The Irish potato famine began in Ireland around 1845 and crippled the country’s crops. Potatoes were a staple to the Irish meals and tradition, as it was high yield crop with little labor necessity. When the blight struck the primary crop then, the population suffered dramatically as they lost close to a half of their most critical food product. This led to millions of deaths and mass starvation, disease, and emigration around the 1850s. It also led to a mass migration movement of Irish citizens to seek better living conditions in the United States.
The fact that only two primary variations of the potato crop were used made the famine more likely to occur. Oomycete was the fungus identified to have spread throughout the plantations, making the potatoes small, mushy, and inedible. This HERB-1 strand was thought to come originally from Mexico, and have traveled through North America before contaminating a ship that spread it across the world, particularly Ireland. With the undernourished population, people became more susceptible to contracting disease such as measles, TB, and whooping cough. Poor hygiene lead to diarrheal disease to also spread and even Cholera was spreading throughout Ireland. The Irish were suffering on several fronts. The Irish carried these with them as they fled the country, leaving one disaster, and creating another (mass infection).
To consider if something like this could happen again opens the discussion of plant gene modification. With use of CRISPR, gene ‘editing’, and full on modification, ethical issues and cost benefit analysis are discussed in depth. Conducting research on plant modification would have significant benefits in that it would produce a greater yield of crops, make their growth more controlled and less susceptible to natural disaster, and overall provide necessary and significant food security for our global future. The downside to this, however, is the concern that such new technology could be used as a biological weapon, since such could be spread by insects that are incredibly hard to regulate and control. Many people fear that, should we continue to advance and fully support such agricultural modification, it would sent a dangerous precedent for other gene manipulation, perhaps in the context of animals and human embryos.