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Insects Rapidly Becoming Resistant To GM Corn
DrHeasley writes "BT corn, which contains the DNA for Bacillus thuringensis toxin, was once hailed as the final solution for insect predators on this valuable crop. Now it turns out that insects, and evolution, are smarter than we thought, and the corn that contains the built in pesticide is no longer reliably protected."
Life finds a way
insects that are resistant are breeding more rapidly. Survival of the fittest.
Is this a surprise, that nature can route around humans? Seriously, this was expected. However, all this means is that Monsato and other evil corporations like it who create GM seeds now have an opening for a new product to develop and sell, for an even higher price. And they will get this higher price because the "old" GM seeds are not successful any more. And the cycle continues...
Everytime we've hailed a one-shot approach to these types of problems, the same thing happens. Look at antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and the like. Do you really think this is going to be any different?
Monsawndo, it's got what plants crave!
Argumentum ad Probabilitum
.. it at least still hurts the people who eat it. They don't adapt as quickly as insects.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I don't know jackshit about biologic or agricultural but I have strong opinions about why this has happened, how it can be prevented, and how our farmers ought to grow the crops.
Not to fear, your Good Friends at Monsanto will have an even newer, better, genetically modified-ier model available just in time!
It only takes a small percentage of resistant organisms out of a population of potentially tens of millions( or should that be hundreds of millions in this case ) to pass on their resistant genes to the next generation and the "killer" gene in the plants is overcome. The only surprise here is that it hasn't happened sonner.
~That population control is at the top of the food chain. And as far as we know, (we just don't all know it yet), we are on someone's endangered species list..
Wow, I'm just so taken by surprise by this! I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this could have happened! Oh, and look at this! The GMO corn may well be causing organ failures in mammals that eat it! How could that have possibly happened?
Monsanto == Umbrella Corporation
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Nature vs Biotech 2-0? Yes, make that Nature vs Biotech 2-0; I just happened to watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1318514/) yesterday! :)
Maybe marketing types. But I seriously doubt many entomologists or crop scientists were saying that this was the "final solution" to rootworm or any other pests.
In fact, they've been advising using non-bt planted in a certain number of acres near the bt ones to slow down the development of resistance.
All they need to do is make the corn produce MORE toxins than it already does, duh. They should hire me.
Gotta keep the business going...patents only last so long...
Now it turns out that insects, and evolution, are smarter than we thought
Did they really just write that, really?. While we're at our peak of evolutionary misconceptions, why not sign it all away to Intelligent Design and say god wanted a better insect because it was christmas and Jebus didn't have any friends to play with.
The longevity of the utility (usefulness) of an adaptive modification (e.g. endogenous pesticide) is inversely proportional to its distribution, either geographic or temporal.
so an adaptive modification that is consistently found in a small geographic area for a long time will take a decent amount of time for predators/pests to circumvent it.
and an adaptive modification that is quickly and widely distributed will result in predators/pests quickly circumventing that defense.
you know how most of the exploits are against the most widely distributed, and centrally controlled OS?
it's like that.
Organic gardeners saw this coming from the get-go - I remember a Mike McGrath (then editor in chief of Organic Gardening) editorial predicting it. Heck, we'd already seen this happen with badly managed organic farms - back in the 1990s, resistance had been seen in Diamondback moths on Hawaiian farms that sprayed B.t kurstaki repeatedly rather than just when monitoring indicated a need for spraying.
The continued usefulness of organic/botanical pesticides has, in large part, been due to their lack of persistence in the environment. Inserting those genes into plants is basically making the pesticides persistent, which (obviously) leads to much quicker development of resistance on the part of the pests.
The part of me that's a cynic wonders if this is what Monsanto had in mind all along... one less organic competitor to their stable of proprietary chemicals.
#DeleteChrome
You mean life is adapting to an environmental pressure? Don't these insects realise they're in breach of Monsanto's patents?
We didn't expect it to happen so quickly, that's all. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than insects: E. coli splits once every 8 hours under optimal conditions in colonies of millions of cells, and may mutate up to 0.003% of their genome with each cell division under stress. That's a lot of brute forcing power. Insects, by contrast, have much more elaborate and stringent eukaryotic mutation controls, and most species take a couple of weeks to hatch.
