A company called AquaBounty used gene science 10 years ago to develop salmon which grow twice as fast as the wild variety — or the tame ones grown in salmon farms. The Food and Drug Administration has been looking at the science they used for this past decade and are about to agree with AquaBounty that the genetically altered fish are identical to wild and farm-raised salmon and should be welcomed to the world’s table.
This is exceedingly important news — even though it is 10-year-old news.
Salmon that grow twice as fast can be grown at half the cost and feed twice as many people.
Just months ago, the word on the world’s fisheries was grim. Catches were diminishing all over the globe. Scientists were raising alarms. It might be necessary, they said, to ban fishing for certain species in certain locations to let populations recover their numbers.
The AquaBounty success with salmon writes a bright new chapter in that book: if science can, in effect, double the salmon population, then it surely will be possible to do the same for many other varieties of fish.
Much more important, this scientific success is being repeated in crops and farm animals.
Geneticists are confident they can develop hogs that produce leaner bacon. Scientists at a Canadian university have developed an “enviropig,” which has less phosphorus in its manure — which would make hog farms much more welcome near populated places. Genetically altered crops have already been developed which produce greater yields and are resistent to diseases and drought.
Human knowledge may be at least keeping pace with people begetting people.
(Down the road some geneticist will find a way to insert smart genes and excise mean genes in human embryos — but will we really want to go there?)
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
