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Scotts Testing Genetically Modified Grass
Caseyscrib writes "There is an article on Yahoo! News that talks about how Scotts is testing a genetically modified version of creeping bentgrass, popular on golf course greens and fairways, that will be resistant to a common weed-killing chemical. Environmentalists have long opposed bioengineered crops of any kind, and fear that '...if it was to escape onto public land, we wouldn't know how to control it.' It is now in the final stages of approval."
Scott makes towels. Scotts makes lawn products.
Well, suddenly the bull frogs started turning up in wet areas FAR from where they were originally introduced. No one knew that they could cover such long distances without water. Then they started eating all of the local wildlife that was smaller than themsevles: tarantulas, birds, other species of frogs, fish, etc.
1. Just build fences and keep them out, right? Wrong, the bull frogs learned to climb over the fences.
2.Posion them? How, when the poison will kill everything else too?
3. Bioengineer a poison that only affects bull frogs? On whom's dime, the taxpayers?
4. Kill them all with spears, guns, knives, and arrows? Tried that, night after night by dozens of volunteers: virtually no effect, the population held strong as ever.
But back where the bullfrogs came from, in the bayous of Louisiana, the alligators and birds that evolved alongside the frogs have no problem keeping their population in check.
Do you get the logisitical issue(s) of introducing new species into new environments (manmade or otherwise)? It is never easy to control.
Well, the real reason to be sceptical to Monsanto inserting genes that resist 2,4-TD (RoundUp, aka Agent Orange) is that it has a habit of spreading to closely related plants. In tests in Italy (more than ten years ago now) this gene successfully transferred from Rape to Wild Turnip, which is a mother of a weed to get rid of. There are several grasses that we wouldn't want to aquire this gene. (Google e.g. "wild turnip gene resistance")
As a gene resisting herbicides is a very desirable gene to have (if you happen to be a weed), you can bet your sweet ass that's it's only a matter of time before you've created the mother of all weeds. And no, burning/barriers/diging won't fix the problem.
In this case an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Stefan Axelsson
A Saskatchewan farmer has been taken to court by Monsanto because his fields had some of their genetically modified canola. The canola seems to have blown in from neighbors fields and ditches. The case has gone to the Supreme Court of Canada but I haven't heard the outcome.
--RANT-- Monsanto makes SCO look like Boy Scouts. The sad thing is that lots of farmers support them and this makes them harder to fight. Let's put it this way; I wouldn't drink the milk in Florida because of the (Monsanto) drugs that get into it. Fining Monsanto has about the same effect as fining Microsoft.--/RANT--
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
Repeat after me: Agent Orange is in no way related to RoundUp.
Agent Orange is a mixture of 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4 dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (reference).
RoundUp is glyphosate: N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine (reference 1, reference 2).
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
No, it's unfortunately not FUD. Sure, we *could* make it vunerable to cooking oil (well, I don't know that cooking oil is a good example, but we certainly could make it vunerable to other chemicals) but unless it's profitable, we won't.
We can also make plants that don't produce viable seed, and we do so because it is profitable.
However, we don't make plants that don't produce pollen. It's more profitable not to. If we did, companies couldn't sue people whose plants were accidently pollinated by GM plants for using GM technology without paying licensing fees.
It's sort of like people being sued for including source code from other projects without paying fees (or otherwise violating license agreements)...if bits of source code just randomly wandered about and inserted themselves into other programs without human help.
This is already happening with other crops, it's not a theoretical problem. I don't particularly see why this couldn't possibly happen with this grass, either.
Legislation could help this, but doesn't stop the environmental problems. The issue isn't killing these plants (in which case your ideas would work pretty well) but in killing these plants without killing all the other plants around them.
You can be mindful of what corporations are currently doing, but your complete lack of background knowledge makes your beliefs dangerous.
Monsanto didn't insert a gene that resists glyphosate (RoundUp), because their plant is a loss-of-function mutant. They did it through insertional mutation, using either forward (sequence not known) or reverse (sequence known) genetics methods. They isolated a mutant that was resistant to glyphosate and clapped their hands and cheered.
RoundUp Ready beans have a mutation in the gene, making the resulting enzyme product non-active. In other words, they changed that part of the enzyme to be a NOP, halting the metabolism of glyphosate into something that is lethal to the plant.
Agent Orange has nothing to do with RoundUp, and others have addressed that.
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
Their closed-source version is a variant of better dog food.com where they don't just sell you the dogfood. The dog can only eat BDF.com dogfood *and* you only lease the dog *plus* you only can get poodles (and they'll sue you if poodle puppies show up in your neighborhood). The problem that Montanto is trying to solve isn't "how can farmers improve crop yields and reduce weeds?" Monsanto's problem is "How can we lock farmers into using our weedkillers?"
Think of it like a bug patch. Imagine we find a major vulnerability, solved by upgrading some software. The open source method might be to make that software available for people to patch into whatever software they're currently running. The closed source version would be to 1. Sell new software that works with the patch 2. Sell the patch, 3. Insist that all old software is dangerous and outdated and should never be used in business. (4. and then later on when a new worm comes out, a huge percent of programs can be hit all at once due to the monoculture).
With Andean potato farmers this is exactly what happened. You have farmers who've developed hundreds of different potato varieties over the years: buttery tasting ones, meaty tasting ones, ones that grow in drought / shade / various altitudes... and these potatoes could be susceptible to a particular pest (quite likely one or more of their varieties already had resistance: another story). A major North American company came in saying "Hey, our potato + pesticide combination is resistant to the pest. Buy both from us, then you'll have no problems. By the way our potato is patented- don't think about crossbreeding it." At the same time they launched a major advertising (FUD) campaign in major potato buying markets saying "Hey, our potato is the best most modern potato. Don't buy anything else." So farmers couldn't just patch their own potatoes- they had to buy into the product / product cycle upgrade of the NA company. Sounds familiar?
Or look at "golden rice." Who can argue with preventing blindness from vitamin deficiencies? Do you want Blind Babies??? But is upping the vitamin A content of rice the best method to get vitamin A to people? What about veggies which already contain high quantities of beta-carotene (yams? carrots? Other richly-colored veggies and fruits?). The royalty payments for Golden Rice could instead pay for a variety of other seeds. And if you do want to up the A content of rice, should people get to choose which varieties get upgraded?
And sometimes they're breaking standards while they're at it, (think like what VeriSign did recently with their redirect). For example, BT is a bacteria /toxin used by organic farmers for decades to kill certain insect pests. At the previous rate of use- as a spray- there was a very, very low probability of insects developing resistance. Decades of use hadn't produced it. Now that BT has been spliced into crop plants, the widespread planting of monocultures of BT crops means BT resistance is increasingly likely. As this happens the non-organic farmers can move onto other pesticides. But the organic farmers whose old standard- BT sprays- will also become useless have no backup. There was no system set up to compensate these farmers from their soon to be broken standard. Nor was their any "royalty" paid to these farmers who'd discovered BT in the first place.