Hello, my name is Elizabeth and I work for
the European Food Safety Authority in the area of
Genetically Modified Organisms, or as we call it in short – GMOs.
EFSA’s role in this area is to provide a scientific risk
assessment and to evaluate the safety of GM products.
Today I would like to talk to you about genetically
modified animals, but before we go into this topic,
let’s back-up a second and see what a GMO is:
and here the European legislation gives us a definition:
A GMO is an organism in which the genetic material
has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally.
So how can a GMO be created? I would like to give you a very simple example.
Let's assume that this is a bacterium with its genetic material,
and this would be the chromosome of another
organism, for example the chromosome of an animal.
Scientists can take a piece of the genetic material
of the bacterium and insert it into the chromosome of this animal.
This would then give rise to a genetically modified animal.
At the moment we have no products from genetically modified animals
on the European market, nor does EFSA have any
applications for the safety evaluation of such products.
But there are several developments worldwide to insert into different types
of farmland animals’ different characteristics – for example, disease resistance.
I would like to briefly explain to you one example which is quite
advanced in the pipeline, and this is a genetically modified salmon.
This salmon grows faster than its non-genetically modified counterpart.
If such an application would come to the European Union,
EFSA would perform the risk assessment,
which means that we would use the comparative approach
to compare the GM salmon with its non-GM counterpart
and that means we would ask questions like:
what are the toxic elements? Are there any allergens?
Is this GM salmon as nutritious as its non-GM counterpart?
And based on all these elements, EFSA would then write
a so-called scientific opinion that evaluates the safety of this product.
We would provide this opinion to the policymakers,
to the European Commission, and to the Member States,
and it is then the European Commission and the Member States
that decide whether or not to authorise such a product for the European market.
EFSA itself is neither for nor against GMOs;
our role is to provide a scientific risk assessment on the safety of such products.