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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."
This is nice to see. Information, free for all. In this casr especially, since it helps all of us.
I wonder how many other things would benefit the 'end user' if things were opened. Auto safety for instance.
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I understand BioForge is a place for scientists to collaborate but is it also a place for funding? Did the scientists who put together this article do so with funds from a University or (less likely) a corporation?
If more of these papers are to come out, and I hope they do, the proper funding channels should be lined up since those who fund a research project tend to be very possessive about the results.
-Teiresias
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.
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Their license allows anyone to use and improve the technique as long as improvements are shared with everyone, à la open source.
This is foolish. They should have released it under a free license for anyone except those who deny the same right to use their bio-patents. Otherwise certain scums are able to use this technique while not being forced to change their behaviour, hurting the industry, hurting the farmers, hurting the scientific progress, with no consequences. A perfect license should be useful for cross-licensing with proprietary patents portfolios but sadly this one while being certainly great in spirit is just too weak in its current form to achieve this goal. In the real world of patent sharks we need to fight a little bit harder.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I've already started. You should see my 5 assed garbanzo beans.
I don't know about every one else, but I've been using Open Source and BIOS technologies together for years now.
i just put in
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?
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Sorry guys. My modified corn crop not only causes cancer in 90% of all people it also kinda crossbred with the native corn in most of the southwest... so... uh... Sorry Guys.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
When monsanto crops breed with your GPL crops, they have to release the genetic code or they are in violation of the liscense?
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>
I don't think the analogy with open source software is quite right. After all, with OSS I have a choice - I download the software, .configure, make install and I have it. Then if it I choose I can delete it.
With this stuff I can still choose whether I want to plant it or eat it, but I cannot choose whether my neighbor's GM'd tomatoes pollinate my tomatoes. I won't find out until I plant the resulting seeds next summer and WHOA! My tomatoes have deformed frog legs on them, but geez, they grow like the dickens in my cat's litter box!
I'll leave them on the front porch - help yourself.
-- 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
My uncle is part of a small group of people who are experimenting a "new" form of agriculture, wherein you let nature do its job. You basically make it hard on the plants, by spreading diseased ones all over the field rather than removing them. Some plants die, but some survive.
The end result is a crop that may not produce the best yield under perfect conditions, but it is so resistant to disease and weather that it ALWAYS produces something. It's basically the opposite of these engineered, single-strain crops that are used in many places.
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If you are ok with GM stuff then you should also be fine with the intro of non-native species. Why would one be ok and the other not ok? The same fundamental issue exists with both: the unintended consequences of introducing a species alien to this environment are unknown and predictions of "it'll be fine" are often wrong. Go talk to the Australians about introduced species and see if they agree that the human mind is up to the task, last I heard the problems were NOT solved. And yes, if it is genetically modified surely it is a new species!?
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This is incorrect. Genes hop across species lines all the time. Microorganisms routinely swap, inject and steal genes on an on going basis even across such divisions as eukaryotes vs prokaryotes. Viruses move genes between multicellular species routinely.
It has always amused me that people fear GM when for the last 100 years the standard breeding method for food crops has been to force mutate them with radiation and mutagenic chemicals. Such practices mutate thousands of unknown mutated genes for every beneficial gene they produce. Nobody ever checked if if 1/10 or 1 percent of the general population was allergic to a protein in a mutated food plant.
At least with GM, we know what we changed and where and when we changed it. With forced mutation and natural gene swapping we have no idea.
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.
I don't really think it's ironic - scientific journals are about prestige, and the impact factor of Nature is very high - over 30. I don't think any of the open access journals even have impact factors yet.
If the purpose of the announcement is to reach as many as the biological sciences community as possible, you want to put the announcement in the journal that most of them read.
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Not so true for plants. Often the diploid offspring are infertile, but conversion to tetraploid form can restore fertility. (This is true for lilium species, at least. For mammals(at least), getting converted to tetraploid form is a bad idea.)
In addition, plant tissue culture makes the issue of fertility somewhat less of an issue, again depending on the plant. Much of the tree-borne fruit that you see in any store (apples, oranges, peaches, I think bananas), was propagated asexually (grafted onto root stock).
The scale of "conventional" techniques for improving species (e.g., plant 10 acres of pink lilies, keep the 100 best stems, crossbreed, repeat for 10 generations) is sufficiently large that I would not bet too much money that accidental gene transfer/modification (by viruses/bacteria/background radiation) isn't occurring anyway. I don't think anyone ever did any formal safety tests on the first navel orange; they saw that it was seedless and tasty enough, and propagated it all over the place.
The farmer I mentioned went bankrupt because he had no way of identifying, or removing, the GM strain of crop from his field.
Note that there is a very simple way for Monsanto to identify whether (in this case) there are Roundup-Ready (in this case) crops present - they simply fly over and spray the field with roundup. If the crops die, then the farmer is innocent. If the crops don't die, then the farmer gets sued. Much like the medieval method for identifying witches.
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