotenoids are added to its feed, as the customers expect it.
We hear this argument from GMO shills but its a fallacious argument. Most foods are not GMO. GMO specifically refers to direct intentional manipulation of DNA by inserting or removing DNA. We've been doing selective breeding for a long time, this is NOT GMO, and the process cannot produce the same effects and dangers of GMO. Also selective breeding isnt necessarily safe, you can end up with toxic effects. The probabilities with GMOs are much higher because it allows changes which would never occur due to a sexual process and allows it to happen with a severity and rapidity that would not occur with breeding. Selective breeding imposes certain limits and constraints on things because genes can only transfer within the same species and the mutations happen at a lower rate.
That you refer to selective breeding breeding as GMO destroys your credibility and your just trying to mislead people.
I'm guessing no one asked for GMO insulin and GMO cheese 30-40 years ago either, but dropping society's dependence on chopped-up cow pancreases and calf stomachs allowed us to significantly ramp up production and lower costs.
So selective breeding is not 'genetically modifying' an organism? What is it doing then?
Like with GMO or hormone poisoned beef, I wonder how long it takes the US will try to force the EU (or asian countries) to allow to sell it there.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I wouldn't be so harsh on people for using the term "GMO" incorrectly, as the term itself is unspecific, and is often broadened to include anything that has had its genes altered[1], even by nature.[2] [3]
It would be so much simpler if people just referred to the specific technologies being utilized, as they all suffer from risk/reward issues, and there aren't clear ethical borders. An incomplete list of the technologies used include:
* Nature's own technique of random mutations with a natural selection filter on top
* Artificial selection by humans, which in ~10,000 years gave us massive, delicious mutants like the modern wheat and corn crops, and docile cows, pigs and dogs
* Cloning started around the 1800s in order to perpetuate popular varieties of e.g. apples, oranges and bananas, whereby a branch of the tree is cut off and re-planted
* Forced hybridization has been around the 1900s, where two distinctly inbred parental lineages are perpetually bred to produce sterile offspring (e.g. seedless watermelons, or mules for use by the British Empire as amazing pack animals)
* Radiation-induced mutation breeding (mutagenesis) has been around since around the 1930s, which forcefully increases the mutation rate and splits chromosomes in order to allow breeding with other species -- a technique the EU even calls GMO (see [1])
-- a lot of western staple crops are based on, or hybridized from, crops produced from this technique
* Chemically-induced mutation breeding is a more modern version of mutagenesis that's doesn't cause as much DNA damage -- still a GMO in the EU though (see [1])
* Transgenic modifications, where specific genes can be takes from unrelated species, was invented in the 1970s
* Cisgenic modifications, where the specific genes are taken from a species where it would have been possible to acquire it naturally through conventional breeding,[4] have been a classification of GMOs since around the year 2000
So GMO debates could be untangled massively if people just spoke about the specific technologies. For instance, I suspect based on your comment that you would be against transgenic GMOs and mutagenesis, but for cisgenic GMOs... while being on the fence about forced hybridization?
They don't dye the flesh. That's one of the myths listed in the first article I linked -- tl;dr: farmed salmon is fed with the same caroteniods that wild salmon gets from crustaceans.
Personally, I can't taste the difference between farmed and wild, nor frozen or fresh. But uncontrolled anecdotes are next to useless.
Do you happen to have some video evidence of this? Why doesn't it happen when its refrigerated at the store, is there a specific temperature where this occurs? Why isn't its scale dyed? And why would the farmers go through the trouble of dying flesh, when feeding them carotenoids is so much simpler?
It's not that simple, even just selective breeding can accidentally produce or spread very dangerous organisms such as Heracleum sosnowskyi. The main dangers of any modified organism (regardless of its GMO status) is toxicity and damage to the ecosystems from its rapid spreading. GMO organisms are very carefully tested/studied before entering market, this can even sometimes take decades. Even after entering market if any issue is reported, the product will be recalled. Most people who are scared of GMO usually have very limited knowledge about genetics and the process of food digestion. All normal proteins are fully broken down into amino acids in the digestive system, so the original protein doesn't even matter (except for very few exceptions). You can even drink very toxic snake venom and not die for same reason, of course, if there are no wounds in the mouth or in the stomach.