Credit: Photo by Hisashi Urashima
A statistically rigorous survey of Japanese consumers has found that they have more negative opinions about the use of new gene-editing techniques on livestock than they do about use of the same technologies on vegetables.
The survey findings were reported in the journal
Because humans tend to feel closer to animals than plants, and commonly express feelings regarding animal welfare but not plant welfare, the researchers, led by Naoko Kato-Nitta, a research scientist at Tokyo s Joint Support Center for Data Science Research and Institute of Statistical Mathematics, wanted to see if such moral or taxonomic distinctions would produce any difference in their attitudes towards use of emerging gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9.