Hello, and welcome to lecture 4 of Genetics and Society. Think of this. By the year 2050, there will be 9 billion people on this planet and the resources to feed those people will have dwindled. And we won't have enough resources to feed those people. So, what does this have to do with genetics? And what does it have to do with us coming up with an informed opinion about the problem that I just described. Well, today what we're going to do is talk about genetically modified organisms and talk, we're going to talk about their technical aspects. That is, how you make them? we're going to talk about the existence of GMOs for because of breeding in the past. We're going to talk about the policy around GMOs. And we're also going to talk about some of the controversies of GMOs. Genetic engineering or genetically modified organisms or GMOs have been around for millenia. People humans have genetically modified organisms either agricultural of their pets for thousands of year. Wheat is a great example of a genetically modified organism that more than likely wouldn't exist if it were not for humans. And the breeding programs that humans have imposed on wheat. Dogs are another great example. The myridad of breeds that we see int he world today would not exist without the intervention of humans. And the breeding of this particular species of animal. While the genetic modification that we can do through breeding is an interesting way to think about genetic modification. More recent ways of modifying genomes have come about and these take advantage of the fact that we know what particular genes, gene products are made from which genes. And what we can then do is take the genes themselves and transfer them into new places into new organisms. And in particular, on this slide we see how the genome of a plant looks. And what our target would be is to get a genetically modified sequence into the genome of the pea plant. Now, we can also use genetic modification for some very interesting problems. One would be making a lot of a protein product that we have that we find in very, very low amounts in nature such as insulin or lactase. in this particular approach what we do is we take the gene for say, insulin and insert it into a plasmid. And then insert that into a bacterium. We then grow the bacterium up in large quantities and then harvest the bacteria. And extract the insulin that's been produced by the bacteria, from the bacterial mixture. And this way we can produce large amounts of, of we can produce large amounts of insulin. or chymotrypsin or lactase or any other protein or molecule that, that is, is important to our, our health. And one of the specifically spectacular examples of genetic modification in this way. but not using bacteria is the insertion of a silk gene into a, a milk gene and this milk gene then being inserted into the genome of a goat. the silk gene is a drag line silk from a spider. Drag line silks are perhaps the strongest material on the planet. And once this gene inserted into, into the milk gene into the goat and then becomes operational in the goat's genome, the goat make milks. But now it also milk linked to silk. And you simply need to milk the goat, harvest the milk and then spool out the silk from the milk in order to get the precious, spider silk. Before we go on to the social aspects of, of, GMOs, I wanted to talk about two specific examples that I, I hope both, that I hope all of you are familiar with. The first is BT corn. And this is an ex, an example of corn that's been engineered to carry a gene from a bacterian, the gene that comes from the bacterian is lethal to insects. And so when this gene is inserted into the corn genome, the corn becomes resistant to insects. The second example are salmon. salmon have been engineered with a growth hormone gene that causes them to grow faster and bigger. And this is of obvious commercial importance in the salmon industry, and is used in fisheries in the pacific northwest. So, let's go on the the social aspects of GMO. Now, there's a lot of controversy that surrounds GMOs but the attitudes toward GMOs are different from country to country. So, for instance, Europe has a very, very different attitude toward GMOs than United States and Canada. And, in fact, Europe is one of the places where certain countries have banned GMOs from being sold in that, in those countries. But notice that the United States and Canada have no such ban. Generally, in the United States and Canada, GMOs are accepted quietly accepted whereas they're rather loudly rejected in, in European countries. This chart just shows the growth of GMOs in different countries across the globe. And note that when GMO's first started to be used back here in, in 1996 and 1997, the United States was the main producer of GMO's. But as we get into the current day, you'll notice the the United States still has the, the kind of the corner market on those. But now countries like Argentina and Brazil and Canada have started to produce more and more GMOs. this is a very interesting statistic that we can get from this, from this graph. In 2008, there were about 120 million hectares of genetically modified foods being produced. This is about 30 million acres of genetically-modified food being produced worldwide. Another controversial issue is whether or not to label GMO foods. In this case, what happens is Europe and Asia have requirements for labeling for, for the presence of GMOs in, in products. And the United States and Canada do not require labeling of, of GMOs. Now, as I said GMOs have a lot of controversy associated with them. Let's go back to the question that I posed at the very beginning of this lecture. 9 billion people on the planet with not enough food to feed them. Will people who are proponents for GMOs feel that GMOs can help us solve that problem? there are other aspects of GMOs though, that are relatively detrimental. For instance, we still haven't done enough studies to understand the impact of GMOs on our physiology and our health. We also haven't done enough research to understand the impact of GMOs on the environment. And those two things are very, very important for our understanding of, of how we might use GMOs in the future. Of course, there's also economic arguments for and against GMOs. And there's also health arguments for and against GMOs. Whether or not you should be using genetically modified, products from genetically modified organisms or from GMOs. Is a question that you could address by thinking about the ethics of, of the situation. and given that there are some advantages to it and some disadvantages to it. It becomes a relatively difficult ethical problem to think about and to deal with in modern day life. But because, as I said earlier, all of you will have ingested genetically modified organisms even in the last 24 hours. it becomes a very, very important question for us to address.
