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Anti-GMO Activists Slow Scientists Breeding a CO2-Reducing Superplant (thebulletin.org)
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists calls it "a plant that could save civilization, if we let it." Slashdot reader meckdevil writes:
A "super chickpea plant" now in development could remove huge amounts of excess atmospheric carbon dioxide and fix it in the soil, greatly diminishing the impacts of climate change (not to mention producing large amounts of tasty hummus). But fear of anti-GMO activists has so far deterred her from using the CRISPR gene-editing tool to speed work on the plant.
The effort is led by Joanne Chory, director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences -- who according to the article will make much slower progress without CRISPR. "Even with advanced breeding techniques, Chory estimates that developing a super plant in this fashion would take around 10 years..."
"She estimates that if 5 percent of the world's cropland, approximately the total area of Egypt, were devoted to such super plants, they could capture about 50 percent of current global carbon dioxide emissions."
The effort is led by Joanne Chory, director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences -- who according to the article will make much slower progress without CRISPR. "Even with advanced breeding techniques, Chory estimates that developing a super plant in this fashion would take around 10 years..."
"She estimates that if 5 percent of the world's cropland, approximately the total area of Egypt, were devoted to such super plants, they could capture about 50 percent of current global carbon dioxide emissions."
Sorry, but activists like this don't give a fuck what method you're using. They just hate GMO full stop. The idea that activists are stopping you creating this magical solution to climate change because they're focused on use of CRISPR reeks of bullshit.
It's probably the worst excuse I've ever heard for over-promising, and under-delivering.
Fear of the unknown.
All offset by the super flatulence that would occur from people eating chickpeas. I love hummus, but by God, I could power my home with a fart turbine generator!
Capturing co2 in plants will be temporary as the plants die and release it back. What you need is trees for long term capture.
In true slashdot fashion, I comment before reading the article.
If the carbon gets fixed into the soil, how does that change the soil chemistry? It is something that can be done for a couple of years, and then the soil is saturated and can't support life any more? Does it deep down with the water and poison the ground water? I hope that it would be something that could be useful, and not an egypt-sized carbon landfill.
But they should consider crispr on the "Azolla" genus. Azolla is already considered a co2-reducing superplant and was directly responsible for changing earth's climate state from a greenhouse to the current icehouse
Think of all the worst things we've imagined about science.
Nature has done all those most horrible things on a scale millions of times larger already.
Nature kills millions of people with radiation each year.
Nature makes self-replicating killing machines each day.
Nature has groups killing sub-groups within a species for random non-reasons, leading to extinctions in each era of life.
All the worst-case scenarios science is accused of slippery-sloping down have happened with nature, and WILL happen with nature over time.
Science lets us pick and choose the parts of nature we want to see more of. Yeah - we're still stumbling on nasty notes as part of that remix - but the sound of science so far has been amazingly good so far overall.
I'd completely understand if what they were protesting is corporate manipulation of science - that's worthy of protest and debate. But protesting the science itself? As in, our foundational shared understanding of nature? Might as well protest language.
Ryan Fenton
It could be everything predicted and more besides. It could just as well be very very negative instead.
Who gets to decide whether we let these eggheads play with fire?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
See also... Australia, Rabbits.
However, that said, it's worth investigating.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
... lets start now. It could easily beat the CRISPR approach in terms of regulation and would cost next to nothing.
It sure seems like with everything that matters, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
Why does anyone who makes decisions actually care what the fringe fuck-balls are screaming? In reality, the people who are screaming about things like this, or transgender people needed bathrooms, or chem trails, or peoples right to make up their own sexes aside from the scientific fact that only two exist are a tiny fraction of the voting public.
It's like these fat people making a stink that clothing companies are fat shaming" then because fat people clothes cost more. Hello... if you need double the material in your genes that I do in mine, why TF should I pay the same price? To subsidize you being fat?
This shit gets in the news because the 30 people who give care through a bloody tantrum and of course, the media circus sees blood in the water and easy click bate... so it makes the cycle.
