The new super bananas that get old
The new variant of the fruit has taken years of research. Using a proprietary technique called Geigs (gene editing induced gene silencing), similar to Crispr (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), Tropic has modified the Cavendish banana – the variety that comprises 99 per cent of all the bananas eaten in the UK – so its flesh does not go brown. Until now, bananas have been unwelcome guests in a fruit salad, becoming unappealingly sludgy within minutes of being undressed.
'They have the same taste, smell, sweetness profile, the same everything, except that the flesh doesn't go brown as quickly, which means you can add them to fruit salads and cut-fruit products, opening up a huge new market,' says Gilad Gershon, Tropic's co-founder. 'This is very exciting to the industry as, historically, you wouldn't include bananas, which are very popular fruits, in a prepared fruit selection in a store, because they go brown too quickly.'
Browning is triggered by polyphenol oxidase, an enzyme that catalyses the oxidation of certain compounds in the banana's flesh. By 'cutting out' the genes responsible for the enzyme, Tropic's scientists have slowed the browning process. This gene editing is different from other forms of genetic modification, in which new genes are introduced from other species, and typically comes with fewer regulatory obstacles.
Tropic says the change only affects the colour, it won't change the sweetness. Your banana will still get old, it just won't get so brown. Tropic predicts the non-browning banana – which has been approved in the United States and Canada, and it hopes soon in the UK – will reduce food waste and save millions of tons in carbon emissions.
This is only the first in a series of edited bananas Tropic has planned. By the end of this year, it also hopes to release its extended-shelf-life bananas, which stay green for up to 10 days longer, making them easier to transport. Tropic is also working on versions that are resistant to Panama and Black Sigatoka disease.
Any talk of 'Frankenfruit' brings out the sceptics. But Cavendish bananas are already the mutant children of centuries of tinkering. They do not produce seeds, and are instead propagated from cuttings so they are all practically identical, making them extremely vulnerable to diseases.
Tropic's bananas are not the first gene-edited product – a Crispr-edited tomato has been on sale in Japan since 2021 and edited soybeans are also available – and they certainly will not be the last. But the banana is Britain's most popular supermarket item, a green and yellow emblem of globalisation: cheap, tasty, nutritious and amusing to eat. It has quietly achieved supremacy while traditional British crops have fallen by the wayside. Over the past 50 years, the average consumption of turnips has plummeted, while banana consumption has more than doubled. Today, British households get through around 25kg of them per year. For Tropic and the other companies busily editing fruit and veg, the potential market is too big to ignore. When it comes to bananas, it pays to stay ahead of the curve.
This week's specials
Portable cooking just gained a new status symbol. Somerset Grill Co 's Asado Go! is a wood-fired grill small enough to be carried around. Just the thing for turning your corner of the beach into San Sebastian (£895).
Entries are now open for the British Library 's Food Season Awards, which this year include a new prize for writing, sponsored by the online magazine Vittles. The winner will receive £1,500 and access to the library's collections.
Harvey Nichols is making a play for the north London crowd by welcoming Trullo, the Islington Italian, for a three-month residency. Among the new dishes will be tagliarini with caviar. Patsy and Edina would approve.
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Professor Darren Griffin, a geneticist from the University of Kent, said at the time that Mr He had taken trust in science 'back to the Stone Age'. As the trial took place, it also emerged that Mr He had taken a number of highly unethical and often illegal steps to hide his research from prying eyes. Mr He and his colleagues were accused of forging ethical review documents, misleading doctors into unknowingly implanting gene-edited embryos. How did He Jiankui genetically edit babies? Throughout 2017 and 2018, Mr He recruited eight couples in which the male was HIV positive. He took sperm and eggs from these couples and created fertilised embryos. Using CRISPR gene editing technology, Mr He altered a gene that would give the baby protection against the HIV virus. He then took these embryos and implanted them into their mothers' wombs. Two women then became pregnant and gave birth to three babies, including a pair of twins. Since HIV positive parents are not allowed to receive assisted reproduction, he asked others to take the volunteers' blood tests on their behalf to avoid regulations. It was also revealed that he had used private funds from his two biotech companies to finance the research personally to avoid scrutiny. Despite all that, Mr He, who requested he be introduced as a 'pioneer of gene editing', appeared confused by the criticism. 'I have three babies born now, and the two families thanked me. They thanked me for what I did for them, for their family. They have a healthy baby and a happy life now,' said Mr He. 'The three babies are normal, healthy, free of HIV. They are living a happy life. That's the proof that what I've done is ethical. 'People don't want to get involved with me because I have a bad name. But actually, nothing happened. There's no bad result, I'm not breaking the law. 'I do everything legally, I do everything ethically. So nothing bad has happened yet.' Although Mr He said he is 'actively' petitioning the Chinese government to legalise embryo gene editing, he doesn't want this to be totally unregulated. In 2018, He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the genes of human babies in an attempt to make them HIV resistant. This was a violation of China's prohibition on human genome editing In fact, he is staunchly opposed to any editing which tries to enhance intelligence, appearance, or create 'super-soldiers' - adding that these should be 'permanently banned'. In Mr He's view, genetically editing embryos is simply the obvious solution to the health problems affecting the world. '10 years ago, my dream was to be a physicist - to be Einstein the second,' said Mr He. 'But then, when I went to the US, my grandfather died of some disease. It would not be a big problem today, but 15 or 20 years ago in China, the medical conditions were not so good. 