A geneti salmon i

The US Food and Drug Administration has given a green light to a genetically modified salmon, the first GMO animal ever submitted for regulatory approval. Some think this will lead to the salvation of humanity, and others to its downfall. think it’s just a fish.

What happened is that biotech researchers mapped the genome of the Atlantic salmon and then made two modifications. First, they incorporated the growth hormone gene of the Chinook salmon into the Atlantic salmon genome.

Then they turned on a promoter to keep the growth hormone gene turned on year round. Normally the growth hormone gene is turned o during the winter when food is scarce. The result is an Atlantic salmon that grows bigger and twice as quickly, maturing in two years as opposed to four.

But the mere fact that this salmon was genetically modified has raised a storm of protest. People are scared of GMOs because, to a large extent, they don’t understand the technology, and they see it as something new and scary. That’s ironic, because we’ve been genetically modifying our food for thousands of years.

When the Spanish first explored the Andes, the tomato was a yellow cherry-sized fruit. Humans turned it into the big red juicy things we see in supermarkets. Ears of corn used to be one inch long but now they are over a foot.

We have also done it to our animals. We turned wild aurochs into placid cud chewing cows. We turned hairy wild boars with tusks into smooth pink piggies. We created the mule. And of course we took the wolf and turned it into every dog on the planet from the chihuahua to the Great Dane.

This wasn’t natural evolution’. People purposefully created these animals. A er all, did you really think a poodle could survive in the wild

Our ancestors did this using a number of di erent means selective breeding planting, cross breeding pollination and, of course, cloning. Seedless grapes, potatoes, and bananas are all clones, meaning that they are grown by transplanting a branch of the original plant into a new milieu.

ncidentally, the word cloning comes from the ancient Greek word for branch and the process has been used since before people knew about genetics or genes.