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Terminator Gene Ban Suggested in Canada
innocent_white_lamb writes "A member of the Canadian Parliament has proposed legislation to outlaw the development and deployment of 'terminator genes' that would prevent seeds from germinating after a set span of time. This practice would require farmers to re-purchase seed every year instead of saving the seeds from last year's crop. The legislation is not expected to pass due to opposition from the Agriculture Minister. 'There is also an issue with the technology, which is based on a complicated five-gene construct. It is "inevitable" it will fail and could harm biodiversity, said Lucy Sharratt, co-ordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, which backs the ban. CFIA argues exactly the opposite, saying "the terminator approach provides an excellent method to protect against transference of novel traits to other crops and plant species."'"
Isn't making the plants that grow from the seeds produce seeds that are sterile good enough?
If I buy a seed I should be able to plant it as far away from when I bought it as I'd like.
If you explain to the farmer that the plant cannot be used for seed it is up to the farmer and the open market to decide if that is the right approach. If the farmer cannot afford the seed then they will have to use non engineered seed and the companies will have to decide if it is worth it.
.. DRM for seeds.
-- lol pwned
This has everything to do with recurring revenue, and nothing to do with protection against transference for the sake of preventing unwanted traits in other crops.
Just wrong.
The terminator gene prevents germination, but not pollination. So it can still trade genes with other plants, then those plants are unable to germinate.
But if you happen to be a farmer that likes to reuse your own seeds, and it happens that your neighbor uses a T-gene crop, and they cross-pollinate with your plants, your seeds can inherit the T-gene and next years seeds are no longer any good. The gene prevents germination, it doesnt stop pollination or production of seeds. The same issues with other genetic-modified crops have come up already and made their way through court, specifically the Monsanto RoundUp resistant rape-seed/canola plants.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Jurassic Park anyone?
Yes, that was a great documentary.
Insightful? ugh.
So *THAT*s why a girl can't get pregnant from giving a blowjob!
Have you forgetten about two little things called "Wind" and "Bees"? Genetically altered grain's pollen will spread.
y Schmeiser.html
Theres a story of a guy and his father who for years grow his own canola from seed they had been breeding. Then a seed producer, Monsanto, came in with a crop of these genetically altered canola next to his field. The cross pollination destroyed his crop in 2 years. The first year produced the defunct seeds. The next year the seed did not germinate.
Imagine if few dozen farmer planted altered grain near seed field. Within a few years our entire agricultural system would be wiped out except for a few select seed producers.
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
http://www.savethepinebush.org/News/04FebMar/Perc
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Food shouldn't be intellectual property. Period.
- or -
Patent everything and enslave us all.
Choose your own future.
It might cross breed with normal seed and terminate it. What you would be left with is nothing but what the friendly multinational has to offer each year. That might not be good for you.
The whole "rape seed" Monsanto insanity is a good primer on these matters. An normal farmer in Canada was forced to destroy his crops because they were contaminated by neighbors using Monsanto seed. The US has pushed these practices onto the Iraqi puppet government, so you can see where they would really like things to go.
There are fundamental problems with seed patents that need to be corrected. The contamination issue is one that makes the whole idea look foolish and economically harmful.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Actually, he won, partially, and is firing back with another case due in 2008.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
It should not be banned only, it should be declared as crime against humanity.
Imagine a sudden, global catastrophe that would shut down global transportation, resources or access to harvest and distribute the "designer" seed...
Corporations want to send people for downloading music or copying a movie, but they are free to put in danger the food supply, that can potentially affect the survival of millions, so that the shareholders of one or a few companies can make more money?
I challenge any politician to explain the voters how is it more harmful to society to copy illegally a cultural product than putting in danger the food supply.
That's their job.
It's the government's job to watch out for the public and slap down such reckless and exploitative practices.
Don't blame Monsanto, blame the legislators and bureaucrats who have so shamelessly violated the public trust.