'I gradually realised that all the problems of physics have mostly been solved, but there are lots of things we could do in human biology and human health.' Mr He describes this as a 'transition moment' in his life, after which he became unflinchingly dedicated to his goal of bringing embryo gene editing to the masses. Gene therapy works by fixing or replacing faulty genes to prevent the body from getting sick or make it able to fight off a disease. This treatment has a lot of promise for tackling conditions such as cancer, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, heart disease, diabetes, haemophilia and AIDS. Why is editing human embryos controversial? He Jiankui's gene editing experiments were roundly criticised by the scientific community, even by those who support embryo research. There is not enough evidence to show that these methods are safe or effective, nor are the potential side effects understood. Mr He made little effort to ensure that the procedure would be safe, and his published results were not peer-reviewed. The procedure was also entirely unnecessary to prevent HIV infection, since a regular course of antiretroviral medication would have the same effect. The drawback is that a single course of gene therapy can be prohibitively expensive, with treatments sometimes costing upwards of £3 million per dose. However, making those same genetic changes on a single-cell embryo before someone is born requires only tiny amounts of medicine. In the future, Mr He said he wants these kinds of preventative treatments to become the norm for the vast majority of children. 'I see this happening very soon, maybe in 10 years,' said Mr He. 'The reason is that it's affordable. The current gene therapy is super expensive. No one can afford it. It's a ridiculous price, and it's not benefiting people at all. 'But embryo gene editing, it only costs a few thousand dollars, so most families can afford it. 'Embryo gene editing is the future. It will get cheap, maybe not as cheap as an iPhone, but maybe as cheap as 10 iPhones.' In service of that goal, Mr He said he is opening a new research lab in Houston, Texas, where he will pursue embryo gene therapies. Mr He said he already has two American researchers lined up to start the lab in early August this year. He insists that there will be 'no pregnancies' and no gene-edited babies born in Austin. However, the same secrecy that plagued his earlier research once again threatens to cast a shadow over this latest project. Mr He refused to disclose any details about the lab, including the names of the researchers or the two Chinese 'colleagues' from his earlier projects that are overseeing the lab on his behalf. Mr He would not even name the disease that the lab is supposed to be investigating, other than to say it was a rare muscular disease. This time around, his sources of funding are also even more obscure. Mr He said he has received private donations from an American family suffering from the unnamed disease, as well as from some 'Southeast Asian families'. He also released a 'meme coin' cryptocurrency called GENE, which supposedly provides direct funding for the research. He claims that these measures are necessary to preserve his employees' safety, fearing attacks on the laboratory if the location were revealed. This comes after a supposed attack by a group of rivals last September, which supposedly led to Mr He needing hospital treatment. However, physical assaults are only the beginning of Mr He's troubles. In addition to the three million Chinese Yuan he was fined, he now says that the local government of Shenzhen is demanding the repayment of a further five million Chinese Yuan (£500,000) lent to Mr He to start a research lab. Mainstream funding bodies have also shunned his research, leading to his application for funding being rejected by the Muscular Dystrophy Association in 2024. Mr He said that researchers have declined to work with him, university professors won't answer his emails, and potential collaborators have refused to be associated with him. Although Mr He said these challenges make him 'angry', he remains characteristically undaunted. 'I think it's totally fair. It's fair, because every pioneer, every prophet, has to serve those difficulties and until one day they have been fully recognised by society,' said Mr He. 'People only believe what they want to believe. So, only when those old people die, the young people will accept it. It's natural.' As for why he is so willing to endure these hardships, Mr He appears to be caught between two conflicting motivations. At times, he seems genuinely concerned for those he sees as needlessly suffering from curable conditions, and outraged that gene therapy is only affordable for the super-rich. But at others, his underlying drive seems to be nothing more than a simple desire for fame. Mr He is obsessed with social media, in particular X, where he has amassed 135,000 followers. He claimed to be the 'most influential biologist on X' and boasted that he had 'more followers than Nobel Prize winners' while bitterly complaining that he had been banned from social media in China. He candidly told MailOnline: 'One side, I am always looking for fame. I want my name to be put into history. 'Second, I want to bring glory to my country, China. I want to make it so the Chinese people feel proud of me.' Although he claims that he only wants fame 'on the condition that it's better for the patient', his focus always seems to be on proving to the world that he was right. Asked whether going to jail, facing millions in fines, and becoming an outcast from the world of science was worth it, Mr He replied without hesitation: 'Of course. That's worth a Nobel Prize.' And despite his criminal record and lax attitude towards medical ethics, Mr He doesn't see this as an unreasonable goal at all. Comparing himself to the inventor of IVF, Sir Robert Geoffrey Edwards, Mr He said: 'When Edwards was given the Nobel Prize in 2010, there were already five million IVF babies born all over the world. 'So when we have five million babies born with gene editing, they will give me the Nobel Prize.' 'One day, when China has changed its law, I will have a Nobel Prize.' WHAT IS CRISPR-CAS9? Crispr-Cas9 is a tool for making precise edits in DNA, discovered in bacteria. The acronym stands for 'Clustered Regularly Inter-Spaced Palindromic Repeats'. The technique involves a DNA cutting enzyme and a small tag which tells the enzyme where to cut. The CRISPR/Cas9 technique uses tags which identify the location of the mutation, and an enzyme, which acts as tiny scissors, to cut DNA in a precise place, allowing small portions of a gene to be removed By editing this tag, scientists are able to target the enzyme to specific regions of DNA and make precise cuts, wherever they like. It has been used to 'silence' genes - effectively switching them off. When cellular machinery repairs the DNA break, it removes a small snip of DNA. In this way, researchers can precisely turn off specific genes in the genome. The approach has been used previously to edit the HBB gene responsible for a condition called β-thalassaemia.
