This resembles the Chinese HIV CRISPR study because the deleted receptor was CCR5, an immune receptor. This was controversial because we don't know the long term effects of of deleting CCR5.
Viruses often use immune or other surface proteins as receptors presumably because they are important (can't be down-regulated too much).
For the pigs, it looks like they deleted just the SRCR5 domain of the CD163 protein. CD163 is used by macrophages to scavenge the hemoglobin-haptoglobin complex.
A 2017 article (of 6 pigs?) suggests that the engineered pigs are resistant to the virus "while maintaining biological function" although I don't see any experiments comparing hemoglobin-haptoglobin scavenging ability of engineered vs unedited pigs.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5322883
This 2024 study (of 40 pigs) found 'no significant difference' in a panel of health measures and meat quality, except that the engineered pigs had statistically significantly more greater backfat depth than the edited animals.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genome-editing/articles...
Interestingly, the mean weight of live pigs is slightly higher for edited pigs but lower for dead pigs. Total fat slightly higher for the edited pigs. These numbers are not statistically significant (but only a small number of pigs were tested).
The pigs were assessed at approximately 205 days in age. Pigs can live up to 20 years. Would be good to test the long term effects and the effects over multiple generations.
This paragraph is striking:
> Under the conditions of these studies, neither homozygous nor heterozygous or null pigs inoculated with PRRSV showed the acute clinical signs typically observed in commercial pigs and had overall low depression and respiratory scores (1). This may be explained by the fact that these pigs were sourced from a high-health farm and managed with minimal stress, which differs from disease expression under commercial conditions.
Sounds like the genetic editing is not necessary as long as the farm conditions are good..
repiret · 1h ago
> The pigs were assessed at approximately 205 days in age. Pigs can live up to 20 years. Would be good to test the long term effects and the effects over multiple generations.
It would be good to test for those things if the concern was for the long-term health of the pigs. The concern is whether or not they produce safe meat. Somewhere between most and all of the pork I've eaten in my life came from pigs less than a year old.
pazimzadeh · 46m ago
I understand that. But maybe at 205 days you won't detect a change which would more easily detectable later. Maybe we don't know exactly what to look for, but if something breaks over the long term that would give a clue.
They also only looked at the health of one generation, along with the number of offsprings from that first generation. What happens after 10 generations? 100? Could there be cumulative epigenetic effects from deleting this gene?
arrosenberg · 1h ago
w/r/t the HIV thing - there are HIV immune populations in Scandinavia who have a natural mutation affecting CCR5, so there is at least some reason to believe it’s safe to edit or knock out.
Do Scandinavians have compensatory mutations on other proteins, which allows them to have a mutant CCR5?
Presumably CCR5 exists for reason other than attracting HIV.
jbverschoor · 13m ago
And you find it strange the EU doesn’t buy it “food”
nerdjon · 8h ago
I really really hate that the science behind GMO’s gets clouded by the business practices of some of these companies.
You can separate the 2. Being anti gmo is being anti science. Decrying all GMO as bad, unhealthy, or whatever is as illogical as trying to make any blanket statement about any food. It just so happens that this one gets headlines.
We should be concerned about the businesses like Monsanto. But that is completely different.
Personally I have been trying to avoid any product that goes out of its way to claim “non gmo” because it just signals to me that they don’t care about sustainability and science.
It’s almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than the “organic” crap.
hollerith · 8h ago
So in other words there is nothing wrong with the GMO as an abstract principle, it is merely the actual GMOs on the market today that are bad in almost every instance.
nerdjon · 8h ago
No… that is not what I said at all.
I have yet to see a single instance of any actual health concerns raised from eating GMO food.
It has turned into marketing bullshit.
Again there has to be a clear separation between the science behind GMO and the business practices. They are very different discussions that need to happen but instead we are painting all of it with a negative light.
hollerith · 8h ago
>I have yet to see a single instance
OK, here is a single instance: lots of people are concerned about glyphosate residues in food, and GMO technology is the only thing that allows those food plants to even survive the amount of glyphosate being sprayed on them.
nerdjon · 8h ago
That is not a problem with the act of making GMO's in the first place, which again is the point that I am trying to make here.
If the product that had these modifications is perfectly safe without being sprayed with it, the science behind the creation of that GMO is still sound. The problem is what is being done to it after the fact.
Meaning, it being GMO itself is irrelevant and goes back to the business practices. Grouping that into an "Anti GMO" crusade just continues to further an anti-science narrative.
BuyMyBitcoins · 3h ago
We should be genetically modifying the pest species, not the crops. We should stick to going after the species that specialize in eating domesticated plants, like the corn borer or the Colorado potato beetle. Keep a small population “safe” on some remote island or a lab somewhere if they ever need to be reintroduced for some reason, but use knockout drive to eliminate them elsewhere.
Nullabillity · 8h ago
> Again there has to be a clear separation between the science behind GMO and the business practices.
Discussing the science is worthless until you can solve the business practices.
nerdjon · 8h ago
Then why require GMO labeling on food?
We don't require labeling for basically any other concerns about business practices and yet everyone seems to care about this one. When I buy chicken it doesn't have a sticker on it sayin "this chicken was probably kicked a few times". or slave labor was used on this chocolate. There are other voluntarily done labeling against both of those, but not a requirement to say it.
