Genetically engineered fish is not a matter of “if” but “when”

This is Fletcher and Hew’s innovation, pictured in the photo they showed to Entis 25 years earlier. Entis, whose father ran one of the first companies to import farm-raised salmon from Norway, had seen a revolution in the making. “The first thing I thought was, ‘My God, these guys don’t know what they’re sitting on.’ To raise fish in half the time, that has enormous implications. I pretty quickly realized that this is the kind of massive breakthrough that could be critically important to an entire industry.”

What Entis didn’t realize at the time was just how long it would take to bring that breakthrough to market—nor that he would no longer be there to see it through. Along the way, both Entis and Fletcher—who joined the company in 1994—were ousted.

In 2012, the company’s primary investor, Kakha Bendukidze, a biologist and entrepreneur who’d served as Minister of Economy in the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia, lost patience and pulled out. AquaBounty was close to collapse before receiving a $6 million investment in 2012 from Intrexon Corp., a synthetic biology company.

Today, AquaBounty’s fish are available in Canadian grocery stores. Five tons were sold there in 2016 without being labeled as such. Canada has no law that requires labeling of genetically modified seafood.

Back in the Bay Fortune hatchery, the transgenic fish patrol the tanks ceaselessly, the only sound the occasional splash as a fish breaks the surface, thinking we might have food. The salmon are stippled and banded in endless shades of gray, silver, and black, with occasional flashes of green. Evolved to travel hundreds of miles from their freshwater spawning grounds to the open ocean and back, these fish will live out their lives in these tanks, fed by constantly circulating filtered freshwater, never leaving this building.

Dawn Runighan, the facility manager, shows me the miniature tanks where the baby fish are raised, and the grow-out area where they reach maturity. There are big bags of fish feed, and canisters of sperm lined up like old-fashioned milk tanks. In another room are tubular incubators containing the eggs that will become superfish. If I was expecting a high-tech sanctum where Faustian scientists use supercomputers to meddle with the building blocks of nature, what I found was more quotidian: a few technicians in rubber boots moving equipment around and checking water levels. Much of the space in an adjoining room is taken up by an elaborate, three-phase filtration system that includes settling tanks, “bio-beads” impregnated with organisms that remove ammonia and organic matter from the water, and finally a UV-light filter to finish the cleansing process. “It’s basically a wastewater treatment plant, with fish,” cracks Runighan.

Upstairs there is a lab where quality control and R&D on the company’s proprietary gene technology takes place. A white-coated technician dips a pipette and fills tiny tubes in a rack. These will go into a machine that multiplies copies of a specific sequence of DNA for later analysis. No actual gene-splicing goes on at Bay Fortune. In fact, none has gone on for 13 generations of AquaBounty salmon, dating back to a single ancestor fish that reproduced and died in 1992. Each descendant carries a copy of the genetic construct that combines the Chinook growth hormone gene with the promoter gene from the ocean pout.

After a period of incubation at the Bay Fortune hatchery, the sterile, all-female transgenic embryos are then flown to a rearing facility in the highlands of Panama, where the resulting salmon are grown to maturity before being re-imported into Canada. (According to Conley, Panama was selected because the president of the company at the time had contacts there and the cost of building a facility was far less than it would have been in North America.) Eventually, AquaBounty plans to produce market-ready fish at a new facility now under construction at Rollo Bay, on Prince Edward Island, and at the Indiana facility—an existing fish production factory that belonged to a now-defunct aquaculture company.

The key fact about all of these places, existing and under construction, is their location: They’re on land. Nearly all other aquaculture takes place in ponds, lakes, or the sea—in pens designed to keep farmed fish in and wild fish out. Unlike fish produced using this conventional approach, AquaBounty salmon have no chance of escaping into wild habitats. That was key to the company’s application for approval by the FDA. But land-based aquaculture is expensive, and many previous attempts have failed. Finding cost-efficient ways to maintain water temperature and quality at levels needed to grow healthy fish—things nature does for free—is critical to AquaBounty’s business success.

“We saw the convergence of these two technologies: the improved biology of the fish, and the improved technology of contained aquaculture systems,” says Stotish, a former pharmaceutical executive. He says the company has “altered the economics of growth and production.”

