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."

Comments

Breed your own!

[Stile 65]

I just recently bought Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's & Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding & Seed Saving by Carol Deppe. It's a very good treatment, by a professional geneticist, on breeding your own vegetables, fruits, flowers, etc. It's a testament to the power of more natural and even organic ways of getting what you want out of plants.

So maybe Monsanto has done us all a favor?

[CatGrep]

From the article:

Opponents have found an ally in crop scientists who condemn the conglomerates behind transgenics, especially Monsanto. The company owns scores of patents covering its GM seeds and the entire development process that creates them. This gives Monsanto a virtual monopoly on GM seeds for mainline crops and stifles outside innovation. No one can gene-jockey without a tithe to the life sciences giant.

Of course we /.'ers know that patents tend to stifle innovation. However, maybe this is an area where it's good to have the innovation stifled (or at least slowed down) for a while. Since we're not quite sure what will happen when many of the genes inserted via the Monsanto method will do when they get out into the gene pools of wild-plants, perhaps it's good that Monsanto has stifled innovation in this area. It has caused the search for alternatives such as the super breeding outlined in the article. Of course, the other thing that was happening was that 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.

Interesting side effects of Patents... I recently took an algorithms class where we were discussing various optimization algorithms. A company patented a particular algorithm a few years ago which essentially stopped all research in that direction. So researchers started looking at different classes of alternative algorithms and now have come up with a much better class of algorithms than the patented one - basically nobody uses the patented one anymore. Now, had the company not been so greedy they could have seen further development of their (very promising at the time) algorithm, but now all development in that direction has basically been halted for several years.