Dr. Alison Van Eenennaam is a Cooperative Extension Specialist in the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis, and runs the Animal Genomics and Biotechnology Laboratory. She recently spoke about gene editing at K-State’s Cattlemen’s Day. Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays is featuring comments from her conversation with K-State’s radio network after her presentation.
Yesterday, she explained what gene editing is and some opportunities it presents for the beef industry. Click here for that conversation. Today, she is discussing some of the pros and cons of the practice.
The main benefit of gene editing is to introduce useful genetic variations into an animal without altering anything else. “I see it as a synergistic improvement on conventional breeding programs,” Dr. Van Eenennaam said. “It is a targeted way to introduce useful genetic variations into breeding programs.”
The risks of gene editing are centered mostly around the public’s perception of the practice, specifically animal activist groups that make money from creating fear around GMOs. “They have found a very lucrative business model in creating fear around that technology,” the doctor explained. “They have said genome-edited products in their definition of what a GMO is. Of course, they are because they make a lot of money doing this!”
According to Dr. Van Eenennaam, the general public has yet to form an opinion of gene editing, and she touted the usefulness of the technology. Editing the genes of naturally horned cattle to be born polled to prevent dehorning is a win for everyone. Creating disease-resistant animals is also a hard one to argue against.
“These are the types of traits that are good to be coming out first because more difficult to argue that disease susceptible pigs are better than disease-resistant pigs, so I think there are some difficult moral quandaries that people will have go in their heads and think about,” she said. “I think it’s great when you have those kinds of dilemmas because it makes you think about what it is that I really hate about GMOs.”
Some countries, like Argentina and Brazil, are already close to full acceptance of gene editing practices so long as genes being introduced are from the same species. Dr. Van Eenannaam emphasized the multiple studies regarding the safety of gene editing.
“They (Argentina and Brazil) have made regulatory determinations around a few cattle examples: the slick characteristic which is a knockout of the prolactin receptor gene which results in a phenotype where the animal is about one degree cooler than a non-edited animal,” Dr. Van Eenannaam explained. “They have made the determination that is a knockout – that is an analogist to a conventional mutation – that they aren’t going to treat any differently, so it’s not an approval, per se, because it’s no different from breeding and we don’t approve breeding either. It is just saying, ‘Nothing to see here, guys.’”
She explained that South Africa has determined that all genome editing is GMO and has to go through a full GMO approval process.
“The U.S. is taking the approach that all intentional alterations introduced by editing will be treated as new animal drugs, and then they break it down into categories like low-risk applications. Those would be things where you are mimicking an existing allele that we already eat, so slick, for example, would be one. In that category, they make a decision – if it is not risky – that they are going to exercise something called enforcement discretion which means that they are going to allow that product to go to market because they have evaluated it and determined that it is low risk. So, there is no need to enforce the new animal drug rules which say that you cannot market an unapproved animal drug when it is a low-risk product.”
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