The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Viruses often use immune or other surface proteins as receptors presumably because they are important (can't be down-regulated too much).
For the pigs, it looks like they deleted just the SRCR5 domain of the CD163 protein. CD163 is used by macrophages to scavenge the hemoglobin-haptoglobin complex.
A 2017 article (of 6 pigs?) suggests that the engineered pigs are resistant to the virus "while maintaining biological function" although I don't see any experiments comparing hemoglobin-haptoglobin scavenging ability of engineered vs unedited pigs. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5322883
This 2024 study (of 40 pigs) found 'no significant difference' in a panel of health measures and meat quality, except that the engineered pigs had statistically significantly more greater backfat depth than the edited animals. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genome-editing/articles...
Interestingly, the mean weight of live pigs is slightly higher for edited pigs but lower for dead pigs. Total fat slightly higher for the edited pigs. These numbers are not statistically significant (but only a small number of pigs were tested).
The pigs were assessed at approximately 205 days in age. Pigs can live up to 20 years. Would be good to test the long term effects and the effects over multiple generations.
This paragraph is striking:
> Under the conditions of these studies, neither homozygous nor heterozygous or null pigs inoculated with PRRSV showed the acute clinical signs typically observed in commercial pigs and had overall low depression and respiratory scores (1). This may be explained by the fact that these pigs were sourced from a high-health farm and managed with minimal stress, which differs from disease expression under commercial conditions.
Sounds like the genetic editing is not necessary as long as the farm conditions are good..
And remember if you document or report on bad farm conditions in many US states, you’ll go to jail for telling the truth while the people running the farm do not.
https://www.animallaw.info/article/detailed-discussion-legal...
Do Scandinavians have compensatory mutations on other proteins, which allows them to have a mutant CCR5?
Presumably CCR5 exists for reason other than attracting HIV.
Turns out, CD163 already has a known function.
A spandrel not only has to have obvious function but removing it has to not be detrimental. I'm questioning the bar that is being used to say that it's not detrimental.
Unless humanity was on the brink of starvation and this was the only known way to increase food production then no it's not dangerous to be cautious.
On the other hand, I think it's dangerous to assume that a protein only has one function
It would be good to test for those things if the concern was for the long-term health of the pigs. The concern is whether or not they produce safe meat. Somewhere between most and all of the pork I've eaten in my life came from pigs less than a year old.
They also only looked at the health of one generation, along with the number of offsprings from that first generation. What happens after 10 generations? 100? Could there be cumulative epigenetic effects from deleting this gene?
You can separate the 2. Being anti gmo is being anti science. Decrying all GMO as bad, unhealthy, or whatever is as illogical as trying to make any blanket statement about any food. It just so happens that this one gets headlines.
We should be concerned about the businesses like Monsanto. But that is completely different.
Personally I have been trying to avoid any product that goes out of its way to claim “non gmo” because it just signals to me that they don’t care about sustainability and science.
It’s almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than the “organic” crap.
No, it isn't. As scientists we know how little we know of complex biological systems. This is bio-engineering based on rickety models.
Especially in times where the US is all about 'trade balances' , would it not suite them to take onboard some of the precautionary principles adopted in other parts of the world when it comes to health and safety?
We like our beef clean, our chickens unchlorinated, and our pigs without heavily experimental GMO modification, thank you very much.
Not because we are anti-science. Because the US has a horrible track record when it comes to how far you can go with caveat emptor.
I have yet to see a single instance of any actual health concerns raised from eating GMO food.
It has turned into marketing bullshit.
Again there has to be a clear separation between the science behind GMO and the business practices. They are very different discussions that need to happen but instead we are painting all of it with a negative light.
OK, here is a single instance: lots of people are concerned about glyphosate residues in food, and GMO technology is the only thing that allows those food plants to even survive the amount of glyphosate being sprayed on them.
If the product that had these modifications is perfectly safe without being sprayed with it, the science behind the creation of that GMO is still sound. The problem is what is being done to it after the fact.
