How to make a farm animal with properties that are especially valuable to us? Well, we have three options: myths, decades of selective breeding or and genetic engineering.

The Book of Genesis teaches us about the myth. There, the father-in-law promises Jacob every striped lamb or kid. To achieve his aim the patriarch makes the animals mating at the waterhole and look at the stripes. I encourage those who take biblical stories literally to try to grow a new variety in such a way. This would surely cure them of the belief that the Bible always tells the factual truth and is also infallible in biology. Jacob, however, in his work was clever, because he chose white and black animals to mate at the waterhole ...

The second way of creating a novel species has been used by people for years. In every region of the world, wild cattle and sheep were domesticated. Then, over the centuries, animals with desirable characteristics were bred and the so-called “clean” lines were created. This method of obtaining new breeds of cattle must be calculated for decades, although today it is supported by artificial insemination and embryo transfer techniques, which make the whole thing faster and cheaper. For example, you don't have to pay for two animals living on the opposite ends of the world to meet in some cowshed to mate. SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE Modern technology of genetic engineering has been around for a quarter of a century: CRISPR / Cas9, commonly known as genetic scissors. It has been widely adopted in agriculture, changing the breeding of new varieties of crops and livestock. The technique has already been awarded a Nobel Prize (in chemistry). So we have a way to make any changes we like to the genome. And the challenges are growing. It is no longer about getting even more milk and meat or making wool softer and stronger, but ensuring that crops and livestock survive the looming climate challenge. In the past, it was about frost resistance. Today, we are desperately looking for genes that will make crops and cattle adaptable to temperatures on the other side of the scale. People are trying to change their heat-awerse genes into their thermophilic variants or add new appropriate genes that will do so.

Cows ready for the beach

GMO plants are now the new normal, although many of us still have a problem with them. Therefore, legislation, especially the European one, tries to accommodate the fears of citizens. It is clear to me that if we ingest something, its genes - made up of DNA - are completely digestible and are highly unlikely to mutate us. However, they do constitute a threat to biodiversity, according to prof. Łukasz Łuczaj from the University of Rzeszów with whom I spoke lately. This includes anything from displacing less "perfect" varieties to patenting seeds and creating such that plants grown from them are sterile (to force farmers to buy more from the manufacturer).

However, genetically modifying livestock is something else entirely. This is because we humans also belong to the animal kingdom. Whatever our attitude to the theory of evolution may be, no one will deny that we are more closely related to cows than to wheat. So when scientists modify bacteria or alfalfa, we continue browsing the web in search of more interesting topics. When they start dealing with the cattle, we pause.

It was in March of this year, that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved genetically edited beef cattle for human consumption. This decision could pave the way for biotech companies to sell other CRISPR / Cas9 modified foods. It is not about the "new world order" ... US farmers and food corporations have figured it out: heat causes losses in the US worth about $ 370 million a year. These are the costs of decreased productivity, fertility, and increased mortality. A cow can also have sunstroke and hanging an umbrella over its horns will not help. And the situation in the years to come is more likely to worsen than improve.

China turns monkeys into…

The leaders in using "genetic scissors" to modify farm animals, monkeys, or even humans are the Chinese. As a side note: He Jiankui, creator of Lulu and Nana - two girls with a genome modified for an increased HIV resistance and, as it turned out, slightly higher intelligence - was released from a Chinese prison at the exact time the FDA announced its decision on genetic alteration of cows. Already three years ago, Science published Jon Cohen's text about Chinese attempts to modify farm animals over the last 25 years. They interfered with their genome not only to increase the amount of meat in the diet of Chinese citizens. It is also about organ transplants - projects of this type (i.e. pigs for organs) are also being developed in the West.

The Chinese are especially famous for creating transgenic monkeys at the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research on the outskirts of Kunming in southwest China. The work is carried out under the direction of Niu Yuyu and Ji Weizhi. Since 2014, the lab has produced all kinds of monkeys, subsequently used for studying specific human diseases, such as muscular dystrophy, autism and cancer, sleep disorders, and diabetes. The animals had their genes altered so that new drugs against these diseases could be tested on them. The Chinese publish the results of their research in the best Western scientific journals. They worked closely with Hi Jiankui until his arrest, but as you can see, this did not create any major problems for them. Today, there are at least four laboratories in China carrying out genome editing experiments using the CRISPR / Cas9 technique on large cohorts of monkeys.

And not only monkeys. The Chinese are the leaders when it comes to genetically modifying dogs, mice, rats, pigs, and rabbits. These studies promise not only drugs for human diseases, and organs for transplants, but also higher meat quality and disease-resistant livestock. However, despite the multitude of monkeys with altered genomes, Chinese teams have so far published, according to Western specialists, very little further research to characterize what these mutations mean for a given disease or treatment perspective. However, Jennifer Doudna from the University of California at Berkeley, who together with Emmanuelle Charpentier received a Nobel prize two years ago for devising the CRISPR / Cas9 technique, noted that China "is a country and culture that truly values science and technology. Their government has invested a lot of money in it and it is not wasted.

Let’s wrap up the story of monkeys as genetically modified animals. Even in China, they are rarely a source of protein in the diet. Therefore the experiments involving these animals are aimed at human medicine. The creators of transgenic animals and scientists conducting experiments on monkeys in China are subject to less public scrutiny than their counterparts in the US or Europe. The Chinese claim to adhere to international ethical standards in the care and use of animals, and the Chinese public (whatever that means in a totalitarian state) has long supported using monkeys in research aimed to improve human health.

Ji Weizhi, who is the director of the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research, explains in Science: "Our religion or our culture is different from that of the Western world," he says, adding that opinions in China are also changing. According to him soon "We'll have the same situation as the Western world, and people will start to argue about why we're using a monkey to do an experiment because the monkey is too smart, like human beings."

Transgenic meat in two years from now

Let's go back to the cows that have just been approved for consumption by the FDA. The Americans set out to create their own breed. It is meant to be similar to cattle from tropical and subtropical areas, which has an exceptionally short and smooth coat, making it more resistant to overheating. But instead of crossing Texas cows with Congolese bulls for many generations and laboriously selecting offspring that were smooth-haired, they used "genetic scissors".Using this technique, scientists from the bioengineering company Recombinetics from Minnesota, in cooperation with the University of California in Davies, changed the gene in a variety of beef cattle popular in the USA, to the one naturally occurring in animals raised in the tropics.

It was thanks to this prototype that the FDA issued a decision on Recombinetics cattle in less than a year. Before, the FDA had spent many years inspecting two other genetically altered animals that it had approved for human consumption: faster-growing salmon and a pig that is safe for people with pork allergies. These have been modified in a way that probably could not occur in nature. In contrast, a genetic variant altered in American animals can be found in other beef cows. This means that humans are already consuming such beef. And they live, at times even happily. In addition, the cow was modified using CRISPR / Cas9, a technology much more precise than traditional genetic modification applied to the aforementioned pig and salmon.

Transgenic beef from Minnesota will appear on the US market - and probably in other places- in two years. The cattle's embryos will be shipped across the increasingly warmer North and will likely become insemination hit in the coming decade. Even if the European Union’s legislation is against any genetic modification of food, for the time being, this revolution is unlikely to be stopped. That is unless we will stop global warming, but I have no illusions here. Will we "create" CRISPR humans, biologically more resistant to the increasing heat? It could become necessary for the survival of our species in less than a hundred years from now.

Magdalena Kawalec-Segond

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

–Translated by S.J.