Frankenfish - Coming to a BC Inlet near you?

[Rockfish]

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/better+worse+Canada+hook+Frankenfish/4150



For better or worse, Canada on hook for 'Frankenfish'
By Steve Bartlett, St. John's Telegram January 22, 2011 •Story•Photos ( 1 )
In a place built on fish five centuries ago, this is a fish tale like no other.Photograph by: File, Postmedia NewsST. JOHN'S — In a place built on fish five centuries ago, this is a fish tale like no other.


Controversial salmon research pioneered on Canada's East Coast decades ago is in the final stage of the U.S. approval process.


The science sees genetically engineered fish that grow twice as fast as wild salmon.


If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives it the go-ahead, the salmon will be the first genetically modified animal species approved for sale to Americans — a move that could open the floodgates to other engineered animals.


"Pioneers? Yes, and we have the bruises and scars to show it," says Ron Stotish, president and CEO of AquaBounty Technologies, the Massachusetts company hoping for the green light.


"It's always difficult to be first. You're the lightning rod for everyone who opposes your technology."


The science stemmed from the work of Memorial University in Newfoundland-based researchers Garth Fletcher and Choy Hew, and Peter Davies of Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.


In the 1980s, the team began injecting genes into Atlantic salmon to see if they could produce a fish better able to survive the province's frigid winter waters.


They were unable to produce such a salmon. However, they were eventually successful in transferring the gene.


"It took a number of years to do it," Fletcher said.


Using what they had learned, the researchers injected the fish with a growth hormone gene to try to create a salmon that matured faster.


That was in 1989. A eureka moment soon followed.


"We saw the first fast-growing fish in the summer of '90," Fletcher recalls.


The scientists then worked with Memorial University and the University of Toronto to protect the discovery, with the final patent coming in 1996.


That's the same year they were approached at an academic conference by Elliot Entis, who wanted to license the research.


He had started A/F Protein, a biotech company pursuing a fish antifreeze protein it could sell.


The firm reorganized and spun off AquaBounty Farms in 2000. Four years later, the name changed to AquaBounty Technologies.


It became publicly traded in 2006.


Around that time, AquaBounty started trying to get the sale of super salmon approved.


A process to approve the fish for market didn't exist at the time, and the U.S. agency spent a few years creating a regulatory mechanism.


In September, the FDA declared AquaBounty's genetically engineered salmon safe to eat and said it posed no environmental threat.


The company's quest and the FDA's approval has been met with waves of controversy.


Some critics have dubbed it "Frankenfish."


They question the safety of eating genetically engineering salmon. One of the main consumption fears is that dangerous allergens could be present in the fish.


Others wonder what will happen if the fish escape and breed with wild salmon. Such concerns are unfounded, Stotish said, arguing it's actually safer than traditional aquaculture because the genetically engineered salmon are sterile.


The detractors are in high places, though.


On Tuesday, Alaskan Senator Mark Begich said he'll soon introduce legislation to prevent the FDA from rubber-stamping AquaBounty's salmon.


"Many call them 'Frankenfish' for good reasons: a monster that threatens our wild stocks and their habitat, our food safety and economic harm to Alaska wild-salmon fishermen," Begich was quoted as saying at a marine-science event in Anchorage.


Outside the safety and ecological concerns, there is also a movement in the U.S. to have AquaBounty's fish labelled as being genetically modified, if the FDA approves it.


A bill was introduced in California earlier this month to make such packaging mandatory.


Most of the debate is happening in the U.S., but there is opposition in Canada, too.


AquaBounty has a production facility in Prince Edward Island, and a group opposing it met with P.E.I. Premier Robert Ghiz this month.


"People all over the world are very concerned that Prince Edward Island will become the sole producer of the first genetically engineered (GE) animals, if in fact the United States does license it for the dinner plate," Leo Broderick of the Council of Canadians told The Charlottetown Guardian following the meeting with Ghiz.


"It's a black eye for the province. We do not need this distinction or designation as the home of the Frankensalmon."


Sharon Labchuk of Earth Action, a P.E.I.-based environmental group, told the paper their premier doesn't have an issue with genetically modified food.


"He has no problem with eating them himself. . . . Now that he's a father, I don't think his daughter should be eating (GMO foods or animals) either," Labchuk said.


"I don't think anybody should be eating these foods because they have not been proven safe."


AquaBounty's Stotish says people railing against his company's salmon are uninformed or simply doing so because they oppose the technology behind genetically modified foods.