Producing salmon in Indiana, Stotish points out, would eliminate the need for long-distance flights that now carry frozen fish from overseas fish farms to the U.S. market. Producing fast-growing fish on land reduces the amount of food and energy required to grow a given volume of food, while also reducing the use of fungicides, antibiotics, and pesticides that are prevalent in conventional aquaculture. AquaBounty’s scientists say they have devised a sustainable, environmentally friendly and economical way of producing high volumes of healthy seafood, without the environmental risks of conventional aquaculture.

Most scientists who have studied the matter concur—and believe that the significance of AquaBounty salmon extends far beyond the fishing industry. A 1992 article in Nature Biotechnology by Fletcher, Hew, and five other scientists laid out the evidence behind the company’s claims, and since then those claims have been validated by a number of other studies. An article published in the journal Aquaculture in 2013 (by seven scientists independent of the company) concluded that transgenic AquAdvantage salmon had higher feed-conversion ratios, retained nitrogen more efficiently, and achieved their target weight 40 percent faster than conventional Atlantic salmon fed the same diet.

“In 20 or 25 years we’re all going to be eating genetically modified animal products,” says Eric Hallerman, a professor of marine biology at Virginia Tech who served on an expert panel that reviewed AquaBounty’s technology for the FDA application. “What’ll make it attractive to producers is the benefit to consumers.”

That potential benefit has not allayed the concerns of the vocal movement opposed to GMOs in general and to genetically engineered “Frankenfish” in particular.

~

Humans have been consuming salmon virtually since we first arrived in North America, and salmon have become deeply intertwined with both the cultures and the ecosystems of the places where they thrived. Indeed, salmon in many ways shaped both the civilization and the environment of those places. And salmon have been an intensely managed food source all along.

“The anadromous fish resource was perhaps the most intensely managed and ecologically manipulated food resource among these aboriginal societies,” wrote the anthropologists Sean Swezey and Robert Heizer in a 1977 study.

“Ecological manipulation” is a good description of today’s salmon market. Even the wild salmon fishery of Alaska is helped along by human intervention: Each year the Alaska Department of Fish and Game releases nearly 2 billion juvenile salmon spawned in hatcheries into the waters of Prince William Sound and Southeast Alaska. In 2015 Alaskan fishermen caught 93 million hatchery-born salmon, more than one-third of the total harvest of 263 million. Salmon stocks in the northern Pacific have recovered since bottoming out in the 1970s; that would not have happened without the coastal hatcheries.

U.S. imports of salmon totaled 339,000 metric tons in 2016, worth more than $3 billion. The vast majority of that came from farmed Atlantic salmon raised in floating cages off the coasts of Canada, Chile, Norway, and Scotland, and flown into the U.S. According to SINTEF, an independent research institute in Norway, accounting for feed, aquaculture, and energy to freeze and transport the fish, 1 kilogram of farmed salmon eaten in Paris or New York produces the equivalent of 2.9 kilograms of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. A 2016 paper in Aquaculture Engineering found that the carbon footprint of salmon produced in land-based closed systems, like AquaBounty’s, is less than half of that from salmon produced in conventional fish farms in Norway and delivered to the U.S. by air.

But carbon footprints don’t pack the emotional punch of cultural legacy. “The Coast Salish people have organized their lives around salmon for thousands of years,” Valerie Segrest, the project coordinator for the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project, said in a 2017 statement. The group is based at the Northwest Indian College in Bellingham and works to preserve access to traditional foods. The Salish fear that GE salmon could wreak environmental havoc with native species, and that the combination of genetic engineering and aquaculture could finally overwhelm the traditional fishing methods that they still carry out. “Corporate ownership of such a cultural keystone is a direct attack on our identity and the legacy our ancestors have left us.”

In July 2016, the Quinault Indian Nation joined a lawsuit put forth by environmental groups and recreational fishermen in March of that same year. It challenged the FDA approval, saying the agency “has not adequately assessed the full range of potentially significant environmental and ecological effects presented by the AquaBounty application.” That lawsuit is still pending. Led by the Center for Food Safety, anti-GMO activists are concerned that GE salmon could threaten native species if some fish Houdini escaped and spread its transgenic kind in the wild.

But scientists who have followed AquaBounty’s long road to regulatory approval believe that the quarter-century process signals a flawed and politicized approval mechanism. The delay “sends the message to the rest of the world that the science-based regulatory oversight as embodied in the FDA review process is subject to political intervention,” testified the late Calestous Juma, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, in a 2011 hearing before House Agriculture Committee’s Subcommittee on Rural Development, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture. “Furthermore, it signals to the world that the United States may cede its leadership position in the agricultural use of biotechnology.”

