Introduction

This chapter traces the development of AquAdvantage (AA) salmon from the initial scientific insights in the 1970s that led to its invention to the eventual approval of the fish for human consumption by the FDA in 2015. Since AA salmon was the first genetically engineered animal approved for human consumption, its story is significant on its own terms. In particular, it is important to understand how AA salmon came to be approved in the face of substantial opposition to – and public concern with – genetically modified foods (GMFs).

By examining how risks were managed and framed around AA salmon, this chapter aims to provide insight into how genetically modified and synthetic organisms are perceived and understood by GMF opponents and regulators. I argue that in this case the perception of risk was successfully managed through a series of displacements; by (literally and figuratively) moving the fish into different categories and zones, its creators were able to convince regulators that the fish posed no substantial risk for human consumption. This success reveals a great deal about how GM organisms are perceived. But it also raises significant questions about who is risked and what is risked in the making of GMFs and synthetic organisms. The construction of AA salmon as a transnational animal suggests how risks and rewards are increasingly unevenly distributed within global scientific and capital-commercial flows.

Importantly, my aim here is not to argue for or against AA salmon in terms of health, safety, environmental impact, or any other factor; rather, my objective is to explore how risks and benefits were framed and counter-framed by those on both sides.

After some background on AA salmon, this chapter examines the historical development of the fish from Newfoundland, Canada, to Boston to Washington, DC, to Panama. The main sections of the paper explore how AA successfully constructed the fish as both a “foreign” and “safe” object.

Background

AA salmon is a genetically modified Atlantic salmon with several types of genetic modifications. First, it has a growth hormone gene taken from a Chinook salmon so that it can grow (and reach maturity) faster. Second, it has a promoter borrowed from an ocean pout that causes the growth hormone to be expressed all year round, not just in spring and summer. In the pout, this promoter – known as an anti-freeze promoter (AFP) – turns on an “anti-freeze protein” that prevents blood from freezing and allows the fish to survive in arctic waters. This promoter is repurposed in AA salmon for turning on growth genes in winter months. And third, AA salmon also has some genetic modifications for increased disease resistance.

The most important and novel element of this cassette of modifications was the AFP. The development of this element dates back to work undertaken by Singaporean biologist Hew Choy Leong working in Canada in the 1970s. Hew and Garth Fletcher isolated anti-freeze proteins in flounder and began to study them in detail. In 1991, Hew, Fletcher, and Elliot Entis founded A/F Proteins Inc. to explore possibilities for commercialization of anti-freeze proteins. At this time, they had in mind applications in frozen foods, cosmetics, and cryogenic surgery.

In 1995, A/F Proteins acquired the intellectual property for transgenic salmon, giving them the right to produce and sell the modified fish. In the same year, they submitted an application for a “New Animal Drug” to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This marked the beginning of a 20-year investigation by the FDA to establish the safety of AA salmon. During this time, anti-freeze proteins were also adapted and developed for use in other foods (e.g., ice cream) and cosmetics. News of “anti-freeze” in food made consumers more aware and warier of such genetically engineered products.

Perhaps most importantly for the FDA’s review, however, AA salmon were not farmed within the United States. Juvenile transgenic salmon were transferred directly from facilities in Canada to inland fish breeding facilities in Panama. There, distant from the United States, AA salmon could be portrayed as non-threatening to US wild salmon stocks and rendered “safe” in a variety of ways.

Biotechnology and genetic engineering have long been discussed in terms of hybridity and boundary crossing. Donna Haraway’s account of genetically modified laboratory “oncomouse,” for example, described it as a gender-bending, category crossing, radically unstable, monstrous vampire of a creation (Haraway 1997). Newer biotechnological creations – like AA salmon – are perhaps even more radically “crossed” and hybridized. This ability to challenge and bend biological categories is perhaps now so strong that we need new theoretical tools to account for it and understand it. Sophia Roosth outlines ways in which we might draw on queer theory for understanding the new and category crossing formations of synthetic biology: “Now queer kinship theory may be applied to objects of synthetic biology – and perhaps all biotechnologically-made transgenic organisms – to make sense of how synthetic biologists arrange and define biological relatedness” (Roosth 2017).

Queer theory can also help us understand how objects such as transgenic fish stabilize themselves through the performances of “trans”-identity. How are such “trans” objects constructed as “same” or “other” by different parties (both advocates and opponents)? How are such objects policed? How do they become “deviant” or “normal”? The tools of queer theory – in challenging binaries and exposing the ways in which identities are performatively constructed – may be of help in understanding the kinds of cultural roles transgenic organisms are occupying. In so doing, they can also help us understand how regulators and GMF opponents construct and perceive risks of particular kinds of “foreign” objects.

