Articles

Up until a year or so ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that the issue of genetically engineered foods in the UK had faded quietly away.  It hadn’t, of course. While consumer scepticism remained a big hurdle to introducing GMOs into the UK food system – and more widely into Europe – genetic engineers were creating new genetic technologies, imagining new ways to apply them to food and farming and, perhaps most importantly, inventing new narratives to position genetic engineering as simply a natural step on the continuum of plant breeding and improvement of our crop species. In the last decade genetic engineering and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) became ‘gene editing’, genetic engineering became ‘biotechnology’ and genetic engineers became ‘biotechnologists’. ‘Sustainable intensification’, ‘nature-based solutions’, ‘precision breeding’ and ‘speed breeding’ have all become euphemisms for genetic engineering.

This year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to two scientists―Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna―“who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans.” According to the Nobel Prize committee the “genetic scissors” of CRISPR “have […]

The global spread of coronavirus/COVID-19 has sent researchers and scientists into overdrive to find both treatments and cures. In the meantime, doctors and other practitioners are, to a large extent, improvising. They are employing best-care practices for the very sick in hospital and providing best-guess advice for those with mild symptoms who are self-isolating, and […]

In a hall filled to the rafters with agroecological farmers, a man approaches the podium. Most already know what he’s going to say, but they’ve come to listen anyway—only half believing that what they’ve seen and heard about his assault on farming and farmers could be accurate. George Monbiot is a journalist and author specializing […]

These days, without most people being aware of it, genetic engineering is spreading from the crops in the field to the animals in the barn.

In the first Jurassic Park movie, there is a scene where the head zookeeper reveals that the genetically engineered velociraptors have been systematically testing the electric fences that confine them to find out where they are weakest and where they are strongest. Remarkably prescient for a popular film, it has become, throughout its franchise, a […]

Thanksgiving dinner means only one thing for millions of us: turkey. Of the 100 million turkeys on farms around the U.S., 46 million of them will be eaten on Thanksgiving Day. Americans will consume another 22 million turkeys over the Christmas holidays, according to the National Turkey Federation. When turkeys arrive at our supermarkets, plucked […]

What will we eat in the future? What was once an rhetorical musing has now become the critical question of our time as scientists grapple with tricky questions about life—and larders—in a climate-changing world. Agriculture is both a key contributor to climate change and one of the sectors most vulnerable to those changes. That fact alone […]

A new study confirms what most scientists already know, and what proponents of industrial agribusiness either don’t get, or won’t admit: Nature abhors a monoculture. The study suggests that by restoring biodiversity, we can vastly enhance the soil’s potential to store carbon. That’s good news for the climate. And there are co-benefits: healthier, more resilient […]

Novelty, the ability to stay ahead of trends and to offer the unusual is one of the things that drives the restaurant business. There is very little regulation around the kind of food that can be served. There’s no real prohibition, for instance, against serving endangered species – though this is a questionable practice, especially […]