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Smart Breeding to Beat Biotechnology?
divisionbyzero writes "Scientists are developing superorganics made through improved traditional interbreeding in order to circumvent Monsanto's patents and finally deliver on the promise of genetically engineered food."
This article is quite typical of the conceptual problem that many people still have with breeding versus genetic "manipulation". Both methods are means to the same end, ergo the introduction of desired genes or variations thereof into an organism. Breeding takes longer and cannot be controlled to the same extent. And don't start about the dangers of vectors, unwanted integration and crap like that. Nature does that every single minute (ever heard of transposons?) and nobody is complaining about that. So, "Frankenfood"? I think not.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
You can.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
There's a very nice summary at the bottom of page 4. I will karma-whore it for you, since I know most people won't be able to maintain their concentration for so many pages.
How Smart Breeding Works
The mission: Develop rice that's resistant to bacterial blight and will thrive around the globe.
SEARCH Food scientists scour the rice gene bank, consisting of 84,000 seed types, in search of varieties with blight immunity.
INSERT MARKER Scientists extract DNA from selected varieties and tag the blight-immunity gene - previously identified by researchers - with a chemical dye.
CROSSBREED A network of researchers around the world cross disease-resistant varieties with thousands of local versions. With some plants, this means merely putting two varieties in a room. Self-pollinating rice requires manual pollen insertion.
ANALYZE The offspring are analyzed to detect the presence of the immunity gene. Those containing the gene are planted in a field.
TEST Mature plants are exposed to bacterial blight to confirm resistance. Those that don't die, and maintain desired traits from the local variety, are distributed. Unless
REPEAT Sometimes, the process reveals several genes responsible for a trait. Three genes confer resistance to different blight strains. In such cases, breeders repeat the crossbreeding until all genes are turned on.
END RESULT A rice plant with broad resistance to bacterial blight that will thrive in local conditions.
What you describe is selective breeding . . . it has existed for a long time. But this is using naturally occuring genes in the genepool and selecting for them through mating within a species or closely related species.
Taking a gene from a firefly and implanting it in a tobacco plant to create glowing tobacco, or creating a brand new modified gene that does not exist in the natural gene pool is also genetic engineering. The statement
The difference is that now, we have the advantage of looking under the hood at the genes themselves. This new data gives farmers and geneticists an unprecendented level of control in selecting for certain traits.
is true but not comprehensive. It ignore the concerns of the alarmists. We aren't just looking under the hood . . . to use your analogy, we are taking parts one vehicle and force fitting them into another. And we are coming up with new parts that don't exist yet and fitting them into our existing vehicles. The alarmists beleive that we don't know what effect these new vehicles will have on the environment
Selective breeding has nothing to do with the transgenic techgniques used in GM crops. It makes me so mad when GM apologists offer up this tired and inaccurate canard.
When you crossbreed tomato strains, all the genes in the hybrid were in the tomato gene originally; the same cannot be said of transgenic grops. (Barring the small possibility of a mutation, or of genetic transfer via viral infection - but in most cases these will kill the plant, or render it less likely to reproduce.)
Also the genes in the hybrid are (to simplify) "well attached" to the organism's genome; in GM organisms, the transgenic part is "loose". This increases the chance of it migrating into a virus, and we don't know the implications of this "looseness" over generations of reproduction.
GM crops are nothing like selective breeding. But there is a huge problem with the way we apply selective breeding, and GM crops suffer from this also: we're losing the genetic diversity of our food crops, as heirloom varieties are displaced.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Yes I can infact list the dangers of genetically modified food. and they are as follows:
Genetically modified foods have not been around long enough yet to have any long term effects on humans scientifically confirmed... would you randomly go to a chemlab and mix a bunch of vials together and drink it?
Whereas we know the long term effects on un modified foods.
Genetic engineering is not sustainable--especially with technology like the terminator technology--which if ever got let out into the wild, or even on to other's farms via bird poop or wind would wipe out entire species of plants( terminator technology is the technology that grows a fruit or vegetable without producing fertile seeds).
then there is intelectual headaches involved.
even if genetically modified foods do turn out to be ok; Why should we let a few small corporations be able to patent life?
further more, why should poor farmers be sued for having "illegal seeds" thanks to the wind. It is virtually impossible to grow,certified organic, canola rape seeds ( yes I know they were not "natural" to begin with) but there is also issues with some variants of I believe corn,tomatoes, and wheat in canada and in parts of ca.
Also, organic food simply taste better. Try it. go buy some gmo fruit and then some natural organic of the same, and do a blind taste test with your friends.
the list is far greater then this, but these are a few issues that encumber the world of gmos.
hope this helps.
Other dangers from this this article come to include:
Here is yet another article that you can read on this topic.