Cori Hayden’s work has pointed to the connections between kinship and intellectual property, especially in the regimes of bioprospecting. As she notes, both are, at root, about genealogy of people, ideas, and things: “How do new property relations rearrange genealogical grids, not only turning natural kinds into brands but also creating novel, ‘propertized’ kinds in the first place?” (Hayden 2007, p. 342). AA salmon emerges from exactly such a rearrangement of “genealogical grids” into new forms of property and profit. But it also trades on the rearrangement of “geographical grids,” re-organizing space and place to accommodate the emergence of new kinds of crosses, objects, and brands.

AA salmon is “trans” in multiple dimensions: transgenic, transgender, and transnational. This “trans”-ness is critical to how this salmon is perceived as alternatively risky, safe, familiar, foreign, animal, monster, edible, and inedible.

Methods

This account is based largely on historical methods. It uses a range of primary sources to reconstruct the origins and development of AA salmon from the 1970s to 2015. These sources include oral history interviews with scientists, published scientific and technical literature, as well as documentary sources drawn from the FDA and the civil society organizations.

The Making of a Transgenic Fish

Singapore to Newfoundland

Hew Choy Leong was born in British Malaya and educated in Singapore at Nanyang University, graduating in 1963. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Vancouver and completing postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and Toronto, in 1974 Hew was appointed assistant professor at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Hew’s field was insulin precursor pathways. Since insulin from cod was exceptionally easy to purify, his work took him to the Ocean Science Center in Logy Bay, a remote and frigid part of the Canadian Maritimes (Hew 2017).

As one of the earliest areas of settlement for Europeans in North America, the Maritimes have a long history of economic activity centered on shipping and fishing. The fishing of cod, whale, haddock, herring, lobster, scallops, and other marine animals began in the sixteenth century and remained a prosperous activity into the twentieth century.

As such, Logy Bay was a natural location at which to study these fish. Hew’s cod were imported into his tanks from further south in Nova Scotia. The tanks themselves were fed with seawater from the ocean nearby and heated to ensure that the fish, which were not accustomed to the colder water of Newfoundland, did not freeze. One night in February 1975, however, disaster struck! Just as Hew’s experiments on insulin were getting underway, the power in the Ocean Science Center failed overnight; the heaters went off and Hew’s 200 cod died in their tanks (Hew 2017).

As Hew recalls, “While I was devastated, I was at the same time the most popular guy in the Center that day because everyone wanted cod for dinner!” But Hew also noticed something peculiar. He shared his lab and the tanks with a fish physiologist, Garth Fletcher, who was studying flounder. Although the flounder were in the same freezing water as the cod, they did not die. Why, Hew wondered? Fletcher immediately suggested that the flounder must produce some kind of anti-freeze into their bodies to keep them alive in the cold waters of the North Atlantic (Hew 2017).

Seizing the opportunity, Hew put aside his work on insulin and began to collaborate with Fletcher to attempt to figure out exactly how the flounder stayed alive – what was this anti-freeze and how did it work? Answering this question consumed the next decade of Hew’s life. With Fletcher, Hew built the world’s leading laboratory for the study of the molecular biology of anti-freeze proteins.

During the 1970s, Hew and his co-workers gave little thought to the application of their work, let alone the possibility of commercial fish farming. It was only in 1982, in what Hew attributes to another “serendipitous” turn, that his attention was turned to salmon. During a coffee break at a conference, a salmon aquaculturalist mentioned that some salmon farms had had problems with freezing fish. Was it possible to put the anti-freeze in the salmon? (Hew 2017).

Motivated by this question, over the next several years, Hew and Fletcher aimed to do exactly this. They were also inspired by the work of Ralph Brinster and Richard Palmiter. In 1982, Brinster and Palmiter managed to inject a rat growth hormone gene into the embryo of a mouse; the gene was not only taken up by the mouse but also passed on to subsequent generations to create “Mighty Mice” (Palmiter et al. 1982). If such a gene transfer could be done for a mouse, it could be done for a fish, Hew thought (Hew 2017).

