It will be difficult to completely prevent genetically engineered plants and animals from having unintended environmental and public health effects, says a report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

One solution may be biological methods of containment (“bioconfinement”). These include measures like inducing sterility by giving fish an extra set of chromosomes or exposing insects to radiation. Bacteria might be given “suicide genes” that would cause them to self-destruct if they escaped. Crop scientists are working on a variety of techniques, including putting the foreign genes into the chloroplasts rather than the nucleus because chloroplast genes usually do not get into the pollen.