Around 500,000 children go blind
every year because of vitamin A deficiency. So a strain of rice has been
developed that unlike normal rice contains enough vitamin A to keep children
healthy or healthier anyway. Now the term Genetically Modified Organism is
actually somewhat of misnomer, I mean people have been genetically modifying
organism since the invention of agriculture. Every plant and animal species have
natural genetic variability and for thousands of years , We’re harnessed this
variability by practicing artificial selection, We cultivated breed organisms to
emphasize. Their most desirable traits. Cows that produce more milk in, Squash
plants that survive route, brassica oleracea also known as wild cabbage has been
bred so intensively, that it is the wild ancestor of half a dozen different garden stable
including broccoli cabbage cauliflower Brussels sprouts Kohlrabi an KO, Corn
originally looked like this. over years a selective reading, we have turned it into a
massive crazy giant mutant version of itself that we happily for on the grill
without thinking of the centuries a breeding necessary to turn a grass seed into
with a sweet and starchy masterpiece, So when we talk about GMOs today we’re
actually talking about genetically engineered organism or transgenic organisms.
We talking about gene from one species being extracted and infused into the
genome other different species, this is called trans genesis and though not all
GMOs food has created this way transgenic crops are by far the most common
kind of genetically engineered organism you come across so here’s the thing
engineered organisms aren’t new either. We’ve been tinkering with food in
laboratories for nearly 100 years and in 1920 scientist realized that they can cause
mutations in plants thereby creating more genetic diversity and possibly more
desirable traits by exposing them to X-RAYS in and gamma rays in various chemicals
Though the 1970s these methods have mutation breeding were quite popular in
completely unregulated in largely ignored by the public, Thousands of cultivars
produce this way are currently on the market. It’s the kinda brute force attack
just mash the genes up, plant seeds and see what happens then breed the cool
new traits back in the various strains a crops, Then in 1983 scientist pioneered a
new tactic where they successfully took a gene from an antibiotic-resistant bacterium
and like that into the DNA and the tobacco plants, Now of course antibiotic-resistant
tobacco doesn’t have any real purpose, but it didn’t prove that it single gene
transfer was possible, the new practice of transgenic was born on the
GM industry wasn’t really able to take hold until 1994, when the USDA approved
something called the flavor saver tomato. Approved invented by California biotech
company that was altered, so that it took longer to ripen giving it a longer shelf
life, It was the first genetically engineered crops al the consumers the flavor saver
ever though didn’t last very long partly because people didn’t like the taste and
partly because others mainly in Europe, were suspicious if it’s genetic alteration
The flavor saver and it’s not ideal player touched off a debate that continues
to rage. Today most GMOs aren’t found in your produce section like the flavor
saver was, Instead more 90% of commercially grown GM food are commodity
crops, stables like feed corn and soybeans which have been modified to resist
herbicides or insects in fact these drugs are used to make the ingredients a lot to the
processed food we eat or are used as fodder for animals that, we later enjoy
consuming the flesh of probably the most well-known on these transgenic
crops are the so-called roundup ready crops foods like
soybean,corn,sugar,beets,cotton,algalfa,and canola that are the engineered to resist
the active ingredient in the herbicide roundup. These crops provide us with some
might say digestible examples of how transgenic foods are engineered, why’ve
made the way they are, what they do, as well as, what they don’t to do. Let’s
start with why they were made in the first place. The active ingredient in the
herbicide roundup is Glyphosate. A chemical that inhibits and enzyme plants
used to synthesize amino acids by blocking this enzyme roundup stops plans for
making what they need to grow and metabolize food thereby killing them. And
it pretty much takes no prisoners so much, so that it can be hard reuse around
plants that you don’t want to kill like your crops. In the early 1990s the company
that makes roundup,Monsanto, to decided to develop e crops that were
resistant take life Glyphosate, so farmers could sprayed the herbicide over their
whole crop but only kill the weeds, See they’re these micro organisms that produce
an enzyme that is unaffected by Glyphosate all Monsanto and had to do was
transfer those bacteria genes to food plants and farmers could use roundup to
protect their crops without killing them, so they extracted small pieces a