In fact, transferring genes from one species of fish to another proved difficult – fish eggs are very delicate and it proved tricky to get foreign DNA to be taken up into the nucleus of the egg. Hew and Fletcher eventually came up with a way of achieving the transfer using a hollow needle inserted through the micropyle of the fish egg (Fletcher et al. 1988). They filed a patent on this method and on transgenic anti-freeze fish in November 1988 (Health and Social Care Research Development Corporation 1988). Although their salmon stably took up and expressed the flounder anti-freeze gene, the absence of other crucial proteins to interact with the flounder anti-freeze meant that it remained in a relatively ineffective form. The salmon still froze in sub-zero water.

Undeterred, Hew and Fletcher saw that there might be different uses for their anti-freeze gene and for their transgenic technique. In particular, their idea was that the anti-freeze promoter could be spliced to a fish growth hormone and used to speed up fish growth. The anti-freeze promoter would ensure that the growth hormone gene would be turned on even in cold weather and fish could grow throughout the year. By 1988, having put the idea of cold-resistant fish aside, the Canadian team was able to rapidly grow big salmon using their technique.

Toronto to Boston

By the late 1980s, the long-prosperous trade in cod the Canadian Maritimes had begun to enter a serious crisis. Although a substantial 1.4 million tons of cod were fished in Atlantic Canada in 1988 (with a total value of over $1 billion), stocks were already under pressure. By 1992, Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans Minister called for a moratorium on cod fishing in the area. Bans on other fish such as haddock and other groundfish soon followed. This was a major economic blow to the region – 40,000 individuals in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces lost their jobs (Gough 2013).

Hew and Fletcher’s work in Newfoundland was developing at a time when other economic opportunities in the area were in rapid decline. The National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which had funded their work, was keen to see their new discovery commercialized. The crossing of fish with biotechnology was just the sort of high-tech product that might help to revive the region by bringing new jobs and new industries.

The opportunity for such commercialization presented itself in the form of an entrepreneurial fish salesman, Elliot Entis. In 1990, Entis was based in New England and specialized in exporting fish from Atlantic fisheries to the Caribbean. Entis was searching for better methods of preserving frozen fish in transit and on the shelf. This interest led him to the work of Hew and Fletcher. A few conversations with them led Entis to the realization that fish anti-freeze proteins had multiple potential uses – not just for fish or other foods but also potential medical applications such as freezing tumors or human organs during surgeries.

It was with this goal in mind – the preservation of cells, tissues, and organs – that Entis, Fletcher, and Hew established A/F Protein Inc. in 1991 to pursue possibilities for commercialization of anti-freeze technologies (Powell 2006). The new company was established in Waltham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston (Entis’s hometown) with a subsidiary in St. John’s, Canada. Hew, in particular, was keen to make this move – he saw Boston as a more dynamic place for biotech and start-up companies. Targeting the US market involved one substantial factor: the innovation’s success or failure ultimately depended on the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Since A/F was focused on these other commercialization opportunities, the development of fish as a technology in its own right remained on hold. It was only 2 years into A/F Protein’s operations that one of its scientists mentioned to Entis their discovery of fast-growing salmon. Entis quickly seized on this as another possible lucrative business opportunity. By 1995, A/F Protein had acquired the intellectual property rights for transgenic salmon from the University of Toronto and Memorial University and began the process of gaining regulatory approval. In the same year, A/F Protein established an Investigational New Animal Drug file for transgenic salmon with the Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) at the FDA.

Fish to Ice Cream

During the 20-year FDA process, anti-freeze proteins emerged in several different contexts. These came to play an important role in how the debates around AA salmon played out. The identity of the first GM animal for human consumption was shaped by broader debates and fears around GM foods.

As it turns out, flounder are not the only organisms that contain anti-freeze proteins. Also occurring in other fish such as smelt, herring, and sea raven, anti-freeze proteins exist in plants, insects, and various microorganisms that live in sea ice. In 1999, Unilever, the Dutch food giant, filed for a patent on utilizing such anti-freezes to an “unaerated ice confection” (Unilever 1999). By 2004, the company had applied to the FDA for approval of an ice cream product containing genetically modified anti-freeze components.

Unilever had in fact taken an anti-freeze protein from an ocean pout and modified it for insertion into yeast. These GM yeast, when cultivated, would produce a version of the fish anti-freeze. Appropriately utilized in ice cream, the protein can cause the ice cream to melt more slowly and provide better “mouthfeel” (the anti-freeze causes smaller ice crystals to be formed, yielding a smoother product). This proved particularly useful for the production of “low-fat” varieties of ice cream. By 2006, anti-freeze proteins produced from yeast were approved for sale and were appearing on the shelves in products such as “Breyers Light Double Churned” ice cream bars.

