Piggybacking on President Trump’s government-wide deregulation effort, the biotech industry is lobbying for the removal of restrictions on creating pigs without tails and cattle without horns through gene editing.  They insist the new process is not a big deal, since cattle horns can be eliminated through cross-breeding. Gene editing, which tweaks an organism’s DNA without introducing other species, merely makes the process much faster.

They want the Trump administration, according to a report in Technology Review, to move the responsibility for oversight of gene editing from the Food and Drug Administration – which now puts gene-edited animals in the same classification as new drugs – to the Department of Agriculture. The latter agency likely would have a far more tolerant view, the report said, having “already decided that gene-edited plants (unlike transgenic ones) can be planted and sold in an unregulated fashion.” READ MORE