I'd wager to bet that 90% of the people would have a hard time giving one single fuck less about it.
Why do the same people who believe science can do no wrong when it comes to modifying genes also believe that 98% of scientists are wrong when it comes to climate change?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because pie in the sky! No problems, no risks involved!
Morons.
- release super CO2 sucking plant into wild.
- said plant mutates and grows like crazy.
- too much CO2 removed... now we have a different problem...
Plants do this thing with other plants, called fertilization, primarily via pollen, which ends up spreading by bugs, animals, gusts of wind, etc.
Ask Monsanto about how easily their proprietary DNA spreads between fields and between crop types.
So what happens when this gene starts showing up in other plants where we didn't intend it to be present?
Should I expect impending global crop blight, or simply lawsuits because the world-saving crop genes got into my tomato garden?
I guess it is just due to ignorance about science that most people don't understand that GM, CRISPR, etc. just mimic the same processes that nature does trillions of times a day. Lots of mutations and viruses take genes from one species and insert them into others. Nature does this in a random manner, not targeted like scientists but the method is the same.
I think some people fear some mad scientist creating a super-organism which will take over. That's hard to do. Nature does routinely create more hardy organisms through the same mechanism and humans have created a few hardy organisms.
The most dangerous are superbugs created in industrial animal farms by bathing animals in antibiotics. No GM required. Nature just does its thing.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
We returned millions of years of plant sequestered carbon to the atmosphere in a few hundred years. I call BS on the claim it could capture and sequester significant carbon from atmospheric CO2. Show the numbers
- As far as I can tell, the reason this plant breeder isn’t using CRISPR is because she is “concerned” anti-GMO activists will fight it. There’s no mention of anything these activists have actually done - so the premise itself seems a bit dicey. It’s like me saying “I don’t want to go outside for a walk because I read about people getting proselytized when they were out for a walk”.
- The approach itself doesn’t seem to address the fundamental problem of increasing CO2 production. Yes, we can plant some farmland with this theoretical super crop... but the amount of land available for this has an upper bound, so the quantity of CO2 that can theoretically be fixed also has an upper bound. We’re basically talking about, at best, moving the clock back by some set number of years.
#DeleteChrome
Sparrows are eating our grain. Let's kill all the sparrows! We'll have a shit ton of grain and we'll all be happy.
(a couple months/years later) Oh crap, everyone is starving.
This actually happened, and this is what I think of when there is talk of geo-engineering.
To be fair, planting a billion tons of weird plants is probably relatively mild and harmless compared to what we can do or not do. I wonder if it'd go well, though. These need nutrients and water, and if there's thousand square kilometers of them I have no idea of the upsides and downsides. This can easily lead to a crazy invasion of pests, or a chick pea plague that will wipe most out, or : I don't know, again.
Maybe coal addicts should eat gmo beans. Why should people that want wind and solar, and walk and bike everywhere we forced to eat gmo, you haters.
Are you suggesting that soybeans can fertilize tomato plants?
Because... they can't.
Nobody is anti-GMO (unless it's on religious grounds, that is).
We just don't want the consequences of certain GMO. Like greens that kill you, too, instead of just killing insects; or, in the present case, a CO2 cleaning plant that would make the Earth a paradise for (really) big insects while burning us when we light a match.
Everyone is in favor of giant watermelons, sweeter grapes or strawberries growing in trees. Cancer from lettuce... not so much.
Stop saying people are anti-GMO. This is big corp tactics to get laws approved; it's old and nobody fall for that trick anymore. You spent millions on something that will kill all life on Earth? Too bad, but we need you to go bankrupt -- if not more, for excess of stupidity.
History is fiiled with times that humans have attempted to improve on nature, usually by introducing some living thing into an ecosystem where it wasn't before.
Its almost impossible to find even one example where the result has actually been successful and not actually caused far more of a problem, especially to the other parts of the totally unprepared ecosystem.
My objections to GMOs have less to do with the GMOs and more to do with the legal and social issues. Patents are largely the problem and it is enhanced by the abuse of the legal system. Monstersanto has created this negative climate by going after farmers and even people who aren't using their seeds.
