Source: Genetic Literacy Project

The glacial pace of the U.S. FDA’s approval process for genetically engineered food animals has inhibited innovation for decades. It wasn’t until 2021 that the first of them — the AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon tweaked using transgenic engineering (which makes it a “GMO”) to grow twice as quickly as the unaltered variety — finally went on sale in the US. The FDA review of the fish took more than 20 years. (Compare that to the five-month review of human insulin, the first biopharmaceutical, which was approved in 1982.)