Agriculture

"We're looking at a doubling of the population in the next 40 years. We're looking at a need for food production increases of 250 percent. At the same time, we're looking at dwindling resources for that food production. So clearly, biotechnology with its ability to improve yield, quality and nutritional value will help us in feeding today's and tomorrow's population."

Terry Medley, J.D.
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service US Department of Agriculture

Genetic engineering can be done on any living organism because all living organisms contain DNA within each cell nucleus. Genetic engineering involves the manipulation of DNA and the transfer of gene components in order to encourage replication of desired traits. The same techniques used to further medical genetics (such as cloning, gene therapy and splicing, etc.) are used to enhance crops and livestock to more effectively feed the growing human population, preserve the diverse variety of life on the planet, and many other exciting possibilities.

Simple genetic engineering has been practiced since ancient times. For thousands of years, plant and animal breeders have selected parent stock with certain desirable traits to produce offspring with the same characteristics. Fast dogs could be bred to become faster, sweet corn could be bred to become sweeter, and so on. By selecting and crossbreeding, farmers changed the genetic makeup of many of the plants and animals that exists today. Modern genetic engineers, however, do not wait for generations of offspring to develop a trait; instead, they isolate the genes responsible for a specific trait and insert them into the DNA string of another plant or animal. A large part of genetic engineering in agriculture is simply trying to achieve the same results that farmers have been producing for hundreds of years, but with genetic engineering the process is controlled and deliberate- thus the results are obtained faster and more accurately.

In 1981, new advancements made genetic engineering more feasible with the creation of the "gene machine". Gene splicing could be done using polynucleotide assembly machines (machines that make DNA by assembling base pair sequences) that made chains of genetic fragments to lengths determined by programmers. These "gene machines" add one nucleotide after another onto the deoxyribose backbone in the order specified. This allowed scientists to find, cut and reassemble genes, and change the order of the genetic messages.

Later that decade, this invention enabled American researchers to transfer a gene from a French bean seed into a sunflower cell. The gene was spliced into a bacterium that would normally infect the sunflower cell; instead of infecting the cell, though, the recombinant DNA that replaced the disease genes simply created a "sun bean" plant, a food extremely rich in protein. Using this and similar methods, plants can be altered to bear more and healthier food.