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Genetic Engineers Barking Up the Wrong Trees?
Rick the Red writes "In a commentary titled 'Genetic engineering for better suburbia', Vincent Barnes says, 'Cures for diseases and feeding the world with genetically modified foods is well and good but the real money is in solving the problems of homeowners, the vast silent majority of Americans who toil away every spring and summer fighting pests and every fall injuring their backs and falling off ladders.' Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves? Would you buy designer grass that grows two inches and stops? Even if you won't eat GM food?"
...I think curing disease would be pretty good.
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Should we focus our money on massively increasing food production, making backup organs, and fighting diseases or should we make some nice trees?
Idiotic.
This article isn't really worth your time. The blurb really says it all. His only really good idea is that genetic engineering could be useful closer to home, but his examples are really nothing more than wishful impossibilities.
For example:
Surely some genetic feature of a non-deciduous tree could be implanted in maples so that one may enjoy all the reds and yellows but not the stupefying task of raking and cleaning out gutters. In the spring, the leaves could turn green again and the cycle would repeat so that a sense of seasonal change isn't lost, only my backache.
He obviously understands the process by which die, causing them to turn colors and fall off, since he knows that if leaves don't die and turn colors then plants would loose devastating amounts of water durring the winter period. However, he somehow wants those leaves to come back to life when spring hits. I don't care how many genes shift around, it's going to take nothing more than voodoo magic to both kill the leaves so they change color, and make them come back to life.
The best you could do is get a nice waxy coating on the leaves so they can stay green all year without drying the tree out, or make them stick tighter to the brances so they fall off slowly throughout the winter rather than all at once in the fall, with stragglers falling out like loose teeth as new leaves budded underneith them.
From this point the article goes completely downhill. He doesn't even mention actual possibilities, like removing the gene that causes cat to produce dander people are allergic to (something that already is recieving lots of research money.)
Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves? Would you buy designer grass that grows two inches and stops? Even if you won't eat GM food?
The answer is still NO. The issue with GM plants is that GM corporations have proven time and time again that they are not being in the remotest bit responsible for what they are producing. They take GM plants that have not been anywhere near adequately tested, and let them out in the wild, where they crossbreed with other plants freely. They have absolutely no clue if they are about to create the next kudzu, and they don't appear to give a damn if they do, either. (Heck, they'd probably see one of their plants getting out of control and taking over everywhere as a gold mine!) And don't forget that it's Monsanto that gave us the Terminator Gene.
No thanks. My life depends on plant life, so I'd prefer if people didn't wantonly muck with it. What was that old saying about people who live in glass houses throwing stones?
its caused by greed, ignorance, bad education, capitalism, war, land mines, etc etc etc.
its not caused by 'we dont have a magic melon'
if u can genetically engineer humans with emotional health, then you would stop world hunger a lot faster.
Of course I would! I really don't understand those who fear GM food. It's not like the cows, or even the corn we eat now, is "natural." Most of our food has been selectively bred for centuries. The result is the same mucking-with-genes, just much more slowly than genetic engineering promises.
If you refuse to eat beef because of moral reasons (I understand that there are lots of legitimate reasons not to eat beef--but I'm concentrating on the "oh, poor cow" reason), then would you be willing to eat beef grown in a cow body that was born with no brain whatsoever and kept alive by machines? You'd be eating beef, but it would've been grown like a vegetable. Most of the vegetarians I've asked say they would sooner eat a real cow than my genetically engineered monster. But why? How is it really any different from any of the food products we're created for ourselves over the centuries?
Personally, I'd much rather have GM food than beef that has been fllled to the brim with hormones to to make the "natural" animal perform better. And I'd be first in line to buy trees and grass.
The lameness filter is complaining about junk characters. What are junk characters? Did that question mark just count? Will this block of text make this message ok? ---------------------
watch funny commercials.
So, people start using grass and other pants that are geneticly engineered plants. What sort of impact is this going to have on the local insect population? YOu might not care if there are less bugs, but the fish in your local streams and rivers might care quite a bit. Also the other critters that eat the fish could be impacted.
Pretty Pictures!
I mean, could rumanants like cows eat the grass, and would it cross pollenate with normal grass, to create another weed? Would it invade gardens?
There are oodles of ethical questions to be answered BEFORE releasing a GM product into the wild. Profit is not the bottom line in the real world.
Microsoft is well known for making software that is popular in suberbia, but it's also known for being insecure, and a scourge on the Internet if plugged in unpatched. Releasing "perfect height" grass into the wild is much more dangerous than releasing an unpatched operating system. The consequences to the ecosystem aren't as simple as unplugging every Windows computer from the Internet and cleaning the worms off of them, or blocking ports.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Same for leaves. They want to use those loud leaf blowers. They'll use a leaf blower on individual leaves. Picking up the leaf would be more efficient but efficiency is not the point.
No, but I'd be the first on my block to buy an Elm tree resistant to dutch elm disease or an American Chestnut tree resistant to blight.
In an evermore artificial world, a person can go an entire day without seeing the sky, a tree or any animal, or touching cotton, wood, or anything *real*.
I know that there are kids that live in cities that have never seen the stars, and have no clue to the connection between the stuff that magically appears in the supermarket and the dirt that it's grown in. Gen-modding everything for the sake of fattys who don't want to care for their living landscape is only going to leave us with plants and animals that are not adapted to the natural world, and a weakened ecosystem.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back on my horse so I can cry at sunset when somebody litters.
I thought that too. The tone seemed sarcastic. However, if he was serious then he is very stupid.
Risking contaminating the gene pool of Maple trees with leaves that don't fall could have devastating ecological effects. It could reduce the survival and reproductive effectiveness of wild maples if it out-crossed thus drastically changing the food chain and species composition of effected eco-systems.
This seems to be a general problem with GM people don't think of the consequences of what would happen if they outcross into wild populations.
It does also seem to reflect the attitude of the average sububanite who is willing to risk any possible damage to the earth to keep their yard neat. Frankly it disgusts me.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
How about genetically engineered humans that can appreciate nature without having to compulsively twist it into something considered "beautiful" by the chemical industry?
...you can spend lots of money fixing your roof when a NeoMaple branch cracks under the weight of the snow on it and crashes through. Good idea!
I lived through this crap back in 1995-96 (I think) in upstate New York when there was a heavy early snowfall. There was much damage, both to trees and to buildings.
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I already did - it is called "Buffalo grass", and is a native grass of the midwestern region. Once established, it needs little water, and will not grow very tall.
In this particular case, there is little need for gengineering, just for people to realize that the brilliant green of fescue grass is not needed, and the more muted green of buffalo is just as good.
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If leaves didn't fall, wouldn't that eliminate a lot of the nutrients in the ground that come from them? Even if any new trees grew from the deprived soil, all the herbavores would be eating their young shoots instead of the itty-bitty grass blades. Once all the young trees are gone, the plant eaters'll die off and there'll be no meat for the carnivores! And then society will fall into disarray as we battle each other in post-apocolyptic wastelands for rations and gasoline with our superpowered death cars, seeing only by the light of cinematic explosions!
Yeah. Think about it.
And you wonder why people oppose GM?