Which probably means that some small fraction of the population was already resistant when the "experiment" began. No need to wait for a lucky mutation. Just apply strong selection pressure and the trait quickly spreads.
I wonder if the patent will be useless before it expires. Monsanto, eat your heart out, you just got outsmarted by a couple of bugs. Who are you going to sue to get yourself out of this?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Yet again the human race proves it has zero business messing with nature. Seriously, who is surprised by this?
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
There is some research indicating health issues associated with certain GMO corn. Of course it's difficult to say much with certain Food Libel Laws being what they are, but suffice it to say that if there's a reasonable concern that GMO foods could be harming people and if their efficacy at improving our agricultural processes is in question then we should probably slow down on implementation.
Based on the number of chirps per minute and the ambient temperature in this room, it is a snowy tree cricket.
Your comment was so vague that either:
1) You don't know what you are talking about
2) You are delusional and think the what you just posted was offering useful information
3) You're social circles do not contain anyone who argues with you
4) etc
5) Some combination of the above
At least offer a link to a "journal" article so we know what you mean.
Let's examine the problem and solution:
Problem: bugs eating crops
Solution: make crops produce pesticide to kill them
Problem: GM crops being eaten by the pests that are immune
Solution: Stop planting crops outside you dimwits.
Time for the mega-skyscraper-farm. In all seriousness, with the exception of the construction costs (which is why "outside is cheap") this would be much more efficient use of farming space and can be applied to regions that are entirely unsuitable for farming (like most of the Pacific coastline not near a river, deserts, and tundra.) It does require a lot of planning and is pretty much the Simcity 2000 Arcology type buildings as a step towards megacities that do the same. As an added bonus it solves the greenhouse effect but putting the farm "greenhouse" in a climate controlled environment and recycling all the waste.
A century from now we'll be digging up our landfills in regions that didn't incinerate their trash to recover precious metals and convert the organic waste back into oil. GM crops and animals will be grown inside and natural light will be piped via fiber optics to make more efficient use of the surface area.
No Shit Sherlock!, You mean that they did NOT expect this to happen? gosh! /sarcasm
There was an unknown error in the submission.
No, I don't. Gaia can't "plan" a damn thing since the earth isn't sentient. As for the super famine, that's been predicted for decades and it hasn't happened. There's always a famine somewhere, but developed nations haven't had that problem. The Green Revolution was amazingly successful and has allowed the world's population to reach 7 billion. Yes, millions die from famine, but they are in backwards countries such as North Korea, Somalia, Ethiopia and are attributable to either bad weather, or bad government, or both.
Quit trying to terrify people with bogus prophecies of doom.
thanks for your informasian serba serbi
Jebus told me.
How is Monsanto evil in this case? One of the big reasons cited in the article for farmers abusing the BT corn is the market price of corn is very high. Not mentioned in the article is the reason why it is so high. My cousin informed me that he is going to sell off the bit of corn they don't use for cash this year. Why? The government has been subsidizing the corn/ethonal in at least three different ways, exaggerating the price. Why wouldn't a farmer plant and sell of as much as he can and cash in on the high prices? The only reason they are able to do this in the first place is the high yield of corn crops since the 1960's (150-200 bushels and acre compared to only 50/acre years ago). Would we even consider burning corn in our cars if we were not able to realize current yields? If the government wasn't distorting the price, then normal supply in demand would limit the interest in planting too much corn and flooding the market.
what does this stuff do in the human stomach & intestines? does it cause problems with the natural beneficial biological cultures & enzymes in the human digestive system? (i bet it does)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
A couple months ago I drove Dr. Don Huber of Purdue from the airport to a field day (ag industry for product demo) being put on by my family's non-GMO seed firm in the Upper Midwest. He of course had already been hearing of this problem for a while (the plant pathology/development community is pretty small, and when something new crops up everyone is in the loop) but was (and still is) much more concerned with a different pathogen that's been cropping up slowly for the past few years at higher and higher rates. Personally, I am not a seedsman and can't explain it very well, besides saying that it's a bacteria that he has been linking to Roundup Ready plants (Roundup Ready is a gene that Monsanto inserts in all sorts of plants in order to make them resistant to a pungent herbicide, Roundup) that causes infertility in everything it touches and we're unsure of how to deal with it. This website explains the problem pretty well (ignore the activism associated with it, it should just be used as a teaching point) http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/dr_hubers_warning/
What's really chilling is that our non-GMO firm does very well outside the US. This is because most country's will not allow GMO's to be planted in their country due to their lack of long-term testing of effects on humans. I can't remember the exact regulation but in the EU they only allow something like 10-15% of their foodstock to be GMO. In Japan they're not allowed to be planted at all. My dad (the non-GMO seedsman) always likes to tell this anecdote - that when asked why they won't plant any GMO corn, the Japanese grainsman says, "We are conservative with our food. We want to see what it does to your children's children before we'll even consider it."
