The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food
118 comments
·May 3, 2025pazimzadeh
repiret
> The pigs were assessed at approximately 205 days in age. Pigs can live up to 20 years. Would be good to test the long term effects and the effects over multiple generations.
It would be good to test for those things if the concern was for the long-term health of the pigs. The concern is whether or not they produce safe meat. Somewhere between most and all of the pork I've eaten in my life came from pigs less than a year old.
pazimzadeh
I understand that. But maybe at 205 days you won't detect a change which would more easily detectable later. Maybe we don't know exactly what to look for, but if something breaks over the long term that would give a clue.
They also only looked at the health of one generation, along with the number of offsprings from that first generation. What happens after 10 generations? 100? Could there be cumulative epigenetic effects from deleting this gene?
arrosenberg
w/r/t the HIV thing - there are HIV immune populations in Scandinavia who have a natural mutation affecting CCR5, so there is at least some reason to believe it’s safe to edit or knock out.
pazimzadeh
That is interesting.
Do Scandinavians have compensatory mutations on other proteins, which allows them to have a mutant CCR5?
Presumably CCR5 exists for reason other than attracting HIV.
nerdjon
I really really hate that the science behind GMO’s gets clouded by the business practices of some of these companies.
You can separate the 2. Being anti gmo is being anti science. Decrying all GMO as bad, unhealthy, or whatever is as illogical as trying to make any blanket statement about any food. It just so happens that this one gets headlines.
We should be concerned about the businesses like Monsanto. But that is completely different.
Personally I have been trying to avoid any product that goes out of its way to claim “non gmo” because it just signals to me that they don’t care about sustainability and science.
It’s almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than the “organic” crap.
hollerith
So in other words there is nothing wrong with the GMO as an abstract principle, it is merely the actual GMOs on the market today that are bad in almost every instance.
nerdjon
No… that is not what I said at all.
I have yet to see a single instance of any actual health concerns raised from eating GMO food.
It has turned into marketing bullshit.
Again there has to be a clear separation between the science behind GMO and the business practices. They are very different discussions that need to happen but instead we are painting all of it with a negative light.
hollerith
>I have yet to see a single instance
OK, here is a single instance: lots of people are concerned about glyphosate residues in food, and GMO technology is the only thing that allows those food plants to even survive the amount of glyphosate being sprayed on them.
Nullabillity
> Again there has to be a clear separation between the science behind GMO and the business practices.
Discussing the science is worthless until you can solve the business practices.
AzzyHN
This has the potential to be really cool, and really beneficial to society.
It's a shame the people who want to do this the most are the people who want to treat the pigs the worst, and who care the least about potential side effects in humans.
JumpCrisscross
> shame the people who want to do this the most are the people who want to treat the pigs the worst
When there is almost-perfect (and unnecessary) union between animal rights interests and the anti-GMO community, this is almost a necessity.
> and who care the least about potential side effects in humans
I see no evidence of this.
SoftTalker
> the pigs appear entirely immune to more than 99% of the known versions of the PRRS virus, although there is one rare subtype that may break through the protection.
Doesn't this just set the table for that rare subtype to become dominant?
biophysboy
Evading immunity doesn’t always mean you become dominant. It might not be as transmissible, worse at replicating, or not as compatible with the host. Basically, there may be reasons why it was the rare subtype that remain true even in the new environment
nothercastle
Yes
sinuhe69
>>That experiment [Chinese Crisper babies] on humans was widely decried as misguided.
Misguided? No, it’s criminal! It was widely criticized as deeply unethical, unprofessional and irresponsible. The guy was considered a rogue scientist and he was put in jail for many years.
So clearly it was not just ‘misguided’.
dyauspitr
I think it’s fine. I’m ready for heavily genetically modified humans given they volunteer for it.
lantry
I think your two statements are contradictory. Babies can't volunteer for anything
BuyMyBitcoins
[flagged]
voidfunc
Parents can volunteer the baby. And babies are easily renewable.
comrade1234
This is just so that they can pack even more pigs into a factory farm.
onlyrealcuzzo
How is that possible?
Are the pigs going to grow vertical or something?
walterbell
> Culbertson says gene-edited pork could appear in the US market sometime next year. He says the company does not think pork chops or other meat will need to carry any label identifying it as bioengineered... Genus edited pig embryos to remove the receptor that the PRRS virus uses to enter cells.
What would be required to test retail pork product for the presence of this receptor?