Stotish points to the FDA declaration that the fish are fit to eat. He says he's eaten and enjoyed the product.


"It's indistinguishable from any high-quality Atlantic salmon," he says.


Amid all the debate, Time magazine named AquaBounty's faster-growing salmon as one of 2010's best inventions.


"On the one hand, you have people who don't like technology decrying the use of this technology, and on the other hand, you have an unsolicited endorsement from a major publication, saying this is certainly one of the most interesting stories and perhaps one of the best technologies of the year," Stotish says.


Keeping a close eye on all this from where the salmon discovery hatched two decades ago is Fletcher, now the director of Memorial University's Ocean Sciences Centre.


"I guess it's my baby," he says. "And, certainly, a huge chunk of the development was done at Memorial here. The fish they are growing today still carry at least one gene from the Newfoundland salmon."


The amount of reaction to the fact that it could be approved for market by the FDA raised Fletcher's eyebrows.


"One day alone, I think there were 150 publications on the subject. Hey, I don't get citations like that on my science stuff."


As for the concerns, he says there needs to be a cultural education on the food product and echoes the fact the fish are sterile.


Time's nod, 20 years after that first fish was developed, came as a surprise to Fletcher. It's recognition he welcomes, though.


"I'm not too concerned about me, personally, but I felt this was good, this was a first for Newfoundland, a first for Memorial University — at least in this technology — and we were the pioneers anyway."


Stotish wouldn't hazard a guess as to when the FDA's final decision might come down. He says he wishes he knew.


"What they tell people is they don't work on timelines: 'When we're ready to grant approval, if we're ready to grant approval, we will do so and we haven't decided yet.'"


If the salmon gets the fin's-up from the U.S. agency, Fletcher believes it'll be proof of something the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council has always preached — that basic research can be turned into a business.


The scientist said he doesn't think the FDA will block sale of the salmon because there's no scientific rationale for doing so.


Stotish and AquaBounty's investors hope Fletcher is right.


The U.S. market for salmon is massive, with the country importing as much as 300,000 tonnes per year.


Stotish has no idea how much of that market his company could capture, but says a small percentage would make them successful.


sbartlett@thetelegram.com


Twitter.com/bartlett_steve

© Copyright (c) The Daily Telegraph

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/technol...+Frankenfish/4150953/story.html#ixzz1BujQtkNe

 

[Rockfish]

Another newspaper story on Frankenfish.

Genetically engineered fish could pose threat to wild stocks: DFO scientists
By Sarah Schmidt, Postmedia News February 22, 2011 •Story•Photos ( 2 )
More Images » A transgenic (top) and a non-transgenic salmon at the AquaBounty Hatchery in Bay Fortune, PEI. The AquAdvantage salmon contains a growth hormone gene from the Chinook salmon and a genetic on-switch from the ocean pout, resulting in the continuous production of the hormone. The salmon grows to market size in 16 to 18 months instead of three years, but does not grow any bigger than conventional salmon.Photograph by: AquaBounty, Photo HandoutOTTAWA — There's a risk Canadian fish stocks could be harmed if the world's first genetically engineered salmon is approved for commercialization, federal scientists suggest.


Internal records obtained by Postmedia News also indicate experts from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans are concerned about "limited" and possibly "constrained" regulatory powers around the approvals for GE fish.


The analysis, from senior scientists specializing in biotechnology and aquaculture, comes as a company called AquaBounty Technologies works to bring GE salmon to the dinner plate.


Hoping to get approval in the United States to sell the first genetically engineered fish that people can eat, the company cleared an important hurdle in August, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's preliminary analysis concluded that the salmon, engineered in Atlantic Canada to grow twice as fast as normal fish, are safe to eat and not expected to have a significant impact on the environment.


The AquAdvantage salmon contains a growth hormone gene from the Chinook salmon and a genetic on-switch from the ocean pout, resulting in the continuous production of the hormone. The salmon grows to market size in 16 to 18 months instead of three years, but does not grow any bigger than conventional salmon.


The company plans to produce the eggs in Prince Edward Island, home to AquaBounty's research facility, where the Massachusetts-based company currently grows sterile female GE salmon for research purposes. It uses technology developed by scientists at Memorial University in Newfoundland.


The eggs would then be shipped to Panama, where the genetically engineered Atlantic salmon would be raised at an inland fish farm and processed before getting shipped as table-ready fish to the U.S. for sale. The FDA's preliminary environmental analysis concluded it is "extremely unlikely that AquAdvantage Salmon would ever be able to survive and migrate to the Pacific Ocean."


