With the advent of golden rice, a GMO product, just five ounces of this rice would provide an adult with their complete daily allowance of vitamin A.

As of May 2018, the FDA has approved golden rice for human consumption.

What are other uses for GMO?

The efforts associated with the creation of golden rice pretty clearly makes the case for increasing the nutritional value of the end product, but GMO products have been made for any number of reasons.

Some of them are: drought tolerance, apples that don’t brown when exposed to air, fungus tolerance in many cultivars, increasing crop yields, and lowering food costs.

Is there a reason to be afraid of GMO?

Note: it is a widely held position by many scientists that there is nothing to fear from GMOs. In fact, in June 2016, 107 Nobel Laureates—most having been given the award for medicine or chemistry—signed a letter urging Greenpeace and its supporters to stop campaigning against GMOs. In fact, the letter called opposition to precision agriculture (GMO) a “crime against humanity.”

I will summarize the view of the GMO opponents below:

1) There are concerns that genetically modified substances remain in the body once consumed, and are suspected to cause ill effects.

2) By making some GMO crops resistant to herbicides, this enables greater use of herbicides, which is believed to be dangerous.

3) Despite testing, there is fear of unpredictable side-effects that could be caused by the transferring of genes from one species to another.

4) It is believed that government oversight is lax.

5) There’s a belief that GMOs harm the environment.

6) There are some who refute the evidence that GMOs can have beneficial effects.

7) There may be dietary concerns for some religions where genes from an “unclean” animal are used. Also, there are some religions that hold a stance that anything not found in nature should not be consumed.

Gene therapy:

In the prior section, we discussed GMOs. Gene therapy is really not much different than what happens in the creation of a GMO, except that the target of the gene manipulation is an animal.

Gene therapy, as applied to humans, has been around since the late 80’s.

Unlike with GMOs where often the goal is to improve upon what nature has provided, gene therapy is used for trying to fix a problem at its genetic source.

There are two types of gene therapy that are employed on animals (humans included).

1) SCGT – somatic cell gene therapy: this is the most commonly used method of gene therapy. It is what’s used to try and fix diseases, and is characterized as affecting all cells in the body except for those which could be inherited by subsequent generations.