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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."
Ever been to Mississippi or Arkansas? I don't *think* so. . .
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.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
When I can buy tomacco in my local grocery store.
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.
If they can get my kids to eat those veggies I can't seem to get them to eat...
"Dad, can you please pass the Rocky Road Brussel Sprouts?"
Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code...
From the article:
/.'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.
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
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.
Other dangers from this this article come to include:
Here is yet another article that you can read on this topic.
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.
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.
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.