First, let’s define GMO…
The short answer is ‘no’ but there’s a bigger and more nuanced answer – and it’s important.
What Are GMOs?
In its broadest sense, humans genetically modifying organisms is nothing new.
We’ve been doing it to plants and animals for thousands of years. Whether it’s domesticating the wolf into dogs of all shapes and sizes to cross-breeding different types of corn, we’ve been creating new varieties of organism for ages. this can involve cross-pollination to create a hybrid species trying to get the best traits from closely related species.
Countless varieties of common plants have been genetically engineered in this way: orange carrots were developed by a lucky mutation resulting in high levels of beta-carotine and carrots became an important staple crop and source of vitamin A.
Then about a century ago we came up with ‘mutation breeding’ – exposing plants to chemicals or to radiation that increases their genetic mutation rate. This led to 2,540 mutagenic plant varietals being released between 1930 and 2007. It’s not just the carrot, there is not a single thing we eat today that is ‘natural’ in that we’ve been cross-breeding, forcing mutations and all sorts of other techniques to increase yield, flavour or whatever else we wanted for a very long time.
But all this changed in 1969 when Herb Boyer, Stanley Cohen and Paul Berg discovered a means to splice a gene from one organism and insert it into another, and have its new host express the gene as its own. Herb Boyer continued with the research and he and in August 1978 he produced synthetic insulin using his new ‘transgenic’ genetically modified bacteria, followed in 1979 by growth hormone.
Just let that sink in. Until that point Type 1 diabetics only had access to bovine or porcine insulin. Suddenly it was possible to brew pure human insulin in exactly the same way you would wine or beer. Since then there have been many advances in the field. For the genetic pedants out there (they exist, we have one safely locked away in the lab here) the ability to swap genetic material between different species does occur in nature too.
So, for the purposes of this answer we will define GMOs as:
Organisms where one or more specific genes from a distant species – even from different kingdoms of life – has been artificially inserted; for example putting a gene from a bacterium into a plant or vice versa.
Glad we’ve cleared that up.
So what’s the answer?
We do not use any GMO / transgenic organisms in our products.
Why not?
Quite simply because we don’t need to. There are plenty of naturally-occurring strains out there that do the sort of green biotech tasks we need them to, and they do it rather well.
But we aren’t fence-sitters on GMOs: yes, it’s a powerful technique and needs to be used responsibly but if we’re going to feed the planet’s ever-increasing population it’s difficult to see how we can do it without using these technologies. Better yields, less pesticide use, the list goes on.
If you’re curious about GMOs and what the fuss is about there is an excellent book by Mark Lynas called Seeds of Science. He was a very active anti-GMO campaigner and activist in the 1980s. He then studied the subject in great depth and was brave enough to change his views when – after much research – he couldn’t find any evidence to show harm – quite the opposite.
