Program: 03 | Artificial Evolution: Yuck or Yum? Gene-Edited Meat

UNEDITED

Peter de Kruijff: Humans are continuing to multiply.

Newsreader (Archive): Global population is projected to hit an all-time high, reaching the landmark figure of eight billion people.

Peter de Kruijff: With so many mouths to feed, making sure everyone gets something to eat is becoming more and more complex.

Newsreader (Archive): Now globally, 700 million people are food insecure, meaning they don't have access to enough safe and nutritious food.

Peter de Kruijff: And maintaining sustainable food production is also getting more difficult. 

Newsreader (Archive): Carbon emissions are driving ocean warming and acidification, destroying biodiversity and causing sea levels rise that threatens heavily inhabited coastlines.

Peter de Kruijff: So, food producers around the world are looking for alternatives.

Newsreader (Archive): While the world's population is consuming more farmed fish than wild caught fish for the first time in history.

Peter de Kruijff: But can science find a way to make something like fish farming sustainable and tasty?

Mark Tizard: Now we've seen in Japan the ability to just edit the gene that controls muscle growth.

Peter de Kruijff: And this gene-edited food is beginning to appear on supermarket shelves.

James Oaten: It looks like seabream, it smells like seabream. I'm going to say it's seabream.

Peter de Kruijff: I'm Peter de Kruijf. I'm an ABC environment reporter. For Science Friction, this is Artificial Evolution on ABC Radio National, my series on how gene technologies are reshaping the world around us.

And when it comes to food production, animals we eat are being edited in labs to be faster growing, resistant to disease and adapted to climate change.

Alison Van Eenennaam: I really do believe that innovation is important for agricultural production and it's the only way we're going to address some of the problems that are coming down the pipe at us.

Peter de Kruijff: But, when it comes to the consumer, will they be comfortable with this innovation?

Rachel Ankeny: Australians don't like the wool being pulled over their eyes.

(MUSIC)

Peter de Kruijff: Japan was once the world's biggest exporter of fish, but now half of the country's own domestic supply is imported. Catches are declining and species like skipjack tuna have seen a big drop.

Newsreader (Archive): For half a century, Takeo Nakajo has fished for katsuo, or skipjack tuna, off Japan's southwest coast. And catch numbers in the area are a quarter of what they were in the 1980s.

Peter de Kruijff: Like in many parts of the world, land and sea-based aquaculture is on the rise in Japan. Depending on the fish species being farmed, the sustainability of what you feed them has faced scrutiny.

Newsreader (Archive): It's claimed it takes five kilograms of wild fish to produce a kilogram of fish meal, so aquaculture may use more fish than it produces.

Peter de Kruijff: Well, um, that's a problem. So a scientist from Kyoto University, Masato Kinoshita, turned to genetic engineering as a solution. As a quick refresh from episode two, genetic engineering is where you use technology to alter DNA.

Masato wanted to see if he could use gene editing to make red seabream, which is related to Australia's pink snapper, more sustainable. In 2018, he used a newer genetic editing tool, which you may have heard of called CRISPR. To precisely turn off a specific gene in a red seabream called myostatin. Here's animal geneticist Alison Van Eenennaam from the University of California. She keeps track of genetic editing projects in food production, and she's across the process.

Alison Van Eenennaam: Basically, it increases the amount of protein or muscle that an animal has, because, well, myostatin is muscle stop. So if you knock out muscle, stop, you get muscle go.

And so in the case of fish, it just produces fish that get to market weight in less time. They don't necessarily get bigger. I mean, it depends, obviously, when they're processed. But in the case of animals, their cost of production is about 70% feed. So if you can get an animal to market weight in half the time, obviously, it eats approximately half the feed, which is beneficial to producers.

And actually, from a sustainability perspective, it really lowers the kind of emissions per unit product too. So it has an environmental benefit as well.

Peter de Kruijff: Japan's regulators decided in 2021 this gene-edited sea bream was OK to eat, making it the first animal food product made with newer gene-editing tools to hit a domestic market. Masato's company, Regional Fish, was quickly able to bring two more species, including a flounder, known in Japan as a flatfish, to market.

