Slashdot Mirror
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 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
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
GM and selective breeding are two TOTALLY different processes.
Here are somes clues for you:
When a bull and a cow fuck, there is no jellyfish involved.
Tomatoes have never needed fish genes before, so why would they suddenly need them now?
I do not trust my long-term health to corporations.
Neither should you.
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.
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
The obvious answer is: genes should not be patentable.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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
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.
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?