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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."
First it was the pea pods...
Then it was the people
All the remained were Pod People
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And people will still think there's something wrong with this food, that they're somehow splicing jellyfish genes into it or something stupid like that. It makes me so mad when talking to misinformed people who get into these campaigns to ban GM food when all the food you eat is pretty much been GM'd through several thousand years of selective breeding
drunk chemists
150 years later and we have a new fancy name for selective breeding and we've gone full circle . . .
Deja vu
This just reinforces the point that genetic engineering has existed on this earth from the first time our ancestors bred dogs for obedience or put the biggest bulls out to stud.
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.
So jokes about killer tomatoes aside, this is a positive development. I look forward to the day when we develop robust cereal crops that can thrive in the dry, nutrient-poor soils of East Africa. Without being encumbered by patents, of course.
Where you take a mommy plant and a daddy plant and then make lots of baby plants. The you take the brother plant and the sister plant and create strange uncle Jethro who no-one in the family talks about much but HELL can he survive in hot weather.
Uncle Jethro is currently serving 25 life sentences for a string of murders in Arkansas.
I love it when people talk about "natural" a normal ways when talking about this stuff. Arsenic is a natural product... doesn't make it safe.
The key is safe and not likely to go postal like Uncle Jethro, that means long term testing and genetic strength, something tradtional breeding often fails at (potato blight anyone ?). Equally genetic engineering is not tested in the long term and we have no clue to the effects (thalidomide(sp?) anyone ?).
I want to eat a cow that is not pumped with hormones, wheat that isn't racked with chemicals... and a realisation that we can produce enough food for the world but the west subsidises farmers the way it never would do to steel (except in the US), coal, cars, manufacturing etc etc.
Maybe the solution isn't more products, its a decent and fair economic policy. Shocking I know, but more expensive plants for the 3rd world might not be what they are after, fair access to our markets might just be a better bet.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
This is all well and good untill somebody starts calling it "gene-laundering" or some other such unflattering name that implies that it's just sneaky GM, and nobody will eat this stuff either. Especially if it's essentially the same result. The real problem is that people oppose things they don't understand by default.
Firm cardboard doesn't sell as tomatoes, no matter how bright red.
Yet it works for strawberries... I think that the lack of flavor is just an add on to an already sad story. They didn't succed because of the GM, and to make matters worse they didn't taste good. Hell, bigger and better looking sells every other thing in the produce department, why would tomatos be any different? Most people don't know what a fresh grown tomato tastes like anymore anyway.
This is why farmers (that can afford them) buy need seeds/seedlings from Monsanto and friends . . . to make sure that they have a type that is genetically predisposed to express certain desired but uncommon traits.
Can someone list any meaningfull danagers of GM food, preferably with something that resembles proof. I'm not trolling for either side here I'm simply curious.
The main reasonable objection I've heard is that, because you're splicing genes from wherever you please, you can no longer tell by inspection whether or not you'll be allergic to any given food. While the "splicing fish genes into vegetables" is an extreme example, it gets the concept across. IMO, this isn't likely to occur accidentally (you know what genes you're copying, and so would know when you're copying something that codes for an allergen). However, it would still occur, and so presents a concern.
A secondary objection is that it's very difficult to grow samples of an engineered crop without it spreading out of the controlled area or cross-pollinating with other nearby compatible plants. This means that if you do, for instance, engineer a strain of wheat that makes anyone with a peanut allergy keel over and die, there's a significant risk of that strain propagating into mundane wheat fields, with un-fun results. Engineered strains are usually specifically designed to be hardier than normal strains (that's why we're engineering them), so they will be competitive with normal strains in the field.
That having been said, I think that genetically engineered crops are inevitable, and mostly beneficial. When this becomes a tried-and-true technology instead of an experimental one, the fuss should die down.
And that is my #1 issue with GM foods: not the frankenfood FUD, but instead the excessively greedy corps like Monsanto who would be able to concentrate wealth & power like you wouldn't believe.
Also, organic food simply taste better.
Organic food also isn't sustainable; organic food can't feed the world.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Take some time and go to your library. Many years ago, one of my favorite articles in Scientific America (and was almost tragic) (1st on the list was an article labelled "Absinthe"). There was a family portrait of the group being studied and all of the inter-connected family members. Now, if I were to hand the picture to you sans caption or association in anyway, then would ask you what that picture meant to you, it was as easy to determine as dropping a ball and hitting the floor.
Remember the X-Files episode "Home"?
