Saving Our Oranges

We all love our Vitamin C, but what if I told you that farmers were at one point struggling to grow healthy oranges. You wouldn't believe me right? I mean, how hard is it to grow an infamous fruit like an orange?

Well, you would be half correct, the growing part is fairly easy and just like any other common fruit. The part that farmers are struggling with is this orange-affecting disease they like to call “citrus greening”. Now I don’t know about you but surely don’t like my oranges when they are orange, not green. It sounds fairly simple but it actually became very hard to get rid of. The big orange industries like Tropicana tried everything including tons of pesticides but the problem wouldn't budge.

Now, the problem was huge and the solutions weren't working so what would you do in a situation like this? I mean, it’s not like we were running out of some rare and exotic berries, these are our oranges we’re talking about! So when all else failed, the only viable option seemed to be to change the DNA of the orange so it would become immune to this unwanted greening.

        There were a lot of standard controversies involved with this that come along with a topic as such and the Tropicana was concerned about their image of a “100 % natural” company. There were people against G.M.O and then there were people for it. Finally, after much debate, a scientific agreement was made that the only way they could save the oranges was to alter its DNA, no longer making it a target of the greening.

I think this article goes hand in hand with Anthes’s Frankenstein’s Cat because she also discusses genetic modification of animals and also debates about its advantages and disadvantages. She also speaks about all of its risk factors and all of the ethics behind it. She specifically quotes that “if there is peril here, there is also great promise,” meaning that after everything, she still ends up agreeing with it because that’s the way science is leading us to and that is the only way of advancing.

Anthes, Emily. Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave

      New Beasts. New York: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus, and

      Giroux, 2013. Print. 

Harmon, Amy. "A Race to Save the Orange by altering its DNA" The

      New York Times. The New York Times, 27 July 2013. Web. 10

      Oct. 2013.