The first sign of humans “genetically modifying” an organism dates to 9000 B.C. when ancient farmers in the middle east and northern Africa began selectively breeding wheat to be hardier and have bigger grains, beginning the concept of selective breeding. Moving further down the timeline we started to selectively breed many more crops and even animals, with an excellent example of this being corn. Corn as after a multitude of years being selectively bred it has experienced an astonishing change to its size nowadays being an enormous crop when compared to what it once was (the size comparison shown above); bananas, apples, and tomatoes also experiencing dramatic changes to them similar to the corn and its changes throughout time.
The more traditional form of genetically modifying an organism would continue to be used by humans for many more years to come, with a noticeable discovery around the 1700s when cross-breeding within a species began. Bringing us to a more recent time when in 1973 Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen made a revolutionary breakthrough in GMO technology by being the first to successful genetically engineered an organism by targeting a specific gene of one organism, cutting out the gene, and including it into another organism’s genetic pool. All this accomplished via the use of bacteria that carried encodes for antibiotic resistance to another. The finding causing a chain reaction of events surrounding GMO’s as well as growing concern from the public about the ramifications that the use of this might come about for the ecosystem and human health down the line. Following the event GMOs only became more prominent in the research and commercial field with genetically modified tomatoes becoming approved in 1992 and ATryn, anticoagulant antithrombin becoming approved shortly after in 2009. And now to modern-day where 88% of corn, 94% of soybeans, and 95% of sugar beets sold worldwide are a Genetically modified crop.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
