World egg production industries rely on a single sex only (female), with the males generally disposed of by carbon dioxide gassing or rapid maceration one or two days post-hatch. Males of layer breeds cannot be raised for meat because it is not economically sound to do so, hence their "hatch and dispatch". The issue was highlighted by Jamie Oliver when he gassed male chicks in front of an audience of celebrities at a 2008 dinner to demonstrate some of the processes currently used in food production.

This is both an economic and serious ethical problem, and there are currently no commercially useful methods for sexing chicks within the egg before they hatch and become sentient. It is less of a welfare issue since disposal is thought to be humane in most cases (with death being instantaneous), even though the methods seem abhorrent to many.

To solve this problem, my team and I are developing a genetically modified (GM) line of chicken. It will have a gene encoding a protein from a jellyfish which fluoresces green under ultraviolet light (very useful if you are a chicken at a disco). We hoped to put this gene into one of the sex chromosomes, so that only females of such a line will be fluorescent. If this can be achieved, it is likely that the sex of chicks within the egg could be determined by simply scanning the eggs with a laser and detecting fluorescence in female embryos and its absence in males. Eggs containing males could then be disposed of early during incubation in a simple automated process.

This applied research project is being conducted at Charles Sturt University in Australia, in conjunction with a group in the United States Department of Agriculture. Other researchers are also trying to solve this problem in different ways, with some also generating GM chicken lines. Though it is early days for our project (we are looking for industry support, financial or otherwise), the GM chicken lines we hope to produce need to be accepted by the egg industry and consumers alike to be useful.

Of course, all genetically modified organisms and foods need to be rigorously tested for safety and risk assessed as to whether they should be released into the environment, for fear of gene transfer to native species. In this case, the single gene we are transferring to chickens (green fluorescent protein) is, as far as we know, non-toxic. The event of an escaped hen mating with a wild jungle fowl is highly unlikely, at least in most developed countries, but mating of GM chickens with non-GM chickens is possible. The fluorescence of offspring would make them easily detected and managed in that event.

The question remains: would you eat eggs from a GM chicken in preference to those from a non-GM chicken to solve this problem, even if these were demonstrated to be neither a danger to health nor the environment?

From a personal perspective, my answer is yes. The eggs of course would not be green at all, at least under normal lighting conditions, and appearance and taste should not be affected – so why not eat them? We live in an imperfect world, and the way we produce eggs needs to change to improve the economics of the process and improve the welfare of the chickens. The question therefore seems to be whether we want to destroy billions of day old male chicks per year, or whether we could accept a GM line of layer chickens.

If you are fence-sitting, consider the added economic benefit in reduction of greenhouse emissions and reduced electricity costs for hatcheries in not having to incubate eggs containing male chicks for at least part of the 21 days they take in an incubator. To quote a Dr Seuss poem, the question for everyone appears to be “Do you like green eggs and ham … Sam-I-am?”.