Genetic engineering has already proven it can cure previously untreatable diseases, feed more people with fewer resources, and reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint. The case for allowing it rests on concrete results: a 93.5% success rate in the first approved CRISPR therapy for sickle cell disease, a 22% average increase in crop yields worldwide, and meaningful reductions in pesticide use and carbon emissions. These aren’t hypothetical promises. They’re measured outcomes from technologies that exist right now, with far more potential still untapped.
Treating Diseases With No Other Cure
In December 2023, the FDA approved Casgevy, the first therapy using CRISPR gene editing, for sickle cell disease in patients 12 and older. Sickle cell causes excruciating pain crises when misshapen red blood cells block blood flow, and for decades the only cure was a bone marrow transplant from a matched donor, something most patients never find. In clinical trials, 29 of 31 evaluable patients (93.5%) treated with Casgevy went at least 12 consecutive months without a severe pain crisis. Every treated patient’s modified cells successfully engrafted, with no graft failure or rejection.
That single approval changed the trajectory of a disease affecting roughly 100,000 Americans and millions worldwide. And sickle cell is just the starting point. Gene therapies are in development for conditions ranging from inherited blindness to muscular dystrophy. Banning or heavily restricting genetic engineering would mean telling patients with well-understood genetic diseases that a working treatment exists in principle but is off limits in practice.
Growing More Food With Fewer Chemicals
A large meta-analysis published in PLOS ONE, covering studies from multiple countries and crop types, found that genetically modified crops reduced chemical pesticide use by 37% on average while increasing yields by 22%. The benefits were strongest for insect-resistant varieties, which cut pesticide quantities by about 42% and boosted yields by nearly 25%. Herbicide-tolerant crops showed more modest yield gains (around 9%) but played a different environmental role, which we’ll get to below.
These numbers matter most in developing countries, where smallholder farmers have the least margin for error. For every extra dollar a farmer in a developing nation invested in GM seed over conventional seed, they earned back an average of $5.22 in additional income. In developed countries, the return was $3.00 per dollar. Over the 25-year period from 1996 to 2020, about 72% of the total income gains came from higher yields, with the remaining 28% from lower costs on inputs like insecticides and herbicides. For GM insect-resistant cotton specifically, farmers in countries like China and Colombia saw average income gains of $209 per hectare.
When people in wealthy nations debate genetic engineering in the abstract, it’s easy to overlook that for a cotton farmer in India or a maize grower in sub-Saharan Africa, this technology can be the difference between a failed season and a viable livelihood.
Reducing Agriculture’s Carbon Footprint
Herbicide-tolerant crops have played a surprisingly large role in lowering carbon emissions from farming, not because of the crops themselves but because of how they changed the way farmers manage weeds. Traditionally, farmers control weeds by tilling the soil before planting, a process that burns fuel and releases stored carbon into the atmosphere. Herbicide-tolerant crops allow farmers to skip that step and instead manage weeds chemically, shifting to what’s called conservation tillage or no-till farming.
Surveys of U.S. soybean farmers found that herbicide-tolerant soybean technology was the single greatest factor influencing their decision to adopt reduced tillage. A review of 51 studies confirmed this relationship, and farm-level data from nearly 30,000 soybean growers showed that adoption rates for conservation tillage and no-till systems were 10% and 20% higher, respectively, than they would have been without the technology. Globally, conservation tillage practices facilitated in part by herbicide-tolerant crops contribute to an estimated annual net reduction of about 42 billion kilograms of CO2 equivalent emissions through lower fuel use and better soil carbon storage.
Solving Vitamin A Deficiency
Vitamin A deficiency kills an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 children each year and blinds many more, overwhelmingly in regions where rice is the dietary staple. Rice naturally contains no vitamin A. Golden Rice, engineered to produce beta-carotene (which the body converts to vitamin A), contains up to 35 micrograms of beta-carotene per gram of uncooked rice.
