Viewpoint: Promoting CRISPR crops at the expense of GMOs to appease activists undermines both technologies

Luis Ventura  | January 19, 2021

In the span of a few short years, gene editing has allowed scientists to begin rapidly and cheaply improving food production in ways that benefit farmers and consumers. Examples range from heart-healthy soybeans to chemical-free pesticide alternatives, and many more powerful applications have already been approved by regulators. Such important developments are poised to continue provided technophobic consumers and politicians can be convinced that CRISPR and other gene-editing tools ought to be regulated with a light touch.

With this in mind, many science advocates has resorted to defending the safety and efficacy of gene editing by distinguishing it from older transgenic (GM) genetic modification technology, which often involves transferring DNA between unrelated organisms and invites charges that scientists are “playing god” and breeding “Frankenfoods.” The logic is that gene editing can be spared the PR nightmare GMOs endured if the public can be convinced that the former is more natural—“it’s just plant breeding but much faster”—than the latter.

This is a well-meaning but ultimately misguided approach to advancing gene editing. The truth is that both GM and gene-editing technology have important roles to play in our efforts to make farming more sustainable. Promoting CRISPR at the expense of GM makes this sustainability goal harder to achieve and further solidifies the public’s unjustified fear of genetic engineering (GE) more generally...................

 

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CRISPR Made Easy: Who Am I Kidding?

By Jay Lehr

By now most everyone has read the acronym CRISPR, the hottest thing in biotechnology, hailed as the path to many medical cures. But just about no one knows what the letters stand for. I will tell you but you will have forgotten by tomorrow or sooner. The full name is Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats. It is a clumsy relatively non technical term created by a researcher at one of the three groups that hit upon the new technology simultaneously in Japan, Spain and the Netherlands in 1987. They all agreed to use it. Actually it is far less complicated than the microbiology jargon that tells the real story.

The key word that does have real meaning is palindromic. A “palindrome” is a series of letters that reads the same from beginning to end and end to beginning. The most famous one used to describe the term is”madam I’m adam”. I suppose one can say they appear regularly on a strand of DNA

and the repeats are relatively short so it kind of works. However, because the term contains little scientific jargon almost no one can remember what the letters stand for. Maybe some of you could win a trivia bar bet if you can hang onto to the words long enough. I have been working as an educator in biotechnology for years and I can’t. I have to look it up before every lecture.

This most advanced gene editing tool was first discovered in bacteria. Some single celled microbes were able to fight off a virus by injecting a payload of their own DNA into the virus cell in a palindromic fashion. They first had to create RNA the messenger primed to recognize and dock to the virus DNA, neatly encasing in a pocket of CRISPR Associated enzyme which is usually a protein. Thus as often as not you will see CRISPR written as CRISPR CAS9, a favored protein. Okay now I have lost you so lets end the details and talk of the practicality of it all. Let’s face it, most of you drive a car but don’t understand how it works and appreciate atomic power and surely never understood nuclear fission.

All that is important to you is that, where we have understood the DNA of living things for a couple of decades we could rarely find the combinations of genetic letters A,C,G and T that made up the genes that determine all living traits. Your hair color and height and a plants ability to withstand drought are genetic traits. They simply do not have signposts on the helical strands we know as DNA. Now because of these clustered, regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats we find ourselves with a tool to map the DNA for most living things and then make alterations to them. We do not need to introduce any foreign genes as is the case of the much maligned but totally safe GMO technology which we call genetic modification.

One last stab at a simple recipe for the use of CRISPR technology is as follows: a researcher designs and orders a piece of RNA that locks on to whatever gene they are interested in, mixes it up with a CRISPR associated (Cas) enzyme, and they have cooked up their own customized precision gene-editing tool. Think: a GPS system in biology. (Note: RNA is ribonuceic acid, present in all living cells whose principle role is to act as a messenger carrying instructions from DNA for controlling the synthesis of protein).