The problem is, the narrative is grouping them together. The general narrate is "concern over what it going into our bodies" which has nothing to do with business practices.
Nullabillity · 8h ago
> We don't require labeling for basically any other concerns about business practices
Maybe we should. Then again, pretty sure both of those are completely illegal anyway. (Not that that stops it entirely, but somehow I'm not convinced lying about it would be the thing to stop those actors.)
nerdjon · 8h ago
Right I mean the chocolate one is illegal. The chicken one, honestly not fully sure since Purdue keeps getting exposed but idk if they actually have had legal issues? But my point with both of those is, as bad as those would be they don't have an impact on your health eating the product.
Regardless, I don't disagree that we should have some labeling on business practices behind the food that we eat as long as it is actually communicating what needs to be communicated instead of just fear mongering.
"GMO Free" (or requiring it to say it has GMO) tells the consumer absolutely nothing. Its meaningless. All it does is try to sow fear about a thing that its existence itself is not the problem.
"Forbids farmers from using last years seeds", "Uses increased herbicide" like the example the other person mentioned, or whatever that actually communicates what the business concern is to the consumer would be great.
But that is not what we are doing here with labeling GMO.
AzzyHN · 12h ago
This has the potential to be really cool, and really beneficial to society.
It's a shame the people who want to do this the most are the people who want to treat the pigs the worst, and who care the least about potential side effects in humans.
JumpCrisscross · 12h ago
> shame the people who want to do this the most are the people who want to treat the pigs the worst
When there is almost-perfect (and unnecessary) union between animal rights interests and the anti-GMO community, this is almost a necessity.
> and who care the least about potential side effects in humans
I see no evidence of this.
SoftTalker · 12h ago
> the pigs appear entirely immune to more than 99% of the known versions of the PRRS virus, although there is one rare subtype that may break through the protection.
Doesn't this just set the table for that rare subtype to become dominant?
biophysboy · 1h ago
Evading immunity doesn’t always mean you become dominant. It might not be as transmissible, worse at replicating, or not as compatible with the host. Basically, there may be reasons why it was the rare subtype that remain true even in the new environment
nothercastle · 10h ago
Yes
sinuhe69 · 4h ago
>>That experiment [Chinese Crisper babies] on humans was widely decried as misguided.
Misguided? No, it’s criminal! It was widely criticized as deeply unethical, unprofessional and irresponsible. The guy was considered a rogue scientist and he was put in jail for many years.
So clearly it was not just ‘misguided’.
dyauspitr · 3h ago
I think it’s fine. I’m ready for heavily genetically modified humans given they volunteer for it.
lantry · 3h ago
I think your two statements are contradictory. Babies can't volunteer for anything
BuyMyBitcoins · 3h ago
>”Babies can't volunteer for anything”
Agreed. And yet some societies are perfectly fine with subjecting newborn boys to a permanent cosmetic surgery within days of being born. The decision is usually rationalized by giving some disease prevention excuse that is minimally effective at best and bogus at worst.
I find it utterly baffling. If you ask most people if it’s ethical to dock a dog’s tail or clip its ears because you think it looks better and it will be easier to clean, they’ll tell you that’s wrong. In many places it’s even illegal. But for a newborn? Well, that’s just how we do things.
timewizard · 2h ago
> subjecting newborn boys
It's an elective procedure. No one has made it mandatory.
> by giving some disease prevention excuse that is minimally effective at best and bogus at worst.
A reported 10x reduction in UTIs does not seem "minimal."
> if it’s ethical to dock a dog’s tail or clip its ears because you think it looks better
Usually it's done for working dogs to reduce their chance of injury. Even in countries where the practice is fully illegal exceptions are made for working dogs.
> But for a newborn? Well, that’s just how we do things.
We tend to respect peoples religions. Judaism, Islam and some branches of Christianity require it for males. We accept the practice for newborns under the logic that it will be less traumatic and less risky than doing it when they come of age later in life.
BuyMyBitcoins · 27m ago
Yes, it is not a mandatory procedure. However that misses the point. As an elective procedure made without an immediate and compelling reason, it should be left to the individual to make the decision and no one else. It should not be done routinely and the decision is not to be made casually. Most American parents simply elect to have the procedure done because they consider it “normal” and don’t investigate much further, if it all.
As for UTI reduction, I should have framed this differently. There is a reduction, but is that reduction worth it? Tonsillectomies used to be routine, but now they aren’t and are only suggested if there is a chronic problem. Surveys have been conducted and found that an overwhelming number of intact men would not have the procedure done just to have fewer UTI’s. I for one, would rather treat such infections as they arise rather than amputate some tissue just so that I could deal with those uncommon infections less often.
>”We accept the practice for newborns under the logic that it will be less traumatic and less risky than doing it when they come of age later in life.”
It is said that it is less traumatic to do this at birth, but I question this. I suspect people only believe this because babies cannot articulate what is happening to them and none of us are able to remember anything from our infancy. I have no idea what babies “think” but if we agree that this surgery is traumatic and risky, I simply don’t believe one can argue that it is less traumatic and less risky for a human who is only a few days old. A newborn cannot possibly understand and contextualize the intense pain that it is being subjected to, both during the procedure and during the recovery. Whereas an adolescent or an adult opting for this procedure would be informed beforehand, give explicit consent, and be given sufficient anesthesia.
voidfunc · 1h ago
Parents can volunteer the baby. And babies are easily renewable.
comrade1234 · 13h ago
This is just so that they can pack even more pigs into a factory farm.
onlyrealcuzzo · 3h ago
How is that possible?
