Abstract
AquAdvantage salmon was approved for human consumption by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015 after a 20-year process. The fish – with inserted genes promoting rapid growth and disease resistance – was the first transgenic animal designed for eating. This chapter examines the various ways in which risk around AquAdvantage salmon was framed and managed by the various parties involved. It argues that a key (and ultimately successful) strategy was the geographic displacement of risk to scientific and global “peripheries.”
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Notes
- 1.
The “Trojan gene hypothesis” emerged from a widely cited 1999 paper by ecologists William Muir and Richard Howard (Muir and Howard 1999). It argues that genes could spread from genetically modified fish to wild relatives and eventually decimate both populations.
- 2.
More recently, AquaBounty has sought approval for a facility in the United States in Albany, Indiana (Slabaugh 2018).
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Stevens, H. (2020). Transfish: The Multiple Origins of Transgenic Salmon. In: Trump, B., Cummings, C., Kuzma, J., Linkov, I. (eds) Synthetic Biology 2020: Frontiers in Risk Analysis and Governance. Risk, Systems and Decisions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27264-7_3
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