Meaning, it being GMO itself is irrelevant and goes back to the business practices. Grouping that into an "Anti GMO" crusade just continues to further an anti-science narrative.
Discussing the science is worthless until you can solve the business practices.
We don't require labeling for basically any other concerns about business practices and yet everyone seems to care about this one. When I buy chicken it doesn't have a sticker on it sayin "this chicken was probably kicked a few times". or slave labor was used on this chocolate. There are other voluntarily done labeling against both of those, but not a requirement to say it.
The problem is, the narrative is grouping them together. The general narrate is "concern over what it going into our bodies" which has nothing to do with business practices.
Maybe we should. Then again, pretty sure both of those are completely illegal anyway. (Not that that stops it entirely, but somehow I'm not convinced lying about it would be the thing to stop those actors.)
Regardless, I don't disagree that we should have some labeling on business practices behind the food that we eat as long as it is actually communicating what needs to be communicated instead of just fear mongering.
"GMO Free" (or requiring it to say it has GMO) tells the consumer absolutely nothing. Its meaningless. All it does is try to sow fear about a thing that its existence itself is not the problem.
"Forbids farmers from using last years seeds", "Uses increased herbicide" like the example the other person mentioned, or whatever that actually communicates what the business concern is to the consumer would be great.
But that is not what we are doing here with labeling GMO.
Depends. Stressed animals produce food with stress hormons included.
It's very unlikely a chocolate without a fairtrade label to be slavery free. Kinda easy to avoid that. So easy to pick to slavery one
We have a few relevant labels you find on ever meat. It's not as easy for meat as there are local variants without labels and high standards but in a supermarket in Switzerland you can literally pick by colour. To get the kicked chicken that never seen a grass halm you just buy the yellow or red package.
It's a shame the people who want to do this the most are the people who want to treat the pigs the worst, and who care the least about potential side effects in humans.
It might sound a little extreme at first, but if you think it through I think it's the conclusion one has to reach when extrapolating from ones own experience to similar animals. Sure a cricket and I have not too much in common, but a orangutan and I, a dog, a pig?
When there is almost-perfect (and unnecessary) union between animal rights interests and the anti-GMO community, this is almost a necessity.
> and who care the least about potential side effects in humans
I see no evidence of this.
Doesn't this just set the table for that rare subtype to become dominant?
Misguided? No, it’s criminal! It was widely criticized as deeply unethical, unprofessional and irresponsible. The guy was considered a rogue scientist and he was put in jail for many years.
So clearly it was not just ‘misguided’.
Are the pigs going to grow vertical or something?
If I ran a bacon company and I didn’t have CRISPR pigs I’d advertise in large red print
“CRISPR Free”
Or
“Non-genetically modified”
People are afraid of lab grown meat already, they’ll be terrified of CRISPR meat
My competition won’t be able to advertise the same
Considering the prevalence of PRRSV, it would be difficult for farms with non-CRISPRed pigs to say the same.
Scare tactics can work both ways here.
Kind of bizarre, considering that food advertising routinely suggests all sorts of good or bad things about products, like the idea that if you drink a certain brand of beer or drive a certain model of car you will be surrounded by hot models. But there's long been a revolving door between Big Ag and departments like the FDA and USDA, so not exactly surprising that the FDA would go to bat for a Big Ag Pharma product.
They'll ban American pork entirely if we can't guarantee that the GMO pork are excluded.
The purpose of food labels is to increase safety, transparency and honesty around the contents of food. Companies who oppose safety, transparency or honesty and/or produce products with questionable contents will oppose labels and companies who support safety, transparency and honesty will support them. I don't know many end-consumers who oppose labels themselves. But they will oppose products that contain questionable ingredients, so transparency is bad for companies that produce those products.
Not quite.
Companies who can use the official labels to back up their own advertising campaigns will support them. (I know people who think that having a label for something is evidence of that thing being good or bad. No, it's evidence that someone thought that expending the effort to convince the government to have that label would have a positive return.)
Companies with more ability to amortize regulatory overhead (relative to their competitors) will support them, because for then that overhead is itself a competitive advantage.
