Over on Twitter Magdalena Plotczyk (@MPlotczyk) posted a striking photo of an anti-GMO poster from Lausanne, Switzerland. The top part of the poster translates as, “‘After GMO corn, GMO children?'”
As readers of this blog know, I do have concerns about the eventual production of genetically modified people using rapidly evolving genetic modification/gene editing technology such as CRISPR.
In fact, I’ve written an entire new book on this, GMO Sapiens. I hope you’ll read it. However, as you’ll see in the book, I’m not so concerned about GMO plants and foods in a general sense. I also do not see that GMO people or as I refer to them in the book, GMO sapiens, directly follow from GMOs in the plant world.
I think the bottom part of the poster translates roughly as, “No to unlimited reproductive medicine”.
Here’s the tweet.
Anti-GMO campaign spotted in Lausanne, Switzerland 'After GMO corn, GMO children?' #GMO #geneediting @pknoepfler pic.twitter.com/FuCPceMD43
— Magdalena Plotczyk (@MPlotczyk) May 24, 2016
Yes, your translation is correct, and I saw the same in German in Zurich and Bern train stations today. There are posters like this in many places in Switzerland right now as we will vote on the amendment to the Reproductive Medicine Act (RMA) at the Swiss federal level on June 5th.
But this has nothing to do with CRISPR (yet..): it’s about conventional preimplantation genetic diagnostics (PGD) which is still prohibited in Switzerland by the current law. So the poster is actually quite misleading IMHO, because the law amendment is about allowing under very specific conditions the selection, not the modification of the embyos… See Swiss government English summary here: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/votes/20160605/Reproductive-Medicine-Act.html