This resembles the Chinese HIV CRISPR study because the deleted receptor was CCR5, an immune receptor. This was controversial because we don't know the long term effects of of deleting CCR5.
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..
> 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.
Parent poster may be referring to laws on the books that forbid the sale of videos depicting where animals are subject to harm or treated cruelly. I suspect that these laws were passed in response to animal snuff videos a few years ago, but the law could be used to prosecute an activist, I guess - although it might also demonstrate the point the activist was making in order for a prosecution to pass.
w/r/t the HIV thing - there are HIV immune populations in Scandinavia who have a natural mutation affecting CCR5, so there is at least some reason to believe it’s safe to edit or knock out.
It's dangerous to assume that everything in biology exists because it's useful in some way. Some things are just spandrels* that came along for the ride, vestigial, or otherwise neutral features. Not everything exists because it provides an evolutionary advantage.
If a receptor is used as an entry point by a common virus and disabling it prevents infection but evolution has kept it around (cells spend energy actively expressing it, not having it encoded in the genome) then you can assume that there is a function provided by the receptor.
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
I don’t believe so. I looked into it a bit more, and it looks like homozygous variant carriers are more susceptible to other types of infection (West Nile is specifically cited), but I don’t see anything showing the variant causes issues with CCR5s other critical functions. I do think a knockout is probably a bad idea based on further reading, but modification seems like a promising path.
> 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.
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.
I understand that. But maybe at 205 days you won't detect a change which would more easily detectable later. Maybe we don't know exactly what to look for, but if something breaks over the long term that would give a clue.
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?
I really really hate that the science behind GMO’s gets clouded by the business practices of some of these companies.
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?
From the other side of the pond, when your chieftain wonders aloud again why the Europeans don't buy your beef, or your chicken, or now your pork: This here, is the reason.
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.
So in other words there is nothing wrong with the GMO as an abstract principle, it is merely the actual GMOs on the market today that are bad in almost every instance.
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.
That is not a problem with the act of making GMO's in the first place, which again is the point that I am trying to make here.
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.
We should be genetically modifying the pest species, not the crops. We should stick to going after the species that specialize in eating domesticated plants, like the corn borer or the Colorado potato beetle. Keep a small population “safe” on some remote island or a lab somewhere if they ever need to be reintroduced for some reason, but use knockout drive to eliminate them elsewhere.
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.
Not sure where you are from but in Switzerland you can very well choose these things from a product.
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.
> We don't require labeling for basically any other concerns about 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.)
Right I mean the chocolate one is illegal. The chicken one, honestly not fully sure since Purdue keeps getting exposed but idk if they actually have had legal issues? But my point with both of those is, as bad as those would be they don't have an impact on your health eating the product.
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.
This has the potential to be really cool, and really beneficial to society.
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?
>>That experiment [Chinese Crisper babies] on humans was widely decried as misguided.
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.
It's an elective procedure. No one has made it mandatory.
> by giving some disease prevention excuse that is minimally effective at best and bogus at worst.
A reported 10x reduction in UTIs does not seem "minimal."
> if it’s ethical to dock a dog’s tail or clip its ears because you think it looks better
Usually it's done for working dogs to reduce their chance of injury. Even in countries where the practice is fully illegal exceptions are made for working dogs.
> But for a newborn? Well, that’s just how we do things.
We tend to respect peoples religions. Judaism, Islam and some branches of Christianity require it for males. We accept the practice for newborns under the logic that it will be less traumatic and less risky than doing it when they come of age later in life.
> We tend to respect peoples religions. Judaism, Islam and some branches of Christianity require it for males. We accept the practice for newborns under the logic that it will be less traumatic and less risky than doing it when they come of age later in life.
We don't really respect people's religions in general when it comes to harmful practices inflicted on others, including their own children. Plenty of historical practices have been phased out from many religions for this very reason, and children of cult members are sometimes taken into the state's custody for this reason.