USDA Organic label is rampant with fraud, and just having thr USDA label on it isn't a guarantee of trust. Similarly, the AHA endorsing oils blatantly bad for the heart is also similar example how labeling doesn't promote trust necessarily. Labels can and do lie, quite often even.
You will never, ever get that. It's simply impossible. Label games are the biggest legal tug-of-war between consumers, regulators, vendors, and the industries.
When I began reading about labeling and its regulation, and all the bullshit tricks that are played to "stay compliant" but also lie out their asses to the consumer, and hide everything from us, I concluded that there is no way to truly read a label properly.
It basically comes down to a question of whether you trust this vendor or provider to give you a quality product. If you do not trust, then do not purchase. If they play games and lose trust, then do not purchase. Once you have a decent-sized blacklist, then there is no reason not to patronize those survivors.
Oversight is then called for (eg USDA organic) which itself can still be frauded around, especially when dealing with sources outside of the US.
I'm reminded of a tiktok that had raw chicken labeled with a particular weight at Walmart. When they weighed it on a checkout scale, it didn't match the weight the label had. On multiple packages.
Overhead in particular can be rather stifling. For example environmental reviews for large projects have reached a "the process is the punishment" level of overhead.
Kurzgesagt had a very interesting video[0] about the fact that it wasn't really that much more expensive to make sure we ate torture-free meat.
Same thing in Austria, clear labelling, good availability, people are buying it.
Nobody in Spain does because none of their supermarkets has any concept for labelling the meat standard
So it's easy to say nobody would if they didn't really try
Meat is a status symbol food. Most consumers want it as cheap as possible so they can consume as much of it as possible. Because it's a status symbol food. Eating meat every night is seen as a status symbol.
What would be required to test retail pork product for the presence of this receptor?
Along the lines of https://www.plasticlist.org/report
We launched.. [a] project: to test 100 everyday foods for the presence of plastic chemicals.. We formed a team of four people, learned how this kind of chemical testing is performed, called more than 100 labs to find one that had the experience, quality standards, and turnaround time that we needed, collected hundreds of samples, shipped them, had them tested, painstakingly validated the results, and prepared them to share with you. Over time our effort expanded to nearly 300 food products. It took half a year and cost about $500,000.
If there's already a variant of the virus that can overcome the edit, then without additional measures it will simply go from 1% of the case to 100% and the disease is going to be as prevalent as before and the benefit of the tech will be null after just a few years.
(Except that it will draw negative light on CRISPR-based gene editing , slowing down actual progress. That's the curse of GMO: companies making them for bad reasons and reducing collective trust in what is a very promising and important technology for long term food security)
And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.
So it's one of those "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" things?
You understand that the majority of "food science" is designed to allow increasingly lazier and sloppier food handling and allowing it to still be palatable/not kill too many people right?
Don't fall into the "lower cost" idea either, being lazier and sloppier means higher corporate profits and not lower consumer prices (for worse food).
Compare the grass fed/ranged (produced on farms 1/10th the size of the US equivalent) BigMac in Germany versus the one you get anywhere in the US, which do you think is healthier and tastier? They are basically the same price to the consumer mysteriously...
Neither of those things is actually useful as an eater of food?
You want less fresh food and from sketchier sources yet you think those are virtues?
I don't eat fumigated strawberries so replacing fumigated strawberries with irradiated strawberries is... not useful?
It comes down to superstition.
Like is a blanket ban the only reasonable approach?
I also am in that camp, I don't want to eat pork raised in unsanitary conditions and then sold to me at top dollar (because lying/obscuring about sourcing).
We have those. EU animals have "five freedoms".
There answer after a good 40 minutes of searching is... nothing.
It's a technology 100% in service of being lazier/sloppier for industrial scale food production and in service of IP restricting the food supply in favor of shareholder X or Y.
"but we can make tasteless US tomatoes on even more inappropriate cropland!"
...
Great for my stock portfolio to screw over developing countries but useless for me as a first world eater of food.