Scientists hope CRISPR could one day be used to correct genes which lead to diseases in humans, and introduce genes which can protect from disease. For now, medical applications are confined to research labs, but as scientists remove potential problems and the debate over the ethics of human engineering is settled we are bound to see human applications.

In agriculture major applications and advances have already occurred. Chinese scientists have used the method to produce a wheat strain that is resistant to a fungal disease called powdery mildew. Dupont is ready too test a drought resistant corn and a high yield wheat developed using CRISPR technology.

The US Department of Agriculture has approved a new white mushroom that does not quickly brown because the gene that produces the enzyme that causes the browning was removed. It did not need to go through the GMO testing protocol as no new genetic material was introduced and was thus approved in a short time.

CRISPR - based gene editing has now been implemented across the scientific community for the past five years. While it is relatively easy to accomplish compared to previous work in the area it is experiencing rapid improvements annually. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that thousands of diseases will eventually be cured with it. While I am an optimist as to these predictions I remain aware that the genes that result in the Cystic Fibrosis lung disease have been known for many decades, a cure has yet to be achieved. Thus my optimism is cautious

Dr. Jay Lehr CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books.

‘Synthetic biology doesn’t have to be scary’: It could offer us new medicines, biofuels and everything in between

Erin Wilson | One Zero | October 10, 2019

Though hacking organisms and rearranging genomes may sound scary, there is definitely a Light Side to this narrative (a balance, if you will). From medicines to biofuels and everything in between, there is incredible potential for cleverly redesigned biology to help us take on some of our world’s most pressing challenges in sustainability.

One of the first success stories in the field was engineering yeast to convert sugar into the precursor to artemisinin, the key molecule used in malaria treatments. It’s an expensive endeavor to grow a field of Chinese sweet wormwood plants, harvest the field, and extract the small traces of artemisinin found in the plant leaves. Now, we can more directly brew the malaria treatment in giant fermenters, concentrating most of our resources on producing the specific molecule we want rather than growing up all the other parts of a leafy plant..........To Read More....

GMO's Are Not the Problem. They're the Answer!

By Rich Kozlovich

On September 13, 2019 Cameron English posted the article, GMO, CRISPR-edited crops can cut pesticide use—if environmental activists do not block them saying:

In 2017, University of Florida plant geneticists Zhonglin Mou and Kevin Folta, along with their team of graduate students, announced a new method to fight common diseases in fruit plants. Their discovery could drastically reduce the use of fungicides if widely implemented by growers. 

Unfortunately, their methods may never be put to use thanks to the controversy surrounding crop biotechnology. 

The research confirms a point that cannot be stressed enough: scientists continue to make agriculture safer and more sustainable with the tools of modern genetics, but activists have waged such an effective scare campaign against crop biotechnology that it often remains unused by industry.

Luddite urban dwellers only consume, they don't produce, so they not only don't realize just how important this is, they don't want to know since environmentalism has become the neo-pagan religion of the urban atheist.  In their worship of the planet they self-righteously believe they're morally superior to the rest of us in their "all natural" views.  It would be nice if they had to take responsibility for the consequences in human suffering they're "all natural" views produced in preventing these major crop engineering advances.

Genetic engineering advances that would have brought Golden Rice to the dinner tables of those in Southeast Asia, whose diet lacks sufficient Vitamin A because rice is the primary carbohydrate source in this area of the world, and as The Golden Rice Project notes:

Rice does not contain any β-carotene (provitamin A), which their body could then convert into vitamin A. Dependence on rice as the predominant food source, therefore, necessarily leads to VAD, most severely affecting small children and pregnant women. In 2012 the World Health Organization reported that about 250 million preschool children are affected by VAD, and that providing those children with vitamin A could prevent about a third of all under-five deaths, which amounts to up to 2.7 million children that could be saved from dying unnecessarily. "

This picture is from the Golden Rice Project

The map shows the vast areas impacted by this problem, which gives you an idea of how many millions of people are suffering unnecessarily. 

