The following is an excerpt of an article at Gro Intelligence on the history of genetic modification.
Advances in genetic modification have been revolutionizing medical research for decades, helping humans gain a deeper understanding of the biological process, treat various diseases and forms of cancer, and develop a wide range of other modern vaccinations. When it comes to food and agriculture, however, genetic modification tends to elicit a nearly complete and opposite emotional reaction amongst the public; given the understandably profound and nearly unanimous connection human culture has to food, few people, if any, have no opinion on the subject. Yet at the same time, most consumers do not think twice about eating organic broccoli or if their dog sneaks a bite too.
It often comes as a surprise that, without the presence of mankind, neither broccoli nor the dog that consumed it would exist—in its loosest definition, the term genetically-modified organism can be applied to nearly every extant life form with which humans regularly interact. From artificial selection (selective breeding for desired traits) of the first domesticated animals and plants; to hybridization (forced mating of uniquely different cultivars and species) of the high-yield cereal varieties behind the Green Revolution; to current transgenic innovations (insertion of recombinant DNA and exogenous genes into organisms) behind the GMO revolution, human development can even be described as the process of optimizing our sources of food. As such, the recent development and proliferation of genetically-engineered crops—the more accurate title for crops consciously modified on a directly genetic level—is often clouded in confusion, fear, and a deeply instinctual reflex to protect our most hard-earned resource: food.
For better or for worse, we humans have, both consciously and unconsciously, been altering the world around us since our genesis. As a species, we have even engendered our own proposed epoch, the Anthropocene, a period when human activities began to significantly affect the earth’s ecosystem—starting at the first dog’s bark. Believed to have been selectively bred and domesticated (rendering an animal or plant dependent on humans or artificial environments for continued existence) in a search to better secure food, dogs (of the subspecies Canis lupus familiaris) first diverged from wolves roughly 30,000 years ago, so long ago in fact, that the first native peoples brought their dogs with them into the Americas.
In the continued search for our most prized resource, humans expanded their efforts to traditional livestock and plants. Although it is impossible to know precisely when and where agriculture first began, the first crops—cereals such as einkorn wheat—appear to have been domesticated in Mesopotamia between ten and twelve thousand years ago. Providing a rare yet visible glimpse into the motivation behind selective breeding (a term coined by Charles Darwin), wild and cultivated einkorn wheat differ in only one regard; the seed heads of the domesticated variety do not shatter and disperse as easily as wild einkorn, a mutation selected by humans that sacrifices natural seed dispersal for ease of harvest.
Please visit the Gro Intelligence website to read the entire article.