The introduction of fish proteins into ice cream resulted in immediate opposition. The idea of fish (or anti-freeze) in one’s ice cream seemed intuitively distasteful to many consumers. This was used by opponents of GMOs to portray the new ice cream as scary and unsafe (Reidhead 2006). One Unilever representative reported that he had repeatedly had to explain that the new product would not taste “fishy” (Moskin 2006).

Such arguments are influential because they rely on cultural ideas about the kinship of objects – ice cream and fish don’t go together! Assumptions about categories and kinship are deeply related to (and structured by) all sorts of other divisions, hierarchies, and power relations – between men and women, homo and hetero, for instance. Crosses are threatening not just on their own terms but because they are deeply imbricated with one another. The incorporation of fish products into ice cream established public awareness of GM fish as an “unnatural” product and set the stage for the battle over regulatory approval of genetically modified salmon.

Boston to Washington

During the long approval process, A/F Protein and Entis continued to advocate forcefully for their product. In 2000, the company changed its name to AquaBounty Farms and spun off A/F Protein as a separate company. After submitting its first regulatory studies to the FDA in 2003, the company again changed its name (in 2004) to AquaBounty Technologies. In 2006, AquaBounty was successfully listed on the London Stock Exchange Alternative Investment Market, raising $30 million in an initial public offering of stock. By 2009, the FDA had completed its site visits to AquaBounty’s facilities, and the company had submitted all its studies for approval (AquaBounty Technologies 2014).

The length of this process was partly due to the fact that this was uncharted territory – the FDA had never approved a genetically modified animal for human consumption. Transgenic crops were regulated under the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology – an agreement between the FDA, the EPA, and the US Department of Agriculture – but the process for animals was unclear. In fact, the FDA gave A/F Protein a choice between two regulatory pathways: a New Animal Drug Application or a Food Additive Application (Juma 2016, pp. 266–268).

The FDA considered a large number of factors in attempting to decide whether the fish was “safe”: efficacy (did it actually grow faster?), stable inheritance over multiple generations, stable base sequence and copy number of modified genes, equivalence to standard Atlantic salmon (did it have similar tissue composition, hormone levels, and levels of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids?), salmon health (did it have similar rates of disease?), and environmental safety (FDA 2015).

The key to AquaBounty’s (and the FDA’s) argument that the fish was safe for human consumption was the construction of a “standard of identity” of the fish that was at once technically novel but also “normal” in the sense of behavior and appearance. This was central to the methodology of the AA’s testing, showing that the GM salmon could “pass” as regular Atlantic salmon in as many respects as possible: in DNA testing, in appearance, in general health, and so on. The following quotation is typical:

There are no significant adverse outcomes associated with the introduction of the opAFP-GHc2 construct… Most of the adverse outcomes that are observed (e.g. morphological changes) were present in comparators or have been described in the peer-reviewed literature… their consequences are likely to be small and within the range of abnormalities affecting rapid growth phenotypes of Atlantic Salmon. (FDA 2015, p. 18)

The FDA used language such as this (“no meaningful differences,” “no biologically relevant differences”) to argue that the GM salmon, while showing some differences, was within “normal” ranges expected for fish and that such differences are unlikely to pose any risks.

The data from these tests was presented to the Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee at a public meeting in Washington, DC, in 2010. Subsequently, in December 2012, the FDA released a draft “Environmental Assessment” and “Finding of No Significant Impact” (FONSI) based on their preliminary analysis. There was an outpouring of opposition. During the early 2013, the FDA received 38,000 public comments in response to these documents. Many of these came from civil society organizations including the Center for Food Safety, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, Organic Consumers Association, and Food Democracy Now (Juma 2016).

These objections and comments can be divided into four broad classes. First, opponents contended that the process of assessment was not transparent enough and that the FDA had not released sufficient data to the public. Second, critics argued that the FDA’s review, and especially its Environmental Assessment, was not sufficiently wide in scope. In particular, commenters argued that it should have covered overseas facilities, that it should have taken into account the effects on endangered species, that it should have sought approval from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Fisheries and Wildlife Service, that it should have considered “economic, social, and cultural impacts,” and that it should have considered the effects on minority populations and on “Indian Tribal rights.” Third, comments suggested that the FDA was not in a position to monitor fish-growing facilities and would therefore not be able to enforce any conditions under which approval would be granted (FDA 2017). Fourth, many worried that the “containment” of the fish would be insufficient and that AA salmon would escape and potentially outcompete wild populations. Since this became the most controversial issue, it will be discussed separately in the next section.

