Is It a GMO or Not?

A new generation of genetically modified organisms will be genetically indistinguishable from non-GMOs.  There are many potentially useful genetic modifications that scientists can now make to crops and livestock that don’t involve adding foreign genes, however. An example of this kind of next-generation genetic engineering wasrecently published by the small, Minnesota-based biotechnology companyRecombinetics. Scientists at the company created hornless dairy cows by using genetic engineering to put a naturally occurring bovine mutation into a normally horned cattle breed. How should we define what counts as a GMO — do we care about the process used to create them, or simply the end result? Second, GMOs clearly can be used to address important ethical and environmental problems in agriculture that are difficult to tackle by other means. As the technology gets better and less expensive, more companies will design GMOs to solve these problems, especially small companies that aspire to achieve some social good. That means choosing whether or not to eat a GMO won’t be as simple as deciding whether to avoid food with foreign genes produced by Big Agriculture. Sometimes, GMOs might be an ethical choice.