Along the lines of https://www.plasticlist.org/report
We launched.. [a] project: to test 100 everyday foods for the presence of plastic chemicals.. We formed a team of four people, learned how this kind of chemical testing is performed, called more than 100 labs to find one that had the experience, quality standards, and turnaround time that we needed, collected hundreds of samples, shipped them, had them tested, painstakingly validated the results, and prepared them to share with you. Over time our effort expanded to nearly 300 food products. It took half a year and cost about $500,000.
andsoitis
I can already see CRISPR Bacon™ in our future.
charliebwrites
I’d flip it:
If I ran a bacon company and I didn’t have CRISPR pigs I’d advertise in large red print
“CRISPR Free”
Or
“Non-genetically modified”
People are afraid of lab grown meat already, they’ll be terrified of CRISPR meat
My competition won’t be able to advertise the same
Aloisius
Sure. And I'd advertise in large print, "PRRS Virus Free"
Considering the prevalence of PRRSV, it would be difficult for farms with non-CRISPRed pigs to say the same.
Scare tactics can work both ways here.
smallnix
Farms without immune pigs can still claim it. Do some sampling tests, culling etc and call the product "virus free". But calling modified pigs not modified is tougher, I think.
nothercastle
If this becomes common it will be illegal to label food as gmo free
johnohara
Are you declaring first use?
janice1999
I get it's a joke, but this won't be advertised to consumers. The current US administration (and previous ones to a lesser extent) oppose food labeling regulations. It's one of the main "non-tariff trade barriers" they complain about to the EU.
jfengel
The EU already refuses to import American chicken (over sanitary practices) and has limitations on beef (over hormones).
They'll ban American pork entirely if we can't guarantee that the GMO pork are excluded.
barbazoo
What’s the idea behind it? Just anti consumer or is there a reasonable angle?
estebank
If someone doesn't care one way or another, the label is useless. If someone has a positive opinion, the label helps the consumer seek it out. If someone has a negative opinion, the label helps the consumer avoid the product. If they fight against labeling it is because they consider that the third group is or can become bigger than the second.
tbrownaw
The generic arguments against that sort of thing are distortion when the category boundaries are a bit off from where they should be, and overhead where any time you do anything there's extra compliance paperwork and delays.
Overhead in particular can be rather stifling. For example environmental reviews for large projects have reached a "the process is the punishment" level of overhead.
conception
Eats into profits and increases accountability.
justin66
I believe they prefer the term “pro-business.”
theGeatZhopa
The new job at McDonald's: CRISPRer - your one job is to take the bacon and grill it crispy.
DesaiAshu
We could also just stop breeding genetically modified sentient animals for protein and directly synthesize protein...
barbazoo
Or just eat vegetables.
tengbretson
Or crispr yourself to photosynthesize.
undersuit
You lack the surface area to do much more than photosynthesize a snack's worth of calories.
shutupnerd0000
Vegetables are alive too and scream when cut. We must starve.
Electricniko
There's a solution for this:
cute_boi
If you worry about vegetables or plants, you wouldn't consume more pork/beef. Cows and Pigs eat more plants and produce less...
barbazoo
Source?
stavros
Could we not just... not confine the pigs in spaces about as big as their bodies?
Kurzgesagt had a very interesting video[0] about the fact that it wasn't really that much more expensive to make sure we ate torture-free meat.
onlyrealcuzzo
The majority of consumers aren't willing to spend a penny on that.
null
null
ajma
Mmmm CRISPR bacon
lazystar
does this mean they can create a kosher pig? huge business opportunity there.
looofooo0
Lol, achieving the neccesary characteristics (cloven hooves and rumination), i am not sure that thing would be called a pig anymore.
BuyMyBitcoins
You’d have to CRISPR parts of the Torah to accomplish that.
This resembles the Chinese HIV CRISPR study because the deleted receptor was CCR5, an immune receptor. This was controversial because we don't know the long term effects of of deleting CCR5.
Viruses often use immune or other surface proteins as receptors presumably because they are important (can't be down-regulated too much).
For the pigs, it looks like they deleted just the SRCR5 domain of the CD163 protein. CD163 is used by macrophages to scavenge the hemoglobin-haptoglobin complex.
A 2017 article (of 6 pigs?) suggests that the engineered pigs are resistant to the virus "while maintaining biological function" although I don't see any experiments comparing hemoglobin-haptoglobin scavenging ability in the engineered pigs. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5322883
This 2024 study (of 40 pigs) found 'no significant difference' in a panel of health measures and meat quality, except that the engineered pigs had statistically significantly more greater backfat depth than the edited animals. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genome-editing/articles...
Interestingly, the mean weight of live pigs is slightly higher for edited pigs but lower for dead pigs. Total fat slightly higher for the edited pigs. These numbers are not statistically significant (but only a small number of pigs were tested).
The pigs were assessed at approximately 205 days in age. Pigs can live up to 20 years. Would be good to test the long term effects and the effects over multiple generations.
This paragraph is striking:
> Under the conditions of these studies, neither homozygous nor heterozygous or null pigs inoculated with PRRSV showed the acute clinical signs typically observed in commercial pigs and had overall low depression and respiratory scores (1). This may be explained by the fact that these pigs were sourced from a high-health farm and managed with minimal stress, which differs from disease expression under commercial conditions.
Sounds like the genetic editing is not necessary as long as the farm conditions are good..