Ever see "Deliverance"? The locals you see along the river and before they start their journey are not actors - they are locals.
There is only one real danger coming from GM food: the irrefutable proof of human capacity to tinker with life, the God-like power that religious fanatics are so afraid to admit to be attainable. Mediocrity hates achievement of any kind, and that hatred, the hatred of what is the best within us, is the root of all evil propagated by those who refuse to make the choice that makes such achievement possible: the choice to think.
Did you even read the entire article?
The genetic manipulation that they refer to in this article is the idea of taking a gene(s) from a completely different species, and putting it into whatever they are manipulating. The breeding they refer to is not the traditional breeding we've practiced for thousands of years, but rather looking at all the genes available for all possible breeds of a plant and tagging it. Then they do crossbreeds and check for the gene, and if it is present, then growing the plants outside of a lab. Because you arent actually changing the genes, just bringing out latent genes of the species, it is less likely there will be side effects. Because of this fact, its cheaper to do, quicker to produce, and easier to test than GM products.
RTFA
go buy some gmo fruit and then some natural organic of the same
well in the US at least it's not labled so how do you tell.
Actually I don't agree with this one
would you randomly go to a chemlab and mix a bunch of vials together and drink it?
If you think that's how genetic modifications are arrived at and released into the food chain then you really need to ask why it costs so much to develop and test the stuff. Just zap a few dozen chickens with ionizing radiation or mutagenic drugs and let out the ones that don't die to see what they do special, like laser eyes for defence against predators (birds and aircraft) then sell it before it dies. I don't think so.
My fiance is a Plant Breeder who graduated from Cornell and studied for a time under Susan McCouch. There is a lot of misunderstanding of traditional plant breeding, and while this article touches on some of the more non-scientific aspects of the field, it certainly is right about breeding.
/.ers analogy:
// thisfsoidahu8903w //OWI%#H lkjh // HACK AND SLASH - INSERT RED TOMATO GENE HERE // END HACK AND SLASH
To those of you who think there is no difference between G.M.ed foods and bread foods, let me give you a
Traditional plant breeding is a little bit like editing a makefile. The breeders job consists primarilly of decoding and understanding the contents of that makefile in order to eventually modify it to turn on and off certain features.
MAKEFILE for peachtree.c
# Make sure our peaches are large
FRUITSIZE = HUGE
# Make the shelf life long so
ROTTIME = VERYLONG
# Make the item pretty
COLOR = PEACHY
All of these traits already exist in the target species, or at least in a species closely related enough to cross with it. At one time or another, they've all been expressed, just not at the same time. If you have enough experience with the plant, and know the plant isn't dangerous, you know you can incorporate these traits together into single plants without much worry.
Contrast this to G.M.ed food, which can best be described as a hack and slash modification to the actual source code.
#include peachoptions.h
peachcolor(fruit thisfruit) {
#ifdef PEACHY
thisfruit.color=PEACHY;
thisfruit.stem=SHORT;
#endif
#ifdef PASTEY
thisfruit.color=PASTEY;
thisfruit.stem=LONGER;
#endif
thisfruit.color=RED;
thisfruit.nutrition=TOMATOE LIKE;
thisfruit.stem=VERYLONG;
thisfruit.nutrition=LOW;
if (thisfruit.color==PEACHY) thisfruit.nutrition=HIGHER;
if (thisfruit.color==PASTEY) thisfruit.nutrition=HIGH;
return;
)
OK, this is all fake, but the point is, just like sticking code in software at poorly controlled places can have unintended consequences, sticking genes in to a plant's genetic sequence can also have unintended side effects.
As it turns out, nature can do something similar through the use of transposons: genes that randomly remove themselves from one part of a plant's genetic code and insert themselves elsewhere. However, the chance of producing a dramatic change is not as great, since the transposon gene is not being expressed in a completely different species from the one originating it.
Most of the time, the results from GMing are positive. But occasionally the results are negative, and the real issue is that we must implement safeguards specific to GM crops in order to protect our food supply.
Mother nature does not discriminate one corn plant from another, and many GM projects have the express purpose of introducing traits you would NOT want in your average corn field. Suppose he introduces a gene which turns the corn kernel flesh pink, making a great new popcorn for teens. Suppose this gene also turns out to cause the corn to be poisonous.
