Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
than 3 percent of survey respondents in the United States are
truly concerned about GM food.
The two surveys together tell us that, although very few
people have lost trust in the food system because of GMOs,
they still want to know if their food contains GM ingredients.
So people haven't lost confidence in food because of biotech-
nology, but they would feel even more confident if GM labels
were required.
Before delving into the controversy we should define exactly
what a genetically modiied organism is. In this topic, a GMO
will refer almost exclusively to transgenic crops, where the
genes from a nonplant organism (usually bacteria) are delib-
erately inserted into a plant (using recombinant DNA or
gene-splicing) in hopes that the new plant will exhibit certain
desirable traits, like creating its own pesticide or being resistant
to a certain herbicide. Not all GMOs are created in this manner.
For instance, a cisgenic plant is formed by inserting into the
plant's DNA a gene acquired not from a different organism, but
from the same or similar species. A GMO can also be formed
by removing or silencing a gene within a plant. Most of the
controversy concerns transgenic plants, though we still refer to
them as GMOs because that is the term used by food activists.
The transference of genes from one organism to another
is nothing new. At least 8 percent of the human genome was
transplanted from viruses, but we are not GMOs because this
transplant was not the direct intervention of human scientists.
The alteration of genes by human intervention is not new either.
We intentionally alter the DNA of plants constantly through
selective breeding. Genetic mutation is a natural process of
evolution, and sometimes these mutations can lead to better
crops. The rate of natural mutations can be rather slow, so we
sometimes increase the rate by zapping plants with irradiation
(scientists often wonder why this form of genetic alteration
receives little attention from food activists, while GMOs do).
Technologies in genetic modification are different in that
humans are choosing the genes they want to insert into