Are the pigs going to grow vertical or something?
walterbell · 3h ago
> Culbertson says gene-edited pork could appear in the US market sometime next year. He says the company does not think pork chops or other meat will need to carry any label identifying it as bioengineered... Genus edited pig embryos to remove the receptor that the PRRS virus uses to enter cells.
What would be required to test retail pork product for the presence of this receptor?
We launched.. [a] project: to test 100 everyday foods for the presence of plastic chemicals.. We formed a team of four people, learned how this kind of chemical testing is performed, called more than 100 labs to find one that had the experience, quality standards, and turnaround time that we needed, collected hundreds of samples, shipped them, had them tested, painstakingly validated the results, and prepared them to share with you. Over time our effort expanded to nearly 300 food products. It took half a year and cost about $500,000.
Restaurants and grocery stores can advertise corporate policy to use non-GMO meat suppliers.
andsoitis · 14h ago
I can already see CRISPR Bacon™ in our future.
charliebwrites · 11h ago
I’d flip it:
If I ran a bacon company and I didn’t have CRISPR pigs I’d advertise in large red print
“CRISPR Free”
Or
“Non-genetically modified”
People are afraid of lab grown meat already, they’ll be terrified of CRISPR meat
My competition won’t be able to advertise the same
Aloisius · 9h ago
Sure. And I'd advertise in large print, "PRRS Virus Free"
Considering the prevalence of PRRSV, it would be difficult for farms with non-CRISPRed pigs to say the same.
Scare tactics can work both ways here.
smallnix · 3h ago
Farms without immune pigs can still claim it. Do some sampling tests, culling etc and call the product "virus free". But calling modified pigs not modified is tougher, I think.
nothercastle · 10h ago
If this becomes common it will be illegal to label food as gmo free
johnohara · 13h ago
Are you declaring first use?
janice1999 · 14h ago
I get it's a joke, but this won't be advertised to consumers. The current US administration (and previous ones to a lesser extent) oppose food labeling regulations. It's one of the main "non-tariff trade barriers" they complain about to the EU.
jfengel · 13h ago
The EU already refuses to import American chicken (over sanitary practices) and has limitations on beef (over hormones).
They'll ban American pork entirely if we can't guarantee that the GMO pork are excluded.
barbazoo · 14h ago
What’s the idea behind it? Just anti consumer or is there a reasonable angle?
estebank · 13h ago
If someone doesn't care one way or another, the label is useless. If someone has a positive opinion, the label helps the consumer seek it out. If someone has a negative opinion, the label helps the consumer avoid the product. If they fight against labeling it is because they consider that the third group is or can become bigger than the second.
ryandrake · 13h ago
I mean, that's so vague that it can be said about anything: Some people think X is positive and will buy the product and some people think X is negative and won't buy the product. Pretty obvious.
The purpose of food labels is to increase safety, transparency and honesty around the contents of food. Companies who oppose safety, transparency or honesty and/or produce products with questionable contents will oppose labels and companies who support safety, transparency and honesty will support them. I don't know many end-consumers who oppose labels themselves. But they will oppose products that contain questionable ingredients, so transparency is bad for companies that produce those products.
Dylan16807 · 29m ago
The median label is transparent and honest but that's not a guarantee, especially when marketing gets involved. Plenty of companies will make statements that are true but opaque, dishonest, and unrelated to safety. And they'll support any labeling standard that helps them along those lines.
tbrownaw · 11h ago
> and companies who support safety, transparency and honesty will support them.
Not quite.
Companies who can use the official labels to back up their own advertising campaigns will support them. (I know people who think that having a label for something is evidence of that thing being good or bad. No, it's evidence that someone thought that expending the effort to convince the government to have that label would have a positive return.)
Companies with more ability to amortize regulatory overhead (relative to their competitors) will support them, because for then that overhead is itself a competitive advantage.
ThunderSizzle · 9h ago
> The purpose of food labels is to increase safety, transparency and honesty around the contents of food.
USDA Organic label is rampant with fraud, and just having thr USDA label on it isn't a guarantee of trust. Similarly, the AHA endorsing oils blatantly bad for the heart is also similar example how labeling doesn't promote trust necessarily. Labels can and do lie, quite often even.
amanaplanacanal · 5h ago
I just want the label to tell me what's in the product. I can then make my own decision as to whether I think that's healthy or not.
ThunderSizzle · 5h ago
That's the double edged sword. Requiring labeling doesn't prevent label fraud, and pretending label fraud is rare is either naive or obtuse.
Oversight is then called for (eg USDA organic) which itself can still be frauded around, especially when dealing with sources outside of the US.
I'm reminded of a tiktok that had raw chicken labeled with a particular weight at Walmart. When they weighed it on a checkout scale, it didn't match the weight the label had. On multiple packages.
