In five years, we will be eating CRISPR-modified food, says the geneticist who had a hand in inventing this incredible gene-editing technology. While ethicists discuss the use of CRISPR in human health, the tool's creator believes it will find better uses in improving our food. “I think that in the next five years, the most profound thing we will see in terms of the impact of CRISPR on everyday life will happen in the agricultural segment,” says Jennifer Dudna, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley who invented CRISPR in her experiments with bacteria in 2012. year.
How CRISPR will change what we eat
CRISPR has dozens of potential uses, from treating diseases like sickle cell anemia to eliminating certain inherited forms of blindness. Not so long ago, a large number of people far from science learned about this tool: when a Chinese scientist used it to edit the DNA of two twin girls. And he went to jail for this. Moreover, Dudna herself expressed, to put it mildly, disapprovingly, writing a column about this to the scientist in Time.
There are also practical uses for CRISPR - which we'll see in grocery stores and farm fields in ten years, Dudna said.
The appeal of CRISPR in the food segment is simple: it is cheaper and simpler than traditional breeding methods, including those currently used to produce genetically modified crops (aka GMOs). CRISPR is much more accurate. Where traditional breeding methods cut the culture genome with a blunt knife, CRISPR works with the precision and precision of a scalpel.
Want mushrooms that aren't brown? Maize that gives you more yield per square meter? These products already exist, although they have not yet reached the plates of consumers. What about strawberries with a longer shelf life or tomatoes that keep better on display?
“I think this will all appear relatively quickly,” says Dudna.
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Work on CRISPR has been going on for more than five years, but it was only recently that US regulators charted a sure way to bring CRISRP products to market.
Back in 2016, scientists at Pennsylvania State University used this tool to make mushrooms not brown, but a different color. Last spring, startup Pairwise raised $ 125 million from agricultural giant Monsanto to work on CRISPR-modified products and bring them to stores for decades. A month later, Stefan Jansson, head of the Department of Plant Physiology at Umeå University in Sweden, grew and ate the world's first CRISPR cabbage (a kale variety).
More recently, several Silicon Valley startups have begun experimenting with CRISPR to produce meat in a test tube.
Memphis Meats, a startup backed by famous personalities such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, who made real chicken sticks and prototype meatballs from animal cells (without killing a single animal), also uses this tool. Like New Age Meats, another San Francisco-based startup that is trying to create real meat without slaughter.
Last spring, the USDA passed a new crop regulation that exempts a number of CRISPR-modified crops from the oversight that conventional GMOs usually come with. As long as these crops are edited through CRISPR, they are not subject to additional regulatory burdens.
“With this approach, the USDA seeks to enable innovation when there is no risk,” says Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue. Genome editing tools "will help farmers do what we aim at at the USDA: do it right and feed everyone."
Despite mixed reactions to the initiative, Dudna believes CRISPR food can help dispel fear around GMOs and raise awareness of the role of science in agriculture. After all, we need to feed billions of people.
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Ilya Khel