Marc Brazeau in his March 5, 2019 article Golden Rice is coming. Finally! Will it be the game-changer hinted at for almost 20 years? saying:

Comes the news that the government of Bangladesh is about to approve Golden Rice for commercial release some time in the next three months. 

First and foremost this is fantastic news for Southeast Asia for humanitarian and economic development reasons. On a less consequential level this is great news for the overall debate surrounding the use of biotech in agriculture. Golden Rice occupied a space in the debate as the Great Golden Hope of Biotech Crops, a wholly virtuous crop devoid of the grubby commercial concerns of intellectual property or profit motive. In this case, the IP had been donated, the rice was being developed by a non-profit NGO and the rice will be given freely to farmers and local breeding programs—a trait of value directly to consumers, among them some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Because of this history, it is a crop not linked to so-called ‘industrial agriculture’ and its key trait is not tied to pesticide use.

Let's try to get this once and for all. Activists are constantly touting the idea what they do "is for the children".   That's a logical fallacy known as the appeal to emotion fallacy, and when someone uses it you need to start looking very closely at what they're really promoting.  Because what these activists have done isn't "for" the children, what they've done has been "to" the children.  From DDT to GMO's the green movement is now, and has always been, foundationally misanthropic. 

For twenty years this has been going on.  That means if we take the number 2.7 million at face value that comes to 54 million children whose lives would have been saved.  And untold millions more would have been saved from other afflictions as a result of Vitamin A deficiency. 

I would like for everyone to think about this.  If GMO techniques become common place here's what would happen. Agriculture would be able to produce food in an abundance that was never dreamt of.  It would be done with less land use, allowing for animal protection, less pesticides, less labor, less cost and in some cases less water would be needed, all of which makes agriculture amazingly "sustainable".  Isn't what they claim they want?   Isn't "sustainability" their ultimate goal?  Yet, these "all natural", "anti-pesticide", "sustainability" advocate Luddites are against it.  Why? 

Because they're not really against pesticides, land use, water use or GMO's, and they don't really care about "sustainability".  What they're against is humanity. 

The radicals among these activists think humanity is a plague on the planet that needs to be eradicated.  The "moderates" only want to eliminate between four and six billion people.

We are rightly outraged by the actions of the socialist monsters of the 20th century who killed over 100 million people, and they got started taking power in 1917.  But environmentalism has probably been responsible for the deaths of that many and more, and they didn't really get started until 1972 with the ban on DDT.  Where's our outrage over that? 

Definition leads to clarity.  Clarity leads to understanding.  We need to understand the green movement is irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.  That's history, and that history is incontestable.

You may wish to view my GMO file. 

We can identify ‘bad’ genes. Why can’t we use CRISPR gene editing to get rid of them?

David Warmflash | August 30, 2019

If you want to remove an undesirable gene from a population, you have a couple theoretical options — one that most people might find unthinkable, and one that lies outside our current scientific abilities.

The first involves locating a group of people without a particular gene and designing breeding programs around them. It would mean mating people in ways that society would consider incestuous. And we’ve seen the difficulties that result from that in the past — marriages between close relatives were a notorious cause of hemophilia in European royal families, for example.

A much more desirable option would be to use CRISPR gene editing to essentially cut out the unwanted gene. There are, however, many challenges ahead for such a strategy. Chief among them is the need to find mutations that, by themselves, are linked to particular diseases or disorders. And then we need guarantees that CRISPR will edit the correct genes.

One candidate for the first hurdle was revealed in a study in Pakistan that identified a group of people living without the APOC3, as an important risk factor for heart disease, the number one killer of humans in developed countries. Since lacking the gene apparently entails no major drawbacks, it raises the prospect of using gene editing to knock out the same gene in other people.......To Read More....

CRISPR breathing new life into wheat and other crops—can it avoid GMO controversy?

Andrew Porterfield | August 23, 2019

One need not look far to find reasons for wheat growers to be clamoring for drastic improvements to the crop that represents their livelihood. The 2017 US wheat harvest was the lowest in 15 years, according to the USDA. The reasons ran from low prices and wet spring weather to pests and diseases. Meanwhile, bacterial blight in rice caused by Xanthomonas oryzae is decimating crops in Asia and Africa.