The Canadian connection means AquaBounty must undergo a separate regulatory approval process in Canada. During early consultations a year ago involving AquaBounty officials and scientists from the Department of Fisheries, Environment Canada and Health Canada, fisheries officials voiced concerns.


"DFO clarified that while the risk assessment will focus on potential effects in Canada, there is potential risk of fish migrating back to affect Canadian fish stocks," according to the minutes, redacted in many places and released under access-to-information legislation.


"DFO requested that containment and limitations to which companies in other countries will have to comply be clearly outlined in the notification."


In separate correspondence about draft minutes of this meeting, two government experts raised issues about the regulatory approvals process in Canada to approve GE fish.


Key passages of email correspondence between Caroline Mimeault, a scientific adviser at DFO's Biotechnology and Aquatic Animal Health Science, and Robert Devlin, a world renowned DFO scientist who studies risk assessment of GE fish at the department's Centre for Aquaculture and Environmental Research in West Vancouver, are redacted.


But the correspondence refers to limits and possible constraints of the current Canadian regulations for GE fish.


Mimeault wrote that she "totally agreed" with Devlin, "but we are limited by the current . . . regulations."


Mimeault, citing another colleague's input about the kind of information that can be requested of a company seeking to commercialize GE fish, said the government "may be constrained" by the regulations.


This email exchange includes an attachment of a journal article Devlin co-wrote that found dispersal behaviour has been affected by introducing an outside gene into a fish, so GE fish may venture into habitat previously not used by wild fish.


The apparent concerns about assessments and regulations contradict newly released internal DFO media lines, prepared in May 2009 in case of journalists' questions about AquaBounty.


The Canadians regulations "currently provide an effective regulatory framework for protecting the environment from potential risks of GE fish," state the media lines.


Another draft of media lines, prepared in August 2010 by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, also shows that DFO scientists say there is a risk of contamination of wild species in the case of accidental escape of GE fish.


The draft stated: "The GE salmon are bred in contained, land-based systems and are reproductively sterile females, eliminating the threat of interbreeding amongst them or with native populations."


But Mimeault, the DFO scientific adviser specializing in biotechnology and aquatic animal health, reviewed the media lines and took issue with the sweeping claim: "I would rather use a less definitive term such as 'significantly reducing‚' as opposed to 'eliminating‚' as we know that the possibility for accident release can never be completely eliminated and that the technology to render the fish reproductively sterile is not 100 per cent efficient."


Lucy Sharratt, co-ordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network and critic of AquaBounty's efforts to commercialize its GE fish, said she's worried inadequate regulations could hamper the ability of DFO scientists to carry out a comprehensive risk assessment of a GE fish application.


"The documents confirm the fish cannot be contained, infertility cannot be 100 per cent achieved, and when fish escape, there's a risk it will come back to affect our fish stocks," said Sharratt. "This could be a case of good scientists inside departments constrained by regulations."


Michael Hansen, a scientist at the New York-based Consumers Union, said the concerns of federal fisheries experts are noteworthy.


"The real issue here is DFO are raising credible scientific issues because, frankly, the assessment that the FDA did was scientifically completely inadequate."

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

Read more: http://www.canada.com/technology/Ge...s+scientists/4328313/story.html#ixzz1ElfSEeJh

 

[Little Hawk]

If it indeed ends up in a 'closed-containment' production facility I'd sure as hell give it a 'fins-up' as it might drive yet another nail into the net-pen industries coffin.

Would I eat it? Probably not.

 

[Rockfish]

Another article with an interesting perspective.

Frankenfish Phobia
By TIMOTHY EGAN

Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

.Tags:
Genetic Engineering, nature, Salmon

.
At a time when the shell of the earth has cracked and the ocean heaved a mortal wave upon a shore of vulnerable nuclear plants, a small miracle is playing out in the biggest river of the American West. Spring Chinook salmon, the alpinists of the maritime world, are following biological imperative and climbing their way up the Columbia to spawn and die.

They are returning from a life in the distant Pacific, swimming home to a grave in gravel, some going almost 1,000 river miles inland. Chinook are the largest salmon, easily the most tasty, and perhaps the most imperiled.

Given the demand for salmon, it is no surprise that a Frankenfish has emerged — a lab-created hybrid that could soon become the first genetically engineered animal approved by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption. The company behind these manufactured fish promises that they will not affect ones from an ancient and wild gene pool.

