It is time to shake off the fear of “Frankenfoods” and embrace the genetic editing of farm animals for disease-resistant, fast-growing super-cows and chickens, a science conference has heard.
In the future humans will eat meat and eggs and drink milk from animals for whom the natural selection of desirable traits has been sped up using cutting-edge techniques to make them “more efficient”, said Dr Jon Oatley, of the college of veterinary medicine at Washington State University.
It has, he said, been possible to produce bulls that are sterile and inject them with stem cells from a prize male with edited genes. The sterile bulls act as “surrogate sires”, producing sperm that carries the genetic material of the gene-edited bull.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is consulting on allowing food from gene-edited animals to be sold in Britain, having opened the door for genetically altered plants to be sold in supermarkets as soon as this year.
The techniques available are used to “accelerate” the selection of traits that occur naturally in an animal or plant, creating what are known as precisionbred organisms, or PBOs, Oatley said.
This is different from GMOs, genetically modified organisms, where material from other species is spliced into DNA to create “abnormal” and unnatural alterations, he said.
The GMO process prompted the coining of the word “Frankenfoods” from opponents in the 1990s, but modern techniques “don’t create foreign or abnormal things that could never arise in nature”, he said before a talk entitled “Harnessing tech solutions to nourish the world” at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Arizona.
The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 allows the sale of gene-edited plant products in England, but the government is consulting on secondary legislation to allow the same for animals. The act only permits genetic edits that “could have resulted from traditional processes alone”.
Humans have been interfering with the genetics of animals for years by selectively breeding cows, sheep, pigs and chickens that grow more quickly, produce more milk, develop thicker wool or lay more eggs, to produce offspring that share these traits, Oatley said.
Carrots, for example, are not naturally orange. Orange ones were created in the Netherlands in the 17th century by mixing yellow and purple varieties.
Modern gene-editing techniques allow scientists to perform the same process, but greatly sped up. It allows them to identify naturally occurring genes in an animal linked with faster growth or greater resistance to infections to ensure that the next generation is born with those traits and will pass them on.
The gene-editing process would not lead to the creation of anything outlandish, such as six-legged chickens or gigantic cows, Oatley said.
He said instead it would mean the breeding of pigs that are resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome and chickens that are resistant to avian influenza, minimising waste from animals that die. Cattle would reach adult size more quickly.
Oatley said: “If an animal takes two years to reach market weight, that’s two years of [consumption] and methane emission. What if we shorten that by a year? Now it has a 50 per cent reduction in its impact on the environment.
“We are also trying to overcome some of the things where traditional, conventional husbandry practices have reduced the welfare of animals.”
Farmers often cut the tails of sheep, known as “docking”, to prevent maggot infestations, while the beaks of chickens are trimmed to prevent them from violent pecking. However, scientists could find the genes that create naturally short tails or beaks.
Oatley added: “I think the fear and concerns in the public … is that GMO strategies were putting foreign DNA into the genome of animals, things that could never arise in nature, using ‘recombinant’ DNA, things you couldn’t bring along by breeding.”
He said those developing new geneediting techniques were trying to teach the public about the “new narrative”.
He said he had obtained authorisation in the US to make pork sausages from a pig whose DNA had been modified using the Crispr technique, which allows precise edits to DNA strands.
“I’ve had very little backlash,” he said.
“Most people are more than interested, more than willing to consume the product.”
Monday, February 16, 2026
ZZ26011 Frankenfoods V01 160226
Sunday, February 8, 2026
ZZ26010 Biotech Futures V01 080226
British firms are brilliant at biotech.
We must not squander our lead
Biotechnology is one of the most revolutionary yet underappreciated technologies of our time. This year alone it promises personalised cancer vaccines, cures for rare childhood diseases and the ability to design and print new DNA to kill bacteria. It is expected to contribute upwards of $2 trillion to the world economy by the end of the decade, transforming everything from medicine to manufacturing.
But Britain, despite our historic strength in this area, risks missing out.