Alison Van Eenennaam: The third species they edited was puffer fish, which you may know is quite a toxic fish and you have to cook it in a very special way. 

Peter de Kruijff: Oh yeah. The puffer fish, or fugu, is super poisonous.

Newsreader (Archive): It's horrendously expensive, hideously ugly, and contains enough poison to kill you many times over. But in Japan, fugu is a delicacy almost worth dying for. If you eat the most toxic parts, you die fast. They say it's 200 times more poisonous than cyanide.

Alison Van Eenennaam: You'd think whilst they were going in there and editing it to get to market in half the normal time, they may as well go out and inactivate the gene that makes the toxin. They could have made a safer fish too, but that's not what they did. 

Peter de Kruijff: The company does have a long-term vision of creating poison-free puffer fish and allergen-free shrimp by 2050, as well as fish with smaller bones and no scales like an eel. But for now, I was curious about what the current offering of gene-edited fish tastes like. Luckily, I had some colleagues in Japan happy to give it a try. Unfortunately, puffer fish was sold out. But flounder sashimi and steamed sea bream were still on the menu.

(MUSIC)

James Oaten: Welcome to ‘Cooking with the ABC Tokyo Bureau’. I'm James Oaten, the North Asia correspondent. This is Akane Saiki, my trusted producer. The next dish is a cooked one with rice, already washed rice. For the purposes of those at home, we're going to pretend we wash the rice. Don't do as we do. So we've put in some rice in the rice cooker. I'm now opening the fish broth and putting that in the rice cooker. Just fill it up?

Peter de Kruijff: And then 15 minutes later, voila! So what's James and Akane's verdict on the gene-edited fish?

James Oaten: Alright, let's try the cooked dish.

Akane Saiki: Itadakimasu!

James Oaten: This one’s good. Yeah, I was just going to say I like this one. This one's good. I mean, it tastes what I expect it would. It's still firm, so it's not just completely dissolving in the bowl or in my mouth as I eat it. It's a good meaty, fishy flavour without being too pungent or anything, but it doesn't lack flavour either. So it's a happy medium for me. What do you think?

Akane Saiki: This one is more than supermarket quality.

James Oaten: So this is better than supermarket for you?

Akane Saiki: Well it's very expensive, the sea bream in Japan. So if I can get it at a cheaper price, I would be very content.

Peter de Kruijff: There you have it. Gene-edited sea bream confirmed: pretty good!

James Oaten and Akane Saiki from the ABC Tokyo Bureau there, our intrepid taste testers.

For the moment, the gene-edited fish cost more than similar non-gene-edited products. But the company Regional Fish is scaling up and recently announced a fourth species that it will bring to market. So why are they able to bring these products to market so fast if they involve genetic editing?

Well, that requires understanding the difference between what we now know as gene-editing and an older but similar term you may be aware of called genetic modification.

Genetic engineering got started in the 1970s. Biochemists moved DNA from one bacteria into another, creating the first genetically modified organism, or GMO.

Alison Van Eenennaam: Typically, that term has been used for an older technology that's been around about 40 years or so.

Peter de Kruijff: That's genetic engineering expert Alison van Eenennaam. She says this inserting of transgenes, genes that go from one organism into another, could be a little random in its results.

Alison Van Eenennaam: And it would kind of introgress or integrate … or get itself into the genome in a random spot. You didn't know where it was going to go. And typically that was being done to give that organism, plant, animal, a novel characteristic or trait, like insect resistance in the case of, for example, BT corn.

Peter de Kruijff: So corn that could repel insects thanks to it being genetically modified with genes from soil-dwelling bacteria. And this was the promise of GMO, speeding up the lengthy process of breeding plants or animals for favourable traits. From decades to a few years. And then saving money because of this produce that may be resistant to insects, disease or weather extremes.

Alison Van Eenennaam: And that technology basically has been around for a long time. And that's the typically the products that are on the market now that are labelled as GMO, is referring to that particular technology. And what was kind of different about that technology was you were actually introducing typically a protein from a different species. So maybe a bacterial protein in a corn plant. And so you had to test to make sure that the protein that was being produced by that construct wasn't a toxin or an allergen. And so there were potentially novel food safety risks associated with it.