Here we go again. It is human to think we can trick nature, or do it one better. It is human to think a tsunami would never knock out a nuclear plant, a hurricane would never bury a city and a deepwater oil drill would never poison a huge body of water. In the gods of technology we trust.

Until they fail. And then, we feel helpless and small and wonder what they — or we — were thinking.

The fate of wild salmon and a panic over power plants that no longer answer to human commands would not seem to be interlinked. But they are, in the belief that the parts of the world that have been fouled, or found lacking, can be engineered to our standards — without consequence. You see this attitude in the denial caucus of Congress, perhaps now a majority of Republicans in power, who say, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that climate change is a hoax.


AquaBounty Technologies
The “AquAdvantage Salmon,” in the background, with a non-transgenic Atlantic salmon of the same age.The newfangled fish comes from AquaBounty Technologies, a company in New England, where many species of the water world are now extinct. They have patented an “AquAdvantage Salmon,” a sterile Atlantic female with a Chinook gene that can “grow to market size in half the time of conventional salmon,” says the company.

Consumer groups, and a bipartisan cluster of Congress that has not forsaken reason, are fighting fast-track Food and Drug Administration approval. They are also insisting that if the Frankenfish comes to market, the new salmon would have to be labeled transgenic — over the company’s objections.

Wild salmon require so much work: they need clean water, a bountiful ocean and restraint to ensure that they aren’t fished out of existence. Vigilance, and a small amount of sacrifice — what a drag.

The alternative, some feel, is to create something under human control. What AquaBounty would do is to take the Chinook gene and splice it into a farm-raised Atlantic. A third fish, an ocean pout, which looks like an eel on a bad fin day, would provide the genetic code that allows AquAdvantage Salmon to grow so fast. Voila: fast fish from the factory, without the hassle of habitat preservation.

I’m not reflexively afraid of living better through chemistry. Genetically modified corn and soybeans have been around for some time. If we can grow food and fiber with less demand on water and nutrients, that’s often worth pursuing.

But the Frankenfish is a much bigger step, and not just because it opens the door to federal approval of all kinds of freaks from the farm. Splice a breast-heavy chicken with a pellet-loving pig and you’re into some seriously modified “other white meat.”

With wild salmon, many people wonder what all the fuss is about. In the Northwest, salmon is our symbol, even if we’ve so mismanaged their spawning grounds with dams and overfishing. Where once there were perhaps 20 million salmon returning to the Columbia, that number now is barely a million in some years.

Alaska has done much better. They have the world’s largest wild salmon runs because they’ve protected habitats, kept water quality fairly good and regulated fishermen.

These new salmon, AquaBounty says in its pleadings before the government, will not harm the ones handed down by the ages. There is “virtually no possibility of escape and interaction with the wild population,” company officials say.

Why do I not feel reassured? The last quarter century has bred skepticism into me, beginning with a personal experience in 1986. We were in Italy, my wife pregnant with our first child, when the Chernobyl nuclear plant blew. The Soviets lied, and covered up the accident.

But what soon became clear — that a runaway reactor had spewed more than 400 times the amount of radioactivity into the environment than that released by the atomic bomb over Hiroshima — made us tremble. For days, along with the rest of Europe, we watched the pattern of a huge radioactive plume, as officials warned that pregnant women were at particularly high risk.

Luckily, the radioactive cloud never came our way. But given the choice between the hard work of trying to respect the laws of nature, and the engineered solution, I’ll take the seasonal miracle of wild salmon — and try to learn something about humility.

.

 

[Fish-Hunter]

It's a boat, it's a submarine,,, no it's a SUPERSALMON!

Holy $#!T! At what point will these friggin people stop, and for what? The almighty DOLLAR!

Won't catch me eating it - no way! I don't eat salmon at restaurants at all now because of the probability of it being farmed salmon. (And you can't always trust what the server says when they say it is "Wild", because they want to sell their product before it goes bad.)

They can keep that crap on their coast (east), we don't want it here!

If they do allow them to sell at market, the labeling should have to disclose that it is GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD in huge font, so that it cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is.

If they spent half as much money on restoring wild stocks that they do on this genetically modified crap, we would have healthy natural stocks that would sustain our heritage fisheries instead of trying to create an aquaculture industry that has lots of problems.

I'm going to stop there, (gettin all riled up). These people, as smart as they may be,,, Are Ficken IDIOTS!