Lee Pitts: Enough Is Never Enough

The folks in white lab coats and low shoes with letters after their names are up to their old tricks again in attempting to build the super cow of the future. And please note I said “build,” not “breed.” It seems the gestation length of the bovine is much too long and scientists are much too impatient to wait on better breeding to get us where they think we need to be, so they’ve come up with a couple ways to speed up the process.

The researchers attempting to create cows for the 21st century include genetic engineers and genetic editors. Now I know as much about engineering as a cow does about Christmas, but I was the editor of our own livestock newspaper so the concept of editors messing around with the cows genome frightens me. The job of an editor is to correct mistakes and cut, cut, cut. The space in any periodical is some of the most valuable real estate in the world and any space an editor can save goes right to the bottom line, like shortening a 16 page newspaper to a 12 pager. Some editors I’ve had didn’t even read the stories but just whacked off a chunk at the end that may have contained the punch line. I’d hate to think that gene editors would follow the same shortcuts in whacking off key parts of the cow’s DNA so we ended up with cows without a rumen or missing some limbs.

The only thing I know about engineers is that they make more money than editors do and have retirement benefits and health insurance. But as I understand it, the difference between gene editing and genetic engineering is that the engineers take germ plasm from an entirely different animal or plant and insert it into another’s DNA, so you could end up with sheep that have litters and hogs that go “moo.” Gene editing, on the other hand, takes advantage of something called “mutagenesis” which has been going on ever since the first fish walked out of the sea on its own two gills. Gene editors simply speed up the process of evolution by “turning on and off” certain genetic switches. For example, you might say that eventually all beef animals will be polled, so genetic editors just speed up the process. It’s like evolution on steroids.

According to the Center for Food Integrity, gene editing is going to be a “game changer” and “is in its earliest stages.” Which merely means the gene editors haven’t got all their lobbyists in place to start paying off politicians in DC just yet. But they do say it will have big benefits for the “stakeholders.” I get nervous whenever I hear that word and I don’t understand how a group playing with our food on the genetic level can have the word “integrity” in its name.

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