Kids’ Guide to Genetic Engineering
Evolution, peas and genetics: Tiki’s quick look …. in pictures

(Horse): More…. more money! Uh oh! (Planet): Oh no! Help!
This is probably the way many people see genetic engineering — just another way of big powerful companies making loads of money because they can own genes. But their eyes are fixed on money and they fail to notice the disaster which is almost on them.
Disaster?
What disaster?
Companies exist to make money. That is their purpose and, until recently, their only purpose. But in today’s crowded, overheated and polluted planet, it seems that genetic engineering, if we take the example of food plants, is already proving useful. And it doesn’t have to mean more money for the corporations .
In Africa, several biotechnology research groups are developing varieties of sweet corn which withstand serious drought and resist disease. The seeds are free to local farmers who can be fairly sure that this improved maize will allow their families to avoid starvation during the dry season.
Of course, nobody should be dying of starvation in a world with plenty of food and this is where genetic engineering (GE) can really make a difference. But how? By making food crops like maize, bananas, yams, cassava, cow peas, sorghum, rice, potatoes and many others resistant to pests and diseases, resistant to drought, richer in nutrients and which store well. These are qualities which are needed now. New gene editing techniques like CRISPR are already being tried in East Africa (Kenya) but there is always a problem: people who object to genetic engineering of any sort will not support anything like CRISPR and have turned many governments away from this route. And then, these same people will say, “look: genetic engineering is a failure. Where are all these wonderful promised crops?” The answer of course is that because of the objections, so many countries have banned genetic engineering totally so it became a self fulfilling prophecy.
Genetic engineering – my guide
When I was a young penguin, I was scared about the then-new science of genetic engineering.

This GMO never existed but it is an example of scare tactics
(This was back in the 1990s and I’m older and wiser now – us penguins live quite a long time.) Back then, there were a lot of protests against genetic engineering and a lot of people thought it might be risky to human health and harm the environment. So scientists in the early days of genetic engineering did the sensible and responsible thing and asked other scientists to join with them at Asilomar (California) in 1975. They discussed possible risks and began to sort out a framework for developing this new science, so that they would be well aware of the possible problems.
It turns out we protestors were wrong. Now, more than 25 years after genetic engineering began to be used on a large scale in farming, scientists agree that the dangers were hyped and that the technology has in fact been overwhelmingly beneficial. And no, I haven’t been bought off by Monsanto sending me free fish! I’m just a penguin who believes in following the scientific consensus on an issue – that’s why I’m concerned about climate change, and that’s why I’ve changed my mind on GMOs.
These days, many politicians pretend there is no such thing as truth. Why? In order to make you believe their lies . So it is more important than ever to defend science. Science is the way you clever humans can find true things out about the world and try to understand how it works and how to solve problems. Science isn’t something you can choose to believe or not. It’s just fact. You can try not believing in gravity if you want, but don’t try to fly. As a flightless bird, I can ‘fly’ underwater as can all my friends
My friends over at the Cornell Alliance for Science make it their business to defend science, from climate change to vaccines to GMOs. The scientific debate about the safety of genetic engineering is over. The science is clear. And the anti-science people who deny the scientific consensus about GMO safety are not telling the truth. And many are the same people who deny climate change or sow doubt about vaccines.
Another example of how bans on genetic engineering can hurt humanitarian causes is the story of Golden Rice. This rice was genetically engineered to make it yellow and deliver beta-carotene, an essential nutrient that we all need in the form of Vitamin A. In many poorer countries in Africa and Asia, children don’t get enough Vitamin A, which leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths and blindness. But the anti-GMO people have done their utmost to stop Golden Rice ever being given to the poor. I don’t know about you, but that makes me really angry. Golden Rice is still not permitted to be grown anywhere in the world except the Philippines and malnourished children are still dying as a result.
This shows how much of the food you eat is taken from plants that have been busy transforming themselves by lateral gene transfer, a polite way of saying they have stolen the most useful genes from other plants and left the rest; they have cherry picked the best. If humans had done the exact same thing, then the plant would be called a GMO and there would be a big outcry if anybody tried to grow or eat it. If you are still fearful that GMOs are ‘unnatural’ and are out to get you, please think again!
