I frequently write about genetic engineering (GE) and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on this blog, and I do that because GMOs are often misunderstood and villainized when, in reality, they have enormous benefits and a huge potential both for human health and protecting the environment. We can design them to have increased nutritional content (e.g., golden rice), to brown more slowly thus resulting in less food waste (e.g., arctic apples), to have reduced carcinogens thus lowering cancer risk (e.g., GMO potatoes), to be herbicide resistant thus increasing farming efficiency and reducing land use (e.g., Roundup-ready crops), to be resistant to insects thus reducing pesticide use (e.g., Bt GMOs), etc. Yet despite all these benefits, ill-founded arguments against GMOs abound.
In this post, I specifically want to talk about the Bt GMOs, because they are particularly beneficial. I’ve written about their benefits at length before, but, in short, because they produce…
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