Monsanto was basically making it illegal for farmers in 3rd world countries to reuse their seed because the M company claimed that each succeeding generation contained some of their IP.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Monsanto is pure, undiluted, genetically modified evil. They make Microsoft look like a playful puppy. Here' s an example:
There is a dairy farm in Maine (or maybe Vermont, I don't remember), a decent place (as far as these things go). Now these farmers leaned a bit to the hippy side of the fence, and decided not to use the RBGH (Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone), which is owned by Monsanto. It is used to boost milk output, and the FDA says that it is safe. As a matter of fact, there is no test that can distinguish between the milk of treated and untreated cows. Of course, these farmers were proud of their little hippy dairy, and righfully so. They made a good local product, delivered fresh, for a fair price. They decided to promote the fact that they did it all without hormones. So on their bottles, it says: "We do not use RBGH on our cows". That's it. Nothing saying that RGBH is bad, or that it will turn you into a tentacled monster. What does Monsanto do? They launch a legal campaign to make it illegal to state that you do not use RBGH. They claim that by pointing out that it is not used, you are claiming that it is bad. Now call me crazy, but I believe that I have a right to know what goes into my food.
So yeah, fuck Monsanto. A multi-billion dollar corporation versus a handful of country farmers that just want to run their farm their way. Real fair fight, isn't it?
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
I was able to find this link that talks about the Criminal Investigation of Monsanto Corporation for attempting to Cover up Dioxin Contamination in their Products. Here is a preview of the link
"Monsanto covered-up the dioxin contamination of a wide range of its products. Monsanto either failed to report contamination, substituted false information purporting to show no contamination or submitted samples to the government for analysis which had been specially prepared so that dioxin contamination did not exist."
"Another Monsanto study involved independent medical examinations of surviving employees by Monsanto physicians. Several hundred former Monsanto employees were too ill to travel to participate in the study. Monsanto refused to use the attending physicians reports of the illness as part of their study, saying that it would introduce inconsistencies. Thus, any critically ill dioxin-exposed workers with cancers such as Non-Hodgkins lymphoma (associated with dioxin exposures), were conveniently excluded from the Monsanto study."
Note: this has been posted by r.future (a person who spends way to much time on the internet!)
I encourage everyone in the /. community with a green thumb to support the biodiversity of the un-patented plant realm of heirloom crops (especially food crops). The day we can't save our own seeds w/o paying royalties to Monsanto is a day I dread.
Method of processing duck feet
>(Believers in evolution should have fun >explaining why traits that are more pro-survival >are recessive than those that are not.)
I'll bite:
It doesn't have anything to do with evolution. Evolution works by natural selection. The breeding of crop plants works by "assisted selection": people set out to select for specific traits that make the plant more attractive as food.
The traits that promote plant survival aren't necessarily the traits that promote plants people want to eat.
In addition, as explained in the article, we have been breeding these things for years, essentially selecting for the traits we want without regard to whether they are good for plant survival. The trait we selected for decreases insect resistance? No problem, we'll just add more pesticides to the crops.
Of course, I'm oversimplifying a bit. But it sounds like you have a bias against evolution anyway, so I don't think its worth my time to attempt a discussion of the interplay between natural selection and crop breeding.
"Also the genes in the hybrid are (to simplify) "well attached" to the organism's genome; in GM organisms, the transgenic part is "loose". This increases the chance of it migrating into a virus, and we don't know the implications of this "looseness" over generations of reproduction"
Uhmmmm to put it simply, simplify, simplfied, NO. What you just stated is nonesense. How is this informative? This is in no way informative, misleading yes, informative no. The poster does not understand how Transgenics works. A Basic Website to get an idea:
http://www.anth.org/ifgene/beginner.htm
Remember this is just a basic overview.
Now down to the real stuff, an article done in 1993 testing the very statement you just made about genetic instability in tomatoes: Abstract Below:
"Ac-induced instability at the Xanthophyllic locus of tomato.
Peterson PW, Yoder JI.
Department of Vegetable Crops, University of California, Davis 95616.
To detect genomic instability caused by Ac elements in transgenic tomatoes, we used the incompletely dominant mutation Xanthophyllic-1 (Xa-1) as a whole plant marker gene. Xa-1 is located on chromosome 10 and in the heterozygote state causes leaves to be yellow. Transgenic Ac-containing tomato plants which differed in the location and number of their Ac elements were crossed to Xa-1 tester lines and F1 progeny were scored for aberrant somatic sectoring. Of 800 test and control F1 progeny screened, only four plants had aberrantly high levels of somatic sectors. Three of the plants had twin sectors consisting of green tissue adjacent to white tissue, and the other had twin sectors comprised of green tissue adjacent to tissue more yellow than the heterozygote background. Sectoring was inherited and the two sectoring phenotypes mapped to opposite homologs of chromosome 10; the green/yellow sectoring phenotype mapped in coupling to Xa-1 while the green/white sectoring phenotype mapped in repulsion. The two sectoring phenotypes cosegregated with different single, non-rearranged Acs, and loss of these Acs from the genome corresponded to the loss of sectoring. Sectoring was still observed after transposition of the Ac to a new site which indicated that sectoring was not limited to a single locus. In both sectored lines, meiotic recombination of the sectoring Ac to the opposite homolog caused the phenotype to switch between the green/yellow and the green/white phenotypes. Thus the two different sectoring phenotypes arose from the same Ac-induced mechanism; the phenotype depended on which chromosome 10 homolog the Ac was on. We believe that the twin sectors resulted from chromosome breakage mediated by a single intact, transposition-competent Ac element."
