Many people know that drugs need to be tested on humans, so they ask, why are genetically modified foods not tested on humans? There are two issues involved: human experiments must not only stress scientific ethics, but also consider the feasibility of experiments in design and operation. These two are indispensable.

Drugs are used in human experiments because the role of drugs is to treat diseases. The main starting point is to return people suffering from diseases to health while observing potential side effects. Therefore, experimental ethics are established. However, if human experiments on genetically modified food are to be conducted, the "hidden" premise is that the safety of this food is unknown and may be harmful to health, and people must verify whether it will "cause disease".

In addition, genetically modified human experiments are not feasible in design and fail to achieve the purpose of the experiment. In clinical trials of drugs, not only the symptoms and experimental goals of the subjects are consistent, but also the experimental process of all participants can be strictly controlled, and finally the efficacy of the drugs can be compared. However, food is difficult to manipulate like this. You cannot require all subjects to eat only one or two foods for a long period of time, nor can you require everyone to eat exactly the same food. At the same time, people’s health is affected by many factors. Even if someone really “sick” after participating in the experiment, it is difficult to judge whether it is caused by a certain food or other factors.

To verify the safety of genetic modification, it is not necessary to conduct human experiments. Modern science has been very clear about the composition of food and the digestion process in the human body. For example, genetically modified corn and non-genetically modified corn, there is no difference in the main components, so there will be no new problems for human health.

To verify the safety of food, the common international practice is to use animal testing, which is sufficient to assess the safety of genetically modified food. At present, the safety evaluation of genetically modified food generally selects model organism mice and rats for high-dose, multi-generation, and long-term feeding experiments. So far, all animal experiments have found no safety problems with genetically modified food.

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