Significantly, these first three concerns centered on what remained obscured or left out by the FDA’s investigation. It was not that the public or advocacy groups could point to known and specific dangers or risks associated with AA salmon, but rather the concern was based on what remained unknown (with respect to existing data, with respect to broader impacts, and with respect to future enforcement). In other words, AA salmon was dangerous because it remained foreign and unfamiliar. The fact that the fish straddled existing categories (including institutional and regulatory categories) made it especially dangerous to GMF opponents.

Washington to Panama

As the debates around AA salmon continued, place became more and more important: the geography of the fish became critical to its identity (and, ultimately, its approval). As noted above, this was framed as an issue of “containment” – whether salmon could or would escape into wild, survive there, and potentially destabilize wild salmon populations or other ecosystems. Even if GM salmon could not survive themselves in the wild, critics suggested that “Trojan” genes from AA salmon could spread to wild salmon or that intensively farmed fish could be breeding waters for diseases that could then spread to wild populations.Footnote 1

In order to anticipate and mitigate these risks, AquaBounty developed three related “containment” strategies for their salmon. First, AquaBounty developed a strategy of “biological containment ” in which all fish shipped outside Canada would be female and triploid (have three copies of their chromosomes instead of two). This rendered the populations doubly impotent – females could not breed with females, and triploid fish are usually sterile. If AA salmon ever escaped into the wild, AquaBounty argued that they would be unable to propagate any offspring. Second, a system of “physical containment” was developed through which breeding and growth would take place in tanks (not nets or pens) in well-secured facilities far from any ocean or waterway. AA salmon would find it difficult to “escape” into the environment. Third, salmon were isolated from their wild counterparts through “geographical containment”: broodstock were raised on Prince Edward Island in Canada and the fish would be grown to market size in an inland facility in Panama. Even if fish did manage to escape from their tanks and swim to the ocean, Panama is surrounded by tropical water – salmon, AquaBounty argued, are cold water fish and would not be able to grow or reproduce in this climate.

Through these techniques, AquaBounty and the FDA could argue that the fish was sufficiently “contained” not to pose any realistic threat of spreading in ways that would threaten wild populations. Perhaps more importantly, however, the FDA could credibly claim that Canada and Panama were outside the jurisdiction of their Environmental Assessment:

because these facilities are outside the United States, and because NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] does not require analysis of impacts in foreign sovereign countries, the EA considered environmental impacts in Canada and Panama only to the extent necessary to determine whether there would be significant effects on the environment in the United States due to exposure pathways originating from the facilities in Canada and Panama. (FDA 2017)

The FDA also undertook an “Analysis of Potential Impacts on the Environments of the Global Commons and Foreign Nations” but concluded there would be “no significant impacts” due to the low probability of escape and survival of AA salmon.

The successful mobilization of biological, physical, and geographical containment suggests, first, how the transnationalism of AA salmon was critical to their approval and regulation. Only fish grown in Canada and Panama in the specified AquaBounty facilities, slaughtered outside the United States, and then imported were granted approval by the FDA.Footnote 2 This mobility not only contributed to the perceived “safety” of the fish (far away from US salmon stocks, in tropical waters) but limited the scope of FDA’s investigation.

This geographical isolation also conforms to a familiar pattern of bio-neo-colonialism in which colonies and former colonies are utilized as “testing grounds” for technologies that may not be politically or socially acceptable within the borders of the United States. For example, in the late 1950s, clinical trials for the contraceptive pill were conducted in Puerto Rico by Massachusetts-based scientists and clinicians (Tone 2002). The FDA’s abjuring of any detailed investigation into Panama implies that such “foreign” zones can tolerate greater risks for the potential benefit of US consumers. This uneven distribution of risk and reward became critical to AA salmon’s identity.

Second, the “containment” of AA salmon mixes geography with gender: it is instituted not merely territorially but also through the sexing of the fish. Control over the fish is exercised at once by policing space but also by policing sex and reproductive capacity. The fish become safe by “othering” them in multiple ways, both sexually and territorially. This pairing is not coincidental; there is an enduring association between queerness and geographical foreignness (see, e.g., Chávez 2015). Marking the fish as doubly “foreign” reassures us that it cannot compete with or mix with US wild salmon and interfere with domestic species or markets.

