Summary
If you wanted to create better blackberries, you could try to breed a variety without the seeds that get stuck in your teeth. Or one without the thorns that make the berries hard to pick. Or you could aim for more environmentally efficient plants that produce more berries per acre with less water and fewer chemicals. With decades of work and a fair amount of luck, you might achieve one of those goals. But a North Carolina startup called Pairwise is using the gene-editing technology called Crispr to try to achieve all those goals at once, crafting seedless, thornless, higher-yielding blackberry plants—and in a matter of years rather than decades. That’s the promise of modern genomics: introducing speed, precision, and the ability to solve multiple problems at once to the glacially slow, haphazard, one-tweak-at-a-time world of crop breeding. Pairwise’s triple-threat berries won’t be in US groceries before 2030—even turbo-charged breeding takes time—but they could help jump-start a new agricultural revolution, a high-tech era of designer crops optimized to benefit consumers, farmers, and the Earth. The company is also working on peaches without pits, row crops resistant to a variety of diseases, fruit and nut trees that produce their first harvest within a year or two rather than three to eight, and a slew of other novel products, often in partnership with some of the world’s largest agribusinesses. So far, the market for gene-edited food is almost entirely theoretical. Pairwise launched the first Crispr product in the US in 2023, a less bitter mustard green. It said it was discontinuing the product in early 2024 in favor of developing other gene-edited crops. Today, the company has received more than 50 regulatory approvals for five edited crops in nine countries, but it has only one creation for sale, a high-yielding blackberry variety available in limited quantities in Colombia. Unlike genetically modified organisms—crops tweaked with DNA from different species—Crispr seeds haven’t yet faced major roadblocks from regulators or intense hostility from the public. That doesn’t mean backlash won’t come, though. Crispr was only invented in 2012, and there’s still danger that it could get swept up in the political and cultural backlash against “Frankenfoods” that has limited the impact of GMOs. The rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement is just one symptom of the growing discomfort consumers have with the notion of edible technology. Given the lingering unpopularity of GMOs, despite decades of scientific evidence that they don’t harm human health or the environment, even industry analysts who consider Crispr safer and more useful are reluctant to predict the success of the next revolution. “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 1.5 billion on research and development every year, and vice president for biotechnology Wendy Srnic says using Crispr to prevent crop diseases is the company’s top R&D priority. By 2030, it hopes to release a corn product with four different genes edited to resist four of the worst North American diseases that eat into yields. “This is the holy grail, the ability to make the precise changes you want rather than searching for a needle in the haystack,” said Srnic. “Our mission is to help farmers get more productive on their land so they don’t need more land, and this makes me hopeful we can do it.” So far, governments around the world have largely accepted Big Ag’s argument that gene editing is essentially an extremely sped-up version of conventional plant breeding and therefore doesn’t need particularly onerous regulation. Even the EU, which has restricted most GMO’s, moved last month to treat most gene-edited crops like regular ones. But regulators have been more cautious of Crispr livestock; the US Food and Drug Administration regulates edited animals as if they were drugs, and has required scientists to incinerate them after studying them. The basic argument for caution is that we don’t know what we don’t know, that meddling with genetics can have unintended consequences for our health and the planet. But to advocates like Alison Van Eenennaam, a UC Davis geneticist who has tried to reduce the environmental footprint of beef by creating the first cattle embryos edited to ensure more efficient male calves, pseudoscientific fears of the “unnatural” are getting in the way of solving agriculture’s most pressing problems. She plans to move to Australia’s University of Queensland, where she’ll be able to edit with impunity. “It’s so depressing,” Van Eenannaam says. “People would rather have famines than technology that scares them. And if there’s no path to market, nobody’s going to invest in the technology.” The British startup Tropic Biosciences is bringing a non-browning banana to market, but most Crispr crops are at least a few years away. Startups will need more funding to make it to market, but those needs come as investments in ag-tech and food-tech have dropped 70 percent since peaking above 3 billion in investment in gene-edited seed startups over the last decade. But he believes they have the greatest potential to disrupt the agricultural sector. He thinks there’s some nervousness that the GMO story could repeat itself, if regulators get cold feet or consumers get freaked out. And food and farming have always been tough, low-margin businesses for venture capitalists craving quick, high-multiple returns. It takes time for Crispr crops to be created by scientists and field-tested by farmers and distributed to consumers at profitable prices. “That’s the thing about agriculture: Change is always slow, even with great tech,” Bergman said. Crispr can accelerate the pace of change, and the dream of tastier, healthier food grown on higher-yielding, less-polluting farms is no longer a pipe dream. But Crispr remains a new technology, still in its teenage years. It will take years or even decades for it to mature and an industry to grow up with it. Yet Adams is confident Crispr will build a brave new world of seedless, thornless blackberries and mega-yielding disease-resistant corn and bushy cherry orchards. “This is the crest of a wave that’s coming,” he said. “I wish it was already here.” This article was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit news organization. Comments Back to top