Biotech Industry Cooks up PR Plans to Get us to Swallow Synthetic Biology Food

Two Mondays ago, I sat in a room of some of the most powerful agribusiness, food and synthetic biology companies in the world. The goal of this industry meeting was to discuss how to get the public to accept synthetic biology, a new and unregulated set of genetic engineering methods, as the “foundation for the future of sustainable food.” It was meant to be a closed door and off-the-record industry meeting, in contrast to the open public forum on synthetic biology in our food which I helped organize the week before. But after some of the companies caught wind that Friends of the Earth was going to expose the leaked meeting information, we were cordially urged to attend by the meeting organizers.

Although there is no agreed upon definition of synthetic biology, it is a term that encompasses a variety of new, and many would say, “extreme” genetic engineering approaches, including computer generated DNA, directed evolution, and site specific mutagenesis. It’s faster and uses more powerful methods to engineer new genetic sequences than “traditional” genetic engineering. Engineers can even...