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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."'"
The terminator gene prevents germination, but not pollination. So it can still trade genes with other plants, then those plants are unable to germinate.
Jurassic Park anyone?
Yes, that was a great documentary.
Insightful? ugh.
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.
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.
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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.