4 out of 800 plants showed abnormal F1 progeny. Thats exactly 0.5% of the F1 generation. Now lets look at mutation rates, polymerase that copies DNA is pretty good at what it does and at any single STR location, it is estimated that a mutation will occur only once every 500 'transmission-events' - or roughly 0.2% per generation. 0.5% to 0.2% could be statistically relevant but due to the selective resistant applied to the plants upon DNA insertion that is unlikley, in other words I disagree.
Note, this doesn't mean that other disadvantges do not exist for trangenic plants but what the above poster stated makes no sense.
P.S. I have to go teach a class, excuse the spelling and poor grammar please, thank you.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
I personally think Monsanto is one of the most evil corporations on the planet. Besides their foray into genetically modified food (I have a problem with their patents more than the final products), they are the ones who invented Nutra Sweet (a.k.a aspartame, a tripeptide with who knows what kind of long-term effects). Of course there are many devoted and ethical scientists working there, too, but the corporation as a whole has an atrocious track record.
The worst thing about the cross pollinated crops in this Canadian farmer's field was that he never had any intention of growing Monsanto's corn, but the wind blew pollen into his field, and somehow the courts decided he was responsible. How asinine.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Here are a couple meaningful dangers, just off the top of my head.
1) Crossbreeding into non-GE crops.
This is extremely common with wind-pollenated crops such as corn and other grasses. A recent example was a cross of a GE crop for feedstock crossing into corn for human consumption, was known to produce an allergic reaction in humans. This got into Taco Bell foods. Additionally, it is a pollutant to the gene pool, and the farmers and companies are not responsible for keeping it under control.
2) Effects on the environment
A recent GE corn, designed to resist insects, dropped pollen on nearby milkweed plants. The pollen was poisonous to insects and ended up wiping out the monarch butterfly population in that small area. It could end up an environmental nightmare, but the companies producing this have no idea of the impact. A plant could potentially end up contaminating all crops, especially if it grew as a weed and could outcompete all untainted crops. Pollen is tiny and potent, and can travel thousands of miles over wind or animals.
3) Effects on others
As stated, GE crops pollute the environment because they are not controlled. Produced in a sealed lab, it has little chance of escaping. But all GE crops should be viewed as potential pollution, simply because their pollen can blow into your yard, and contaminate your crops.
4) Legal issues
If your crops become contaminated through no fault of your own, it's very possible -- even likely -- that you'll have to destroy your crops for violating patents or pay license fees, or be basically shut down from legal suits. In other words, everytime a gene is spliced in, that food item is patented and any violation of that patent can be prosecuted. This violation can even happen if your plants happened to crossbreed and incorporate that gene. Intent is not figured into patents... if you invent something completely on your own that is patented, you lose. If you grow something without a license that's patented, you lose.
5) Social issues
Other issues are social, such as the painful idea of corporations owning the rights to grow food. But let's say you practice vegetarianism because you happen to believe in it (for whatever reason). What if GE tomatoes incorporate a fish gene? Is that tomato suddenly non-vegetarian? Let's say you know that GE tomatoes might have fish genes so you avoid them and look for items marked "organic". WHOA THERE... the corporations have lobbied congress to bastardize the concept of "organic" (to make it meaningless, basically allowing full use of pesticides, etc) and even pressed the FDA to disallow labelling things as organic or produced without pesticides. This last part is one of the worst things about patenting foodstuffs -- the corporations want their actions hidden, and will pay lobbiests millions to get laws passed protecting them from people that simply want to know what their eating.
The nasty lawsuit has already happened: http://www.percyschmeiser.com/SC%20Hears%20Case.ht m
Summary: A Canadian farmer alleges Monsantos GM seeds blew in to his field, now Monsanto is demanding royalties.
In the new GM world, you no longer buy seeds, but rather you buy licenses to grow certain crops. Once biotech companies control the distribution, they will vertically integrate with large farms and push small farmers out of the market once and for all.
Choice Quote: "This patent makes us more profitable and better farmers," argued Mona Brown, a lawyer with the Canadian Canola Growers Association.
Agreed. How about anybody with a web browser? In true open-source fashion, you may need to compile the genome yourself from its components, but with over 2,000,000 nucleotide sequences, over 7,500 peptide sequences, the complete genome of Zea mays' chloroplasts, etc. to work with it should be possible...
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