Is there a potential risk to people eating GM salmon?
The kinds of GM salmon that are proposed to be commercialized today probably will not pose a food safety risk to consumers, but that doesn’t mean that others in the future might not. You would have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. David Suzuki, a geneticist, says that the science of genetic altering foods, etc. right now is in its infancy and people have no idea what kinds of problems they might be creating. Would you care to comment about what stage of the science the industry is in? The state of the technology is paradoxically both a very powerful technology but one where the genetic engineers don’t have much control over what they’re doing. They cannot control how many copies of a gene get inserted, they can’t control where in the animal’s chromosomes they get inserted, and it turns out that all those things matter. So I would agree with the general statement that it’s not as precious a technology as people might think it is. Maybe some day, with great improvements in the meth
