GM salmon available for consumption soon?

A salmon that grows at twice as fast as normal is set to be the first genetically modified animal available for human consumption, The Telegraph reports. Scientists from the USA hope that the sterile GM salmon can offer an efficient and safe way to breed salmon in fish farms, so that the wild fish can be left in the oceans. The Food and Drug Administration is currently considering whether the so-called AquAdvantage is safe to eat. It could be on sale within a year. So far, GM crops are available for human consumption, and the fish would be the first GM-modified animal for this purpose. Environmental campaigners, however, question whether the GM material is safe for humans to consume and fear the sterile salmon will mutate in the wild and be able to breed.

AquaBounty, the company behind the GM salmon, claimed the fish would be sterile and therefore no risk to the wild, and would also be a much more energy efficient way to produce a nutritional food source. Lord Melchett, policy director at the Soil Association, said the new technology was not worth the risk. He stated that once an animal was bombarded with other genes, the DNA was unstable, and there was no guarantee these fish remained sterile. It posed far too great a risk to wild salmon. Fish that grew that quickly was likely to lose some of its environmental benefits.
 

The Telegraph