Circumcision happens to sit at a crossroads of not being extremely harmful (unlike, for example, female "circumcision", that is genital mutilation), being actively practiced for a long time, and being practiced by a currently very well-respected religion (Judaism, mostly).
But make no mistake - if tribal people who practice genital mutilation on their girls or other forms of more extreme body modification tried to do so in the USA or Europe, they would be stopped, prosecuted, and lose custody of their children - as well they should. Freedom of religion comes second to the right to a healthy and happy life.
Yes, it is not a mandatory procedure. However that misses the point. As an elective procedure made without an immediate and compelling reason, it should be left to the individual to make the decision and no one else. It should not be done routinely and the decision is not to be made casually. Most American parents simply elect to have the procedure done because they consider it “normal” and don’t investigate much further, if it all.
As for UTI reduction, I should have framed this differently. There is a reduction, but is that reduction worth it? Tonsillectomies used to be routine, but now they aren’t and are only suggested if there is a chronic problem. Surveys have been conducted and found that an overwhelming number of intact men would not have the procedure done just to have fewer UTI’s. I for one, would rather treat such infections as they arise rather than amputate some tissue just so that I could deal with those uncommon infections less often.
>”We accept the practice for newborns under the logic that it will be less traumatic and less risky than doing it when they come of age later in life.”
It is said that it is less traumatic to do this at birth, but I question this. I suspect people only believe this because babies cannot articulate what is happening to them and none of us are able to remember anything from our infancy. I have no idea what babies “think” but if we agree that this surgery is traumatic and risky, I simply don’t believe one can argue that it is less traumatic and less risky for a human who is only a few days old. A newborn cannot possibly understand and contextualize the intense pain that it is being subjected to, both during the procedure and during the recovery. Whereas an adolescent or an adult opting for this procedure would be informed beforehand, give explicit consent, and be given sufficient anesthesia.
> A newborn cannot possibly understand and contextualize the intense pain that it is being subjected to, both during the procedure and during the recovery.
While I wouldn't defend infant circumcision in any way, I think the paragraph from you is exactly the point. Babies don't conceptualize pain in the same way children or adults do, it just isn't the same sort of thing. It doesn't necessarily scare them in the same way, and there is no evidence whatsoever that painful experiences are traumatic for infants. And biology seems to align with this, as all infants also naturally suffer quite intense pain for months as their teeth grow.
So I don't think the case that inflicting necessary pain on infants rather than doing it later as children or adults is a bad one. Of course, the pain of circumcision is entirely unnecessary (for the vast majority of people, since of course phimosis is a thing that affects some people). But, in principle, for a necessary operation, having it done as an infant is sound medical practice.
That used to be true but the rate has declined significantly recently.
> Tonsillectomies used to be routine
Well you can literally observe the inflammation of those. Which is significant if your patient is not verbal yet. The risk of UTI drops off significantly after age 5 which highlights some of this reasoning more clearly.
> Surveys have been conducted and found that an overwhelming number of intact men
In cases where state Medicaid stopped covering the procedure for newborns they found it did reduce the rate of newborn circumcisions; but, it increased the rate of adolescent and adult circumcisions.
Also the use of "intact" and "amputate" are fairly judgemental terms particularly when "uncircumcised" and "circumcised" are more correct and more commonly used. To be technical it's actually a partial amputation as it's not typical to remove all of the foreskin. It's also true that the procedure can be a treatment for Phimosis or other chronic infection issues. So these terms are needlessly loaded and possibly inappropriate for the stigma they create.
> don’t believe one can argue that it is less traumatic and less risky for a human who is only a few days old
I'm sorry but the medical data is perfectly clear on the risk. It is absolutely less risky. "Circumcision risks tend to be lower when performed on infants compared to older children and adults. The complication rate is generally much lower in neonates (around 0.4%) than in boys aged 1-9 (around 20-fold higher) or those 10 and older (10-fold higher). "
> understand and contextualize the intense pain that it is being subjected to
Do you believe that the act of birth itself is painful for the baby? Was it more or less painful than this procedure that is performed with local anesthetic? I also think this is why parents are somewhat inclined to opt into the procedure. You've already gone through so much you might as well get it all done early.