AStonesThrow · 5h ago
> just want the label to tell me what's in the product
You will never, ever get that. It's simply impossible. Label games are the biggest legal tug-of-war between consumers, regulators, vendors, and the industries.
When I began reading about labeling and its regulation, and all the bullshit tricks that are played to "stay compliant" but also lie out their asses to the consumer, and hide everything from us, I concluded that there is no way to truly read a label properly.
It basically comes down to a question of whether you trust this vendor or provider to give you a quality product. If you do not trust, then do not purchase. If they play games and lose trust, then do not purchase. Once you have a decent-sized blacklist, then there is no reason not to patronize those survivors.
encrypted_bird · 1h ago
I'm genuinely curious to learn more. Do you have any good, reputable sources that you can recommend reading? (No videos please.)
tbrownaw · 12h ago
The generic arguments against that sort of thing are distortion when the category boundaries are a bit off from where they should be, and overhead where any time you do anything there's extra compliance paperwork and delays.
Overhead in particular can be rather stifling. For example environmental reviews for large projects have reached a "the process is the punishment" level of overhead.
conception · 14h ago
Eats into profits and increases accountability.
justin66 · 14h ago
I believe they prefer the term “pro-business.”
theGeatZhopa · 13h ago
The new job at McDonald's: CRISPRer - your one job is to take the bacon and grill it crispy.
DesaiAshu · 12h ago
We could also just stop breeding genetically modified sentient animals for protein and directly synthesize protein...
barbazoo · 12h ago
Or just eat vegetables.
tengbretson · 4h ago
Or crispr yourself to photosynthesize.
undersuit · 3h ago
You lack the surface area to do much more than photosynthesize a snack's worth of calories.
shutupnerd0000 · 12h ago
Vegetables are alive too and scream when cut. We must starve.
> The researchers used microphones to record healthy and stressed tomato and tobacco plants, first in a soundproofed acoustic chamber and then in a noisier greenhouse environment. They stressed the plants via two methods: by not watering them for several days and by cutting their stems. After recording the plants, the researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to differentiate between unstressed plants, thirsty plants, and cut plants.
This is interesting but obviously very different from the suffering that animals are experiencing.
Dylan16807 · 27m ago
Man, by that standard a metal rod screams when you cut it.
cute_boi · 2h ago
Exactly — it's not even remotely comparable. It's like comparing a life-threatening disease to a paper cut. The scale is too much different.
stavros · 12h ago
Could we not just... not confine the pigs in spaces about as big as their bodies?
Kurzgesagt had a very interesting video[0] about the fact that it wasn't really that much more expensive to make sure we ate torture-free meat.
The majority of consumers aren't willing to spend a penny on that.
lazystar · 7h ago
does this mean they can create a kosher pig? huge business opportunity there.
looofooo0 · 2h ago
Lol, achieving the neccesary characteristics (cloven hooves and rumination), i am not sure that thing would be called a pig anymore.
BuyMyBitcoins · 3h ago
You’d have to CRISPR parts of the Torah to accomplish that.
ajma · 5h ago
Mmmm CRISPR bacon
unfitted2545 · 11h ago
good day to be a vegan.
ksec · 14h ago
>Regulations have eased since then, especially around gene editing, which tinkers with an animal’s own DNA rather than adding to it from another species, as is the case with the salmon and many GMO crops.
And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.
maxerickson · 13h ago
What sort of regulation do you think should apply to germ line editing to inactivate a particular gene?
Like is a blanket ban the only reasonable approach?
WhatIsDukkha · 13h ago
European consumers seem to not want factory farms that produce such low quality food that it needs to be CRISPRed (as is the case with this story) just to be kept alive long enough.
I also am in that camp, I don't want to eat pork raised in unsanitary conditions and then sold to me at top dollar (because lying/obscuring about sourcing).
thayne · 11h ago
Then you should want regulations about how the pigs are raised, not banning the use of CRISPR.
WhatIsDukkha · 10h ago
As an EATER of food what is the benefit of CRISPR/GMO?
There answer after a good 40 minutes of searching is... nothing.
It's a technology 100% in service of being lazier/sloppier for industrial scale food production and in service of IP restricting the food supply in favor of shareholder X or Y.
"but we can make tasteless US tomatoes on even more inappropriate cropland!"
...
Great for my stock portfolio to screw over developing countries but useless for me as a first world eater of food.
No proof of existence of a benefit.
Aloisius · 9h ago
Uh. Healthier animals.
This specific approval is for a gene therapy to prevent PRRSV infection - a major porcine virus and one that regularly infects pigs in the EU.
It has nothing to do with mistreatment of animals or factory farming.
blibble · 9h ago
poor husbandry is the primary objection to US food products
the chicken has to be chlorinated because it has literally been produced covered in faeces
this would seem to be enable it to become even worse
Aloisius · 9h ago
So don't import US food products if it scares you. That's a separate issue from whether to allow CIRPRed livestock.
Again, this disease regularly affects pigs in Europe and causes immense animal suffering.
blibble · 9h ago
> So don't import US food products if it scares you.
this is exactly the position of the EU, UK governments
and is one of the few policies that is universally supported by their populations
Aloisius · 9h ago
The EU and UK both import food from the US.
Some US food products are banned for concerns about safety, but they're hardly unique - the US also bans some food products from the EU and UK that are considered unsafe in the US.