Glad I could help.
The problem is not within GM itself, the problem is with the reduction of diversity this tends to generate. If plants are identical, insects only need to adapt to one type of corn, once done, its all fucked up. I assume using more traditional methods would yield a gradient of genetic variations over time (which is what evolution is about) and thus less subject (taking corn as a whole) to this things.
Clearly god wouldn't have changed the insects if the farmers were on god's good side, so they must have done something wrong. I suggest they sacrifice their first born to get him to change the insects back.
Deleted
As Darwin himself said: "Well, *duh*. What did you expect?"
It's unlikely to be a famine of epic proportion, but I'm a fan of cyclical famine. It has the great upside of limiting population potential. So no, sane people can disagree that this is a problem that needs to be "fixed" permanently.
Micro scale, yeah, famine sucks. Macro? Not so much.
My brother is a farm manager in Iowa, and he told me that Iowa has regulations where either 10% (or 20%, I forget which) of your rows must be "refuge rows", that is, if you plant a GMO variety, you need to plant non-GMO refuge rows in the same field so that the insects (or fungus or whatever you are fighting) has some place to go live where it then should not develop resistance. Overall it is still a win, because the GMO rows are more productive, and you can plant your refuge rows on fence rows and turn-around rows that never yield as well anyway.
So... does anyone know of other states have refuge row regulations? Or is the % of refuge rows just not sufficient?
To try to get some insight on how many genetic changes there are in insects I churned a few numbers:
Multiply that and you get 10^18 insect offspring per year; a mutation rate of about 1 per individual per generation. So the number of mutations is a very large number. This means a large number of ''natural experiments'' done, one of which may result in an insect a bit more resistant to a GM crop, this will give the insect an advantage and so be able to have more offspring all of which carry the advantageous gene. So advantageous genes spread rapidy, through sexual reproduction are combined with other genes and the best combinations flourish.
WARNING: very rough calculations, most insects die before they have the chance to reproduce and so most mutations are 'lost'. The numbers that I obtained are very likely wrong - but even if each one is wrong by a factor of 100, it doesn't make a huge dent in a very large number.
How could anybody think, that plants would be exposed to the same effects than humans with their antibiotics?
But you have to pay for our IP anyway!
built into its genes ?
and this is safe, because nothing has happened, YET ?
Insects mutated/adapted to this in just years' time. What makes us exceptions despite we are living on the same planet ?
Read radical news here
those random mutations have happened over millions of years of time, evolving to be not in conflict with the entire biosphere it inhabits. break the chain somewhere, and youll get corn growing out of your ass.
Read radical news here
Well DOH, it's called EVOLUTION by NATURAL SELECTION. You bump off 90% of a population and the remaining repopulate the ecosystem only with increased resistance. And as a side effect the resistant genes migrate into other species ...
From the article:
>neglected to plant non-Bt corn within Bt fields or in surrounding fields as a way to create a "refuge" for non-resistant rootworms in the hope they will mate with resistant rootworms and dilute their genes.
- I knew farmers would be resistant to the need to do plant such sacrificial surrounding crops --- I'd love to see Monsanto sue the farmers who didn't follow directions for destroying the value of their research. Of course, one hopes the lawyer defending the farmers will devalue said research by pointing out that Monsanto didn't expect it to be effective for more than a hundred years or so, as compared to the 10,000 or so years people have been farming.
>result of farmers who've planted Bt corn year after year in the same fields.
- but I'm surprised that they're giving up the well-documented benefits of crop rotation --- please tell me that ``organic'' labelling indicates that farmers do sensible things like crop rotation.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
take away the threat to their childrens lives and those mothers might start having a full dozen instead of a half dozen
please don't use "final solution" in reference to exterminating once and for all!
