Case Study Aquadvantage Salmon

The approval of AquAdvantage Salmon to be sold in U.S. markets represents a new concept in the agricultural market: selling genetically modified animals. It marks the first time that a company has been permitted to sell GM animals for food by the U.S. government. AquAdvantage is an Atlantic salmon that has had genes added to its genome from both “Pacific chinook salmon… [and] ocean pout.” It was created by “Massachusetts-based AquAdvantage,”who want to start selling the product in widespread markets. AquAdvantage represents a possible transition of contemporary agriculture in which a lot of the food people buy will be genetically modified no matter if they are from plants or animals. One such difference is how in the time before genetically modified organisms were used farmers had to rely on artificial selection, which is the process of selectively breeding animals or plants with desired traits. The question about this topic is does the concept of genetically modified animals …show more content…
A good portion of the opposition towards the AquAdvantage salmon comes from farmers who will possibly be ran out of business because they cannot compete. Much of what traditional farming techniques use are based upon the basic mendelian genetics that had been discovered years before GMOs or even DNA was theorized to be possible. AquAdvantage salmon was modified so that it can develop to a “growth marker… more rapidly,” which means that it very well may be a candidate for competition with traditional methods of catching or farming salmon. Although the GM salmon is still in its infancy in the food market, it has the potential to replace non-GMO salmon because it is cheaper and more profitable to use salmon that can grow faster and arrive at the desirable size with less resources being expended on their