Thinking Beyond Science

We are a pest species, destroying our environments and wiping out vast numbers of other organisms with whom we share this delicate globe. Ask most individuals from the economically- developed world what we need to do about this problem, and the answer is usually the same: People need to stop having so many children.

There are two major difficulties with this response. The first is that ‘people’ usually refers to other people, typically in the less developed world. This is fairly ridiculous, as the environmental impact of children in the most economically developed countries is much higher than those from less privileged regions. A typical American has 40 times the carbon footprint of someone from Bangladesh, for example.

The other difficulty with the ‘people need to stop having so many children’ response is that it ignores a critical fact. It’s not the number of people being born that is really the problem for our planet, it’s the number of us failing to die in a timely fashion that’s the key issue.

Birth rates are actually falling, and have been for quite some time. In 1950, the average global birth rate was 37.2 births/1,000 people each year. It’s now about half that, at 18.5 births/1,000 people each year.3* Death rates have shown the same trends in the same period, dropping from 18.1 deaths/1,000 people each year in 19505 to 8.33 deaths/1,000 people each year in 2017. Based on current mortality rates, life expectancy in the UK has risen to 79.2 years for men and 82.9 years for women.” In 1951, the figures were 66.4 and 71.5 years respectively.

As long as the death rate is lower than the birth rate, the world’s human population will continue to grow. The rate of growth of the global population will decrease if the birth rate keeps falling, but the numbers will keep going up for the foreseeable future. The consequences of the ever-increasing numbers of humans on this planet are horrifying, with competition for resources intensifying all the time. One of the areas of peak concern is how to feed everyone, and also how to do this without destroying the ecosystems that we will rely on in the future.

Although it’s often claimed that we can’t produce enough food for the world’s human population, this isn’t actually true. We certainly can’t produce enough food to feed everyone the spectacularly unhealthy western diet that rapidly becomes the norm as societies become more affluent. Average per capita consumption of meat in the industrialized world is 88 kg per person per year, compared with 25 kg in the less developed economies.” Unless foraging in low-impact systems, animals inevitably require more inputs than plants to produce a given quantity of human food. At its extremes, in intensive rearing systems, as much as 7 kg of grain can be required for each kilogram of beef meat produced.

We often can’t produce and distribute the food where it is most needed, and that’s essentially a logistics problem. This is compounded by the issue of food waste. In countries with less developed infrastructure, a huge proportion of food spoils before it can reach the people who need it. In industrialized nations, vast amounts of perfectly nutritious food are rejected from the commercial food chain on aesthetic grounds. Yet more is discarded by stores or thrown out by customers who have over-ordered. Globally about a third of all food produced for humans is wasted.

If we are to feed our extended global family, we therefore need to solve various major issues. We need to decrease meat consumption, stop overeating, and use all the food we produce. These require changes in human behaviors; a rapid rolling-back of the obesogenic environments in which most inhabitants of the industrialized world live; and a resetting of our attitude to food as a cheap, throwaway commodity. Unfortunately, as individuals, governments and societies we are remarkably useless at taking long-term decisions that are in our own interests.

Plants have certain characteristics that can make them quite challenging for any form of genetic engineering. Plant cells are surrounded by a thick wall, which can cause difficulties when trying to force new genetic material into them. Many of the most commercially valuable plant species, such as wheat, potatoes and bananas, have also developed really complicated genomes. In almost all mammalian species the cell contains two copies of each gene (one inherited from the mother and one from the father). But at various points in their evolution, many plants have duplicated their entire genomic information. Bread wheat, for example, has six copies of every gene. So if you want to change a gene in bread wheat, you have to change all six copies, making the job much harder than in mammalian cells.

It might be tempting to wonder why we need to bother with gene editing for plants, given that we have been creating new varieties for millennia, simply by cross-pollinating ones that have features we like. Well, one reason is speed. For slow-maturing plants like citrus fruits, which also have low fertility, it can take a lifetime to determine if the new offspring have the desired characteristics and will breed true. With modern gene editing techniques, this could be speeded up to less than the time it takes to complete a PhD project.

Crossbred Strawberries They are red and luscious looking, and survive shipping well without going mushy. There is just one problem. They taste absolutely nothing. That’s because during the creation of this variety, achieved by crossing various other strawberry plants, the versions of the genes that give that wonderful sweet strawberry taste of summer were lost along with the ones that cause mushiness or a pale color. But gene editing holds the promise of being able to change just the precise genes you want to alter, while leaving all the others untouched.

Source – Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures by Nessa Carey

Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43359681-hacking-the-code-of-life

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