The discovery of CRISPR has allowed scientists to successfully mimic this process in the lab, by inserting the genetic makeup of a variety of diseases into humans susceptible to illness. It is also now being explored as an avenue for treating mental illness.
Considering this success, we have to ask: can CRISPR be applied to improve our food systems?
The short answer is that it already has.
CRISPR could come in handy to help essential crops become more resilient in the face of extreme heat, bitter cold, high salt environments, and potentially even bacteria, fungi, and insects.
Considering that farmers already lose 20-40 percent of their crop yields to pests, which costs them $200 million per year, they can’t afford to surpass this amount.
Especially not when 920 million people already live with food insecurity at a severe level – around 11 percent of the human population.
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Still, the emergence of any new technology is always accompanied by scepticism. And as CRISPR is put forward as a saving grace for food scarcity of the future, there are a few fair worries emerging in the field.
These include whether editing out ‘undesirable’ traits and weaknesses in crops will disrupt their natural evolution – possibly changing the entire species. They also worry whether new diseases or mutations could be created by removing certain traits.