We could also observe that parents that are circumcised are likely to opt into the procedure for their own children. So to the extent that this pain made any impression on them it doesn't seem to be evidenced in practice.
These are pretty thin points either way. We need better data otherwise this will always be rooted in subjectivity.
> Whereas an adolescent or an adult opting for this procedure would be informed beforehand, give explicit consent, and be given sufficient anesthesia.
Parents are expected to make health care decisions for their children until the age of majority. In most treatment related cases they would still be under their parents care. In both cases as long as the parent is informed and consents there is no actual difference.
Unless you're suggesting that unless required by medical condition that all circumcisions must be performed after 18 and only when a patient solely consents for it; well, there are clearly just as many problems with that proscriptive and tortuous approach. And without strong data to suggest that it would be a net benefit to do this we're better off with the current status quo.
Vaccines can be administered to adults for clinical trials.
If there was a way to do whole body CRISPR most of the ethical considerations would disappear, because there are a lot of ill people awaiting treatment.
> the pigs appear entirely immune to more than 99% of the known versions of the PRRS virus, although there is one rare subtype that may break through the protection.
Doesn't this just set the table for that rare subtype to become dominant?
Evading immunity doesn’t always mean you become dominant. It might not be as transmissible, worse at replicating, or not as compatible with the host. Basically, there may be reasons why it was the rare subtype that remain true even in the new environment
Farms without immune pigs can still claim it. Do some sampling tests, culling etc and call the product "virus free". But calling modified pigs not modified is tougher, I think.
I get it's a joke, but this won't be advertised to consumers. The current US administration (and previous ones to a lesser extent) oppose food labeling regulations. It's one of the main "non-tariff trade barriers" they complain about to the EU.
If someone doesn't care one way or another, the label is useless. If someone has a positive opinion, the label helps the consumer seek it out. If someone has a negative opinion, the label helps the consumer avoid the product. If they fight against labeling it is because they consider that the third group is or can become bigger than the second.
I mean, that's so vague that it can be said about anything: Some people think X is positive and will buy the product and some people think X is negative and won't buy the product. Pretty obvious.
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.
> and companies who support safety, transparency and honesty will support them.
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.
The median label is transparent and honest but that's not a guarantee, especially when marketing gets involved. Plenty of companies will make statements that are true but opaque, dishonest, and unrelated to safety. And they'll support any labeling standard that helps them along those lines.
> The purpose of food labels is to increase safety, transparency and honesty around the contents of food.
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.
That's the double edged sword. Requiring labeling doesn't prevent label fraud, and pretending label fraud is rare is either naive or obtuse.
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.
> just want the label to tell me what's in the product
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.
The generic arguments against that sort of thing are distortion when the category boundaries are a bit off from where they should be, and overhead where any time you do anything there's extra compliance paperwork and delays.
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.
> The researchers used microphones to record healthy and stressed tomato and tobacco plants, first in a soundproofed acoustic chamber and then in a noisier greenhouse environment. They stressed the plants via two methods: by not watering them for several days and by cutting their stems. After recording the plants, the researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to differentiate between unstressed plants, thirsty plants, and cut plants.
This is interesting but obviously very different from the suffering that animals are experiencing.
In Switzerland where you can tell on every piece of supermarket meat what kind of farming/standard it is trough a easy to follow colour code and some kinda Trustable labels, you very well see customer pick the more expensive ones.
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
Most consumers don't care where their meat comes from.
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.
> Culbertson says gene-edited pork could appear in the US market sometime next year. He says the company does not think pork chops or other meat will need to carry any label identifying it as bioengineered... Genus edited pig embryos to remove the receptor that the PRRS virus uses to enter cells.
