An article on gene-edited fruit recently caught my attention, not so much because it’s unusual but more as a concern based on a meeting I had quite a few years ago in a research station just outside of London. The research station belonged to Syngenta, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, and the particular discussion I had there centered on the development of bananas. I don’t really remember why I was there, or why I was talking about bananas, but it had something to do with Puerto Rico’s industrial incentive program – I was helping to bring European investment into the Island at the time.
What I do remember is being told that bananas have been genetically engineered so that they no longer have seeds. That didn’t seem important to me until the research staff pointed out that there was a distinct downside to developing seedless bananas; that downside was that new banana trees had to grow as off-shoots of existing banana trees, they could not be grown from seeds because there weren’t any. The market for perfect bananas had eliminated them – who wants to eat a banana with big seeds in it? However, if there was a disease that attacked bananas trees, bananas could disappear because there are no seeds, or seed bank as a backup. That downside of genetic engineering has stayed somewhere in my head ever since.
The article in the Economist discussed the development of gene-edited fruit such as seedless, or almost seedless, blackberries, to go along with the successes of seedless cherries, grapes, watermelons and easy-peel mandarin oranges.
Before I go any further with this, I have to say that the fruit we eat today is only edible because humans have bred them over thousands of years; peaches today are 16 times bigger than their ancient ancestors and watermelons originally had so many pips that they must have been almost impossible to eat. The only difference today is that gene-editing has dramatically shortened the breeding method of change and has allowed the fruits to be modified in ways that breeding could not have achieved – a company in California is developing non-browning avocados by obstructing an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, and one in China made tomatoes 30% sweeter by disabling genes that limit sugar production.
The most popular method of gene-editing is called CRISPR and it permits the deletion of single genes. So far, few CRISPR gene-edited fruits have reached the market because, for example, of the time it takes for a genetically-engineered seed to grow into an apple, or peach, tree. However, the process is well underway. Tomatoes and strawberries only take a few months to grow to maturity so they are well up the list for gene-edited fruits coming to market. In 2021, a Japanese tomato with a higher content of gamma-aminobutyric acid, a beneficial nutrient, was the first CRISPR food to go on the market. In 2024, scientists in China used the same technology to make tomatoes 30% sweeter by disabling genes that limit sugar production. Companies believe that people will eat more fruit if it “Tastes better”, “Looks better” (Bigger??), and doesn’t have seeds! A USDA Economic Research Service in the U.S. report says that seedless blueberry imports grew ten-fold between 2000 and 2010, mainly because they were seedless.
My nagging concern with all this goes back to my experience at Syngenta many years ago. We humans have a tendency to develop things just because we can, without too much thought as to the long-term consequences. A world without bananas, cherries, apples, peaches doesn’t bear thinking about … although I wouldn’t shed too many tears over watermelon!
