Swimming upstream: Egulating genetically modified salmon

Abstract

Humans have been manipulating their food supply for thousands of years, often by consciously breeding both plants and animals for traits that made foodstuffs more plentiful, more convenient to use, and even more nutritious. Most of us have eaten items as common as hybrid corn, steaks from beef cattle bred for lower fat content, or tomatoes specifically bred for tougher skins and more efficient transport. But with the advent of genetic engineering in the last 30 years, it has become possible to create completely novel organisms, whose characteristics have been fixed altered at the molecular level by the introduction of new combinations of genes. The emergence of these newly designed sources of food has generated a call for additional legal regulation of food production, or at least of some the biotechnologies, such as recombinant DNA technology, used to produce genetically modified organisms. Unlike most of the world, the United States has been slow to adopt such a regulatory scheme. By focusing on the example of genetically modified salmon, this paper explores why that reluctance persists, and how model regulations already in place internationally might be employed in the U.S.