GloFish have greens seeing red

Okay, this is a fish story. But it’s not about the big one that got away; it’s about the little ones arriving in stores next month called “GloFish.” They’re ornamental pets, nothing more. Yet they shed light on both the tremendous promise of bio-engineered fish and the fanaticism of agricultural biotech opponents.

The GloFish is a tropical zebra fish about 1 inches long that’s normally bright red but becomes fluorescent Rudolph-nose red under ultraviolet light. Singapore researchers created them for their environmental benefits; to light up in the presence of polluted water. They’re like the canary in the coal mine, with fins instead of feathers. Varieties glow different colors in response to different toxins.

You would think environmentalists would embrace these — to the extent you can embrace a flopping, slippery little fish. But many insist the GloFish be gutted. That’s because, instead of having been created through old-fashioned breeding, they were made with newer and more precise gene splicing. Specifically, they were given a gene from a sea anemone.

Never mind that conventional breeding would have been impossible since zebra fish and anemones couldn’t procreate if they wanted, which it so happens they don’t.

The sellers of GloFish — Yorktown Technologies in Austin, Texas — have now commercialized them for consumers.

But “Quel horreur,” say the anti-biotech activist groups, which include such usual suspects as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the National Environmental Trust. All three signed on to a letter to the Food and Drug Administration urging a “moratorium” on the sale of the fish.

Authoring the letter was the Center for Food Safety in D.C., which seems strange since nobody outside a fraternity house would consider eating a GloFish. But “safety” is a rubric. The only food the Center opposes is biotech. And to it, “moratorium” is a euphemism for “ban.”

The center’s Executive Director Andrew Kimbrell, who while wearing his various hats has even fought against biotech drug development, wrote that if the GloFish escaped they would become “biological pollution.” But the term is meaningless.

Almost all the plants and animals we eat came from other countries or from cross-breeding. Thus all might be called “biological pollution.” Yes, we do have many costly invasive species such as Norway rats and kudzu, but none are biotech.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there have been several incidents of accidental or intentional zebra fish releases in the United States. But the fish don’t survive. We don’t have tropical waters. The brilliant GloFish itself, while pretty to us, would probably signal “lunchtime” to predators.

Mr. Kimbrell’s real beef with the fish is that they “will set a precedent for all other [genetically engineered] fish producers, and the floodgates will almost literally be opened.”

To explain: Mr. Kimbrell isn’t concerned with pets at all, but rather the main goal of fish biotechnology, which is to create food. And anti-biotech activists fight tooth and nail against all genetically engineered foods, be they crops or fish. That’s why the groups petitioned the FDA, which as you might guess doesn’t normally regulate pets.

Their great white whale is the Canadian-American company Aqua Bounty Technologies, which hopes to soon get FDA approval to grow salmon that develop 3 times faster than normal and hence can save money for both farmers and consumers.

No matter that the bio-engineered salmon are sterilized so that even if they escaped their pens they couldn’t threaten wild Atlantic salmon populations, or that there’s nothing about making a fish grow faster that would give it a breeding advantage over conventional salmon.

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