None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.
blibble · 8h ago
no GM crops, no milk with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no beef with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no chlorinated chicken (nearly all of it), no washed eggs (nearly all of them)
and now pork will end up on that list too
> None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.
I couldn't care less if US'ians want to eat shit (here, literally)
Natsu · 13h ago
This seems to be a small edit to a single receptor to keep pigs from getting a particular disease by not allowing the virus to enter their cells. It's hard to see how helping pigs stay healthy could have a negative impact on human health, but a lot of people are against eating things that are 'unnatural' in any sense.
mrweasel · 12h ago
> It's hard to see how helping pigs stay healthy could have a negative impact on human health
I think that view underscores the differences in approach and beliefs in the US and Europe (not that both views aren't represented on both sides of the Atlantic, just distributed differently). The Europeans frequently have the view: Prove to us that this is not dangerous. Otherwise we prefer not taking the chance that you might be wrong. The US version in our eyes is frequently: "You can't prove it's not safe".
In this case you could risk introducing even worse diseases, who have previous been kept in check by the competition from the viruses you're now eliminating.
barbazoo · 12h ago
None of those pigs are “healthy”. If we didn’t pump them full of antibiotics they would never see the slaughterhouse.
486sx33 · 12h ago
Because CRISPR isn’t nearly that precise or exact, it always has unforeseen random fall off effects.
Also, who says that particular receptor ONLY prevents entry of a specific virus? It surely has other purposes that aren’t understood.
giraffe_lady · 12h ago
Are the pigs healthy? I think the sibling comment got to the heart of this a lot more directly.
There's an economic reward for keeping the pigs healthy enough to be harvested while spending the least amount of money on their environment. If this lowers the threshold for "healthy enough", or allows them to survive in an even worse, cheaper to maintain environment, that could introduce or exacerbate human health risks even if this change itself cannot.
There is also the animal welfare element, that has resonance to a lot of people. I am by no means a vegetarian, do not in principle object to killing animals for food. But the sheer scale of animal suffering in our food system gives me pause. I am reluctant to accept innovations that would allow us to increase the degree of suffering in exchange for an increase in output or decrease in price.
barbazoo · 12h ago
Healthy animals and industrial meat production are at two opposing ends of the same spectrum. You can have one but not both.
mschuster91 · 12h ago
You absolutely can have both. The threshold to pass for at least "decently healthy" isn't that high and prices aren't that much higher than "normal" industrial farming.
emorning3 · 12h ago
>>
It's hard to see how helping pigs stay healthy could have a negative impact on human health,
<<
Really? You don't see a logical flaw in your reasoning there?
paganel · 12h ago
> Like is a blanket ban the only reasonable approach?
From my pov as a fellow EU citizen a blanket ban for this kind of creepy stuff is the only viable option. Let the Americans become Frankesteins for all I care, it’s their choice, all in the name of “science”.
barbazoo · 12h ago
In the name of keeping up unsustainable lifestyles because one could not fathom to eat anything but abused animals. It’s part of the culture.
SoftTalker · 12h ago
To the extent they don't import, it's much more about protecting their own farm economy. Denmark for example has a lot of large pig farms, they don't want US pork competing with that.
lupusreal · 13h ago
Much of that is reasonable concern, but at least some of it is silly superstition. For instance, Germany doesn't permit the irradiation of most foods except dried herbs and spices. Irradiation is a perfectly safe way of increasing the safety and shelf life of food. Despite this, regulations on which foods if any this is permitted for vary greatly from country to country, influenced by how weirded out the uneducated public feels about it.
tbrownaw · 10h ago
> influenced by how weirded out the uneducated public feels about it.
So it's one of those "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" things?
486sx33 · 12h ago
I wish more people understood how much of what they consume is radiated at some point…
WhatIsDukkha · 12h ago
The alternative to radiation is mixing less poop into your meat etc.?
You understand that the majority of "food science" is designed to allow increasingly lazier and sloppier food handling and allowing it to still be palatable/not kill too many people right?
Don't fall into the "lower cost" idea either, being lazier and sloppier means higher corporate profits and not lower consumer prices (for worse food).
Compare the grass fed/ranged (produced on farms 1/10th the size of the US equivalent) BigMac in Germany versus the one you get anywhere in the US, which do you think is healthier and tastier? They are basically the same price to the consumer mysteriously...
lupusreal · 11h ago
This is the ignorance I was talking about. There are many reasons to irradiate food besides substandard handling. For instance, potatoes can be irradiated to inhibit sprouting, increasing how long you can store them. And imported fruits can be irradiated to prevent the spread of insects and other pests (without needing to use far riskier pesticides.)
WhatIsDukkha · 10h ago
You proved my point actually.
Neither of those things is actually useful as an eater of food?
You want less fresh food and from sketchier sources yet you think those are virtues?
lupusreal · 9h ago
They are useful to people who buy food (who hasn't had some potatoes sprout in a cabinet?), and to society generally. Insects are a fact of fruit, to call that "sketchy" is just ignorant.
