• Question: How far do you think GM will go? What will it possibly be able to do in the future?

    Asked by to Amelia, Izzy on 20 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      I think that GM has a massive amount of potential to do great things in the future.

      In the future we will be able to develop crops that can grow really fast and really well without the need to spray horrible chemicals on them. These chemicals are also expensive, so if you don’t need them even poor farmers (like those in Africa) will be able to grow healthy crops.

      We are also looking at improving the food that comes from crops. They have already made anti-cancer tomatoes, and linseed oil with more omega-3 oils (good for baby development and preventing Alzheimers disease). In the future we might be able to get our entire daily allowance of many different vitamins from a single food!

      I don’t think, though, that we will ever try and GM humans. GM rarely works first time – and I don’t think scientists would ever risk creating a child that might have problems, or even die, because they used GM.

      At the moment, all GM involves taking a gene from one species and then putting it into another. In the future, we might understand DNA and proteins well enough to be able to design genes from scratch. At the moment our DNA knowledge isn’t good enough for that!

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