>once hailed as the final solution for insect predators on this valuable crop.
Those sucker farmers will have to buy more of our increasingly expensive insecticides
Mwaahaahhaaahaaaa!
There seems to be a lot of confusion here. Bt is, itself, a single gene that is toxic to insect species. It is NOT the RoundUp Ready gene that Monsanto is (in)famous for bringing to market. These are two very different technologies. I would suggest taking anything anyone confounding the two says with a grain of salt.
If insect evolution works like bacteria (and I don't know if it does), then if we stop growing this GM crop altogether for long enough, then insect DNA should "forget" how to defend against this toxin. Nature abhors waste, so useless genes tend to get jettisoned from the gene pool given enough generations with no selection pressure to keep them in. At least, this is what happens with antibiotic-resistant bacteria: if an antibiotic is not used at all for long enough, bacterial DNA "forgets" how to make the cell line resistant and it once again becomes vulnerable. Resistance is the reason penicillin became a lot less broadband than it originally was, and the resulting relative lack of use might mean it should become more effective again.
This of course assumes that resistant strains have not already entered the wild and become widespread. With bacteria that is particularly problematic since bacteria can transfer resistance between different types of bacteria in a contagious fashion. An GM crops also have a habit of entering the wild, in which case we will be less able to reduce the exposure of insects to that crop, which might keep their resistance maintained. Disclaimer: I am not a biologist.
Sorry, step 3 is always "????"
This allows you to patent any step three more than a year after posting on slashdot.
> Since we can't actually feed the world without GM
It's amazing luck we somehow survived unti GM crops were available. And I wouldn't like to be starving, in countries were GM crops are illegal.
If the Genetically modified seed quits working, the farmers have to pay Monsanto for seed anyway.
Immunity to chemical X gives no specific advantage for attacking plants that don't produce X to start with.
Especially when you need more plants with chemical X so that you can make more Powerpuff Girls.
I've written two papers on the pros and cons of GE foods, and I understood his references. Not that they were insightful. I've read enough about the subject to start hating both sides of the debate. Consequently, I've burned both those papers because I can't stand arguing for GM or against. It's people, like soylent green, not the plants that are the problem.
Q: The mess is loose in the wild
This is some vague perception that GE crops actually survive in the wild, and cross pollinate non-GE plants (which they often can, but the result doesn't survive much better "in the wild"). Like most domesticated species, they only thrive with constant hugging and other occasional anthropomorphic behavior from people. In the wild they just get out-competed by plants that don't need fertilizer and pesticide. They can't survive in the wild without losing the traits that made them domesticated, or dying out.
Q: Our food biodiversity is down to a handful
We don't have nearly as many varieties of plants being grown as we used to a century ago. It used to be that farm plant species varied from one region to another, but now seeds are chosen for the best qualities (yield) and then spread globally. As a result we grow more food than we could with fewer varieties. Without variety, crops are more susceptible to disease. However, there are vast number of species that aren't being planted on a large scale stored as seeds, and there's no reason plants would be incapable of diversifying if allowed to. All it means is we risk putting all our eggs in one basket each season, and having shortages of particular crops more often if current practices continue. Increasing instability of farm production.
Q: It's destroying mammals organs in non-Monsanto tests
Supposedly corn is bad for people, just like the tasty oils we can't use for frying food anymore because of cholesterol. But, simply the large number of processed foods people eat on a regular basis, compared to the past century, has risen and we're seeing obesity and health problems associated with bad diet in general. Corn is very useful, if for no other reason, and since it's in many processed foods it's easy to blame for an unfair portion of that problem. Some people are lactose intolerant, and some people regard high fructose corn syrup as the same. My (very) anecdotal evidence is that I've been binge drinking HFCS pop my entire life, and the only ill effect I've had is twitchy-ness and bad teeth. If HFCS were as bad as they say, I should have serious health problems after living off soda for three decades instead of drinking regular water. The people that have the most problems with their health, are just doing many more things wrong than I am, and probably doing them without being aware of it so they blame what they know.
The rest of the comment is moderately paranoid conspiracy and the poster wishing they weren't ignorant and helpless like many of us are. Modern life brought us many cheap foods with little else besides calories, and we can eat them all the time. I think the best thing that could happen in the future is better dietary guidelines, possibly based more on the mapped human genome and less on measuring the chemicals present in healthy bodily fluids, tissue samples and cadavars. Right now I think there's a lot of disconnect about what's in the average human, and what's supposed to be there according to our DNA.
