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Open-Source Technique for GM Crops
a_d_white writes "The Biological Innovation for Open Society has developed TransBacter, a new technique for creating genetically modified crops, which is being released as a BioForge project. Their license allows anyone to use and improve the technique as long as improvements are shared with everyone, à la open source. Other techniques for creating genetically modified crops rely on Agrobacterium, but this new method allows using bacteria outside this genus. The New York Times and Wired cover the story. The founding of BIOS was mentioned previously. Although the Nature paper is available from the BIOS website, with their emphasis on the free sharing of ideas it's rather ironic that the technique was not reported in an open-access journal."
More precisely, "à la the GPL". I know everyone here has "GM plants", Monsanto, terminator seeds and the RIAA muddled together into a single ball of confusion but it's not like public domain vectors haven't been available for, what, 20 years?
At any rate, it's a nice piece of work. The submitter can sneer at them for their choice of journal, but I'd take the Nature paper if I were them.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
GM crops have tremendous potential in regions such as Africa, where also, unfortunately, the governments are too afraid to use GM strains because they risk their agricultural exports with the hysterically-anti-GM nations (because of the fear of cross-polination).
These developing countries can't even compete fairly with unmodified crops because of the unfair subsidies Western governments give their own farmers. Imagine that--taxing your highly advanced industrial complex and then using the money to artificially lower the prices of your products in one of the only markets that people of impoverished nations can compete in!
How long is the developing world going to suffer because technological nations remain sentimental over their own agriculture?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
No, you're confusing two things.
Selecting individual plants or animals and breeding strains in the hope of exagerrating desirable traits (resistance to disease, early ripening of fruit, etc). is one thing.
This can only happen within a single species, so far as I know. I might be wrong about this. It happens.
If you manage to get a hybrid of two species, the offspring are sterile, so the strain acnnot ontinue beyond a first generation fo offspring (cf. mules).
What is meant by GM, is taking genetic information from one species and inserting it into the genome of another species. This crossing of the species barrier cannot normaly happen, and certainly has not been used by farmers "for centuries".
Now, while it may be laudable to develop a strain of rapeseed that is resistance to a particular disease by inserting a gene from a bacterium, what happens if pollen from a field full of this rapeseed is taken up by bees and some of this is eaten by another bacterium.
This is what the European Commission is wary of. Monsanto et.el. are pushing for short term profits by being first-to-market. Let's face it, the directors are put there to serve shareholders' interests. "Long term" investment for many of those shareholders is maybe ten years.
The commissionars in Brussels are nominated by career politicians and technocrats, whose short term goals are mainly fiscal but whose long term goals are to return to power over again, in alternating periods of government. Now, we're looking at three to five cycles of five to seven years...
The consumer is torn between the desire for ultra-cheap food right now, this instant, and wanting his childrens and maybe unborn grandchildren to be born with the right number of fingers, toes, eyes and ears.
Beef>
Yeah, and while we're at it, medicine is hard... We might screw up and kill somebody... Lets just let nature decide whether you should die or not when you step on a rusty nail...
Shoot, lets just all go back to living in caves...
In fact, I propose that we should just GIVE UP trying to solve any hard problem... Nature already does it better in most cases anyway, right?
hard core geek-ware
-- If you manage to get a hybrid of two species, the offspring are sterile, so the strain acnnot ontinue beyond a first generation fo offspring (cf. mules).
Well, not totally... lateral gene transfer (transfer of genes from one speicies to another) has been hapening for millenia - bacteria do it, yeasts do it, and viruses allow higher organisms to do it.
Therefore, anyone who has been making cheese, alcohol, or any fermented food has been engaging in GM for a long time.
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Look at the case of Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer whose canola crop was contaminated with Monsanto's Round-Up Ready Canola.
This is a wide-spread problem that is pitting the small farmer against corporate giants. Look at this article from The Des Moines Register.
www.mikesmind.com - www.daddyworkathome.com - www.freetofarm.org - www.tenfoottable.com
There is a whole world of difference between introducing an organism that is genetically modified (=same species + new feature) and a completely new species into an environment.
Of course, it all depends on what this new feature is, but in my opinion, 99% of the modifications we wish to make to a specific crop are beneficial only to us and not to the crop itself (read: its survival in the wild).
For instance, consider a tomato plant that has been modified to grow tomatoes that are twice as big and that can be preserved twice as long as regular tomatoes. While this is obviously beneficial to the farmer and the consumer, it will seriously hinder the survival of this tomato variety in the willd: regular tomato plants will spend less energy on producing fruit and will be able to release their seeds much sooner (because the fruit spoils faster) than the fancy GM variety.