“Historically, there’s been so much pushback against genetic engineering in agriculture,” says Julius Beau Lucks, the codirector of Northwestern University’s Center for Synthetic Biology. The stakes are high, though. “I don’t know if we’ll see it again with editing, but if we do, it will be really hard to solve the world’s food problems.”
Over the next few decades, the world’s farmers will need to produce much more food to feed a growing population while using much less land and doing much less damage to nature to avoid cascading environmental crises. The world is on track to deforest another dozen California’s worth of land for agriculture by 2050, and technological fixes like vertical farms, artificial-intelligence-driven tractors, and less resource-intensive meat substitutes forged from plants or animal cells have struggled in the marketplace.
But the scientists who founded Pairwise believe their product has a chance to break through because Crispr can help farmers grow healthier and more abundant food in a warming world, with significantly less deforestation, agri-chemicals, or greenhouse gas emissions. The company is already developing an enormous pipeline of new crops customized for higher yields; longer shelf life; better resistance to heat, droughts, storms, pests, or diseases; the ability to grow in different regions or seasons or soils; and various combinations of those desirable traits. It has raised more than $160 million, and ever since its short-lived experiment with non-bitter greens, it has focused on licensing its technology rather than building its own brands. It now has working partnerships with the Big Ag giants Bayer and Corteva, the food companies Mars and Sun World, and an array of universities and other research institutions.
Just as an electric vehicle doesn’t have to look like a conventional car thanks to a small engine, Crispr has the potential to transform food and farms in unexpected ways. When I visited Pairwise headquarters in Durham in May, I got to see one of the world’s first cherry bushes. Its appearance surely would have confused George Washington, but Pairwise envisions a future where it can help growers produce more fruit with less land compared to standard cherry trees, and will also make it easier to spray and harvest with machines. Pairwise chief executive officer Tom Adams told me that ordinary-looking bush could be the first step towards a more sustainable and economical form of orchard for all kinds of fruit, because the trait that got tweaked isn’t only found in cherries.
“It’s exciting how one change can fundamentally transform how a food is grown,” said Adams, who oversaw Monsanto’s biotechnology work before it became part of Bayer. “Then we can make more changes that make the food even better. Then we can make similar changes with other foods.”
Courtesy of Joe Atlas/Pairwise
Humans have been breeding crops for as long as they’ve been growing them, initially by selecting seeds from high-performing plants, later by crossing varieties to combine high-performance traits. That’s how barely edible grasses became corn, a single wild mustard species became broccoli, cauliflower and kale, and tomatoes expanded from berry size to baseball size.
But even after the introduction of GMO crops in the late 20th century, breeding has remained a painfully slow and frustratingly random process, relying on unpredictable mutations and inevitable trade-offs. Corn has 40,000 different genes, so mixing and matching plants creates almost infinite variables. If you breed fruit that takes longer to spoil, it might lose flavor or yield; if you breed rice that needs less water, it might need more fertilizer. It can take a generation to develop and test a new variety.