Slashdot Mirror
Genetically Modified Rice Makes More Food, Less Greenhouse Gas
Applehu Akbar writes: A team of researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has engineered a barley gene into rice, producing a variety that yields 50% more grain while producing 90% less of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. The new rice pulls off this trick by putting more of its energy into top growth. In countries which depend on rice as a staple, this would add up to a really large amount of increased rice and foregone methane.
The trouble is, like most anti-GMO people, you have a fundamental lack of understanding of what genes actually do.
They mutate by themselves for one thing. Should we be running around ensuring that no natural mutations occur? No because that would be an insane exercise and would fly in the face of the fact that DNA has been doing shit for a billion years before you came along to worry about it.
Intermingling crops? Are the crops you're talking about native to the area you're in? Are those crops naturally occurring strains of plants or have they been only in human cultivation for a few thousand years?
I'm not gonna say we _can't_ kill the planet by messing with species, but I will say with the utmost confidence that we won't.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.