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."

Comments

FYI

[Otter]

Their license allows anyone to use and improve the technique as long as improvements are shared with everyone, à la open source.

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.

Re:My own Genetics Lab

[Keith_Beef]

Farmers have been GM'ing food for centuries.

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>

Re:Bad license

[mikesmind]

GM crops are a bad idea, in that we don't know what the long-term effects of these modifications will be in the wild. There is no way to guarantee that unintended contamination of pure strains will not occur.

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.