That would be valuable to beef ranchers, she thinks, because males grow bigger and faster. It’s that much more steak. Beef is already America’s most valuable farm product. Imagine, she says, CRISPR bulls roaming the pastureland, skewing the odds toward maleness and making the industry more efficient.

“That’s why I fight for innovation in animal breeding,” she says. “It’s free, once you’ve made the genetic improvement.”

Regulatory problems

Van Eenennaam is a staunch advocate of GMOs in all their forms. In a dispute where anti-GMO moms have organized to argue the foods are unsafe, she doesn’t hesitate to point out that she is a mother, too. In 2014, along with Monsanto’s chief scientist, she vanquished skeptics in a public debate attended by science personality Bill Nye.

The GMO debate, ironically, has had its most chilling effects on animal scientists like Van Eenennaam, who holds the title “cooperative extension specialist.” The job is to spread practical scientific know-how to farmers. Yet that’s proving almost impossible to do. Only a single gene-modified species—a super-fast-growing salmon—has ever been approved for consumption in the U.S.

Scientists hoped gene-editing might get a lighter touch from regulators, speeding new ideas into the food chain. But in January 2017, as one of the Obama Administration's last acts, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it intended to treat CRISPR-edited animals as if they were new drugs, requiring elaborate and costly safety studies.

The proposed rules “put a huge regulatory block on using this gene-editing technique in animals,” says Van Eenennaam, who fired off a seven-and-a-half-page single-spaced letter to the FDA, questioning the decision.

Companies are now lobbying the Trump Administration to kill the rules and declare gene-edited animals unregulated. They've warned the White House the U.S. could fall behind countries like Argentina and Brazil.

Some even expected President Donald J. Trump to announce the change this week during a live address to farmers in Nashville. Instead, Trump offered a more general promise about "streamlining regulations that have blocked cutting-edge biotechnology, setting free our farmers to innovate, thrive, and to grow."

Terminator seed

The advent of CRISPR—a new kind of molecular scissors that can precisely cut DNA—has made it far easier to alter the genes of just about any organism. But fears of runaway technology mean it’s easier to win funding to study CRISPR’s risks and dangers than to do anything useful with it.

Van Eenennaam, in fact, got the funding for the cattle project from a U.S. Department of Agriculture program looking at the potential hazards of gene-modified organisms. The department wants ways to sterilize GM organisms, including catfish and poplar trees, so their DNA modifications don’t spread to wild relatives.

Because animals turned male by SRY are expected to be sterile, they won’t pass on the genetic change, or any other DNA alterations linked to it. That offers a form of “genetic containment.”

“It’s basically ‘terminator’ technology,” Van Eenennaam says, referring to an idea once floated by agricultural giants to create plants with sterile seeds so farmers couldn't collect and replant them. That was “the line we argued that got it funded.”

The original terminator proposal proved controversial. So much so that in 1999 Monsanto pledged never to commercialize sterile GM plants. (Instead, farmers sign contracts agreeing not to save seeds.) Even though it was abandoned, the idea proved notorious enough that GMO critics are still talking about it.