Of cows and corn: What does it mean to be genetically modified? (#GMOMonday)

Driving through the rolling hills and lush valleys of Wisconsin, as I did recently, it’s hard not to contemplate agriculture. In the last days of summer, most everything is still green, and fields are only just beginning to be punctuated by the browns and tans that herald the coming of fall. Rows and rows of corn and soybeans run right up to the road, and if you stop and roll down your windows next to a pasture, you can hear the cows sigh as they lumber by.

Staring out at the farms as they went by, I was also thinking about what it means for a plant or an animal to be called a genetically modified organism (GMO). Much of the corn I saw rushing by was “genetically modified.” Genetic modification generally refers to the technology of inserting, removing, or turning up or down certain genes within the corn plant. Plant scientists have used their understanding of DNA to insert genes into corn that improve it in significant ways, such as making it resistant to insects.

But how different is this “genetic modification” from what mankind has been doing to its food for thousands of years?

Consider the corn and cows in the fields I saw. Corn began as a wild grass-like plant that produced a few, tiny cob-like fruits. More than five thousand years ago, Mesoamerican people began selecting and planting the seeds of the plants they preferred, discarding the rest. From there, as corn has journeyed across continents, this selective breeding has purposefully changed the shape and size of corn, slowly morphing it into the varieties of sweet, bi-color and blue that we know today.

Consider also the delightful cow. Docile producers of copious amounts of rich, nutritious milk and beef, modern cows are the result of over ten thousand years of human-influenced changes. Cows evolved from a wild, hoofed beast called the auroch. The domestication of the auroch began so long ago that archeologists refer to this period by its geologic name, the Holocene. It was way back then that our ancestors began selecting and breeding those animals that were most useful to them, thereby changing the genetic make-up of their offspring.

In fact, every plant and animal I saw in those farm fields was utterly transformed, genetically, from its wild ancestors.

Our ancestors, without knowing anything about DNA or genes, were influencing changes in the genetic make-up of their food, making it tastier, more nutritious and easier to grow. Today, scientists have gained an understanding of how the DNA within plants and animals determines their characteristics. The tool of genetic engineering or genetic modification is a way to leverage that knowledge in the continuing quest for better food.

Geneticists have even found ways to improve foods by moving genes from one species into another, such as disease resistant papayas which cleverly borrow a gene from the virus that afflicts them, or a tomato that incorporates genes from a snapdragon plant.  Even these methods echo our ancient ancestors: They call to mind peoples of the Fertile Crescent breeding goat grass with wild wheat to produce hearty bread grain, or the pharaohs of Egypt breeding donkeys with horses to produce strong, stocky pack mules. The difference is the precision, knowledge and speed with which we can make those improvements today.

So, to answer the question I posed above, modern genetic modification is simply a different method of achieving exactly the same kind of genetic changes that growers have been achieving for millennia. In that sense, virtually every food, crop and domesticated animal in existence today could be considered a “GMO.” As Dr. Henry Miller, former head of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology, puts it:  “…it is not genetic engineering of food that is new, but only the techniques for accomplishing it.”

Did you miss last week’s #GMOMonday post about the story of two tomatoes? Get caught up here.

Image credit: Maciej Lewandowski via Compfight

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