No proof of existence of a benefit.
This specific approval is for a gene therapy to prevent PRRSV infection - a major porcine virus and one that regularly infects pigs in the EU.
It has nothing to do with mistreatment of animals or factory farming.
the chicken has to be chlorinated because it has literally been produced covered in faeces
this would seem to be enable it to become even worse
Again, this disease regularly affects pigs in Europe and causes immense animal suffering.
this is exactly the position of the EU, UK governments
and is one of the few policies that is universally supported by their populations
Some US food products are banned for concerns about safety, but they're hardly unique - the US also bans some food products from the EU and UK that are considered unsafe in the US.
None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.
and now pork will end up on that list too
> None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.
I couldn't care less if US'ians want to eat shit (here, literally)
There's an economic reward for keeping the pigs healthy enough to be harvested while spending the least amount of money on their environment. If this lowers the threshold for "healthy enough", or allows them to survive in an even worse, cheaper to maintain environment, that could introduce or exacerbate human health risks even if this change itself cannot.
There is also the animal welfare element, that has resonance to a lot of people. I am by no means a vegetarian, do not in principle object to killing animals for food. But the sheer scale of animal suffering in our food system gives me pause. I am reluctant to accept innovations that would allow us to increase the degree of suffering in exchange for an increase in output or decrease in price.
Livestock are resilient and adaptable, and can be miserable and unhealthy while being healthy enough to be profitable. Corporate farm organizations like to claim that farmers have an incentive to keep their animals healthy, but that doesn't mean the incentive is to keep them in tip-top condition. The best ratio of profit/cost might be juuuust above "almost dead." Just as human employers tend to look at the low-cost end of the scale when judging employee cost versus employee happiness/productivity, livestock farmers tend to look to the low-cost end of the scale to improve that profit/cost ratio.
I eat meat, some of which I raise and butcher myself, and I'm not generally a big fan of regulations. But I'd be fine with some tighter rules on animal welfare. What's done to cattle in kosher slaughterhouses looks like unnecessary torture to me, for instance. But if consumers want to eat animals that had a reasonably healthy and pleasant existence and a humane end, it should probably be on them to identify farms and butchers that provide that and buy from them. They do exist, but they're small because most people don't care about what they don't see. I'm definitely not excited about any technology which helps to further hide it from them.
I think that view underscores the differences in approach and beliefs in the US and Europe (not that both views aren't represented on both sides of the Atlantic, just distributed differently). The Europeans frequently have the view: Prove to us that this is not dangerous. Otherwise we prefer not taking the chance that you might be wrong. The US version in our eyes is frequently: "You can't prove it's not safe".
In this case you could risk introducing even worse diseases, who have previous been kept in check by the competition from the viruses you're now eliminating.
Really? You don't see a logical flaw in your reasoning there?
https://molecularsciences.org/content/the-challenges-of-cris...
I've yet to see anyone give anything but unknowns as their answer for why it's bad, or what might happen. Nobody seems to have any specific pathway for bad things to happen in mind.
From my pov as a fellow EU citizen a blanket ban for this kind of creepy stuff is the only viable option. Let the Americans become Frankesteins for all I care, it’s their choice, all in the name of “science”.
I mean, this is completely false. 8% of all EU agriculture imports is from USA and has grown year over year for decades.
> U.S. agricultural exports to the European Union reached a record $12.8 billion in 2024, a 1-percent increase from 2023
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
Just a thought from me, as European, in case someone asks for the thinking behind strict import EU rules:
We just don't want to eat things that we believe may cause (abstract) harm, and, sorts of liability of the state and society to care for you and (God beware) your kids if some adverse effects are pinpointed to food/imports or misregulation. I think it's ok like that.
If one think further, the share of export/import to/from non-eu countries is (rounded) 9pc of total EU's agriculture expenses. So, EU do not import much from US and others because they do not want certain techniques and methods and have their inner market and production anyway. Like it's the case with chlorine chickens and washed eggs. So, they don't allow such things to be sold to customers, which is infact not allowing import.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...