There is another issue at stake here and that is that when organizations use public funds to develop products they should NOT get a patent. Instead it should be published and go into the public domain as a requirement of feeding at the public trough.
Then there is the whole world safety issue. Sure, she might develop a CO2 sucking super plant but what are the unintended consequences? Imagine it goes wild, as they do, and drops the CO2 level too low. You actually need CO2 in the air to survive. And if the super plant of hers sucks up all the CO2 then all the other plants we depend on die. With them the animals we depend on and the oceans, etc.
It would be better to reduce pollution rather than depend on some super plant Frankenstein.
Lmao!
The sad part of this is, a lot of these "anti-GMO" types claim they're protecting the environment. Yet they oppose a technology that could cause agriculture to require less land, less pesticide and herbicide, less fertilizer, and less water. Now they're even fighting against plants that would dramatically reduce CO2.
It reminds me a lot of the "anti-nuclear" activists who claim they're environmentalists. You don't get to call yourself that and then oppose technologies that would actually help. Some of these people need to learn to actually think.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Fun fact: "chory" literally means "chory"
they dont actually want to fix anything, they like seeing a world full of problems, then they have something to complain and rant about, if things were actually being improved they would have less to bitch about.
i hope they get to make this super-chick pea plabt in to a big success
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I'm not sure what the problem is. Sure, if they have to spend 10 years on the project when they could otherwise spend less, maybe it's relevant, but ... it's not like with CRISPR they'd have solved CO2 tomorrow. If they could LITERALLY flip a switch and have the end result tomorrow, they'd then have to test that it works, and then start figuring out how to grow the stuff, and how to harvest in a way which doesn't screw up the CO2 capture, etc, so to even get up to speed is going to take like 10 years, and then if it works wonderfully, they'll need another few decades to reach critical mass.
I mean, yeah, too bad that the researcher doesn't have the kind of attention necessary to carry a long-term project, but that's hardly the fault of environmentalists or CRISPR or whatever. Seriously, quit whining about the magic bullet and do the work. It's not like the ten years will be spent solely on breeding. You'll also be learning a lot about working with the plants, in fact well before you've bred the hypothesized super-CO2-binding plant, you might find completely valid reasons why it was a bad idea from the get-go.
Don't those activists have faith that scientists can accurately predict all possible interactions in the real world from their models for decades ahead? Do they not understand that using the geometric progression to propagate extremely unlikely changes in genetic material is not a cause for concern because the models are so good they do not allow any room for errors?
Btw you do not work in biotech, do you? I would like to think that you advocate more GMOs for purely ethical reasons and not because you stand to gain from GMOs in any way.
And I figure if I have kids with three eyes they'll be able to hit a 110mph fastball.
And autism causes vaccines. Just do it dammit.
"She estimates that if 5 percent of the world's cropland, approximately the total area of Egypt, were devoted to such super plants, they could capture about 50 percent of current global carbon dioxide emissions."
If this is accurate then anyone protesting this is insane.
And what would they do if it goles out of control?
Monsanto couldn't handle a test weed spreading out of their labs.
https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100806/full/news.2010.393.html
The balance is so hard to keep.
Another issue is that there's a fine line we're heading towards of a 2nd ice age or a runaway heat expansion driven by trapped CO2 in the atmosphere. If we're too successful in averting the heat expansion, historical evidence shows we're on a cycle to enter another ice age in the very near future. Our industrial revolution has potentially averted the next ice age as is. The concern a lot of scientists have is that the heat could be runaway like Venus endured. But, they don't really know that for sure. I think that is why the head of NASA stated something along the lines of "Who is to say what is right for the Earth" when asked about global warming (I paraphrased from memory). He got a lot of flak for that statement. But, I guess his mindset is that we don't fully understand the Earth yet or the ramification of changes to the environment. It is easy to assume that if you just remove CO2 for example all your problems are solved.
I guess it was inevitable that one group of scientifically illiterate dimwits with a radical agenda would eventually butt heads with another.