Honestly, an Agriculture Minister standing up for t-genes... it's so transparently corrupt you'd swear it was American politics.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
encourage a lot more herbicide use, which kills off other species of plants by `accident'
This also breeds more resistant weeds, so eventually everyone is forced to use pesticide resistant seed ... owned by a single company!
There is also disturbing evidence of the resistance genes being passed directly into weeds from the crop. The mechanism is not understood.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The gene is found in hybrid crops that have a pretty poor yield anyway in a second generation plant. In practice, few industrialized farmers can afford to not buy new seed each year. Sacrificing a portion of their crop for seed that will generate an inferior hybrid-hybrid cross will cost more than just buying the new seed. The people for whom this is a problem are organic farmers (who use much different lines and who do recycle seed). But they don't buy this kind of seed, so they are only worried about cross-polination.
I had worked for Monsanto a long ways back, and so this product was something they were developing at the time. Cross-pollination was a serious concern for them. IIRC, their solution was an insertion of 3 cis genes that all had to be present in order to work: a repressor, a recombinase, and an embryonic toxin. To active the system, the seeds must be treated with and inducer that inhibits the binding of the repressor to recombinase so that the recombinase is produced. In the absense of the chemical inducer, the terminator system doesn't work and the seeds are normal (which is how the producer makes more seeds, by not chemically treating them). If the repressor is blocked, the recmobinase excises a promoter blocker and leaves a late-promoter for the embryonic toxin which causes the embryo (seed) to arrest once it's reached maturity.
It's a pretty fragile system and if there was cross-pollination, the cassette would either transfer intact but uninduced or be destroyed through recombination or genetic silencing (the terminator genes themselves separately occur naturally in maize).
So, the danger of the technology is somewhat misstated. It's not as simple as pollen being carried to another crop -- that alone is insufficient to cause harm. The question is whether or not the traits will be transferred and then subsequently mutated through generations of natural genetic variation to develop a new system that doesn't require an exogenous inducer to activate. And, that such a system will be virulent (since sterile strains of plants occur with a certain frequency already in nature and have no ill effect on the environment -- seedless oranges, for example). No known mechanism for that exists, nor has such a thing been observed. I'm thinking that millions of these plants have been planted so far and there might be some documented evidence of this occurring (it would be fascinating if it did), but in the absence, one can only conclude it would be rare event, and it's also self-limiting (one generation only), soe the risk (probability of event x cost of event) would have to be very low.
There's risk in any agricultural operation. Out in CA there was an organic vendor of celery that had developed a crop that was so toxic, it caused welts on the exposed skin of the pickers (luckily the reaction was quick, if people had eaten it, it would have been deadly) -- and that's through organic crosses.
> These corporate folks are putting greed ahead of public responsibility.
That's their job.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
Sorry for swearing, but i see this so much here. It's not their job to rape and pillage the world for profit. Being a corporation does not give you a free pass to put money ahead of morals. That is not their job. Their job is to offer a product to a market.
It's the government's job to watch out for the public and slap down such reckless and exploitative practices.
Don't blame Monsanto, blame the legislators and bureaucrats who have so shamelessly violated the public trust.
No, blame Monsanto. Blame the government too. They are both doing the wrong thing.
The ultimate goal is to dominate and rule the whole world of seeds. While this may sound like a conspiracy theory, it is the only explanation that makes sense without thinking the Monsanto management has their head stuck up their arse.
The new Canadian law is exactly this - a lobby effort targeting at domination, against our environment.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
The creation and endorsement of terminator seeds is a crime against humanity. I cannot believe money and time were spent to develop this. These should be made illegal everywhere on this planet. We already have enough problems with dictators starving their populations for their political ends. Let's not give them anymore tools to do so.
If there is pollination on some plants then those plants are unable to germinate on the other generation so... they won't propagate anymore.
Right. In other words, it effectively kills any plant strains it cross pollinates with. If terminator crops continue to be planted, then they will pollinate and kill more crops, until eventually there are no non-terminator crops left.
Obviously as the terminators cannot reproduce on their own, this is only a problem if farmers continue buying terminator seeds from Monsanto and plant them.