What would be required to test retail pork product for the presence of this receptor?
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.
Restaurants and grocery stores can advertise corporate policy to use non-GMO meat suppliers.
> the pigs appear entirely immune to more than 99% of the known versions of the PRRS virus, although there is one rare subtype that may break through the protection.
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)
>Regulations have eased since then, especially around gene editing, which tinkers with an animal’s own DNA rather than adding to it from another species, as is the case with the salmon and many GMO crops.
And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.
European consumers seem to not want factory farms that produce such low quality food that it needs to be CRISPRed (as is the case with this story) just to be kept alive long enough.
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).
As an EATER of food what is the benefit of CRISPR/GMO?
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.
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.
no GM crops, no milk with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no beef with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no chlorinated chicken (nearly all of it), no washed eggs (nearly all of them)
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)
> Like is a blanket ban the only reasonable approach?
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”.
This seems to be a small edit to a single receptor to keep pigs from getting a particular disease by not allowing the virus to enter their cells. It's hard to see how helping pigs stay healthy could have a negative impact on human health, but a lot of people are against eating things that are 'unnatural' in any sense.
> It's hard to see how helping pigs stay healthy could have a negative impact on human health
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.
In this case "healthy" refers to keeping them from getting a specific virus, and the genetic changes are so we don't have to fill them with antibiotics.
Because CRISPR isn’t nearly that precise or exact, it always has unforeseen random fall off effects.
Also, who says that particular receptor ONLY prevents entry of a specific virus? It surely has other purposes that aren’t understood.
Biology is always messy, but most impacts of off-target changes would be for the pig. When I look at references like this, it's hard to see what there is going to somehow affect humans:
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.
Are the pigs healthy? I think the sibling comment got to the heart of this a lot more directly.
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.
You absolutely can have both. The threshold to pass for at least "decently healthy" isn't that high and prices aren't that much higher than "normal" industrial farming.
To the extent they don't import, it's much more about protecting their own farm economy. Denmark for example has a lot of large pig farms, they don't want US pork competing with that.
Much of that is reasonable concern, but at least some of it is silly superstition. For instance, Germany doesn't permit the irradiation of most foods except dried herbs and spices. Irradiation is a perfectly safe way of increasing the safety and shelf life of food. Despite this, regulations on which foods if any this is permitted for vary greatly from country to country, influenced by how weirded out the uneducated public feels about it.
The alternative to radiation is mixing less poop into your meat etc.?
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...
This is the ignorance I was talking about. There are many reasons to irradiate food besides substandard handling. For instance, potatoes can be irradiated to inhibit sprouting, increasing how long you can store them. And imported fruits can be irradiated to prevent the spread of insects and other pests (without needing to use far riskier pesticides.)
They are useful to people who buy food (who hasn't had some potatoes sprout in a cabinet?), and to society generally. Insects are a fact of fruit, to call that "sketchy" is just ignorant.
If the potatoes last longer without going bad, then there's no reason to replace them prematurely. You have a predicted narrative that any preservation method you aren't comfortable is intrinsically bad because it lowers food quality, but I can guarantee you there are countless other forms of food preservation you have no problem with.
This is a case where the science evolved to justify a pre-decided narrative. This was absolutely necessary for an unsustainable food industry in an overly financialised nation(guess which). Don't waste your breath arguing logically. Just try your level best to ensure it doesn't occur in your local food economy, for the near future. Eventually, the GMO folks will reap.
While this 8% are limited to "sorts of" and may not include "CRISPRed" or "chlorine-bleached".
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.
It isn't plainly wrong as if they would allow much, then the share would be higher, as it is the case now for example Brazil (~9pc) or UK (>20pc).
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.
I guess you can claim that the 3rd-largest agriculture import source is "not much" if it is making you feel better about something. But I think that even the EU bureaucrats themselves would recognize that it is a very significant amount and continues to grow.
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..
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