The important thing, and I really need to know this - how do I blame this on Trump?
Nature edit gene every day with virus, horizontal and vertical transfer but generally it isn't a huge change such as injecting trans-kingdom gene, e.g. chicken gene into a plant and have it reproduce. By pretending it is the same you are actually giving ammunition to anti-gmo fanatics when they can rightfully point out that natural transfer do not allow in any time much shorter than evolutionary scale to allow such cross transfer as fish/tobacco (to give you an idea how frigging rare this is, we have barely one example such transfer with insect and conifers, see "An Ancient Trans-Kingdom Horizontal Transfer of Penelope-like Retroelements from Arthropods to Conifers").
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You truly understand nothing and your ignorance is as magnificent as your arrogance.
In fact, the thing you claim is impossible is one of the core points of contention with GMO, since its not only quite possible to crossbreed species which can't, it has already been done. Several times, including one introducing genes from a fish into potatoes. And while fish normally can't fertilize potatoes, other kinds of potatoes can, possibly including those carrying genes from a fish.
And yes, you could potentially engineer this particular breed so it couldn't fertilize anything other than in a decomposed state, but as GMO proponents are all to eager to point out, mutations happens in nature too... So, you've essentially created a potential gene-bomb, where you are one mutation away from spreading all kinds genetic material where it doesn't belong.
Finally, let's be very clear about the motivations behind this push. It's about money and complete, utter unadulterated greed, not about the environment, world starvation or anything else noble sounding. Reading vacuous crap like the breathless blurb make the state of the educational system depressingly clear.
And they're doign this as a PR move, not because it would be used. Tell us, is the product going to be free for everyone to use? No? Then all this is is a cash grab. It's like the myth of Golden Rice: a product done not to solve a problem but to make an excuse for the idea of GMOs.
And remember, these companies bleat about how all these trials and the expense slow breeding any new great thing they want to make (like nicotine free tobacco, or caffeine free tea leaves).
5% of the world's cropland? That's a lot of humus for a lot of hummus!
Everyone thinks that it's conservatives that are holding us back scientifically. That is not really so much the case.
Liberals are their own worse enemy. They care a lot about the environment, but want to hold up the tools that would actually get us to the point of improving things. Maybe if they had not opposed nuclear power so vehemently back in the '70s we'd have far more electric cars on the road already. GM had a viable electric car long before Tesla came along too.
First of all, the scientist in the article (RTFA, please) is planning on using cross-breeding to attain the desired plant to avoid GMO activists. That is not a GMO technology. It is taking different existing, non-GMO chickpeas and breeding them with each other to make new ones. It is genetic change in the plants, but is of a type GMO activists approve of.
But with cross-breeding it may take decades or never succeed. The scientist does not control the genetic outcome with cross-breeding. Detailed systematic study of genetic variation is impossible. That impedes results.
And while the US has not had Europe's history of violence in the area, it could. Not wanting to take the risk is perhaps strongly cautious, but there is nothing irrational with not wanting to be the first. We have had violence in animal research protests, logging protests and other activist causes.
Finally history will repeat it self!
....uhhh, wouldn't be cheaper, safet, and better to just get to the cause of the problem and reduce carbon dioxide in the environment? Maybe fewer humans on this crowded bus would help.
I have no problem with GMO. Just label it, so that consumers have knowledge of what they're buying. Some people don't like to buy processed foods with high-fructose corn syrup. Others don't care. That's fine... as long as it's on the label, we can choose.
Is it so fucking hard to plant (non monoculture) trees and stop deforestation once and for all?
You generate hydrogen fuel from renewable energy hydrolosis or from natural gas cracking. The latter you immediately sequester the CO2 waste into the underground reservoirs that had trapped the source natural gas for millions of years. It will stay there.
Hydrogen can fuel current internal combustion technology with minor retuning. No balky battery technology and extremely slow charging stations.
Why not start with Azolla, after all it has previously halved global atmospheric CO2 concentration, so has a proven track record ...