·
Megan
Thompson:
If you
fly to the tiny province of Prince Edward Island on Canada's eastern coast,
then drive about an hour east out of the capital city, you'll finally come to a
small, unmarked building guarded by a chain-link fence. There's nothing special
about it outside. But inside is another story.
These tanks contain the only genetically engineered animal in
the world that's been deemed safe to eat: Atlantic salmon modified to grow
faster.
·
Ron Stotish:
Using new technology is an intelligent way to meet the global food
security needs of the future.
·
Megan Thompson:
Ron Stotish is chief technology
officer of Aquabounty, the company producing the
genetically engineered – or "GE" – salmon.
·
Ron Stotish:
We're going to run out of land, and run
out of water to do what we're continuing to do, unless we find a better way to
do it.
·
Megan Thompson:
It's a
relatively small operation making big waves. 50 Employees at 3 facilities in
Canada and the U.S., breeding, hatching and growing the salmon trademarked
"aquadvantage."
They hope
to have it on the American market next year. It will be the final step in a
long process that began in another part of Canada.
The story
of genetically engineered salmon began nearly three decades ago, here in
Newfoundland, Canada, at Memorial University's ocean sciences center, one of the world's leading marine research labs.
In the 1980's, physiologist Garth Fletcher and his colleagues
started reading about the first work being done to create a genetically
modified mouse.
·
Garth Fletcher:
We said, well if they can do that in mice, maybe we can do that
in fish.
·
Megan Thompson:
Fletcher came up with the idea of altering Atlantic salmon DNA
to get the fish to grow more quickly.
·
Garth Fletcher:
Because behind every production system is an accountant that
says are we making any money, can we produce the fish
faster, can we turn the inventory over, type idea.
·
Megan Thompson:
A
salmon's growth hormones are more active during certain times of the year.
Fletcher thought, what if he could get the hormones to stay active all the
time?
He took
DNA from a fish called an ocean pout, which produces a special protein all year
long that helps it survive in frigid waters.
Fletcher took the DNA that keeps those proteins turned on and
running and connected it to a salmon growth hormone gene, which had the effect
of keeping the growth hormone on.
·
Garth Fletcher:
Now it's free to run summer and winter if you wish. All year round.
·
Megan Thompson:
Fletcher inserted the gene into his salmon eggs and waited to
see what would happen.
·
Garth Fletcher:
So in the
spring of 1990 we saw some big ones. So we said 'oh,
maybe it's that.'
·
Megan Thompson:
So you
could see these fish were bigger?
·
Garth Fletcher:
Yes, much bigger than the other ones.
·
Megan Thompson:
As scientists, seeing that what you're doing is working, what
does that feel like?
·
Garth Fletcher:
Well we were just amazed, right.
·
Megan Thompson:
Fletcher
patented his technology and started a company, which eventually became Aquabounty. His invention is still the center
of its work, a genetically engineered salmon that grows twice as fast as
regular salmon. While actually consuming less feed.
The difference is significant: these fish are both about 2 years
old.
·
Megan Thompson:
It's really hard to believe that these
salmon are the same age and there's such a huge size difference between the two
of them.
·
Ron Stotish:
This fish is 5 kilos, ready for market. That fish is a long ways from market.
·
Megan Thompson:
In the
United States, the majority of the salmon consumed is
Atlantic salmon, but almost all of it is imported from ocean farms in Chile,
Norway and Canada.
That's because, in the U.S., wild Atlantic salmon is endangered,
so catching it is illegal. Ocean farming is only permitted in a few places and
until recently, there wasn't much interest in expensive, land-based production
like Aquabounty's.
·
Ron Stotish:
If you
have a fish that grows a little faster, such as an Aquadvantage
that reaches market weight in half the time, you can produce those fish almost
anywhere because you can grow them in a land-based aquaculture facility.
Closer to
consumers.
So you can reduce the transportation cost, you can reduce the
carbon footprint associated with transportation.
So this
opens up a whole new opportunity for global salmon production.
·
Megan Thompson:
Ron Stotish talks of producing
Atlantic salmon in places it's never been done before – like Indiana, where Aquabounty has set up its first American facility.
·
Ron Stotish:
This is a hot smoked salmon preparation from a roughly 5 kilo Aquadvantage salmon.
·
Megan Thompson:
He gave
me a taste of the product.
Ron Stotish and Megan Thompson: It's
delicious. It's very good.
·
Megan Thompson:
I think some people might think that this would taste somehow
different than non-genetically modified salmon, but it tastes exactly the same.
·
Ron Stotish:
It's exactly the same.
·
Megan Thompson:
Aquabounty first applied for approval from
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1995.
While
it's been regulating genetically modified plants for more than 25 years, the
FDA had never approved a genetically engineered animal as food before. And so it took them two decades to make a decision.
And,
there was stiff opposition – protesters sent nearly 2 million comments to the
FDA and nearly 80 retailers vowed not to sell it.
Despite
the concern, in 2015, the FDA approved Aquadvantage
salmon, saying the product is "safe to eat," "has no significant
impact on the environment" and it found "no biologically relevant
differences" between GE salmon and other farm-raised salmon.
The next year the Canadian government gave the salmon its stamp
of approval, and Aquabounty hit the market there
first, since selling a modest 20,000 pounds of its product. Canadian opponents
remain outraged.
·
Sharon Labchuk:
Do we have the right to manipulate the DNA of another living
being, and I don't agree that that's something that humans should be able to do.
·
Megan Thompson:
Sharon Labchuk, of the environmental
group Earth action, has helped lead the fight against GE salmon in Canada for
decades. She says no one can predict what will happen when people start eating
the fish over an extended period of time.
