FDA regulates gene-edited animals as drugs, so an effort to create safer animals was abandoned.
Every year, millions of beef cattle are born without horns, a trait that naturally emerged in Scottish pastures in the 16th century and has since spared many lives from goring.
In this July 11, 2018 photo, animal geneticist Alison Van Eenennaam of the University of California, Davis, points to a group of dairy calves that won’t have to be de-horned thanks to gene editing. The calves are descended from a bull genetically altered to be hornless, and the company behind the work, Recombinetics, says gene-edited traits could ease animal suffering and improve productivity.
“The strictness of the regulation … is seriously impairing innovation that could be quite beneficial not only to animals but also to our economy and our environment,” said Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. “This makes it so expensive and so long-term that it’s preventing people from doing useful things.”
There is vast genetic variation among cattle breeds that contributes to the diversity of the species. One specific difference, found in Aberdeen Angus, causes animals to grow little knobs instead of horns. Without horns, the animals require less feed trough space, are easier and safer to handle and transport, and are less likely to injure other cattle.
The FDA’s tough policy was established many years ago when gene-editing tools were more blunt and there was little understanding of what tens of thousands of individual genes do, or how they interact with each other. New tools like CRISPR and TALENs enable scientists to add, delete and rearrange DNA with greater precision, but the FDA’s policy hasn’t changed.
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