WhatIsDukkha · 8h ago
Sprouted potatoes is a sing its time to get some new ones... you want to eat horded 6 month old potatoes glhf
I don't eat fumigated strawberries so replacing fumigated strawberries with irradiated strawberries is... not useful?
porridgeraisin · 13m ago
This is a case where the science evolved to justify a pre-decided narrative. This was absolutely necessary for an unsustainable food industry in an overly financialised nation(guess which). Don't waste your breath arguing logically. Just try your level best to ensure it doesn't occur in your local food economy, for the near future. Eventually, the GMO folks will reap.
VWWHFSfQ · 13h ago
> And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.
I mean, this is completely false. 8% of all EU agriculture imports is from USA and has grown year over year for decades.
> U.S. agricultural exports to the European Union reached a record $12.8 billion in 2024, a 1-percent increase from 2023
While this 8% are limited to "sorts of" and may not include "CRISPRed" or "chlorine-bleached".
Just a thought from me, as European, in case someone asks for the thinking behind strict import EU rules:
We just don't want to eat things that we believe may cause (abstract) harm, and, sorts of liability of the state and society to care for you and (God beware) your kids if some adverse effects are pinpointed to food/imports or misregulation. I think it's ok like that.
VWWHFSfQ · 13h ago
Was just commenting on the blanket claim that EU "doesn't allow" much ag import from the US, which is plainly wrong.
theGeatZhopa · 6h ago
It isn't plainly wrong as if they would allow much, then the share would be higher, as it is the case now for example Brazil (~9pc) or UK (>20pc).
If one think further, the share of export/import to/from non-eu countries is (rounded) 9pc of total EU's agriculture expenses. So, EU do not import much from US and others because they do not want certain techniques and methods and have their inner market and production anyway. Like it's the case with chlorine chickens and washed eggs. So, they don't allow such things to be sold to customers, which is infact not allowing import.
Viruses often use immune or other surface proteins as receptors presumably because they are important (can't be down-regulated too much).
For the pigs, it looks like they deleted just the SRCR5 domain of the CD163 protein. CD163 is used by macrophages to scavenge the hemoglobin-haptoglobin complex.
A 2017 article (of 6 pigs?) suggests that the engineered pigs are resistant to the virus "while maintaining biological function" although I don't see any experiments comparing hemoglobin-haptoglobin scavenging ability of engineered vs unedited pigs. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5322883
This 2024 study (of 40 pigs) found 'no significant difference' in a panel of health measures and meat quality, except that the engineered pigs had statistically significantly more greater backfat depth than the edited animals. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genome-editing/articles...
Interestingly, the mean weight of live pigs is slightly higher for edited pigs but lower for dead pigs. Total fat slightly higher for the edited pigs. These numbers are not statistically significant (but only a small number of pigs were tested).
The pigs were assessed at approximately 205 days in age. Pigs can live up to 20 years. Would be good to test the long term effects and the effects over multiple generations.
This paragraph is striking:
> Under the conditions of these studies, neither homozygous nor heterozygous or null pigs inoculated with PRRSV showed the acute clinical signs typically observed in commercial pigs and had overall low depression and respiratory scores (1). This may be explained by the fact that these pigs were sourced from a high-health farm and managed with minimal stress, which differs from disease expression under commercial conditions.
Sounds like the genetic editing is not necessary as long as the farm conditions are good..
It would be good to test for those things if the concern was for the long-term health of the pigs. The concern is whether or not they produce safe meat. Somewhere between most and all of the pork I've eaten in my life came from pigs less than a year old.
They also only looked at the health of one generation, along with the number of offsprings from that first generation. What happens after 10 generations? 100? Could there be cumulative epigenetic effects from deleting this gene?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14636691/
Do Scandinavians have compensatory mutations on other proteins, which allows them to have a mutant CCR5?
Presumably CCR5 exists for reason other than attracting HIV.
You can separate the 2. Being anti gmo is being anti science. Decrying all GMO as bad, unhealthy, or whatever is as illogical as trying to make any blanket statement about any food. It just so happens that this one gets headlines.
We should be concerned about the businesses like Monsanto. But that is completely different.
Personally I have been trying to avoid any product that goes out of its way to claim “non gmo” because it just signals to me that they don’t care about sustainability and science.
It’s almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than the “organic” crap.
I have yet to see a single instance of any actual health concerns raised from eating GMO food.
It has turned into marketing bullshit.
Again there has to be a clear separation between the science behind GMO and the business practices. They are very different discussions that need to happen but instead we are painting all of it with a negative light.
OK, here is a single instance: lots of people are concerned about glyphosate residues in food, and GMO technology is the only thing that allows those food plants to even survive the amount of glyphosate being sprayed on them.
If the product that had these modifications is perfectly safe without being sprayed with it, the science behind the creation of that GMO is still sound. The problem is what is being done to it after the fact.
Meaning, it being GMO itself is irrelevant and goes back to the business practices. Grouping that into an "Anti GMO" crusade just continues to further an anti-science narrative.
Discussing the science is worthless until you can solve the business practices.
We don't require labeling for basically any other concerns about business practices and yet everyone seems to care about this one. When I buy chicken it doesn't have a sticker on it sayin "this chicken was probably kicked a few times". or slave labor was used on this chocolate. There are other voluntarily done labeling against both of those, but not a requirement to say it.
The problem is, the narrative is grouping them together. The general narrate is "concern over what it going into our bodies" which has nothing to do with business practices.