In feeding trials with healthy adults, researchers at Tufts University found that the body converts Golden Rice beta-carotene to vitamin A at a ratio of roughly 3.8 to 1 by weight. That means a single 50-gram serving of uncooked Golden Rice, a reasonable portion for a child aged 4 to 8, could provide more than 90% of a child’s daily vitamin A requirement. A full 100-gram serving would deliver 500 to 800 micrograms of retinol, well above the recommended daily amount for young children.
Golden Rice is not a silver bullet, and larger long-term studies in vitamin A-deficient populations are still needed to confirm real-world impact. But the basic science works. Blocking this technology on precautionary grounds carries its own cost, measured in preventable blindness and death.
Making Organ Transplants Possible
Over 100,000 people in the United States are on the organ transplant waiting list at any given time, and thousands die each year before a donor organ becomes available. Genetic engineering is opening a path to using pig organs as substitutes for human ones, a field called xenotransplantation. Pigs are anatomically similar to humans in key ways, but unmodified pig organs trigger an immediate, violent immune rejection.
Researchers have used gene editing to remove the pig molecules that provoke this rejection and to add human immune-compatibility genes. The most advanced donor pigs carry edits to ten or more genes: knocking out the sugar molecules on cell surfaces that the human immune system attacks, adding human proteins that regulate the complement system (part of the immune response), and disabling pig retroviruses that could theoretically infect human cells. In 2020, the FDA approved genetically modified pigs as a potential source for human therapeutics. In 2022, a patient at the University of Maryland received a heart from a gene-edited pig that functioned for about two months, the longest a pig heart has ever sustained a human life.
Two months isn’t a permanent solution, but it represents a proof of concept that was unimaginable a decade ago. Each iteration of genetic modification brings these organs closer to long-term viability, potentially eliminating the transplant shortage entirely.
Fighting Malaria at the Genetic Level
Malaria kills over 600,000 people annually, most of them children under five in sub-Saharan Africa. Gene drive technology offers a fundamentally new approach: engineering mosquitoes so that they either cannot carry the malaria parasite or gradually suppress their own population over generations. In controlled trials in Tanzania, genetically modified mosquitoes carrying an anti-parasite gene drive had zero detectable parasites in their salivary glands (the part that transmits malaria through a bite), even though 85% had parasites in their midguts. By comparison, 35% of unmodified wild-type mosquitoes carried parasites all the way to their salivary glands, ready to infect the next person they bit.
Multi-generational cage experiments have shown that these modified mosquitoes can spread their engineered trait to near-total prevalence in a population when paired with a self-propagating genetic element. If field trials confirm these results at scale, gene drives could reduce malaria transmission in ways that bed nets and insecticides alone have never achieved.
How Safety Is Evaluated
One reason genetic engineering should be allowed is that robust safety frameworks already exist to govern it. For genetically engineered foods, regulators evaluate whether the modified product is “substantially equivalent” to its conventional counterpart, meaning it has the same nutritional profile, toxicity levels, and allergenicity. Testing focuses on two targets: the new DNA that was inserted and any new proteins expressed as a result. Analytical methods include quantitative PCR and DNA microarrays, which can detect specific genetic elements and identify exactly which modification is present in a sample.
These aren’t token reviews. Regulators screen for known allergen sequences, test for unintended toxic compounds, and require detailed molecular characterization of each genetic insertion. The international Codex Alimentarius harmonizes risk analysis and labeling standards across countries. For medical gene therapies, the bar is even higher: years of preclinical work, phased human trials, and ongoing post-approval monitoring.
No technology is without risk, and genetic engineering is no exception. But the regulatory infrastructure to manage those risks is mature and well-tested across dozens of countries and hundreds of approved products. Allowing genetic engineering does not mean allowing it without oversight. It means allowing it with the same evidence-based scrutiny applied to pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and food additives, and letting the results speak for themselves.