Big Fish and Enviro-pigs

Although genetically modified (GM) animals exist they have not yet been approved for human consumption. That may be about to change as the US Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve a GM salmon very soon.

The GM Atlantic salmon grows at twice the rate of its wild cousins. It has been modified genetically by adding a DNA sequence from Chinook salmon and Ocean pout (an eel-like fish that grows to about one metre long). The DNA sequence that is added is for growth hormone.

In the wild Atlantic salmon stop growing during the winter but the GM salmon continue to grow all year round. In effect the GM salmon grows twice as fast as wild salmon and reaches market weight in one and a half years instead of three.

One of the major concerns regarding these fish is that they might escape from their enclosures and mate with wild salmon. In response to this the company that has developed the fish say that 99 per cent of their GM salmon are sterile. It is also pointed out that the GM salmon are not well adapted to life in the wild since they are so driven by the need for food that they will take huge risks to get it, making them easy pickings for predators.

If the GM salmon are allowed onto dinner plates what will be next? It may well be the enviro-pig. The University of Guelph in Canada has submitted the enviro-pig to the FDA for approval. This pig can better absorb phosphorous from its food thereby reducing phosphorous in its manure. In turn this is supposed to protect the environment by reducing phosphorus levels in waterways and therefore reducing algal blooms.

All of this begs the question though, do we really know what we are doing when it comes to genetic modification? Are franken-fish that are so desperate for food they are willing to die to get it really what we want to create? Aside from the ethics around this do we want to be consuming such poor creatures?

Then there is the enviro-pig; it sounds appealing to assist the environment but what is the cost? The fallacy of genetic engineering is to assume that you can alter a small part without affecting the whole. This is not just alternative, holistic thinking; it is borne out by modern complexity theory too.

Complexity theory has been developed to understand how complex systems like organisations, computers and living creatures work. An understanding that has arisen from complexity theory is that the properties of the system cannot necessarily be tracked to individual components but arise from the whole system.

We simply don’t what impact it will have on the entire living entity of a pig to increase its phosphorous absorption. We should not be willing to do it to the pig and we should be very nervous about having such things introduced to our food chain.

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