Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Can I Have a Featherless Chicken and a Side of Healthy Bacon?
The New Scientist has a great round-up of the various efforts geneticists are undertaking to modify farm animals. The story doesn't break any new ground, per se, but it's remarkable for the sheer breadth of ways that genetic engineers are attempting to redesign animals.
As the New Scientist describes it:
[T]he genetic engineering of animals - with the exception of mice - has been a slow, tedious process needing a lot of money and not a little luck. Behind the scenes, though, a quiet revolution has been taking place. Thanks to a set of new tricks and tools, modifying animals is becoming a lot easier and more precise. That is not only going to transform research, it could also transform the meat and eggs you eat and the milk you drink....
At the same time, biologists have developed more efficient ways of adding DNA to cells, by hijacking natural genetic engineers such as viruses, and jumping genes capable of "copying and pasting" themselves. All these advances mean the effort and cost needed to produce GM animals has decreased a hundredfold.
Here are just a few examples:
- Salmon that grow faster than their unmodified counterparts
- Pigs designed to produce less pollution
- A separate species of pig bred to have muscles full of healthier omega-3 fats
- Cattle designed to be resistant to certain kinds of infections...
The list goes on. A lot of the more novel uses of animal genetics, for example, have less to do with altering the animal to produce some sort of medical treatment for people. A group of researchers just found a way to develop malaria-proof mosquitos while in the world of farm animals, different researchers are attempting to find was to make pig organs safe to transplant into people.
These last examples--modifying animals to produce some sort of drug, organ or other medical treatments for people--are among the more innovative, and also, I'd guess, the most potentially disruptive to the food system, simply because of the new demands these could place on an already strained food system by diverting grains and land from food to breeding animals for medicine.
Of course, none of these animals have been brought into the food web just yet. The New Scientist echoed a point I've heard before: That these animals are most likely to be brought into the Chinese food system before making their way onto dinner plates in the United States or Europe, for reasons having to do with practical supply chain management questions as well as for reasons having to do with social values.
Which brings me to the last animal I want to mention: A featherless, pre-plucked chicken that reduces the labor costs of plucking chicken.
The New Scientist included this in its slideshow of transgenic animals--and it was the only image that startled me and made me think: There's something I won't eat. The irony, though, was that it was the only animal in the slideshow that seems to have evolved simply through chance--a while ago, a chicken happened to mutate to not have feathers, and animal breeders are simply trying to figure out how to make the trait more prevalent.
It reminds me of a similar point I made last year when writing about lab-grown meat: The ultimate success of these animals will, in many ways, ultimately be tied to whether or not these animals seem like safe, healthy things to put into one's body.