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Biotech companies are using tools to tweak the genes of common food crops. They call it gene editing. And there is a lot of confusion about exactly how much government oversight these crops will get. NPR's Dan Charles has the story.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: The company Calyxt in Minnesota wanted to make a new kind of soybean where the oil is a little healthier, more like olive oil. Some wild relatives of soybean already have oil like this because a few of their genes are slightly different, with particular mutations. Manoj Sahoo, the company's chief commercial officer, says that led to a question.
MANOJ SAHOO: Can we have those same mutations in the modern varieties which are grown by our farmers?
CHARLES: The company deployed new technology similar to a famous gene editing technique called CRISPR. Sahoo calls it a genetic scissors, which can go in and cut the soybean plant's DNA very precisely.
SAHOO: It does the cut and then comes out, and there is no foreign material or foreign genes in the soybean.
CHARLES: This is really important because if you insert new genes into a soybean - maybe you copied them from another kind of plant or bacteria - that's considered a genetically modified organism, a GMO. You need government approval to sell a new GMO. It can take years, millions of dollars. But if you just take a little slice out of a gene, if you edit it and don't add anything, that's a gray area.
The European Union's decided that's still a GMO. The U.S., though, says it's not. And you don't necessarily need to get explicit government approval to sell that product. Calyxt did ask for approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration and got it.
SAHOO: We think it is important to build consumer trust and also food safety, which is critical, to go through that oversight process.
CHARLES: On the other hand, there is a gene editing company in San Diego called Cibus that's selling a new kind of canola seed. And Cibus never asked the USDA or the FDA to formally approve it. Now Cibus actually used an older technology to create its canola. It induced lots of random mutations in canola plants by multiplying them in the lab, in petri dishes. Then it found exactly the mutation it wanted.
Companies have been doing this for decades and never had to get government approval. So Cibus didn't need to in this case either. And the company's executives say they also wouldn't have to if they did this with the newer gene editing tools. Greg Jaffe, director of the biotechnology project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says it's a troubling precedent.
GREGORY JAFFE: I don't think Cibus is violating any law. But I think it points out the fact that this is a voluntary process and that, in the future, companies may or may not go through that process.
CHARLES: For a lot of consumers, that's not going to be acceptable, he says. Gene editing is new. It's powerful. And people will have a lot of questions about it, including, is my food genetically edited?
JAFFE: The first step in having a discussion about technology is knowing what's out there (laughter).
CHARLES: So Jaffe says let's at least have an official, comprehensive list of every gene-edited crop that farmers are harvesting and selling.
JAFFE: I think there should be a registry of these products - agricultural crops that are going to go on the market that have been gene-edited.
CHARLES: I reached out to several biotech companies to see what they thought of Jaffe's idea. They were noncommittal. Several of them said they want some kind of government oversight of this technology. They know that's essential for public acceptance. But the companies also are trying to avoid anything that suggests to consumers that gene-edited food is somehow different from every other food and thus, perhaps, more dangerous. Dan Charles, NPR News.
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