·
Sharon Labchuk:
We've had, say, 20 years or so experience in Canada of
genetically engineered plant foods, and we really don't know what are the health effects.
·
Megan Thompson:
So far, Aquabounty has sold its salmon
to distributors, and the company says it doesn't know where it ended up after
that. There's no requirement that restaurants or food services label g.e. salmon. And there's no requirement it be labeled in Canadian stores, either.
·
Sharon Labchuk:
People should have the right to have their fish labeled. And they should have a right to know whether
they're eating genetically modified salmon.
·
Megan Thompson:
And if it does end up being distributed in a store like this?
·
Sharon Labchuk:
Nobody will know. There's no idea.
·
Megan Thompson:
It is a fact that somebody could be eating your product, and
they wouldn't know it. Why not just label it so people know what they're
eating?
·
Ron Stotish:
As a small company, with your first offering, with a limited
quantity, there's a huge risk associated with just putting a label, genetically
modified, genetically engineered, on it. If it's identical to the traditional
food, why put a label on it?
·
Megan Thompson:
But its DNA has been altered.
·
Ron Stotish:
It's the same proteins, the same food that you've been consuming
forever.
·
Megan Thompson:
But not everyone thinks it's that simple.
·
Lisa Murkowski:
At a bare minimum, they must be honest with the consumer with
what you're feeding your family.
·
Megan Thompson:
To Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the issue of labeling is such a big deal that she single-handedly
delayed the sale of Aquadvantage salmon in the U.S.
for years.
·
Lisa Murkowski:
It's that "frankenfish,' is what
we call it. Because it is so unnatural.
·
Megan Thompson:
As a
member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Murkowski attached a rider to
a budget bill that blocked the GE salmon from being sold in the U.S. Until the
department of agriculture came up with rules for how it must be labeled.
Murkowski's home state of Alaska is also the nation's leading
seafood producer. Its massive, wild-caught Pacific salmon industry is a source
of state pride. Murkowski even caught the huge Pacific salmon mounted on her
office wall herself.
·
Megan Thompson:
How much of this is about opposing this technology and how much
of this is about protecting that industry, the politics surrounding that?
·
Senator Murkowski:
It is
more than just an industry. It is an identity, and it is something that we are
so keenly tied to.
The last thing we need is the introduction of some genetically
engineered mutated species that could compete with our wild stocks for food and
within habitat.
·
Megan Thompson:
What
Murkowski's worried about is the new, g.e. salmon
somehow escaping and mingling with Alaska's wild species.
Even
though the only places g.e. salmon is approved to be
grown now are the Aquabounty facilities in Canada and
Indiana, from which, the FDA said, there's an "Extremely low
likelihood" of escape .
In Canada, the Aquabounty facility
does sit right across from a river that flows into the Atlantic Ocean.
·
Ron Stotish:
All the water going through here goes through these containment
barriers, these sock filters.
·
Megan Thompson:
But Ron Stotish says, any water
discharged into the river flows through at least five separate filters inside,
and more barriers outside.
·
Ron Stotish:
The likelihood of a 2-3 kilo salmon going through one of those
filters, through one of those boxes and running out across the street and going
through is virtually zero. We've been operating for more than 25 years and
we've never lost a single fish.
·
Megan Thompson:
He knows this because every fish is microchipped and tracked.
And even if they did escape, almost none could breed with ordinary salmon
because Aquabounty uses a process that it says
renders about 99% of them sterile.
·
Yonathan Zohar:
I think that we are as safe as we can be.
·
Megan Thompson:
Aquaculture expert Yonathan Zohar
leads the department of marine biotechnology at the University of Maryland. He
provided expertise to the FDA when it was deciding whether to approve the
genetically engineered salmon. Zohar does believe the sterilization technology
can be improved and is currently doing research on just that. But for now,
Zohar says there's another reason not to fear escaped g.e.
salmon – studies show they wouldn't survive long in the wild.
·
Yonathan Zohar:
They will
not last for very long.
Wild fish are outcompeting them when they're exposed to mother
nature-type of conditions.
·
Megan Thompson:
Zohar also wants to remind people that they're probably already
eating a lot of genetically modified food.
·
Yonathan Zohar:
I mean in this country, about 70 percent of all the plantable crops are genetically engineered. And people
don't blink twice about it.
·
Yonathan Zohar:
We are
facing a major significant seafood crisis. Simply said, more people eat more
fish, and as a result, we are fishing out and emptying our oceans.
If you are going to use genetic engineering and produce a fish
that is going to make it to the market size, and half the time, this will be
huge. This will help aquaculture actually meet the
challenge and become the industry that we need it to become so we stop fishing
out the oceans.
·
Megan Thompson:
Aquabounty is betting on it. In March, the
company got the green light to start business in the U.S. A few months after
the USDA issued labeling guidelines for all
genetically engineered foods.
There are a few labeling options:
printing a symbol or the word "bioengineered" on the package or
companies can print instructions on how to get more information. But some of
those instructions don't need to mention the word, "bioengineered,"
and that's a problem for Senator Lisa Murkowski.
·
Murkowski:
You can go to the bar code scanner, if you will, and get a
reading. But you don't, you don't have the label that says that it is
genetically engineered. And that's what I'm concerned about.
·
Megan Thompson:
Murkowski is pushing a bill to make the labeling
more explicit. But none of this will matter if Aquabounty's
salmon end up in restaurants or similar institutions, because no labeling is required there. In the meantime, Aquabounty's gearing up production at its Indiana facility
and its salmon could hit the U.S. market as early as the fall of 2020.