According to the scientific panel that reviewed the evidence submitted by AquaBounty to the FDA, the genetically engineered salmon “is as safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon, and … there is a reasonable certainty of no harm from the consumption of food from this animal.”

The agency concluded that because AquaBounty salmon is “not materially different from other Atlantic salmon”—meaning it is nutritionally and chemically indistinguishable—no additional labeling was required.

In the early 2000s, William Muir, a professor of genetics at Purdue University and a pioneer in the risk analysis for GE fish, and his colleague Richard Howard developed a quantitative model to assess risks associated with the other major fear about GE salmon: escape.

In simple terms, Muir’s method quantifies the probability of an escaped transgenic fish interbreeding in the wild, and the level of harm it would cause if that should happen. The first part is itself the product of two factors: “the probability of the organism escaping into the wild, dispersing and becoming feral” and the ability of the new gene to spread.

If either of those terms is zero, according to the model, the risk of environmental damage from transgenic fish farming is zero. It’s a simple matter of multiplication. “If it can’t escape, then don’t worry about it,” Muir says. “Or if it escapes and then can’t proliferate, don’t worry about it.”

By raising the fish on land, in contained tanks, far from cold-water environments, AquaBounty has reduced the risk of escape to near zero (unlike conventional aquaculture, where the farmed fish can and often do escape into the wild). The second factor—the risk of an escaped fish spreading its genetic material—should also be zero, because AquaBounty produces sterile, triploid females. Even if these fish did escape, wild salmon couldn’t successfully breed with them, so they wouldn’t be able to reproduce and persist in the environment. In contrast, when a net pen containing conventional farmed salmon breaks, the escapees can overwhelm an environment with their sheer numbers, and since they’re fertile, they can interbreed and bring down the fitness of native salmon.

“In my view the risk of harm from GE salmon as developed and managed by AquaBounty is less than that of farmed salmon,” says Muir, who is now retired.

Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal genomics and biotechnology specialist at the University of California, Davis, who served as a subject matter expert for the scientific panel that evaluated AquaBounty’s FDA application, says that conventional farmed fish carry different, and arguably higher, risks. “Conventionally bred Atlantic salmon undergo no food safety tests, grow faster as a result of selective breeding, are fertile, and are raised in ocean net pens where they can escape to the ocean and transmit/acquire diseases and parasites,” she says.

Like most scientists who have examined the matter, Hallerman dismisses the claim that GE salmon pose a threat to existing fisheries. “This technology has been sitting on the shelf for way too long. People want more meat and this is a way to get it to them.”

But not all scientists agree with this consensus. In 2013, after the FDA issued its draft environmental assessment of the AquaBounty breeding program, Anne Kapuscinski, a professor of sustainability science at Dartmouth College, and Fredrik Sundström, an assistant professor of ecology and genetics at Uppsala University in Sweden, submitted comments criticizing the agency’s finding of “no significant impact.”

The two scientists wrote that they “found major scientific inadequacies” in the assessment. Among their many concerns was that while the risk of exposure to the open sea and harm to the marine environment from GE salmon is probably low at the existing PEI and Panama sites, those facilities are only the first of many probable hatcheries and production farms—and there is no guarantee that other locations will maintain the same standards.

“The future of GE fish farming will surely involve larger fish farms, with less confinement, in many different environments,” wrote Kapuscinski and George Leonard, the chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, in a 2015 opinion piece. The risks posed by those hypothetical future farms are harder to determine.

Meanwhile, Murkowski, whose legislation is at this point the only remaining legal obstacle for AquaBounty in the U.S., has said allowing GE salmon would amount to “messing with nature’s perfect brain food.” In July 2017, vowing to continue her “years-long fight against ‘Frankenfish,’” Murkowski introduced the Genetically Engineered Salmon Labeling Act, which would not only require plain-English labels for GE salmon but would mandate a review of the FDA’s procedures for approving AquaBounty’s fish. AquaBounty officials say they have no problem with labeling their fish, if regulations require it; but Murkowski’s bill, co-sponsored by senators from Washington and Oregon, would effectively maintain the ban on AquaBounty salmon in the U.S. market.