(hears the siren song, waddles into the fray)
Re: health - the only GMO plant bred for health so far (that I know of) has been the Golden Rice. and know that Golden Rice also faced a HUGE backlash from anti-GMO activists.
Golden Rice is just rice + beta carotene, that stuff that makes your carrots orange. Your body converts beta carotene into Vitamin A, which allows you to live and not be blind. People in developing countries with poor diets, especially children and pregnant women, can have huge difficulties getting access to enough Beta Carotene so scientists thought it would be super helpful to add it to a dietary staple - rice. Even Bill and Melinda Gates think that this is a great idea.
Wikipedia: “The research that led to golden rice was conducted with the goal of helping children who suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD). In 2005, 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women, in 122 countries, were estimated to be affected by VAD.[24] VAD is responsible for 1–2 million deaths, 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness and millions of cases of xerophthalmia annually.[25] Children and pregnant women are at highest risk.“
Anti-GMO activists HATE it though, so there’s currently a lot of difficulties for farmers in developing countries to get access to Golden Rice. They tend to prefer having people take supplements, which they can’t always get (they are provided - sometimes - by charities), and can’t make on their own (which leaves them dependent on others), instead of letting local farmers help solve this problem.
There is a group of plant scientists, who work at a plant science charity / germplasm / research institute in the UK, working on creating wheat that contains more iron. They are fighting a huge backlash against their work - experimental fields get burnt down in the UK by anti-GMO activists a lot.
There are also projects to increase the amount of zinc in various cereal crops and increase the protein in sorghum and cassava. These are all called Biofortification, in case you want to research it more.
Something of a holy grail for agriculture would be to transfer the nitrogen fixing relationship/ability of Fabacea to say, corn. This means that you could enable the corn plant to do what Fabacea does - they make friends with things in the soil, are and able to use the Nitrogen which makes up 78% of the air we breathe. Nitrogen-fixing corn would be a world-changing nobel-prize winning kind of achievement. This would dramatically improve soil health and substantially decrease the amount of fertilizers needed.
Some plant scientists in the UK are working on this. It’s incredibly technically difficult.
Better for the environment: GMOs are used to do different things, so it’s hard to talk broadly. The plants that have Bt (Bacillus thurengenisis, a naturally occurring organism and is widely used in organic agriculture) with them ARE better for the environment, in that farmers use way fewer pesticides since they effectively produce their own. I read a study awhile back that certain water ways in China are cleaner thanks to Bt GMOs. There have been some concerns that this will end up with overuse of Bt, pests will evolve past it, and we’re back at the same problem of pests destroying the things we want to eat (or, more likely, animal feed… so much of what we grow is animal feed it’s pretty insane). The thing is, there’s lots of different strains of Bt, scientists keep running across new ones. But we’ll never get away from the arms race that is humans vs pests when it comes to this, it’s as old as agriculture itself.
Papaya ringspot virus - driving Papayas in Hawai’i to extinction
Ethically: People were upset that the terminator gene existed, the public threw such a shitfit that no plants were ever released with them. So now instead everyone freaks out that genes from the GMO plants could end up in the wild. Sometimes, you can’t win.
Scientists were able to save the Papaya trees in Hawai’i thanks to GMO technology. The Papaya Ringspot Virus came through that was wiping out the Papaya trees there to and destroying the livelihoods of many farmers. It was so bad that it was thought that Papaya trees might go extinct, until a few genes were inserted to make them resistant to the virus. There are still anti-GMO activists upset about this for some reason.
Cheese - cheese is made using a a coagulant called rennet. The main enzyme in rennet is chymosin. The old, traditional way of accessing chymosin was from the stomach lining of baby cows. Rennet was/is a byproduct of the veal industry. A combination of people starting to give a shit about animals, increased human population, and increased demands for cheese, meant that rennet prices were all over the place. Scientists managed to create a microbe that could produce chymosin by implanting certain bovine cells, and ended up with a purer product, at a cheaper price, with no baby cows slaughtered in the process. 90% of cheese in the US is made using GMO chymosin aka fermentation-produced chymosin (FPC). Vermont made all dairy products exempt from their non-GMO labeling. However, if you want dead baby cows (or dead unborn baby cows) as part of your cheese making process, insist on buying USDA-organic cheese.
There are tons of non-plant uses for GMOs. We have been using GMOs in healthcare since the 1980s, which has made things safer - no longer using dead animals and human cadavers to harvest certain things. The cadavers in particular were a problem, they were spreading Creutzfelt-Jacob syndrome, which destroys your brain and takes your life, usually in the span of a year. Prions are a nasty business. Children needing human growth hormones were the ones acquiring and dying from it. Now we make hyper-specialized GMO bacteria and yeast to crank out things like insulin, human growth hormone (without prions), and antibodies to diagnose and treat certain kinds of cancer, among other helpful things.
GMOs are also used extensively in science, from breeding special mice to experiment on to creating special fish that will glow in the presence of certain pollutants. There’s new developments every day.
Could there be bad things done with GMOs? Yes, as with every technology, there can be bad decisions or unforeseen consequences and ethical conundrums. These are important conversations.
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