Peter de Kruijff: This created some public concern in places like America in the 1980s.

Newsreader (Archive): Scientists there who've been trying to hold field tests of these organisms have been plagued by protesters who've fought through the courts and taken direct action to stop them.

Peter de Kruijff: And in Australia in the late 1990s. 

Newsreader (Archive): Genetically engineered foods have no history of safe use and the companies haven't demonstrated to the public's satisfaction that they are safe and nutritious.

Peter de Kruijff: Out of the concern, the office of the Gene Technology Regulator was set up in 2001 as a watchdog for genetic modification in Australia. Basically to make sure there are no health, safety or environmental issues that may spring up from a genetically modified organism. But the Australian public and farmers still have concerns about GMO. Particularly when modified crops are grown next to regular ones. In Tasmania, there's a moratorium on GMOs until 2029. Alison though says there's nothing to worry about.

Alison Van Eenennaam: I'm happy to report after 40 years there is literally no evidence of any safety concerns with the GMOs that are actually on the market, despite what you might read on Twitter.

Peter de Kruijff: In the past 20 years, GMO vaccines, viruses and grains have all been released in Australia. But newer genetic tools are changing the game. About 12 years ago came CRISPR, which is a type of guided nuclease.

Alison Van Eenennaam: Which is basically a fancy pair of molecular scissors.

Peter de Kruijff: That allows you to make a break in DNA.

Alison Van Eenennaam: Which as you may recall is the genetic blueprint of life. And because you have such precision in where it makes that break, you can go in and tweak a gene.

Peter de Kruijff: So you could use this tool to add a transgene for a more precise GMO. Or you could also inactivate or delete genes, like those Japanese fish.

Alison Van Eenennaam: And you might want to do that because that particular gene results in a characteristic that's undesirable. For example, it might make animals resistant to disease. And if you can inactivate that gene, it can maybe make them resistant to a particular virus, for example.

And so it's a little bit different to traditional GMOs where there's foreign DNA involved and there's this random integration of a construct. Whereas with gene editing, you're just tweaking the native or the animal's own DNA and you're not introducing any foreign or exogenous or transgenic DNA.

Peter de Kruijff: And this is the rub. In recent years, some countries have changed their laws so removing a gene from an animal or plant doesn't require regulation. That's because it's seen as a mutation that could happen naturally in the environment during the breeding process. And as we've learnt, the first gene-edited animal products are now being commercialised.

Alison Van Eenennaam: And there was a recent decision you may or may not have heard of in, I think, June 26th by Food Standards Australia, which is kind of the food safety authority of Australia and New Zealand where they basically updated their definition of a genetically modified food to say that it has to have foreign DNA or this transgenic DNA, which often is not the case in gene-edited products, especially when you're just inactivating a gene.

Peter de Kruijff: That means gene-edited products like the Japanese fish could be sold here in Australia without extra regulations or labels. Besides fish in Japan, two gene-edited animals have also been approved in the US. Cattle with shorter hair to deal with hotter climates and a pig resistant to a sometimes-fatal respiratory disease.

Alison Van Eenennaam: That has enabled products to basically be allowed to come to market in a way that just really has been impossible with the prohibitively expensive GMO regulations that really has blocked the use of this technology in animal agriculture for 40 years.

Peter de Kruijff: The change has its opponents, like the organic farming industry, which is concerned Australia's new food regulations will mislead consumers. So, will gene technology solve ethical problems in industrial agriculture, or just create more?

(MUSIC)

Newsreader (Archive): Each year, billions of one-day-old male chicks are culled because they don't lay eggs and aren't bred to chicken meat standards.

Peter de Kruijff: Here in Australia, we have about 20 million laying hens, which means that roughly 20 million male chicks have been destroyed. Roosters can't lay eggs, and we don't tend to eat them. So, they're killed shortly after they're born when their gender is identified.

Lynn Kennedy: Unfortunately, the poor little fellas don't have a long life.

Peter de Kruijff: That's Lynne Kennedy. She's been selling eggs for more than 30 years. She lives in Newdegate in WA's Wheatbelt.

