Author’s note: This article is adapted from a talk given at Objective Standard Institute’s Innovation Celebration 2023 conference.
Do you know what genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are? Could you explain it clearly to a twelve-year-old? If your answer to these questions is “no,” you’re not alone. In a survey of Americans, 48 percent said they know “very little” about GMOs, and 16 percent said they know “nothing at all.”1 Eighty-one percent of Polish students surveyed answered that they either “know very little about” GMOs or that it’s “unlikely” they know what GMOs are.2 In Latvia, half of survey respondents said that an ordinary tomato does not contain genes, but a genetically modified (GM) tomato does.3
Despite widespread ignorance of what GMOs are, the dominant attitude toward them in most countries is decidedly negative (in the best cases, it’s neutral). For example, a Pew Research poll in 2015 found that 57 percent of Americans (excluding scientists) regard GMOs as unsafe to eat.4 Yet by some estimates, as much as 75 percent of processed foods Americans eat contain at least one genetically modified ingredient.5 Given the prevalence of GMOs, it’s important for consumers to understand the arguments and evidence for and against them to better evaluate claims about their safety and policy proposals regarding their legalization and labeling.
What actually are GMOs? The term refers to crops whose genes have been “modified” or “edited” in one or more specific ways. Because genes essentially provide instructions for the organism to produce the proteins that make up its cells and organs, a change in the genes can cause a significant difference in the resulting organism. Of course, humans have been genetically modifying crops and animals for thousands of years via selective breeding. But in the past eighty years, scientists have discovered techniques that allow us to do so in ways that are more precise and quicker, as well as having more applications than traditional breeding techniques. The products of these technologies are typically referred to as genetically modified (GM) or gene-edited (GE).
Current gene-editing technology has its roots in the 1950s, when Marc Van Montagu and Jozef Schell discovered that agrobacterium, the cause of lumpy tumorlike protrusions on trees called crown galls, creates those lumps by “snipping” the tree’s DNA and inserting its own genetic material.6 The genes then “instruct” the tree to create additional proteins along with the proteins it normally produces. Montagu, Schell, and other scientists worked to replicate this process through a variety of techniques, eventually synthesizing the enzyme that agrobacterium uses and streamlining the whole process. The first GM food, the Flavr Savr tomato (which, as the name implies, was supposed to retain a better flavor for longer), was introduced to the U.S. market in 1994.7
The potential applications of gene-editing technology are virtually endless. . . .
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