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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.
... what's it taste like?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And it will probably be just as attacked as golden rice by the Anti-GMO blowhards.
All the seeds that just any jerk can buy are all these heirloom seeds. Which sounds nice until you realize they're basically the most vulnerable seeds possible. The original breeds that mostly didn't make great food plants were able to take care of themselves.
The seeds you get in the packets are nice only they are modified just enough that they suck at protecting themselves... which means you have to be some sort of garden wizard or blanket the field with pesticide doom just to keep your plants alive.
I'd prefer a GMO plant that had the best of both worlds. Ideally something hearty that could deal with a very wide set of climate conditions, high pest resistance, and good production when the conditions permit.
Basically I want a plant that first looks to its own survival. And once that's handled... I want it to output as well as anything. And while we're at it... why not make the produce super nutritious.
That's a thing people don't get with GMO is that it can be made to be better for you than the original. More vitamins etc.
Take wheat for example... We could have a different breed of wheat that has one extra vitamin in it. And do that with every vitamin giving us a dozen or so types of wheat that collectively have all the vitamins and minerals a person needs.
Then when you mill the flour you can blend them together in the ideal ratio to give you a super flour that really does have everything a person needs to survive in it.
The whole anti GMO thing is obnoxious... Its the 21st century, dopes... Get over it.
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Let's face it, it's a GMO which we all know is *bad*. Sometimes you have to let folks starve in order to save them from something evil.
Do you have ESP?
I'll believe it's tested when the CEO eats it for a year (as part of their regular diet).
I grew up eating beans and rice (with a bit of meat for flavor when my mother could afford it) and I bet many of the cultures this will be recommended to will consume it daily as well, so you'd do well to not tell me this is an unreasonable request.
That said I also recognize that genetic engineering isn't completely magic, I assume that the scientists who selected this barley gene know how it will change the expression of other genes in the rice plant and won't add gluten production or introduce other unwanted genes from the barley plant.
I'm always amused by the way science is suborned to political expediency.
Some people strongly tout the consensus regarding global warming/climate change. They commonly disparage and dismiss those who don't fully subscribe as politically-motivated ignoramuses who are anti-science. The doubters view themselves simply as more cautious, unwilling to risk large costs when it is not clear that science can clearly predict there will be benefits.
Other people strongly tout the consensus regarding the safety of GM foods. The opposition claims to be simply cautious, unwilling to risk any unknown dangers of these foods despite the enormous benefits they could provide.
Interestingly enough, very often it's the same people who support massive reductions in CO2 emissions based on a scientific consensus and despite the economic costs and the uncertain climate benefits, and yet would prefer to avoid the benefits of GM foods due to fear of unknown bad results, despite the scientific consensus.
Ok let's put things into perspective for a minute:
Every time a plant breeds naturally, there are some millions of DNA nucleotides that are changed as a result of that process, and it happens in ways that are entirely unpredictable and unknown.
Yet in GMO, you're making a very deliberate change to some 200 (or less) nucleotides, and you know EXACTLY what that change does, because you've already observed its results before putting it on the market.
Why is it that I'm supposed to be afraid of the known very few GMO changes and not be afraid of the unknown thousands of changes in the natural process?
Barley is a glutinous grain, so - is the resulting rice still gluten-free? I have no trouble with gluten (thank goodness - I absolutely love bread), but I know several people that are have problems with it.
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However, I also believe people have a right to their own paranoid delusions
That depends heavily on exactly how harmful the delusion is. Some are harmless, others not so much. But public policy should be based on actual facts and real evidence.
therefore they have a right to know whether or not the food they buy contains GMO ingredients
Why do they have a "right to know"? Is there any actual evidence that they are harmful even a little bit? If the answer is yes then maybe you have an argument. But since the answer so far is an unequivocal no, despite large amounts of research into the question, then I cannot agree with you. I prefer my public policy decisions to be made on scientific facts and not made on ill informed paranoia.
If there is a market for people who want to know if a food is GMO-free then you will see labeling to that effect on some products and that is fine. Although if they are truly paranoid I'm not sure how they could ever be sure the label was actually true.
companies use all sorts of tricks to hide stuff like that. Soup companies use yeast to put MSG in Soup without reporting it (it's a by product of the yeast, which serves no other purpose). Cookie and Donut companies have for years claimed "Zero Grams Trans Fat" on products that are literally made of trans-fat by putting a token amount of wheat in there and adjusting portion sizes. You've got to make these 'warnings' really, really blunt or they just work around it.
As for labels, that's all well and good for the top 10%. What about the other 90%? You know how we found out sodium nitrate causes cancer? It wasn't the FDA. It was a farmer feeding old herring to cows and noticing they kept dying of liver cancer. The food industry doesn't exactly have the best track record....
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Please tells us how many million of years statistically you would need to go from a barley growth factor, to a rice growth factor, and would even the intermediate protein be viable (active) or even if the surrounding gene would still be active.
Yes stuff mutate. That is how we got from bacteria to human over billion of year. The key here is that function of protein evolved too, and sometime mutation are deleterious, and sometime function changes. But if both are sufficiently different, the probability to go from one to the other over statistically human relevant time (e.g. hundreds of year) is trending toward zero. In some case like when researcher inserted fish gene into tomatoe, that probability becomes even low over geological time.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with your assessment that the probability we make something catastrophic is relatively low, but stating that the result could be gotten by random mutation in the wild, or even breeding is overstating it , downright to a lie in many case.
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So, it's a GMO, which means the science-deniers on the left will hate it, and it reduces greenhouse gases, so the science-deniers on the right will hate it.
Basically, this is what we need, and it hasn't got a chance of success.
What you describe seems more likely in hybridization than in GMO. At least in GMO we know what we're doing; in hybridization, we slap two things together and see what happens.
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