Maybe we should. Then again, pretty sure both of those are completely illegal anyway. (Not that that stops it entirely, but somehow I'm not convinced lying about it would be the thing to stop those actors.)
Regardless, I don't disagree that we should have some labeling on business practices behind the food that we eat as long as it is actually communicating what needs to be communicated instead of just fear mongering.
"GMO Free" (or requiring it to say it has GMO) tells the consumer absolutely nothing. Its meaningless. All it does is try to sow fear about a thing that its existence itself is not the problem.
"Forbids farmers from using last years seeds", "Uses increased herbicide" like the example the other person mentioned, or whatever that actually communicates what the business concern is to the consumer would be great.
But that is not what we are doing here with labeling GMO.
It's a shame the people who want to do this the most are the people who want to treat the pigs the worst, and who care the least about potential side effects in humans.
When there is almost-perfect (and unnecessary) union between animal rights interests and the anti-GMO community, this is almost a necessity.
> and who care the least about potential side effects in humans
I see no evidence of this.
Doesn't this just set the table for that rare subtype to become dominant?
Misguided? No, it’s criminal! It was widely criticized as deeply unethical, unprofessional and irresponsible. The guy was considered a rogue scientist and he was put in jail for many years.
So clearly it was not just ‘misguided’.
Agreed. And yet some societies are perfectly fine with subjecting newborn boys to a permanent cosmetic surgery within days of being born. The decision is usually rationalized by giving some disease prevention excuse that is minimally effective at best and bogus at worst.
I find it utterly baffling. If you ask most people if it’s ethical to dock a dog’s tail or clip its ears because you think it looks better and it will be easier to clean, they’ll tell you that’s wrong. In many places it’s even illegal. But for a newborn? Well, that’s just how we do things.
It's an elective procedure. No one has made it mandatory.
> by giving some disease prevention excuse that is minimally effective at best and bogus at worst.
A reported 10x reduction in UTIs does not seem "minimal."
> if it’s ethical to dock a dog’s tail or clip its ears because you think it looks better
Usually it's done for working dogs to reduce their chance of injury. Even in countries where the practice is fully illegal exceptions are made for working dogs.
> But for a newborn? Well, that’s just how we do things.
We tend to respect peoples religions. Judaism, Islam and some branches of Christianity require it for males. We accept the practice for newborns under the logic that it will be less traumatic and less risky than doing it when they come of age later in life.
As for UTI reduction, I should have framed this differently. There is a reduction, but is that reduction worth it? Tonsillectomies used to be routine, but now they aren’t and are only suggested if there is a chronic problem. Surveys have been conducted and found that an overwhelming number of intact men would not have the procedure done just to have fewer UTI’s. I for one, would rather treat such infections as they arise rather than amputate some tissue just so that I could deal with those uncommon infections less often.
>”We accept the practice for newborns under the logic that it will be less traumatic and less risky than doing it when they come of age later in life.”
It is said that it is less traumatic to do this at birth, but I question this. I suspect people only believe this because babies cannot articulate what is happening to them and none of us are able to remember anything from our infancy. I have no idea what babies “think” but if we agree that this surgery is traumatic and risky, I simply don’t believe one can argue that it is less traumatic and less risky for a human who is only a few days old. A newborn cannot possibly understand and contextualize the intense pain that it is being subjected to, both during the procedure and during the recovery. Whereas an adolescent or an adult opting for this procedure would be informed beforehand, give explicit consent, and be given sufficient anesthesia.
Are the pigs going to grow vertical or something?
What would be required to test retail pork product for the presence of this receptor?
Along the lines of https://www.plasticlist.org/report
Restaurants and grocery stores can advertise corporate policy to use non-GMO meat suppliers.If I ran a bacon company and I didn’t have CRISPR pigs I’d advertise in large red print
“CRISPR Free”
Or
“Non-genetically modified”
People are afraid of lab grown meat already, they’ll be terrified of CRISPR meat
My competition won’t be able to advertise the same
Considering the prevalence of PRRSV, it would be difficult for farms with non-CRISPRed pigs to say the same.
Scare tactics can work both ways here.
They'll ban American pork entirely if we can't guarantee that the GMO pork are excluded.
The purpose of food labels is to increase safety, transparency and honesty around the contents of food. Companies who oppose safety, transparency or honesty and/or produce products with questionable contents will oppose labels and companies who support safety, transparency and honesty will support them. I don't know many end-consumers who oppose labels themselves. But they will oppose products that contain questionable ingredients, so transparency is bad for companies that produce those products.
Not quite.
Companies who can use the official labels to back up their own advertising campaigns will support them. (I know people who think that having a label for something is evidence of that thing being good or bad. No, it's evidence that someone thought that expending the effort to convince the government to have that label would have a positive return.)
Companies with more ability to amortize regulatory overhead (relative to their competitors) will support them, because for then that overhead is itself a competitive advantage.
USDA Organic label is rampant with fraud, and just having thr USDA label on it isn't a guarantee of trust. Similarly, the AHA endorsing oils blatantly bad for the heart is also similar example how labeling doesn't promote trust necessarily. Labels can and do lie, quite often even.
Oversight is then called for (eg USDA organic) which itself can still be frauded around, especially when dealing with sources outside of the US.