bacterial DNA that were responsible for making the enzyme and set about
introducing them into plants, But how do you get the genes a bacterium into the
nucleus a plant cell. On the tree live plants and bacteria are not even on the
same branch. Well, it turns out that there are couple of pretty interesting ways the
first involves gene guns. Ya you heard me Gene guns. Gene guns remain do
pretty much what they sound like literally and kind of haphazardly blasting DNA
into plants cell. Most commonly used to engineer corn and rice PCs. They start
with tiny particles of gold that are coated with hundreds of copies of a desired
donor gene called a transgene. Cells from the plants that’s going receive the new
gene are put into a vacuum chamber in fire away. The gene cover gold particles
are shot at the cells using high-pressure gas once inside the nucleus of plant cell
the gold dissolves in the scientist cross their finger and hope that the DNA is
taken up by the chromosomes the nucleus which it sometimes it want the
transgenes have been incorporated into the plant DNA, it can then be bred into
offering plants not exactly elegant but in fact a lot more subtle than just
bombarding the sea with radiation and the hoping for the best. Another more
recent and more effective way to create transgenic organisms involves using a
soil dwelling bacterium called Agro bacterium. This is the plants parasite in a
natural genetic engineer, it has an extra and quite special piece of DNA called a
plasmid. They can move outside the bacterium and implant itself into a plant
cell. In nature the Agro bacterium uses this trick to re-code plant cells to grow
food for it, but in the lab, engineers can use the plasmid as a kind of carrier for
fancy transgenes, using it to infuse plant cells with new genetic material, So
whether you use the Agro bacterium or the gene guns you now have a new
engineered cropland,But can to put that thing in the ground you have to
introduce this new genetic material into existing traditional strains and the
crop, This last step called backcross breeding, involve repeatly crossing the new
transgenic plant with breeding stock over&over again, Until you wild up with a new transgenic crop, at the end the process Monsanto had a patented plant that
could be sprayed with Glyphosate and survive previously planned would have to
be seated far enough apart that machines could kill a way competing weeds
increasing soil loss and costs to the famer not to mention fuel consumption plus
Monsanto gets whole new massive customer base for Glyphosate it’s long
process the whole thing can take as long as 15 years but that’s how just about
genetic engineering is done to your food, whether scientist are putting a
bacterium antibiotic resistance into a tobacco plant or an yield growth patterns
into a sammon of course then there’s the process for getting a crop or animal
approved for use, which can also take quite a number of year, At the moment it
extremely expensive though there are some technologies on horizon that might
make it cheaper, The fact that it’s so expensive and yet still economically worth
doing indicate how extremely useful GM crops can be, it also means that the
companies that produce them closely guard and restrict the patents and sale
and growth and even research done on the crops. One other reasons
engineered food are attacked so viciously is not because of the scientific
consequences of their existence but the economic &cultural consequences of placing so much power over our food simply into the hands of
a very few very large companies .the GMOs debate has become something or a
surrogate for a much larger debate about economics that frankly is out of our
league. There are some scientific concern about genetically modified food. How
does inserting a single gene for example, rather than swapping huge chunks of
genetic material effect the genome at large, We used to think not at all but it
turns out that the genome is more complicated than that additionally. Many
farmers safe non patented seed for next year’s crop something you can’t do
with patented GM crops even if you public domain scene was unintentionally
fertilized by a patented strain you might find that suddenly the senior same
from last year’s harvest the plant next years as genes owned by someone else,
someone who is it turns out suting you and if your livelihood depends on selling
certified organics crops are selling in the market for GMOs are prohibited, The
consequences can be even more dire and of course the traits engineering the
crops might have potential ecological effects like if we’re engineering and insect
resistance we want to make sure that we’re not harming are insects we do like,like
bees and butterflies after Obama consumed in hundreds of millions of meats by
me and probably by you having been studied for decades, there has been zero
indication that genetically modified food poses a danger to human