Scientists Just Found a Way to Make GMOs Much Safer
After several years of painstaking research, bioengineers at Yale and Harvard have developed a method to ensure organisms with engineered DNA could survive only in designated environments, and not in the wild. Their research was on the bacteria E. coli, but the scientists said the same basic steps could be applied to genetically modified crops, as well as to bacteria used to process dairy products, probiotics for health applications, and even the microorganisms sometimes used to clean up oil spills.
“Endowing safeguards now is important to allow the field [of biotechnology] to go forward,” said geneticist Farren Isaacs, a co-author of the Yale study.
To understand how the proposed solution works, let’s back up to a few basics of genetics. Everything about an organism—its color, how it reproduces or digests food, basically any trait you can think of—is encoded in its DNA, a long sequence of base molecules represented by the letters A, T, C, and G. Stretches of this code are called genes; the entire thing is a genome.