The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/02/1116059/the-us-approves-crispr-pigs-for-food/

by DocFeind • 1 year ago

142 141 1 year ago

andsoitis• 1 year ago

I can already see CRISPR Bacon™ in our future.

janice1999• 1 year ago

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.

barbazoo5• 1 year ago

What’s the idea behind it? Just anti consumer or is there a reasonable angle?

jfengel• 1 year ago

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.

johnohara• 1 year ago

Are you declaring first use?

theGeatZhopa4• 1 year ago

The new job at McDonald's: CRISPRer - your one job is to take the bacon and grill it crispy.

charliebwrites• 1 year ago

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”

“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

nothercastle2• 1 year ago

If this becomes common it will be illegal to label food as gmo free

Aloisius4• 1 year ago

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.

ksec• 1 year ago

Regulations have eased since then, especially around gene editing, which tinkers with an animal’s own DNA rather than adding to it from another species, as is the case with the salmon and many GMO crops.

And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.

maxerickson• 1 year ago

What sort of regulation do you think should apply to germ line editing to inactivate a particular gene?

Like is a blanket ban the only reasonable approach?

Natsu3• 1 year ago

This seems to be a small edit to a single receptor to keep pigs from getting a particular disease by not allowing the virus to enter their cells. It's hard to see how helping pigs stay healthy could have a negative impact on human health, but a lot of people are against eating things that are 'unnatural' in any sense.

WhatIsDukkha5• 1 year ago

European consumers seem to not want factory farms that produce such low quality food that it needs to be CRISPRed (as is the case with this story) just to be kept alive long enough.

I also am in that camp, I don't want to eat pork raised in unsanitary conditions and then sold to me at top dollar (because lying/obscuring about sourcing).

paganel• 1 year ago

Like is a blanket ban the only reasonable approach?

From my pov as a fellow EU citizen a blanket ban for this kind of creepy stuff is the only viable option. Let the Americans become Frankesteins for all I care, it’s their choice, all in the name of “science”.

VWWHFSfQ3• 1 year ago

And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.

I mean, this is completely false. 8% of all EU agriculture imports is from USA and has grown year over year for decades.

U.S. agricultural exports to the European Union reached a record $12.8 billion in 2024, a 1-percent increase from 2023

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

theGeatZhopa4• 1 year ago

While this 8% are limited to "sorts of" and may not include "CRISPRed" or "chlorine-bleached".

Just a thought from me, as European, in case someone asks for the thinking behind strict import EU rules:

We just don't want to eat things that we believe may cause (abstract) harm, and, sorts of liability of the state and society to care for you and (God beware) your kids if some adverse effects are pinpointed to food/imports or misregulation. I think it's ok like that.

lupusreal4• 1 year ago

Much of that is reasonable concern, but at least some of it is silly superstition. For instance, Germany doesn't permit the irradiation of most foods except dried herbs and spices. Irradiation is a perfectly safe way of increasing the safety and shelf life of food. Despite this, regulations on which foods if any this is permitted for vary greatly from country to country, influenced by how weirded out the uneducated public feels about it.

486sx333• 1 year ago

I wish more people understood how much of what they consume is radiated at some point…

WhatIsDukkha5• 1 year ago

The alternative to radiation is mixing less poop into your meat etc.?

You understand that the majority of "food science" is designed to allow increasingly lazier and sloppier food handling and allowing it to still be palatable/not kill too many people right?

Don't fall into the "lower cost" idea either, being lazier and sloppier means higher corporate profits and not lower consumer prices (for worse food).

Compare the grass fed/ranged (produced on farms 1/10th the size of the US equivalent) BigMac in Germany versus the one you get anywhere in the US, which do you think is healthier and tastier? They are basically the same price to the consumer mysteriously...

tbrownaw3• 1 year ago

influenced by how weirded out the uneducated public feels about it.

So it's one of those "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" things?

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

To the extent they don't import, it's much more about protecting their own farm economy. Denmark for example has a lot of large pig farms, they don't want US pork competing with that.

comrade1234• 1 year ago

This is just so that they can pack even more pigs into a factory farm.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 1 year ago

How is that possible?

Are the pigs going to grow vertical or something?

cenamus• 1 year ago

I, they already stack the floors vertically, putting them in matrix style boxes wouldn't be that surprising

aaronbaugher3• 1 year ago

Square pigs. The movie Space Truckers was prophetic.

486sx333• 1 year ago

Oh man, this is bad. How many studies do we have some the consumption of CRISPR anything by humans ?

DesaiAshu• 1 year ago

We could also just stop breeding genetically modified sentient animals for protein and directly synthesize protein...

barbazoo5• 1 year ago

Or just eat vegetables.

tengbretson• 1 year ago

Or crispr yourself to photosynthesize.

kylehotchkiss• 1 year ago

Mmm, a patty of bacteria. You can CRISPR the bacteria to taste better too!

