Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Genetically modified salmon up for FDA approval, then dinner

Genetically modified salmon are the first transgenic animal destined for human …

Salmon is really good for us. Of the ten most frequently consumed fish in the United States, salmon has the highest levels of omega-3 fatty acids, which are thought to reduce coronary heart disease and are essential for fetal brain development. In terms of animal sources of protein, salmon is about as nutritious as we are going to find. We might see great public health benefits if everyone ate more salmon, especially if we substituted it for less healthful sources of animal proteins.

But ocean stocks of salmon, like those of many other fish, are dwindling, so we have turned to aquaculture to provide us with tasty fish. Unfortunately, this may exacerbate rather than solve the problem. Farmed fish eat fish oil or fish meal, which come only from wild fish, and it takes three pounds of wild fish meal to generate one pound of salmon. Thus, aquaculture further depletes the oceans rather than sparing them. 

To escape this vicious cycle, Aqua Bounty Technologies, based in Massachusetts, has generated transgenic AquAdvantage salmon that grow to market size twice as fast as regular salmon while requiring less feed. The FDA is considering whether to approve this salmon based on safety grounds alone, and that's simply too narrow, according to a Policy Forum published in Science.


If approved, GM salmon would be the first transgenic animal available for human consumption in the United States. The FDA is evaluating the GM salmon as a veterinary drug. As such, it is analyzing only the risk of GM salmon compared to conventional salmon, and its primary deciding factor for approval will be whether or not the GM salmon are safe (and so far, they seem to be). 

The FDA is not taking market issues into account: how the introduction of GM salmon may affect the price of salmon, how that may in turn impact consumption of salmon, and what effects that might have on public health and its associated costs. Past data indicates that, if GM salmon does in fact lower production costs, more people—especially those in low-income households, who are the most susceptible to poor nutrition—are more likely to eat it. The FDA is also not considering the environmental concerns engendered by a potentially expanded salmon market: pollution by waste, concentration of disease and the drugs used to deal with it, the strain on wild fish used for feed, or the escape of transgenic fish. 

The company that created the fish has minimized this last concern by noting that the fish are grown inland in facilities with containment mechanisms. Even if they get loose, they are sterile and cannot breed with wild stocks.

Since the FDA is evaluating GM salmon as a drug, and not a food, its sole criterion for approval is whether it's safe compared to other salmon. Yet no one is evaluating whether this planet or the population that inhabits it will benefit or not from the introduction of GM salmon into our food supply. 

These additional concerns may not be the responsibility of the FDA, but the authors of the Policy Forum argue that they should be considered by someone, somewhere. And since it will probably take two to three years for the salmon to reach supermarkets if they are approved, market economists, environmentalists, nutritionists, and everyone else have plenty of time to ponder these issues before tasting the cause of all the controversy.

Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1197769  (About DOIs).

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