Introducing GMOs

Ridwan Hossain
Freshman
School of Life Sciences
Independent University, Bangladesh

March 23rd, 2017

We are living in a time where technological advancement is at its peak. Everyday some new kind of technology is found and implemented into our society. Genetically modified organism or GMOs constitute one such technology that is in the process of being accepted into our lives. To understand what GMOs are, we need an idea of what a gene is. My skin color, your ability to digest dairy products, whether a plant can grow in salt water or not: these are all specific characteristics that can be inherited. Such characteristics are determined by genes which are present in the cells of all living organisms. Scientists can now identify genes in the cells of organisms and modify them. This lets us determine what characteristics we want certain organisms such as crops to have and these products of genetic manipulation are called genetically modified organisms. 

A useful application of genetic modification has been the creation of pest-resistant plants. Farmers use pesticides (chemicals that kill insects) to protect their crops from harm. Pesticides are known to be poisonous which harm the environment and any living thing that consumes food that it had been used on, including humans. Scientists can use genetic modification to create plants that produce certain biopesticides. Biopesticides are naturally occurring materials inside certain organisms which act as pesticides. For example, a bacteria named Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) produces a protein which acts as a pesticide to certain insects. Scientists have incorporated the gene that produces this protein into plants such as corn and cotton, thereby enabling the plants to produce the protein on their own. Farmers can now grow these genetically modified plants without worrying about using artificial pesticides. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has tested the safety of these GMOs, and determined that when these crops are consumed, the added protein acts as a normal dietary protein and is digested, posing no health problems to the consumers. Genetic modification can also be used to produce plants that are resistant to environmental stressors such as drought and high salinity, and these varieties – many of them still under development – are likely to be increasingly useful as many regions begin to experience less rainfall and rising salinity as a result of climate change.

In 2003 the total amount of GMO crops farmed worldwide was 168 million acres. In 2015 that number rose to 444 million acres. United States alone had 176 million acres of genetically modified crops growing in 2015. Even though we get so much out of GMO crops, it garners a lot of backlash from the general population. The idea of GMOs and the road leading to its state right now might be old, but the exposure of its products to the general population is relatively new and unknown. Most people who are against GMOs believe that they are harmful to ingest, and that they harm the environment. Such ideas mainly stem from a lack of knowledge about science and a certain amount of distrust toward scientists. An in-depth analysis of 1,783 scientific articles about the safety of GM crops published between 2002 and 2012 has been carried out and the results show no harmful effects of any kind occurring due to GM crops. There is a rigorous process that checks every GMO before making them available to the general population. U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) tests the GMOs to see if they are safe to farm, the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tests food obtained from GMOs to see if they are safe to consume, and the EPA tests to see if the pest-resistant GMO crops harm the environment or not. 

Selecting for beneficial traits is nothing new as we have been manipulating animals' and crops' genes for centuries. We domesticated dogs, cows, sheep and other animals. We choose crops that have the highest yield and grow them in large amounts, thus selecting for certain characteristics. A good example of this is the crop maize whose ancestor is actually a grass plant known as teosinte. At the end of the day, GMOs are beneficial. The only thing we can do is to teach people more about the science behind GMOs, and that it does us no harm.

Ridwan is a freshman at IUB whose dream is to be a renowned mad scientist. He will be a Nobel laureate.