AzzyHN• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

padjo• 1 year ago

Well they’re not making pigs immune to disease because they like pigs are they…

Voultapher• 1 year ago

There is no ethical way to use mammals .

It might sound a little extreme at first, but if you think it through I think it's the conclusion one has to reach when extrapolating from ones own experience to similar animals. Sure a cricket and I have not too much in common, but a orangutan and I, a dog, a pig?

chneu2• 1 year ago

Degrees of harm and justification are pointless.

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

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?

nothercastle2• 1 year ago

Yes

biophysboy• 1 year ago

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

ndsipa_pomu• 1 year ago

However, with a selective pressure that removes its rival subtypes, it's likely to become less rare, at least in areas such as pig farms.

stavros• 1 year ago

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk

onlyrealcuzzo2• 1 year ago

The majority of consumers aren't willing to spend a penny on that.

herbst2• 1 year ago

In Switzerland where you can tell on every piece of supermarket meat what kind of farming/standard it is trough a easy to follow colour code and some kinda Trustable labels, you very well see customer pick the more expensive ones.

Same thing in Austria, clear labelling, good availability, people are buying it.

Nobody in Spain does because none of their supermarkets has any concept for labelling the meat standard

So it's easy to say nobody would if they didn't really try

chneu2• 1 year ago

Most consumers don't care where their meat comes from.

Meat is a status symbol food. Most consumers want it as cheap as possible so they can consume as much of it as possible. Because it's a status symbol food. Eating meat every night is seen as a status symbol.

unfitted2545• 1 year ago

good day to be a vegan.

nerdjon5• 1 year ago

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.

hollerith2• 1 year ago

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.

nerdjon5• 1 year ago

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.

goodpoint• 1 year ago

And yet there are plenty of reputable papers showing clear health benefits of organic food.

PeterStuer• 1 year ago

"Being anti gmo is being anti science"

No, it isn't. As scientists we know how little we know of complex biological systems. This is bio-engineering based on rickety models.

Especially in times where the US is all about 'trade balances' , would it not suite them to take onboard some of the precautionary principles adopted in other parts of the world when it comes to health and safety?

DocTomoe• 1 year ago

From the other side of the pond, when your chieftain wonders aloud again why the Europeans don't buy your beef, or your chicken, or now your pork: This here, is the reason.

We like our beef clean, our chickens unchlorinated, and our pigs without heavily experimental GMO modification, thank you very much.

Not because we are anti-science. Because the US has a horrible track record when it comes to how far you can go with caveat emptor.

lazystar• 1 year ago

does this mean they can create a kosher pig? huge business opportunity there.

BuyMyBitcoins2• 1 year ago

You’d have to CRISPR parts of the Torah to accomplish that.

looofooo0• 1 year ago

Lol, achieving the neccesary characteristics (cloven hooves and rumination), i am not sure that thing would be called a pig anymore.

ajma• 1 year ago

Mmmm CRISPR bacon

sinuhe69• 1 year ago

>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’.

dyauspitr2• 1 year ago

I think it’s fine. I’m ready for heavily genetically modified humans given they volunteer for it.

lantry• 1 year ago

I think your two statements are contradictory. Babies can't volunteer for anything

walterbell• 1 year ago

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.

Restaurants and grocery stores can advertise corporate policy to use non-GMO meat suppliers.

pazimzadeh5• 1 year ago

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 of engineered vs unedited 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..

arrosenberg2• 1 year ago

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.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14636691/

pazimzadeh5• 1 year ago

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.

repiret• 1 year ago

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.

pazimzadeh5• 1 year ago

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?

testing22321• 1 year ago

Sounds like the genetic editing is not necessary as long as the farm conditions are good..

And remember if you document or report on bad farm conditions in many US states, you’ll go to jail for telling the truth while the people running the farm do not.

marviel• 1 year ago

source?

jbverschoor• 1 year ago

And you find it strange the EU doesn’t buy it “food”

littlestymaar• 1 year ago

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.

If there's already a variant of the virus that can overcome the edit, then without additional measures it will simply go from 1% of the case to 100% and the disease is going to be as prevalent as before and the benefit of the tech will be null after just a few years.

(Except that it will draw negative light on CRISPR-based gene editing , slowing down actual progress. That's the curse of GMO: companies making them for bad reasons and reducing collective trust in what is a very promising and important technology for long term food security)

pgryko• 1 year ago

One step closer to making cystypigs from the game the outer worlds

https://theouterworlds.fandom.com/wiki/Cystypig

snthpy• 1 year ago

Will this make the bacon crispier?

The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food

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