New paper lays out problems of developing gene-edited GM crops
By Claire Robinson,
GM Watch
| 08. 30. 2023
Announcing the passing into law of the Genetic Technology Act, which removes regulatory safeguards around a whole subclass of GMOs, notably those produced using gene editing, the Westminster government breathlessly enthused that the UK had now joined “Argentina, the US, Australia and Japan”, which “have already enacted similar legislation, driving innovation on a global scale and helping fight the greatest challenges facing the world”.
I can’t pretend that GMWatch was waiting with bated breath for the “new GM”-based “innovation on a global scale” that was supposed to be pouring out of these countries, especially given the dismal performance and fate of the handful of gene-edited crops that they've released.
But the history of GM crops has settled into a pattern of hyped reports of supposed successes continuing for a good few years before they give way to sad tales of technology failure. So at this early stage of the “new GM” journey, we were expecting something reasonably upbeat about gene-edited GM crops from these deregulatory pioneering countries.
What we didn’t expect just yet is the catalogue of abject failure...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...