I'm reminded of a tiktok that had raw chicken labeled with a particular weight at Walmart. When they weighed it on a checkout scale, it didn't match the weight the label had. On multiple packages.
You will never, ever get that. It's simply impossible. Label games are the biggest legal tug-of-war between consumers, regulators, vendors, and the industries.
When I began reading about labeling and its regulation, and all the bullshit tricks that are played to "stay compliant" but also lie out their asses to the consumer, and hide everything from us, I concluded that there is no way to truly read a label properly.
It basically comes down to a question of whether you trust this vendor or provider to give you a quality product. If you do not trust, then do not purchase. If they play games and lose trust, then do not purchase. Once you have a decent-sized blacklist, then there is no reason not to patronize those survivors.
Overhead in particular can be rather stifling. For example environmental reviews for large projects have reached a "the process is the punishment" level of overhead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HLy27bK-wU
> Vegetables are alive too and scream when cut.
This is interesting but obviously very different from the suffering that animals are experiencing.
Kurzgesagt had a very interesting video[0] about the fact that it wasn't really that much more expensive to make sure we ate torture-free meat.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk
And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.
Like is a blanket ban the only reasonable approach?
I also am in that camp, I don't want to eat pork raised in unsanitary conditions and then sold to me at top dollar (because lying/obscuring about sourcing).
There answer after a good 40 minutes of searching is... nothing.
It's a technology 100% in service of being lazier/sloppier for industrial scale food production and in service of IP restricting the food supply in favor of shareholder X or Y.
"but we can make tasteless US tomatoes on even more inappropriate cropland!"
...
Great for my stock portfolio to screw over developing countries but useless for me as a first world eater of food.
No proof of existence of a benefit.
This specific approval is for a gene therapy to prevent PRRSV infection - a major porcine virus and one that regularly infects pigs in the EU.
It has nothing to do with mistreatment of animals or factory farming.
the chicken has to be chlorinated because it has literally been produced covered in faeces
this would seem to be enable it to become even worse
Again, this disease regularly affects pigs in Europe and causes immense animal suffering.
this is exactly the position of the EU, UK governments
and is one of the few policies that is universally supported by their populations
Some US food products are banned for concerns about safety, but they're hardly unique - the US also bans some food products from the EU and UK that are considered unsafe in the US.
None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.
and now pork will end up on that list too
> None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.
I couldn't care less if US'ians want to eat shit (here, literally)
I think that view underscores the differences in approach and beliefs in the US and Europe (not that both views aren't represented on both sides of the Atlantic, just distributed differently). The Europeans frequently have the view: Prove to us that this is not dangerous. Otherwise we prefer not taking the chance that you might be wrong. The US version in our eyes is frequently: "You can't prove it's not safe".
In this case you could risk introducing even worse diseases, who have previous been kept in check by the competition from the viruses you're now eliminating.
There's an economic reward for keeping the pigs healthy enough to be harvested while spending the least amount of money on their environment. If this lowers the threshold for "healthy enough", or allows them to survive in an even worse, cheaper to maintain environment, that could introduce or exacerbate human health risks even if this change itself cannot.
There is also the animal welfare element, that has resonance to a lot of people. I am by no means a vegetarian, do not in principle object to killing animals for food. But the sheer scale of animal suffering in our food system gives me pause. I am reluctant to accept innovations that would allow us to increase the degree of suffering in exchange for an increase in output or decrease in price.
Really? You don't see a logical flaw in your reasoning there?
From my pov as a fellow EU citizen a blanket ban for this kind of creepy stuff is the only viable option. Let the Americans become Frankesteins for all I care, it’s their choice, all in the name of “science”.
So it's one of those "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" things?
You understand that the majority of "food science" is designed to allow increasingly lazier and sloppier food handling and allowing it to still be palatable/not kill too many people right?
Don't fall into the "lower cost" idea either, being lazier and sloppier means higher corporate profits and not lower consumer prices (for worse food).
Compare the grass fed/ranged (produced on farms 1/10th the size of the US equivalent) BigMac in Germany versus the one you get anywhere in the US, which do you think is healthier and tastier? They are basically the same price to the consumer mysteriously...
Neither of those things is actually useful as an eater of food?
You want less fresh food and from sketchier sources yet you think those are virtues?
I don't eat fumigated strawberries so replacing fumigated strawberries with irradiated strawberries is... not useful?
I mean, this is completely false. 8% of all EU agriculture imports is from USA and has grown year over year for decades.
> U.S. agricultural exports to the European Union reached a record $12.8 billion in 2024, a 1-percent increase from 2023
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
Just a thought from me, as European, in case someone asks for the thinking behind strict import EU rules:
We just don't want to eat things that we believe may cause (abstract) harm, and, sorts of liability of the state and society to care for you and (God beware) your kids if some adverse effects are pinpointed to food/imports or misregulation. I think it's ok like that.
If one think further, the share of export/import to/from non-eu countries is (rounded) 9pc of total EU's agriculture expenses. So, EU do not import much from US and others because they do not want certain techniques and methods and have their inner market and production anyway. Like it's the case with chlorine chickens and washed eggs. So, they don't allow such things to be sold to customers, which is infact not allowing import.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...