CRISPR and the Future of Food

CRISPR AND THE FUTURE OF FOOD WITH RODOLPHE BARRANGOU

MEETING RODOLPHE BARRANGOU

In October 2022, I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Distinguished Professor Rodolphe Barrangou and visiting his CRISPR lab at North Carolina State University, and we spent much of our time discussing gene editing and the future of agriculture. This was an amazing opportunity. Rodolphe is the scientist who experimentally confirmed the role CRISPR plays in nature – in the immune systems of bacteria – which paved the way to developing it into the gene-editing toolkit that has since rewritten all the rules of biotech and is most certainly among the top three technologies changing the world. Additionally, he edits the journal ‘CRISPR,’ is the founder or co-founder of no less than five important biotech companies, and runs his amazing lab at NC State, and that’s only scratching the surface!

Rodolphe is an amazing, warm, generous human being. He seems to go at a hundred miles an hour, and for much of my visit we were moving around as he showed me through laboratories and greenhouses, all the while sharing as many thoughts, ideas and insights as he could. Intensity and passion radiated out of him. It was hard to keep up! As you can imagine, I ended the day exhausted, but at the same time thoroughly energized by what I had learned.

Rodolphe generously agreed to a recorded interview, and both the recording and transcript are below. Enjoy!

CHECK OUT THE PODCAST TRANSCRIPT →

CRISPR AND GENE EDITED FOOD

Reflecting on the exciting and thought-provoking afternoon with Professor Rodolphe Barrangou, we are now capable of doing any editing we like. Our ever-expanding CRISPR gene-editing kit is so comprehensive it allows us to write single letters, long sequences or entire genomes as we wish, giving us unparalleled opportunities to improve nutritional value, yield, resilience and other characteristics of harvested crops. All this opens up new pathways to feeding humanity, sustainably, through peak population and beyond. Note: *sustainably* is the key word in that sentence: the opportunity is in reforesting and urgently restoring some of our critical biodiversity while still feeding the planet. Put another way, I don’t worry at all about our future ability to feed humans. We can manage that easily enough, even through peak population. What I worry about is feeding the population without wreaking catastrophic destruction on the biosphere and losing all semblance of the planet we once had. 

SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS

There are multiple pathways to sustainable food efficiency. Halving global food waste would do it. 30-40% of food produced is thrown away, and relatively straightforward behavioral changes at the consumer end — if we could get enough people to adopt them — would chop this to 20%. Assertive cuts to our meat intake would do also it. 80% of arable land is dedicated to feeding livestock to provide us with just 18% of our calories, which tells you all you need to know about that! So gene-editing for agricultural efficiency, to me, is another pathway. But a legitimate one. And an important one.

PLANT GENOMICS

Rodolphe made this contrast: gene therapies will save hundreds of thousands of lives, but by transforming agriculture and saving the planet's forests and bringing back natural biodiversity we have the opportunity to benefit hundreds of millions or even billions of lives (accounting for future generations). He pointed out not only the enormous challenges and prodigious amount of science still to be done in plant genomics, but also that 95% of CRISPR scientists today are working on human gene therapies while only 5% are dedicated to investigating ALL other forms of life. Wow. Somehow I had imagined a more even split. We urgently need to resource-up here. Opportunity, anyone? 

CRISPR GENE EDITING BARRIERS

Acceptance is, of course, the primary barrier to more aggressive application of gene editing in crops, translating, for example, to strong resistance in Europe. Most of the distrust seems to be linked to the way corporations and governments historically mismanaged citizen-engagement around first-generation transgenic genetically-modified crops, rather than any actual bad events. 

What are the real dangers of this next-generation of gene-edited crops? Rodolphe is firm on this: while there are legitimate risks to consider (one scenario we discussed was an edited food inadvertently triggering anaphylaxis in people with peanut allergies) these can be – and are – easily filtered out with good testing and responsible R & D practices. Most experts agree with him. Furthermore, taken within the context of the random genomic variations and selections that occur in nature, CRISPR editing is at its core a natural process accelerated, something we’ve been practicing via cross-breeding for centuries. 

But I must admit I also struggle with acceptance! When we can rewrite large sections of the genome at a time, do we introduce new risks that are harder to detect? What about subtle impacts on wider non-agricultural flora and flora in the ecosystem? Is it possible to test for all of these? Are my questions even rational, or is my hesitation purely emotional? 

So far, everything I’ve read and seen suggests the risks are minimal. And again, most scientists take the same position. So I’ll stand by that. But I’ll also continue researching and observing. Under no circumstances do I feel comfortable with the notion of editing flora and fauna outside the food system (for example to make forests and coral-reefs more resistant to climate change). This smacks of geo-engineering by another name, an attempt to mitigate effects while providing more excuses for foot-dragging on the causes, and it is a slippery slope to a very bad place. Uh oh, but here again I encounter problems with my own logic. A separation between human agriculture and unblemished nature? Where, exactly, does that boundary lie?

FUTURE APPLICATIONS OF CRISPR

So the next big question is, what is the most likely trajectory? Here’s my take: I predict acceptance will shift rapidly, and that the “democratization” of gene-editing technologies in places that never had the resources before – the same countries where the food stresses have been historically highest – will accelerate gene-edited crop innovation, as well as see frequent reverse-engineering and duplication of successful designs, patents be damned. We are tracking for 15 percent of the world’s planted crops being gene-edited or modified by 2030. I can easily see that doubling by 2040, and hitting half of all planted crops by 2050. Not quite the scenario Rodolphe described at the beginning of our interview, but well on the way.

But the future is for us to decide, and my purpose is to highlight opportunities to create a better future. Using CRISPR to make a step-change in agricultural efficiency, and thus facilitate the replenishment of natural forests and the restoration of some of our critical lost biodiversity, seems to me an important and legitimate pathway. One of multiple (halving food-waste and reducing meat consumption being two others) and we should be taking all of them.

Learn more about Professor Barrangou and his CRISPR lab.

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