Lynn Kennedy: When I started, we would have hatched our own birds, and we would have had the roosters, and we would have ate them, like many, many other people. But now, with a lot of modern technology, they're breeding birds that grow quicker and grow bigger. So, people have done away with that, and they don't have to have the smaller birds, and perhaps the taste is not there. So, that's what, you know, the poor old roosters are not used.

Peter de Kruijff: If there was a way to determine a chicken's gender before it was born, Lynne says it could make eggs cheaper at the supermarket. That's because of the cost of incubating males before they hatch, which is then passed on to farmers like Lynne when they buy laying hens.

Lynn Kennedy: You know, my layers are quite expensive now, so that's why eggs are dear in the shops. And if they were able to, after a very short time, have these euthanised or put somewhere else, it hopefully would bring the price down.

Peter de Kruijff: It's a major issue for egg producers both ethically and financially. But in 2016, with the help of gene editing, CSIRO molecular biologist Mark Tizard and his colleagues came up with a solution.

Mark Tizard: Well, this is a problem that we've known the industry has faced for decades. But several European countries have now banned rooster culling. Which presents a problem. You have to grow them out now. And so you now bear that economic burden. And therefore, technologies rise to meet those challenges. And there are a number of technologies that have been developed to deal with that, but they are clunky and they have, like, hidden cost. And they don't really solve the problem, at least from our point of view.

Peter de Kruijff: And so Mark's team added a fluorescent protein to the chickens that give birth to these commercial egg-laying females and their non-egg-laying brothers.

Mark Tizard: Those chickens are completely healthy and normal. We wouldn't be doing it if they weren't. And they are definitely GM. They're very easy to see and identify because of the presence of the gene for red fluorescence. That actually gives them a lovely pink colour of their skin and skin around their beaks and their feet. 

Peter de Kruijff: This added protein from these hens is only passed down to the male chickens and not females. Which means that the males can be identified by a laser before they even hatch or develop in an incubator. This is because the laser can detect the fluorescence through eggshell. Meanwhile, the future female chickens that will lay eggs don't inherit any fluorescent genes and are just considered a regular chicken. So what happens to these unhatched males?

Mark Tizard: My belief is that there will be ways to actually recover high food value from that. And we've already started to discuss this with regulators. But we're fairly confident that it could be done. But the world's not ready for that bit yet. But it certainly is, I think, ready for the other side, which is saving, incubating and hatching and culling the male chicks in the layer line.

Peter de Kruijff: CSIRO came up with this solution nearly 10 years ago. But commercialising it is still a work in progress. The organisation has teamed up with European breeding company Hendrix Genetics to try bring the eggs to market in the next five years, depending on regulators.

Mark Tizard: Hendrix may be based out of Europe and the Netherlands, but it has reach globally. So it provides birds to industry right across the planet, including here in Australia. And so they'll be looking at, is the market ready in different areas?

Peter de Kruijff: But when it comes to our food, whether you can make genetic edits isn't the question. It's whether people are happy to eat it. Genetically modified food has faced big pushbacks over the years.

Archive Speaker 1: I don't think it would be an exaggeration to describe the state of affairs as one of the greatest intellectual scandals of the last century. 

Archive Speaker 2: I'm pro the use of anything to try and prove the lot of mankind. But I'm in favour of it being done safely.

Peter de Kruijff: But I was wondering what Australians thought about it now.

Rachel Ankeny: I'm Rachel Ankeny. I'm a professor and chair of philosophy at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Peter de Kruijff: Rachel has run focus groups on Australian attitudes towards genetically engineered foods.

Rachel Ankeny: I think everyone's read the popular news about CRISPR and the new gene editing techniques. But if you ask people, and we have, they don't see a huge difference between gene editing and gene modifying. To the average person, they sound relatively similar. It sounds like you're, to put it informally, messing with the natural genes. And the way in which it's done in the laboratory or otherwise, and sort of the extent to which technology is involved, is not particularly what they're worried about. The technologies go back to the early 1970s.