My sincerest advice is that looking closely at your food, shouldn't make you dislike what you want to eat. Figuring out what you have a deficiency in, is better than measuring calories, for long term health. Too many calories is such a common problem, everything else important seems to be partially ignored. In my case, I discovered I get too much iron, but wasn't getting enough vitamin D and iodine. Everything else is close enough to normal. I don't recommend taking multivitamins and then ignoring the details of your diet, either.
Can I call Godwin's law on the summary?
Rich countries outlaw GM crops, and become net importers of food instead of exporters ... and since food is extremely inelastic, this results in relatively large price increases for food ...
Add to that the fact that the human population is still growing exponentially.
Google "Superweeds" (plural)
There is nothing smart about evolution; this is not "insects evolving to become immune." None of these poisons are 100% effective (not the ones we think can't kill us overnight anyways.) If there is a 1% survival rate, due to random variations throughout the species, all we do is drive all other members of the species extinct and give room for the very tiny minority to reproduce freely, without food competition. Given insect rapid generation cycles, it can take less than a year, or a handful of years tops, for the insecticides to become useless.
Worse of all: we will keep using the poisons, despite potential slow and cumulative human side effects.
As a result we grow more food than we could with fewer varieties.
Oops, I meant to say with more varieties. If anybody notices the mistake.
Isn't that essentially the survival of the fittest concept. At one point, our planet will successfully evolve a single dominant organism.
Oh don't give me that symbiosis crap. That only exists until a species appears with the combined abilities.
I wager, eventually either us or ants will evolve into a form of life that is capable of both photosynthesis and consumption. Likely vibrant & small within it's youth. And large and sluggish as it ages. Eventually, serving as an additional food source for the younger generation.
There can only be ONE!!! ;-)
(All others must be consumed or pushed to extinction.)
Could Dr Heasley RTFA?? BT corn was never supposed to be a "final solution". The very first paragraph prominently includes the phrase "developing resistance more quickly than scientists expected".
That the growth rate is slowing down tells you it isn't exponential. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_rate_1950%E2%80%932050.svg
that's a nelson laugh, a la the Simpsons.
The business model here was not that of a final solution. It was just one that looks good and can replace all other corn (hence a monopoly strategy aided by biotech patents), but then begin to require pesticides again. Of course while this new corn now only requires the same amount of pesticide as all the other corn needed before, the other corn will now be annihilated by the upgraded pests and replaced anyways. Everybody loses big-time, except the pests (who do not care) and the people with the biotech patent.
Quite impressive actually. Also quite impressive is the stupidity and number of the people that fell for it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What does evolution have to do with it? Sounds more like adaptation to me. But some people are so desperate to "prove" evolutionary theory that they deliberately confuse the two.
Evolution is only a theory.
Ingredients: Turkey, Mechanically Separated Turkey, Water, Salt, Flavour.
From the article it appears that this is due to farmers not following EPA and Monsanto recommendations and engaging in practices such as replanting the same corn variety many years in succession in the same field.
This is of course stupid and will lead to problems no matter what crop you are planting as pests for that particular crop will accumulate over time in that replanted field.
Can we go back to the old corn now?
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Please read up on human population growth before espousing your disgusting proclamations that mass-death is necessary. Japan's population is shrinking and the only thing keeping western Europe's population from shrinking is immigration. The US isn't far behind.
I'm not a fan of famine, and no sane person should be either based on our current understanding of population growth.
ugh, how did this ever got modded up.
Sorry Samantha, you are mixing many things together to a wholly inconsistent story.
- Random mutation is a biotech tool used to find out the function of things. It is usually not used to find resistances as it is a very good way to break things, not to actually fix things.
- As an other poster mentioned, an insect gene was spliced into plants instead.
- There is no "grass genome". Grasses differ quite a lot (I would say more than between humans and primates). There is a genome for corn and one for wheat. Actually, it is often even specific to a cultivar.
- I am not sure what you try to convey by saying it is complex. The fact that the genome is big does not necessary complicate engineering. It does make it difficult to figure out functionality of genes. But since they only wanted to add a gene to create BT resistance, that did not matter
- Some plants indeed have several copies of their genome (for example hexaploid,like wheat), though I know of no cereal that has 5 copies. The number of copies also does not directly complicate splicing in a gene, but it does make it harder to get homozygous lines.
