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?"

Comments

Wishful thinking of the under educated.

[BobPaul]

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.)

Re:Wishful thinking of the under educated.

[cyocum]

I think you miss the irony of the column. The last paragraph says it all:

Surely it would not be difficult to shift this gene here and that gene there and come up with permanently blooming azaleas, rhodies, and camellias. Then, the only difference between winter and spring would be the temperature. But not to worry. Global warming will take care of that, too

This was a subtle satire of the suburbinite mentality about technology. It was not ment as a serious set of ideas.

Screw GM food ...

[YankeeInExile]

Get them working on producing a GM human-female that thinks that stanky basementgeeks are supersexy. They can come in several variants -- the scrawny goth, the buxom blond, the dominatrix redhead ... They'd make a billion....

No

[Bastian]

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?

Would the perfect height grass be edible?

[saskboy]

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.

Re:Hmm

[Theatetus]

Should we focus our money on massively increasing food production

Why? We already produce about 5 times the world's caloric intake with current agricultural techniques. This is one of Monsatan's huge lies: that people are starving because not enough food is being made.

Lack of food production is not why people are starving. People are starving because corrupt government use food as a weapon against their own population. Increasing food production won't help that; it may even make it worse because the food supply will be even more centrally controlled.