But there was a general conservatism, I would say, in Australia and elsewhere, about use of gene modification in food. We have seen in Australia that that's weakened. There perhaps aren't as many people who would say they're opposed in all instances. And they're not as strongly opposed, perhaps, as they were. I think that's for a couple of reasons. I think it has nothing to do with gene editing, just for the record. I think it has to do with, you know, getting used to uses of technologies in different parts of our lives. I think it also has become, in many ways, the least of many people's concerns.

Peter de Kruijff: In no big surprise, what we're really worried about is the cost of living.

Rachel Ankeny: Nowadays, particularly in the last few years, we're seeing a lot more concern about the financial impacts of the grocery bill and everything else in everyday life. People's main concerns are focused on, is the food going to be nutritional? Is it going to be good enough, particularly for my family and kids? And how much is it going to cost? And so, you know, in some hypothetical world where perhaps gene editing might improve those things, if it was going to be at the same cost, probably people would have no problem.

Peter de Kruijff: That's not to say there weren't some concerns like these, which Rachel captured in one of her studies.

Voice Actor 1: Well, we've got other food options, and they're not endangered. So I think maybe changing those sorts of things there for financial reasons are probably not necessary.

Voice Actor 2: I think productivity increases are important, but I'm not sure increasing muscle growth is the way to go. I think increasing productivity by making the animal less prone to conditions like pests and disease would be of more benefit.

Voice Actor 3: That would turn animals into zombies. No feelings, no characteristics, basically a meat factory on legs.

Rachel Ankeny: And so there's this sort of spectrum that has to do with animal welfare. They had pretty clear kind of ideas and distinctions. There are things you should do and you shouldn't do. Even if, you know, the cow is going to end up slaughtered, there are right and wrong ways to do it.

Peter de Kruijff: Take our gene edited fish in Japan, for example. As Mark Tizard points out, the edits have been made to quickly grow fish.

Mark Tizard: That's an interesting case because it is more about production than welfare and health. In many cases, sustainability has to be a top line thought, but health and welfare always. And so with those sort of systems where you're increasing muscle mass more rapidly, provided you can ensure that the fish doesn't have any abnormalities as a result, then it should be a path into the future.

Peter de Kruijff: And if you're worried about gene change after gene change, making a fish or a cow unrecognisable, Alison Van Eenennaam says there is a limit on what can be done.

Alison Van Eenennaam: Because this technology is limited in that it tends to be useful for single gene traits. So there's not that many single gene traits that exist. And what I mean by that is one gene controls whether or not you grow horns or not. Whereas something like marbling or growth or overall longevity, that's going to be thousands of genes. There's not going to be an editing approach for that.

I think we need to have a more, I guess, nuanced conversation than just GMO bad, you know, non-GMO good. It's just, it's too simplistic. And that kind of dichotomous framing around agriculture never makes sense because there's always going to be situations where some technologies are good for some regions and some not for others.

Peter de Kruijff: And countries are working out these considerations as gene edited products enter the market.

Mark Tizard: What we're looking at is this is the beginning really now. We're in an era where this biotechnology in animals, whether it be editing or GM and null-segregant or other approaches, is going to be on the rise. There's going to be much more of it. And it's really important that when that's done, it's done in a way that shows value to the consumer. They're the ultimate arbiters. We need to show them, the people who want to buy this food and consume this food, that it's done for a really good reason, that it has a benefit for them and that it is safe.

Peter de Kruijff: That's it for this episode of Artificial Evolution, which was made on the lands of the Gadigal, Whadjuk Noongar and Menang Noongar people. Thanks to producer Fiona Pepper, senior producer James Bullen and sound engineer Matthew Sigley. And special thanks to Tara de Landgrafft.

Next on our final episode, gene-edited animals aren't just useful for food. Could they in fact save our lives? 

Timothy Andrews: All of a sudden I had energy, energy that I haven't felt in a couple of years. I was like, what is this?

Peter de Kruijff: Modified organs from pigs are being transplanted into people. That's coming up on our last episode of Artificial Evolution, a special four-part series for Science Friction on ABC Radio National. You can follow Science Friction on the ABC Listen app to listen to the whole back catalogue of the show. And if you have feedback or want to get in touch, you can email us at sciencefriction@abc.net.au.

If you loved it, leave us a rating and review or share it with your friends. I'm Peter de Kruijff. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.