The sector consistently produces pioneering innovation, yet equity financing for British biotech was down 49 per cent in 2025 and venture capital funding fell 13 per cent. Restrictive regulations mean many British biotech products can be sold in other countries but not here, where they were invented.
It would be a tragedy if Britain — the country where the structure of DNA was discovered, where a mammal was first cloned, and which birthed the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold — were to miss out on this moment. It holds the promise of not only medical advances but also the ability to biologically grow rocket fuel, magnets, fibre-optic cables and many other industrial inputs. But if we do not act, we will miss out. China is already hustling to take over biotech — as it has so many other industries.
My Stanford colleague Professor Drew Endy warns that biotech is the sector most likely to produce a “Sputnik moment”, a Western realisation of how far ahead China is in a defining tech. Last year, the US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology warned that Beijing was three years away from achieving biotechnology dominance. Already, many Western pharmaceutical companies are dependent on WuXi AppTec, the socalled Huawei of biotech, and other Chinese firms such as BGI Group.
This matters because China weaponises dependencies. Biotech also has a slew of uses beyond medicines. It can be used to transform, and indeed grow, manufacturing, computing and military materials. If Beijing achieves dominance, it is much more likely the 21st century will be the Chinese century.
Beijing has been investing heavily in biotech for decades. It began with crops, as it strove for food security, but has now extended to other fields. Almost half of all new drugs entering human trials last year were from China, as were well over half of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in antibiotics. But the real chokepoint lies upstream, where Beijing controls the production of key starting materials that go into APIs for drugs like amoxicillin and penicillin.
Beijing is now funding foundational research in a way that we in the West are failing to. As China is radically raising its expenditure, the US is cutting back. I increased UK R&D spending to record levels, and Labour has boosted it again.
But we will never be able to compete in pure funding terms with the US and China. So we have to box clever.
We are getting some things right.
More than half of all European advanced therapy clinical trials take place in the UK. The MHRA, our medicines regulator, is taking a sensible approach to genetic medicines for rare diseases. Rather than requiring each drug to be approved, it instead plans to greenlight techniques: once approved, any drug made using the method will be cleared automatically, saving time and cutting costs.
But on other things we are moving far too slowly. AI-driven drug discovery holds huge promise. At the moment, developing a new drug is a laborious process: 90 per cent of efforts fail at the first hurdle. But AI is changing that, moving it from being a lab-based process to a computer-driven one — from in vitro to in silico, as the industry jargon has it.
This has already accelerated and doubled the success rate of medicine development. Sir Demis Hassabis’s London start-up Isomorphic Labs is one of the leading companies in this field, with almost $3 billion in pharmaceutical partnerships. It promises to be one of the most significant UK start-ups since chip-design company Arm.
But there is an opportunity to create more British winners — and cure more diseases. We have world-leading biobank and genomic sequencing data libraries, and the health data held by the NHS is more comprehensive than any other set in the world. If UK firms were given preferential access to this NHS data, we would provide a compelling reason for companies to be based here.
Our rules and regulations are also holding us back. British scientists have developed a new purple tomato that contains antioxidants helping reduce the risk of cancer. You can buy it in America, Australia and Canada, but not here; it hasn’t yet been approved. Companies won’t stay long in a country where their reward for innovation is to be told their new products cannot be sold.
If growth is truly our national priority, we must resolve this problem. If the Genetic Technology Act we passed in 2023 does not go far enough, then update it. We must also avoid aligning with EU biotech regulations — a precautionary approach fundamentally ill-suited to an era of rapid innovation. If we sign up to these rules to try and facilitate agricultural trade, we will make ourselves internationally uncompetitive.
Biotechnology draws on two of our great national strengths: life sciences and artificial intelligence. If we were to miss out on this multi-trillion-pound revolution because of our failure to use our national data, reform restrictive regulations and fix a flawed financing model, it would show us to be fundamentally unprepared to take advantage of the opportunities of the coming decades.
Biotechnology would be a good place to start demonstrating that Britain really is serious about growth.