AquaAdvantage, Salmo domesticus, and genetic engineering

[ramaldonado]

I think the most obvious comparison of AquaAdvantage salmon and Salmo domesticus is that they have both been taken out of nature and “created’ in a way that involves manipulation, of some sort, to their environment, lifestyle, diet, or genetics. Neither the AquaAdvantage salmon nor Salmo domesticus is a naturally occurring species.

What is far more interesting to me is not how they are alike, but how they are not. What I enjoy the most about the difference between AquaAdvantage salmon and Salmo domesticus is that it creates this twisted version of the nature versus nurture debate that we see so often in the behavioral sciences. However, in this version, scientists are using either nature or nurture to create the largest sustainable salmon in controlled environments. On the nurture side, Salmo domesticus is created through thousands of generations of selective breeding in fish farms, successively selecting individual fish with favorable traits, to eventually create fish that yield the highest amount of meat. Through their nurturing process, Salmo domesticus is created, a fish that grows faster, eats less, and yields more meat than its wild counterpart. On the nature side is the AquaAdvantage salmon, where, through a thorough mapping of its genome, scientists were able to not only identify the gene in the salmon that codes for growth hormone but introduce a second copy of the growth hormone gene. The result is an all-female, sterile species of salmon that grows 4 times as fast as its wild counterpart and yields more meat. In a display of scientific prowess, we can see how what took multiple years of selective breeding to accomplish was done in a much shorter amount of time with a flip of a genetic switch.

To address the statement that “genetic engineering is the obvious next technological step in the history of human’s cultivating our food’ we simply must look at our own population growth and our consumption tendencies. Human population is growing at an almost uncontrollable rate, much too fast for the amount of food we require. Two things are clear to me: there is no way that other species (wild or domesticated) can reproduce fast enough to provide enough food for our growing population, and humans as a whole are incapable of giving up meat of any sort. Because of this I believe that genetic engineering will present itself to humans, who will be skeptical at first, but when they discover that the alternative is less quantities of meat to consume, they will accept genetic engineering and it will find itself in the history of humankind.

[Author]

Posts