Genetically Modified Organisms take the fight to the coronavirus

Some things will change after the pandemic, and one of the likely ones is that opposition to genetically modified organisms will be much diminished. We’ve been using genetic modification since our ancestors first domesticated grains and farm animals about 12,000 years ago, but in the slow way, by cross-breeding and selection. 

When we found how to do it faster by inserting useful traits from one organism into another, some environmental lobby groups discovered they could attract funding by running scare campaigns against it. They coined terms like “Frankenfoods” to imply that GMOs were laboratory monsters that would run amok. 

Since the technology was developed, none of their dire predictions has come about. Americans have been eating GM foods for most of this century with no ill effects at all, and several useful organisms have been developed to help solve some of our problems. A modified enzyme has been developed to eat up waste plastic, and another organism has been tweaked to gobble up oil spills. 

Most of the teams racing to develop vaccines that protect against Covid-19 are using genetically modified organisms to produce effective ones, and the world will be thankful when they succeed. There’s a Canadian company genetically modifying tobacco plants to grow proteins for use in a potential vaccine that would normally be done in eggs, taking longer and at higher cost.

The argument about GMOs is that they should be banned until they are “proven safe.” This is absurd, because nothing can be “proven safe.” It’s more valid to ask if they present a greater or less risk than their traditional, non-modified, rivals. This can, and has been, established in trials. But the anti-GMO lobby opposes even trails, and has systematically tried to sabotage them by destroying crops. No evidence has emerged that GMOs pose greater risk. On the contrary, many of them offer huge benefits.

One of the greatest benefits is offered by golden rice, modified to incorporate vitamin A, whose absence in the diet of poorer countries leads to malnutrition, blindness and death, especially among children. The NGO campaigns against it have prevented its use, and a Johns Hopkins study published late last year puts the death toll caused by their actions at several million lives. The variety has been made open source and non-profit to farmers in needy countries, but has been opposed as a “Trojan horse” that threatens to break a blanket ban.

It does, it should, and it will, and more countries are now beginning to approve its use. After the pandemic has been defeated, helped by organisms genetically modified to fight it, countries will look more objectively at the benefits GMOs offer, and those who accept those benefits will prosper more than those who continue to resist them.