Environmental Concerns

Potential impacts on the environment from the escape or release of genetically engineered organisms was the committee's greatest science-based concerns associated with animal biotechnology, in large part due to the uncertainty inherent in identifying environmental problems early on and the difficulty of remediation once a problem has been identified. The intent of this chapter is to identify the risks to the environment posed by GE animals, prioritize those risks, and explain the criteria used for selecting them. The committee based its assessment on principles of risk analysis that are general in their application and not limited to currently developed biotechnology. Where possible, examples from the scientific literature are used, while in others hypothetical examples are used to illustrate risks that exist in theory but thus far have not been observed.