[Editor’s note: The story is a response to a February 2, 2016, post on STAT news written by a campaigner with the group Friends of the Earth (read GLP profile here).]
[Author Dana Pearls wrote] that “Gene-silenced Arctic apples that do not turn brown when exposed to air, even when rotten, will be sold in stores in the Midwest this week.” Except Arctic Apples do turn brown when rotten.Stat News is hardly the first to get Arctic Apple facts wrong. Dr. Oz, for one, pushed misinformation on the apple in a 2015 segment…
Typical objections to Arctic Apples include run-of-the-mill concerns over GMOs, like unintended consequences of genetic engineering, and food system ills that often get illogically lumped in.
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As my co-author and I explained in a Slate article on Oz’s segment on the apples, the doctor doesn’t “understand that the entire apple industry owes the diversity of varieties to different gene expression patterns. A Golden Delicious apple looks and tastes different from a Red Delicious because different apple genes are expressed. Recent genomic sequencing shows there are about 57,000 genes in the Golden Delicious apple.” There is only one change with Arctic Apples, and there are no novel proteins and no effect on the fruit other than its non-browning traits
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Misconceptions Continue About The Non-Browning Apples Coming To A Store Near You
