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| Photo © Greenpeace / Christian Lehsten |
The odds seem to be on sumo-wrestler-style pigs, cows and
sheep.
These unfortunates grow an awful lot of lean meat because the gene which tells their muscles when to stop growing has been damaged.
More meat per animal equals more profit, and more of the 'healthy
choice' lean meat we're told is the means more market.
Unfortunately more meat means bigger piglets/calves/lambs
and that means birthing difficulties.
Also, they don't seem too healthy: in tests on super-muscly
GM pigs, only 13 out of 32 piglets survived as long as 8 months. Of the remaining two who (presumably) are
being allowed to live out their life-span, only one is considered healthy.
Of course, such animals would, in any case, be too few and
too expensive to eat. The grand plan is
to create a male with a complementary pair of the desired defective genes. Mating such a male with normal females will
produce offspring with a single copy of the non-functional gene, lots of extra
muscle (but not as much as their dad), and hopefully 'healthy' long enough to make
it to the abattoir.
South Korean scientists who have created sumo-pigs using
gene-editing [2] argue that their GM swine could, at least in principle, occur
through a more natural route. (Note,
not 'in nature' because the birthing difficulties would quickly eliminate any
such mutation).
While the regulatory jury is still out on whether
gene-editing is the same as gene-modification, the researchers are hoping to
have free reign to capitalise on their invention.
OUR COMMENT
GM livestock have one parallel with conventional breeding:
the drive to enhance commercially useful traits to a physical extreme at the
expense of animal welfare.
You are what you eat.
Do you want food of this wildly distorted quality? If not, demand genetic-editing is seen for what
it is, an extension of old-fashioned GM: such meat should never be on sale.
Background:
[1] GM SALMON APPROVED - January 2016
[2] SMART BREEDING TOOLS - OR HIDDEN GM? - January
2016
SOURCE:
·
David Cyranoski, Super-muscly pigs created by
small genetic tweak, Nature, 523, 2.07.15
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