Because corn pollen is capable of traveling impressive distances, that corn gene, if not sufficiently isolated, could contaminate a large portion of this year's corn crop. It is important to note that the gene would not cause irretrievable contamination, as today's seed corn is produced in carefully isolated conditions away from stray pollen (both GM and non-GM). But this sort of contamination would cause major headaches for one harvest season, as the StarLink episode in South America demonstrated. We might not know about a given instance until after you've already eaten Corn Flakes contaminated with birth control hormones.
This contamination problem is similar to what would happen to Marijuana plants if industrial hemp were to
What you're saying is true--that both breeding and inserting genes into an organism other ways both modify the genome, but that doesn't mean they have "the same end." We don't know nearly enough about genetics to say that. Look at the differences between cloned sheep and naturally-born sheep. They are genetically identical, yet the clones end up having all sorts of health problems. Now the health of the modified plant is unimportant with respect to human health, but it could be the tip of the iceberg. What if some of these modified foods produce poison, but only under stress? We wouldn't find out until there was a drought/freeze and suddenly a whole field of poisonous corn makes its way into the food supply.
Breeding takes longer and cannot be controlled to the same extent.
True. And all other concerns aside, this is a very good argument for genetically modified organisms.
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.
All right, I'm sorry, but this last part is utter bullshit. No one is complaining about vectors or unwanted integration? What about all those antibiotic-resistant bacteria that spread around their genes for beta-lactamases? Ever heard of methicillin-resistant-S.-aureus (MRSA)? It's fast becoming the major pathogen people get while in the hospital, and it's a bitch to cure. This is the "flesh-eating bacteria" you see on tv. And the dangers of vectors? There is a slim (but not nil) chance of vectors sticking around, and later integrating into the human genome. In the future that might be beneficial, but right now human gene therapy has had no successes. One prominent failure was the gene therapy for immunodeficient children who ended up contracting leukemia. I'd sure complain if my food gave me cancer.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
This is just plain silly -- loose vs. well attached genes? How in the world did such nonsense get modded up? I have a doctorate in microbiology focussing on molecular evolution and it just irritates me how people are willing to believe any sort of pseudo-scientific notion if it agrees with their political agenda. Maybe you read something about it in a Greenpeace pamphlet, but that's not a good place to learn facts about science, any more than a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet.
Perhaps, just maybe, you are recalling a half understood description of transposons, which are genes that can change position in the genome but even so, 1) transposons are found in nature -- Barbara McClintock got her Nobel for finding them in corn decades ago 2) only some GM techniques use transposons. So an attack on transposons, if indeed I'm not reading more into your notion of "loose genes" than is merited, makes no sense.
Yeah, makes me think that people are scared of the silliest things, and if GM food was labeled the way the crackheads want (giant, spoooooky letters!), the moronic public would freak out.
Ignorance is bliss, unless that ignorance tosses your company's bottom line to the bottom of a pit...
Although I have concerns about splicing 'alien' genes into food crops, this isn't my main issue with GM crops.
It is morally repugnant to me to allow the patenting of food. It is blindingly stupid in my opinion to allow patented foodstuff to become the main body of supply for us.
Furthermore, the main advantage with many of the GM crops is not that they are in some way better for us, but that they are resistant to more powerful pesticides and herbicides than non-GM plants, enabling the fields to be blitzed with much stronger chemicals. What do you think that does to local wildlife? To the rivers and streams it runs off to? To the people who live next to the fields?
And what do you think it does to biodiversity? Did you ever hear about the Irish Potato famine? Most of the population depended on a single food crop derived from a small number of imported ancestors. The potato blight came and they were all but wiped out in a stroke.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Pollen isolation is probably impossible, depending on plant breed etc. Some pollen is tiny, light, and can stay viable for quite a while. For pollen to blow thousands of miles is completely possible.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
But I guess it has to stop now because some company is doing it. I know you retch at the fact Monsanto collects patent royalties and it makes me sick also, but it doesn't invalidate their work. Have a look at this page or read Sagan's books for more hints.
I hate such arguments. Sounds like M$ FUD. Well, if you don't produce what the EU wants, you can't complain that they won't buy it. And before you say that the whole point is that the EU isn't letting it's people have the choice - the actual point is that the people of the EU have spoken through their representative, and apparently they don't want GM foodstuffs.
And I though America was all about the free market (as in if a product is not wanted ...) ...
For myself, I do think choice is best, but I think people have the right to know everything. Thus products should be labeled if they contain GM foodstuffs. Similar to the BST situation with milk, where I believe Monsanto got it into a law that labels cannot mention BST content. There are people who want to know, so why shouldn't labeling laws enforce this?