Should We Get Over GM Food?

GM food has been around for over 30 years, yet it still ignites heated debate. So is it safe, and should we allow it to grace our shelves?

- Prof Jim Dunwell

For most people, Miami is either a sun-drenched holiday destination or the favoured location for US crime dramas. However, in 1983, it was forever written in the annals of science as the place where it was first announced that we could introduce specific genes (pieces of DNA) into plant cells, then generate whole plants with only a single altered characteristic. Before that, plant breeders had been confined to crossing together two parents and then screening the resulting plants for that rare individual that emerged with better properties. This process was by its nature hit and miss and it took several years before a new variety with the desired properties could be bred. Suddenly it became theoretically possible to make specific alterations to an existing variety with relative ease. Thus began the age of genetically modified (GM) or transgenic agriculture.

From that point onwards a race began, headed by US agricultural and agrochemical company Monsanto, to exploit this technology and develop novel varieties of crops. Understandably from a commercial perspective, the first targets were those predicted to generate the largest sales. The two dominant products were plants designed to be tolerant to herbicides – particularly the Monsanto product glycophosate – so weeds could be killed without harming crops, and those expressing toxin-encoding genes from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) to give them resistance to certain insect pests. The strategy behind these approaches represented something of a revolution. In the period immediately after WWII, research investment focused solely on the discovery of new herbicides and insecticides. But now, scientists could achieve the same effect by modifying genes within the crops rather than inventing new chemicals to spray on them. The first GM crops came to the US market in 1996 and sales grew rapidly.