Actually genetic engineering is perfectly natural. The bacterium that scientists originally used to modify plant DNA – called Agrobacterium – has already been smuggling its genes into plant cells for millions of years. Scientists can sequence plant DNA and find these genes in fact. Did you know that sweet potato is a natural GMO, for instance? Scientists now know that ‘horizontal gene transfer‘ happens a lot in nature, and that so-called species boundaries are being transgressed all the time. Much of your own DNA originated in viruses in fact. You are also a GMO!
One example might be blight-resistant potatoes. Potato blight is a pretty nasty pathogen . Notoriously, it caused the Irish Potato Famine in the mid-19th century, when a million people starved to death. Today farmers control potato blight using fungicides. They have to spray (sometimes 15 times) their potato plants if they don’t want the crops to fail and end up a slimy stinking mess. But clever scientists have developed potatoes with genes that resist infection by the disease-causing pathogen Great!
Catalogue of potatoes from Peru
That means fungicides don’t have to be sprayed, and the crop could be labelled organic, right? Wrong! Unfortunately, most of the people who prefer organic produce are so blinded by the ‘naturalness’ myth that they won’t accept any use of genetic engineering. And even though GM blight resistant potatoes have been around for years, you still can’t buy them in the shops or grow them in Europe. That makes me feel quite sad.Potato facts
Science doesn’t stand still, and biotechnology is no different. Scientists today can do things that were not even dreamed about when genetic engineering was in its infancy back in the 1970s. In particular you may have heard of a new thing called CRISPR which allows scientists to edit genes, a bit like you can edit something you have written on a computer. That means people can now delete faulty genes or make other tweaks to change how genes work.
So are these new gene editing tools creating GMOs? The anti-science people certainly think so, and have succeeded in getting Europe to ban gene editing in food and agriculture. But most of the changes induced by CRISPR could have happened anyway through natural mutation if you were prepared to wait long enough – and no-one can even tell the difference. Gene editing does not necessarily involve the introduction of ‘foreign’ DNA from other species, which what so many people used to be scared about (recombinant DNA).
In fact CRISPR is such an important innovation that the scientists who discovered it have been awarded a Nobel Prize. This technology could help humans with everything from curing diseases to helping reduce climate change so banning it makes no sense at all. Okay, I’m just a penguin, but I still don’t see how so many people who think of themselves as ‘environmentalists’ oppose useful technologies that could really help the environment!
it’s important for people to understand that all crop breeding techniques involve rearrangements and changes to genes. The risks of using these new breeding technologies are no greater than for older breeding technologies, the products of which are subject to far fewer checks. (Nicola Patron, Earlham Institute, Norwich)
Colourful corals and other wonderfully diverse sea creatures
Another big debate is how far GMOs can and should be used in the natural environment. One example is genetically modified corals, which would help save coral reefs from going extinct as the oceans get hotter due to global heating. Should they be allowed? Another is a GM chestnut, which contains a gene which protect the fabled chestnut trees which once dominated forests in the eastern US from the deadly blight that has all but eliminated them.
Leaves and seeds of the American chestnut
Could forest ecosystems still be called ‘natural’ if they include trees with a gene introduced by humans? And does it even matter?
What scares me most about the loud arguments and misinformation about genetics is that it is the poor people who need these technologies who’ll may be denied access to them because of the vague fears and prejudices of those who have enough to eat.
Genetic engineering has been used for more than 40 years and in all that time, there has not been a single case of harm to human health or the environment
Pamela Ronald, plant geneticist speaking at a TED talk in 2015
I don’t like people who tell lies in order to stop science, but I do think it is a good idea to talk about how far technologies should be used and in whose interests. Most scientists I know are fine with this! But there are no easy answers — and there are a lot of problems to solve. What matters is that those who think about these issues and discuss them know what they are talking about. So I hope that this guide has helped you with some of the basics. There is a lot more to all of these stories, of course. All I’d say is: don’t believe everything you read on the internet.