-what's wrong with your mother-in-law?
I really need to get new glasses (or change default fonts) -- i read the BT corn an BT.com -- and thought why would insects need to become resistant to British Telecom??
Monsanto is evil. I bet they will still use the GM corn even though it's not effective against bugs because their real purpose is HUMAN population control, and our generation cycle is much longer than most insects so we have not and will not evolve around this for some time.
The fact that we have both global travel and different races is an exceptional situation, and a temporary one (in ~500 years, maybe less, there will only be 1 human race left, unless global travel ends before that time). It is not known which race that will be, but if other island species evolution patterns are any indications, whatever race survives will look a lot like the original human race. It would be interesting to see whether the remaining race would be black or not (if not, that would be a strong indication that the original humans in Africa were not actually black before the races split up. My money's on that they weren't black (cause primates have white skin
I'm going to guess that you've never a mountain gorilla in person. They are black. In fact their skin is so dark that it is difficult for the eye to focus on. Chimpanzee's are also black though not to the abyss level of gorillas. Off hand, I can't think of an African primate whose exposed skin is not "black". Macaques are "white" but these extremely numerous and wide spread monkeys live in Asia, not Africa.
See, here is someone who appears to know what they are talking about. Thank you.
GM foods are mainly litigation tools to further the market dominance of corporate controlled food stocks. Even if insects/bacteria begin affecting them, I doubt Monsanto will stop suing family farms out of existence, and that's the worse than insects. If you think patents and copyrights are absurd now, wait until there are only two or three companies growing the entire world's food supply. Support your local farms if you are lucky enough to have some. The GM food thing needs to stop.
* - http://www.raw-wisdom.com/organicsvsgmo
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Seems to me all Monsanto needs to do is sue the corn borers. They aren't legally allowed to eat that corn. That'll fix 'em fer sure.
Insect food critic Buzz Cornborer describes the Monsanto corn as having a lovely picante taste. A salad made with Roundup dressing completes the meal.
"hailed as the final solution for insect predators..."
No biologist worthy of their salt bought that pitch from Monsanto. But Monsanto was successful in fooling the general public, the policy makes, and a good part of the third world. This 'solution' they promise, is a seed dependency trap for the farmers (because they drive out traditional seed sellers). Add their lawsuits to the story and you get their strategy.
Yes, I am a biologist (with a doctorate) with 7 years in the genetic engineering field.
We're playing god far too much. What with this and anti-biotics in animal feed. Oh and wait lets not forget Fukushima while we're mentioning more god like dablings. And while we're at it why don't we also forget to maintain the damn things or better yet pretend we maintained them and then blame nature when it all goes pear shaped!
Can't wait to see what 2012 brings. I just hope we can learn to work with nature a little more instead of against it.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
> xbiotech xscience xhealth xcollapse xstrawman story
Missing? xmonoculture (!)
Lab studies with house flies show that it takes about 25 generations to develop and spread pesticide resistance throughout a population. [ see many studies by David Pimentel and students ]
Tropical mosquitoes can have as many as ~ 20 generations per year, meaning they can become pesticide resistant in less than 2 years. Corn ear worms have one to 7 generation(s) per year, meaning a range from 4 to 25 years to develop resistance, but this species regularly migrates from south to north, skewing the development of resistance toward the lower time span.
Interestingly, fungus farming ants have managed to use the SAME antibiotics to control bacteria pests in their fungus gardens for millions of years. Perhaps they know how to do something we do not.
Mon$anto fail.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
Wait till hackers release agrinanobots and genetically engineered counter-pests.
Victory will be ours!
Plus our breakfast cereal will be grittier.
Because as we all know, the Slashtard Collective knows far more about this than the actual scientists working on it, who never saw this coming and have therefore just been sitting pat rather than working on new solutions to feed the world.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
God intelligently redesigned theses insects to punish these lowly humans for trying to engineer around his original design.
So you mean that lowering the food supply, so rich ecologians can driving cars while feeling good, combined with dozens of policies to redirect all sorts of resources from food to ill-fated inferior products has not resulted in exponential population growth.
Seriously ?
Strange ...
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38589290