This issue of mixing and competition became salient when, in 2011, Representatives Don Young (R – Alaska) and Lynn Woolsey (D – California) proposed axing the FDA’s budget if it approved AA salmon. The ostensible aim was protecting the Alaskan wild salmon-fishing industry (with 78,000 jobs and worth $5.8 billion) (Juma 2016, pp. 271–272). AA salmon, Young assumed, would undercut the prices of Alaskan salmon. But Alaskan salmon remained a premium product, serving a top-end section of the market; AA and other farmed salmon aimed at a lower price segment. The othering of AA salmon served to reinforce this sense of inferiority.

Discussion and Conclusion

In one final twist in this story, AA salmon finally became entangled with skin care. Even the entrepreneur, in 2010, Entis founded another company (again in Waltham, Massachusetts): Liftlab, a proprietor of cosmeceuticals. In a video advertisement on their website, set to images of glaciers and icy mountainscapes, Liftlab describes its unique products:

In the unforgiving arctic, bio-tech scientists first uncovered an evolutionary secret: proteins that allow sea life to survive in sub-zero temperatures. Naturally protecting; intensely moisturizing; damage reversing. Cell Protection Proteins also deliver softer, smoother, more sumptuous skin. (http://www.liftlabskincare.com/about/story/)

Through Liftlab, anti-freeze proteins have found another life, beyond ice cream and fish, in skin care and anti-aging remedies. Significantly, Liftlab’s marketing mobilizes not only biotech science but also the specific nature and geography of the arctic in order to sell its products. Our skin, Liftlab suggests, can be protected by the “proteins that protect the health and survival of plant and marine life that thrive in extreme cold, dryness, and unrelenting UVA/UVB of Arctic regions” (http://www.liftlabskincare.com/about/story/). Not only fish, but the environs of “arctic” Canada, become bound to the circuits of global capitalism. As Entis tells viewers during another promotional video, it was his father’s Boston wholesale seafood business that initially led him to searching the North Atlantic for novel products.

In their essay “Capitalism and the Commodification of Salmon,” Stefano Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark argue that AA salmon is just the latest episode in increasing industrial and commercial control and capitalist exploitation of oceans and fisheries. The commodification of salmon as AA salmon will inevitably lead to further capitalist exploitation; they contend: “This long process has resulted in the privatization of commons, concentration of ownership, loss of subsistence livelihoods, exploitation of natural resources, and disintegration of local knowledge” (Longo et al. 2014). But “commodification” in and of itself is not sufficient to describe how AA salmon came to be approved (if not widely accepted) as fit for human consumption. I have described this as a process of “othering” and displacement that constructed the fish as foreign, alien, different, and mixed in various degrees. The perspective of queer theory is particularly useful here in showing how constructions of similarity/difference, like/not alike, and domestic/foreign pervade our understanding of biotechnologies and their risks. Thinking with Hayden, this suggests that “commodification” is accompanied by attempts to remake the genealogies of salmon in ways that would cast it as either threatening or safe. The making of the “property” of AA salmon went alongside the making of the “family” of AA salmon. The “success” of AA salmon can be partly attributed to the construction of a particular version of its relations: sufficiently close to wild salmon to be safe for eating but also sufficiently distant to pose no direct threats to US territories.

This territorial dimension further suggests that the “commodification” that Longo, Clausen, and Clark refer to is likely to have a very uneven distribution of risks and rewards. The history of AA salmon demonstrates how its ultimate approval by the FDA in 2015 depended on the usage of a range of territories and spaces outside the United States. Both “arctic” Canada and tropical Panama were mobilized in order to realize the value of the GM salmon as a novel invention and a commodity product. Kaushik Sunder Rajan has argued in the case of pharmaceutical trials in India that this phenomenon represents another way in which the global South is “risked,” by the global North (Rajan 2010). Indian subjects, who are unlikely to be able to afford the drugs tested in the trials, stand to gain few “rewards.” AA salmon suggests that other biotechnologies may be following similar trajectories – rich countries and zones stand to gain (economically, environmentally, medically, and so on), while poorer nations and zones are put at risk.

Ultimately, any assessment of risks of new biotechnologies needs to take a more transnational view. As the case of AA salmon demonstrates, this “transnationalism” and its significance may not be immediately obvious without careful attention to the origins and development of new synthetic organisms – it is through the history of this fish that we can see the importance of geography in its development and approval.