NOTSINCEALICEINWONDERLAND’S
hookah-smoking caterpillar gave us
thecallatop a psychedelic-looking
mushroom has the lowlyfungus so
upstagedthe action. At mostdinnertables, mushrooms are ancillarycharacters.
But this past spring, thefood and agriculture
worldsbecame obsessedwithone mushroom
in particular: theAgaricusbisporus,known as
thewhite-button mushroom—that all-purpose
fungus you jam by the fistful into a plastic bag
at the market and abandon in the fridge, only
tofind it slimy and brown several days later.
Science has nowfound a wayto delaythat
browning, using thebuzzy genome-editing
tool, CRISPR, whichcan trigger changes in the
DNA ofplants, humans, and other animals
withunprecedentedprecision andspeed.
The name—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short
Palindromic Repeats—refers to a system that targets
genetic code. The makers of the nonbrowning mushroom,
at Pennsylvania State University, used the CRISPR
enzyme Cas9, which can delete base pairs, changing a gene
and altering its expression.
But that’s not the part that got people talking. In April,
the US Department of Agriculture said that it would not
regulate the CRISPR-altered mushroom. To organic purists
and eco-watchdogs, a genetically modified organism
(GMO) had been given a green light to go to market
without oversight: no warnings about what was in our
food and no investigations into its environmental impact.
The outcry from food warriors was swift: How had a
genetically tweaked food evaded regulation?
It hadn’t, exactly. “The USDA simply decided that,
legally, the mushroom didn’t fall within their regulatory
system,” says Greg Jaffe, the biotechnology director at
the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
The USDA regulates genetically modified (GM) plants
only for their potential to be “plant pests”—whether
they can infect other crops. If there’s that chance, it
can require further testing and a permit before the
crop is planted. A handful of modified GM plants have
previously managed to escape regulation for various
reasons. But the CRISPR process itself is what helped
push the mushroom past the red tape. While most
GM crops use bacteria or viruses to introduce new
genes into a plant, CRISPR needed only a few snips
to the genetic code. Since the CRISPR’ed mushroom
contained no plant-pest DNA, the USDA decided it was
out of their hands. (The Food and Drug Administration
still may weigh in before the ’shroom goes to market.)
Still, consumers are wary. Ever since federal
regulators approved GM seed crops 20 years ago, we’ve
been a society torn—and often misinformed—over
so-called Frankenfoods. The organic-food lobby and
environmentalists vigilantly warn us about potentially
harmful side effects to our health and to the planet.
The issue has created a hothouse split between science
and the public. A 2015 Pew Research survey found that
more than 57 per cent of Americans believe GMOs are
“generally unsafe.” Meanwhile, 88 per cent of scientists
surveyed say they are “generally safe.”
But we’ve come a long way since the early days of
GMO projects, when herbicide-resistant crops led to
“superweeds” immune to chemical treatment. Such stories
make us justifiably wary of playing God with our food. But
nearly everything we eat is genetically modified. (See high
school biology: Gregor Mendel). The real superweeds today
have grown up around, and are choking, our legal-approval
apparatus. Oversight has become part of the problem; our
biotech regulatory framework is outdated and ill-equipped
to deal with rapidly evolving tech. (The White House has
promised to change that.)DoNotFear
Gene-EditedFood
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