Overcoming Obstacles to Gene-Edited Solutions to Climate Challenges
Jared Diamond (1997) observed that,
Any society goes through social movements or fads, in which economically useless things become valued or useful things devalued temporarily. Nowadays, when almost all societies on Earth are connected to each other, we cannot imagine a fad’s going so far that an important technology would actually be discarded. A society that temporarily turned against a powerful technology would continue to see it being used by neighboring societies and would have the opportunity to reacquire it by diffusion (or would be conquered by neighbors if it failed to do so).
Crops improved through biotechnology, often called genetically modified organisms (GMOs), have made major contributions to improved agricultural productivity and sustainability, increasing farmer incomes, improving environmental health, food safety, and benefitting consumers worldwide (Klümper and Qaim 2014; Nicolia et al. 2014; ISAAA 2020; Brookes 2022a,b).
Gene editing has already accelerated the rate at which such benefits are being imagined, developed, and delivered and holds the potential to help rapidly address some of the critical challenges associated with reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as others have shown (Asanuma and Ozaki 2020; DeLisi et al. 2020; Giddings et al. 2020; Ito 2021; Houser 2022; Rosenzweig 2022; Zahoor 2022). Yet, despite these considerable benefits and the urgent need for these solutions, opposition and obstacles threaten to delay or block such beneficial applications. This paper describes the most important obstacles and shows how they can be overcome.
Continue reading:
▪ L. Val Giddings, “Overcoming Obstacles to Gene-Edited Solutions to Climate Challenges,” in Synthetic Biology and Greenhouse Gases, edited by Daniel Drell, et al. (Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2024), 99–108.