Which is why they should stop immediately.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's like DRM, except for living things.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It's like DRM, except for living things.
Actually it is like DRM that not only affects the tract purchased but all your other similar tracts and all of your neighbours tracts.
I still haven't figured out why Monsanto-using farmers do not get sued by their downwind neighbours.
There is absolutely no question that Monsanto pollen harms Canadian farmers who do not have agreements with Monsanto. In Monsanto v. Schmieser the courts indirectly concluded that Mosanto's pollen constituted an airborne infection that made Mr. Schmeiser's seed crop worthless since he did not have a right to use the seeds that the source farmer had infected with Monsanto's IP. Additionally, that farmer was also responsible(*) for Monsanto being given Mr. Schmeiser's IP (his own Canola strain that he had spent 50 years developing) free of charge. In effect, the negligence of the upwind farmer resulted in not only the loss of his crop but having 50 years of research handed to a competitor.
(*) This part is arguable since that part of the judgement was unprecedented and had no apparent legal basis.
I wonder. I suspect that most companies start out "friendly", (I do believe that people are basically good), but become more "evil" as they begin to make larger profits. I think we're witnessing this in Google right now. The pressure is there (especially since they went public) to make as much money as possible, in any way possible.
There is no morality in a big/successful company. I think it's because of the whole "groupthink" mentality that's built-in to the human psyche - even though any given member of the board of directors may know that what the company is doing is against ordinary individual morals, it's the group that's doing it, and so it isn't their individual fault. This links back to the famous Stanley Milgram experiment, where people are shown to be willing to do horrific things, provided somebody lifts the burden of responsibility. Furthermore, a vote against something that will make profit (morality aside) may be perceived as a sign of weakness, possibly jeopardising the individual's career. For these reasons, the ethics which you and I live by simply do not apply to corporations, no matter how well-intentioned their founders were.
This may not sit comfortably with many on Slashdot who love to hate the "bad guys", (Microsoft, Sony), whilst pouring adoration on the "good guys" (Google, Apple), but I'm afraid it's the truth. In the world of business there is no good and bad - just money and the best way of acquiring it.
Nobody else has this sig.
That's because their downwind neighbours get sued for copyright infringement of Monsanto products. You can see a bunch of cases of this at the following places:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/monlink.cfm
http://www.monsantowatch.org/
Monsanto is truly one of the few RIAA-like "evil" companies on the planet. They are vicious, predatory, and have no qualms about being that way.
PCBs - check.
Agent Orange - their creation, too. Most people forget these two facts. I can pull up links if you want to ads stating that Agent Orange was perfectly safe.
GMO Corn that causes liver damage in rats(and any other mammal, actually) - yep. Many unexplained cases of pets getting sick come from this, btw. The reason they have to pump cattle and chicken full of antibiotics? Because the corn they feed them destroys their immune system and they would otherwise be dead way before slaughter. Except - cats and dogs and people live a TAD longer than cows and chickens.(the meat is evidently fine, but the stuff they pump them full of to keep them alive till slaughter is another horrifying mess and why I don't eat non-organic meat anymore)
GMO Crops that cross-pollinate so that ONLY their pesticide works - you betcha.
Crops with an 80% die-off rate that happen to easily cross-pollinate? - Just invented!
And of course, as it was previously pointed out, Microsoft-type "deals" with other nations via our government. IE - a grant or money but only if they use the "approved" products. They currently spend billions every year trying to get GMO crops into Europe and India and everywhere around the planet that they can, despite the near universal rejection. They keep pounding away regardless because in the U.S., GMO crops from Monsanto and ADM(much less evil, though equally unenlightened) make up 80%+ of all crops other than wheat(though they are trying HARD to legalize GMO wheat as well right now - Corn, Canola, Soybeans, and half a dozen other crops are mostly GMO now in the U.S. Canola and Soybeans are virtually 100%.
All in the last ten to fifteen years, no less. They don't test it, they don't care - they just make the stuff and lie to our faces like the tobacco companies did(and still do).