Farmers look upon the the GMO technology that has improved corn, soybean and cotton crops and find themselves wishing for more. Some producers see hope for innovative gene-editing techniques to create hardier, more successful grains.

Ever since humans decided to settle down and raise their own food, they’ve been growing plants and selecting the ones that have the traits they want most. Plant breeding has since been accomplished through a range of techniques, including the basic plant-and-choose, directed mutagenesis, transferring germplasm from wild to domestic plants, and the transgenic combinations that have given us modern herbicide-resistant crops. But now, the new CRISPR  gene editing offers the potential to radically change the way we breed crops.

Short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” these naturally occurring yet quirky sequences of DNA are used by bacteria to fight disease, and now are under scrutiny for their potential to create new traits in plants. But, like any new technology, there are a few shortcomings which may or may not block its way to commercial use—and not all of those are because of “anti” activism.......To Read More....

Genetically Modified People: Gene Editing Arrives in the Clinic

By Christopher Gerry — August 6, 2019

Genetically modified organisms may soon be walking among us. But don’t worry—it won’t be due to some horrible tomato-based experiment gone awry.

Pop culture often depicts laboratory research as a frenetic rush filled with exploding test tubes, plumes of greenish smoke, and hair-singeing breakthroughs. In reality, science is a methodical, incremental process that more closely resembles an oil tanker than a jet ski. Drug discovery tends to be particularly sluggish because we must be absolutely sure that a new medicine is both safe and effective before we let patients both pay for it and put it in their bodies.

True “eureka” moments are rare, and rarer still are findings that change how entire branches of medicine attack diseases. But they do happen. Alexander Fleming’s serendipitous discovery of penicillin sparked the “dawn of the antibiotic age.” Genentech’s laboratory-based production of human insulin launched the modern biotechnology industry. And now, less than a decade after it was first disclosed, a gene-altering technology called CRISPR is facing its first real clinical tests.......To Read More.....

Pseudo-science alert: For $9,500, Politico provides disinformation about crop biotechnology, GMOs and pesticides

Andrew Porterfield | Genetic Literacy Project | March 19, 2019

The Politico news website is known for its political coverage in the United States, posting stories on a wide range of topics, mostly cataloguing the infighting in the nation’s capital.

But more recently, the site strayed into territory outside of its comfort zone, into science and the controversial issue of agricultural biotechnology — GMOs and the pesticides used by farmers, organic and conventional — and its ideological naiveté and lack of science expertise showed through, much to the embarrassment of the political news site.

The site’s graphics editor, Patterson Clark, who has no background as a working scientist or journalist writing about crop biotechnology, produced an infographic that illustrated how food has been genetically modified by corporations, and purported to offer a “deep dive” into gene editing — for as much $9,500! But the information they offered was poorly sourced and inaccurate. And when given the chance to address the actual science behind the issue of breeding, they declined.

Here’s the story..........To Read More.....

CRISPR-Cas9 is hot but it’s not the only way to edit a genome

David Warmflash | October 28, 2016 | Genetic Literacy Project

It has earned fleeting mentions in TV biothrillers, such as Orphan Black (BBC America) and The Last Ship (TNT), but now CRISPR genome editing is getting a sci-fi show of its own. Though actually an acronym for a biological term that most sci-fi fans will have no use to remember, “CRISPR” makes it a catchy title for the new bioterror thriller that actress-singer Jennifer Lopez is producing for NBC.

Imagine a TV series named ‘ELISA,’ ‘Northern blot,’ ‘PCR,’ or some other biological assay and you’ll realize how precisely nerdy this is, but it may be premature. The series is only in the developmental stages, after all. But the fact that a major network is considering naming a show after CRISPR is shows that it is generating a lot of buzz. Why? Researchers working with CRISPR are on the brink of acheiving a number of major breakthroughs in science and medicine......To Read More....