- I'll just call in an aberration.
It's that Frankenfish is what we call it.
- Frankenfish.
- [News Anchor] Frankenfish!
- Frankenfish...
- [Micheal] That Frankenfish that they're talking about,
well, this is it.
It's a bio engineered fish and it's got
a lot of people feeling a lot of things.
- It is so unnatural!
- It's the first bio engineered animal
ever approved for consumption.
And after 30 years of debate about whether we should eat it,
it's now on its way to your dinner table.
And it may forever change how we produce food.
(upbeat electronic music)
(gentle electronic music)
We're here outside of AquaBounty's Indiana facility.
Just last week they received their first shipment
of AquAdvantage salmon eggs.
Now these eggs, when harvested, will become the first
genetically modified animal ever approved
for consumption in the US.
So, these are the eggs.
They don't look like much but they're
the culmination of decades of research and debate
over whether genetically modified animals
have a place in our diet.
- We're going to see a two billion person increase
in the population in the next 30 years.
So, we're gonna have to feed 28% more people.
So you start with that premise and then you think
"how is seafood gonna play a role?"
Wild caught salmon is basically at full capacity.
Other farmed method is ocean cages
and they have their own set of challenges
because those fish are exposed to climatic conditions,
predators, disease.
- [Micheal] And that's where AquaBounty's fish
come into play.
30 years ago, scientists figured out
how to produce a salmon that grows to market weight
in half the time as conventional salmon.
To do this, they injected the growth hormone
from a chinook salmon into an Atlantic salmon,
along with a hormone from the ocean pout
to ensure the rapid growth is constant.
These super fast growing salmon have two big advantages.
First, is that they need a lot less food.
- They have what we call an improved feed conversion ratio.
And what that means is for every pound
of feed that you put in,
you get more than a pound of meat out.
So if you think about cattle,
it takes about eight pounds of feed to create
one pound of meat.
With our fish, you put a pound in and you get
like one and a quarter pounds out.
- [Micheal] Since they grow faster,
AquAdvantage fish require 25% less food
than conventional salmon.
The second advantage of fast growing salmon
is that you can simply produce a lot more of them.
And that's what unlocks AquaBounty's other upside.
They grow their fish in what boils down to big tanks.
But the facility is actually pretty high tech.
It has some huge upsides.
Super tight controls on the conditions prevents disease,
nearly all of the water's recirculated
so it's ultra efficient,
and you can put them pretty much anywhere.
The problem has been that it's so expensive.
But when you have fast growing fish in there,
the numbers start to balance out
in a way they never have before.
All of this may sound great,
but it's been far from a cake walk.
Genetically engineered anything is rife with controversy.
The long road to market is the result
of an approval process that has surfaced
two consistent and pretty reasonable questions
that arise when considering genetically modified animals.
What if they get out and overrun native populations?
And more prominently,
are we sure they're safe to eat?
At the Indiana facility, Pete the Farm Manager
is the point man for making sure the first one remains moot.
- We have, first of all, on a really large scale
we have geographical location.
We're in Indiana.
There are no native salmonids.
Nevertheless, inside our units we have
a very high level of physical containment.
Every possible escape route out of the facility,
water discharge points of pipes,
they have layers of containment and physical barriers
in place that will prevent the passage
of the fish and we do have numerous redundant layers.
- [Micheal] And on top of the physical barriers
nearly every single fish is sterile.
If one gets out, it can't breed.
So, then the question remains,
is it really safe to eat?
After decades of asking the same question,
the answer from regulatory bodies is yes.
Why did it take that long?
Well, since there was nothing else really like it,
there was no process for it.
- So the case of animals,
they didn't have a really good law,
so they used the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act.
- [Micheal] This is Doctor Eric Hallerman
from Virginia Tech.
He was brought in as an expert during
AquaBounty's approval process.
- [Eric] What they said is the transgene
is basically a drug because it's altering
the structure or function of an animal.
And in traditional food like Atlantic salmon,
it's not regulated at all for that.
In fact, we learned a lot about the biochemical
composition of Atlantic salmon
because AquaBounty had to go and do baseline research
on what is conventional Atlantic salmon.
Then they had to show, rigorously, that theirs
was no different.
- [Michael] And, ultimately,
that's exactly what the FDA decided.
- [Eric] Basically the way that FDA pithily put it,
AquaBounty salmon is Atlantic salmon.
That's it.
- [Michael] With all the regulatory questions settled,
AquaBounty has the green light to sell their salmon
on US shores.
And now the looming question is
what does this mean for the industry?
Does AquaBounty's long fight with regulators
clear the path for more innovations like it?
Or does it serve as a warning to anyone else
trying to bring bio engineered animals to market?
Doctor Alison Van Eenennaam from UC Davis
fears it's the latter.
- I've worked in this field for, you know,
almost 30 years and there's one product
that's ever got to market.
I mean, how depressing is that?
'Cause there's been a number of really useful
applications that've been developed
over the last 20 years and they're all basically
sitting on the shelf because no one has been
able to raise the capital to bring them
through the regulatory process.
But the problem is that it precludes the use
of that technology in food production
and more concerningly in developing countries.
The average first world consumer
has no idea that their choices are actually
kind of impacting the ability to use innovation
in the developing world.
I always find it strange to be
like categorically opposed to technology.
I think you have to look at it on a case by case basis
and I think most people want healthy and safe food
and also to reduce the environmental footprint
of our existence on Earth,
and quite honestly I can't think of an industry
that more requires, you know, innovative technology
to reduce the environmental footprint of food production.
- Conventional methods are not gonna feed
two billion extra people on this planet.
And it certainly isn't gonna happen
without some pretty significant impact to the environment.
We're proud of the fact that, you know, we solved
a problem and we used science to do it.
- Thanks for watching.
If you like The Future of Food,
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