Regulators Kept a Fish Treading Water for Years.

• Author: Miller, Henry I.

This is the story of a fish that spent years treading water.

The first U.S. sales of the AquAdvantage salmon, a faster-growing, genetically engineered fish, have finally begun. The farmed fish grows to maturity almost twice as quickly as its non-engineered cohorts, and on much less feed. It is coming to market after a quarter-century and close to $100 million spent trying to get the approval of federal regulators. In addition to governmental foot-dragging, the journey was constantly dogged by activists opposed to genetically engineered food.

The salmon, produced by the biotechnology firm AquaBounty, was genetically engineered to incorporate a growth hormone gene from the closely related Chinook salmon along with a DNA regulatory sequence from another fish, the ocean pout. The result is a fish that, short of DNA sequencing or measuring growth hormone levels, is completely indistinguishable from its wild salmon counterparts.

Timid retailers / Having a salmon that is easy to grow and maintain, even far from the ocean, is a win-win-win for consumers, the fish industry, and the environment. Yet, dozens of grocery chains, restaurants, and food service companies are refusing to sell AquAdvantage out of concern that the public could wrongly perceive the fish as dangerous because it was genetically engineered using modern molecular techniques.

As described in these pages previously, the AquAdvantage salmon is almost too good to be true. (See "The Use and Abuse of Science in Policymaking," Summer 2012; "How the FDA Virtually Destroyed an Entire Sector of Biotechnology," Winter 2017-2018). All of the farmed fish will be sterile females, which will only be raised in land-based facilities using recirculating aquaculture systems that recycle 95% or more of the water in which the fish are grown. Waste products are filtered out of the water (and the solids can be used by land farmers as fertilizer or soil amendments). The salmon eggs are produced in the company's certified disease-free hatcheries, so there is no need for antibiotics or pesticides because the fish are not exposed to pathogens or parasites found in the natural environment outside of the farming facility.

Escapes from land-based recirculating aquaculture system facilities are extremely unlikely because of the many fail-safe measures: screens and filters in the piping of the facility tanks, pump impellers that would mince the fish, and chlorination of water leaving the facility. Even if a...