Botox Apples

The speed of scientific development has resulted in numerous medical, technological, and agricultural advances. Most of these advances we have labeled as “good” as they have helped us move faster and more efficiently through various obstacles allowing us to save lives and to essentially get important things done. Others advances honestly speaking have been questionable at best, involving several different risk taking innovations that have made several people nervous. An example of one of these novel innovations is the new technology evidently created to stop apples from browning, commonly known among critics as the "Botox Apple".  This raises some very obvious and important questions, for example; how safe are these apples? How will we know when they’re getting bad? How will we know if we are in fact buying fresh apples? Who is really benefitting from this invention? The lack of answers to these questions is one of the reasons the USDA has yet to approve this product for sale in the United States.

According to the Associated Press it was essentially created by the Canadian fruit company Okanagan using licensed technology from researchers in Australia who established it and used it in potatoes. To help us understand the way these apples would be we need to ask the essential question; why do apples brown? And what does this technology actually do? Apples contain a chemical compound that consists of iron that reacts with the oxygen in the air when exposed; they also contain enzymes that speed up the reaction between the oxygen and the iron. What the researchers have done is “silence” the enzyme hence drastically slowing the rust-like chemical reaction, and the “browning” of the apples. This product would mostly be used for children’s lunches, that provide already cut apples and possibly salads and other foods that could not previously include apples without a large amount of added antioxidants, to avoid browning, that are expensive for the companies. People have not showed very optimistic responses to these apples, neither have apple corporations seeing as a genetically modified apples would not go over very well with consumers, there is proof from examples such as the genetically modified salmon that has yet to be approved by the USDA.

Although I disagree with this specific form of genetically modified fruit, I also think it is very important to recognize the effort put in by the researchers and scientists, and that it is also important to take into consideration that this sort of pioneering science could help  deal with diseases that have been plaguing crops all around the world, could prove useful for eradication of fungal, bacterial and viral infections of certain agricultural crops. I believe that its not all bad, we must open our minds to understanding where the researchers are coming from and what this could mean for the future.