Genetically Modified May Save Africa and Other Places From Disease and Starvation

As much as there is an aversion in the Global North (mostly Western countries) to genetically modified (GM) anything, this technology is truly lifesaving.

Here are four examples:

1. GM golden rice has an added gene that biofortifies it with vitamin A. It is designed for rice-dependent diets. Adding vitamin A prevents childhood and night blindness, helps strengthen the body’s immune response and decreases the severity of respiratory, gastrointestinal and other infections including measles. Currently, as many as 500,000 children go blind from a lack of vitamin A in early diets.
2. GM mosquitoes are being engineered to fight vector-borne diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika. Millions each year, mostly in tropical and semitropical latitudes are at risk of these insect-spread diseases. Malaria alone kills 400,000 annually. Recently there have been a number of laboratory-bred releases of GM mosquitoes that are designed to mate with wild populations that become infertile or produce larvae that die before maturing into adults. The World Health Organization has recognized the efficacy of this GM research and provided guidelines for its further pursuit.
3. GM fall armyworms have been engineered to end the devastating impact of this crop-destroying insect that has infested parts of Africa, South America, Australia, the Middle East and Asia for several years. An engineered version of the insect when introduced into the wild has been designed to produce high levels of female mortality. The advent of this GM technology couldn’t come soon enough for countries heavily reliant on corn and another 350 different grown crops critical to their food security and economies.
4. A little over a month ago, a 57-year old man in Baltimore, Maryland, was the first recipient of a GM pig’s heart. This wasn’t a medical stunt put on by surgeons seeking publicity. This person was no longer a candidate for a human heart transplant and had been on an external mechanical heart pump for two months. He faced certain death and thus was a willing candidate.

Xenotransplants have come a long way since Baby Fae, the first recipient of a heart transplant was performed back in 1984. At that time our ability to modify the genetic information of another species to make it compatible with humans didn’t exist. But today it does and as of February 10th, the heart transplant patient with his GM pig’s heart is now going through rehab.

GM engineering of plants and insects has been seen by a large number of people, mostly in the Global North (the rich western countries of the world) as human tinkering that is interfering with “God’s work.” Yet humans have been modifying plants and animals through selective breeding since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. The difference now is that science allows us to do this to a species’ DNA rather than trial and error experimentation involving multiple generations of cross-fertilization and observation.

Today we tolerate producing new breeds of dogs and cats and hybrid versions of wheat and corn, using a method that is 10,000-years old. But when scientific advancements give us the means to parse DNA and selectively remove a bad gene and replace it with a healthy one, or one that adds a specific advantageous attribute, many of us interpret it as almost obscene.

I know I have qualms, and you may have too, about sacrificing animals to save human lives when we are at the dawn of other medical breakthroughs that could make xenotransplants no longer a needed technology. If we can perfect the regrowing of human organs and other body parts using donated stem cells, and be able to do this safely and speedily, then like laboratory-grown meat which is becoming a reality, we will end the need for xenotransplants.

A final note about GM crops and ingredients in the foods we eat. Today when I shop in my local grocery store, products proudly display “no GMO” as if this statement means they are safer and more wholesome than other items on the shelves. But GMO for those living in the Global South can be the difference between a full belly and starvation. It can be the difference between being blind for life or being able to see. It can be the difference between dying from malaria or another vector-borne disease or thriving. And in one man’s life in the Global North, it is a beating heart.