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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!
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
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.
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.
You do realize fossil fuels are dead organic matter that died a looooooong time ago, and are now only 'releasing it back' when we burn them? When they die they become compost within the soil, look up why good topsoil is valued.
Looks like this is long term:
All plants produce suberin, a waxy, water-repellent, carbon-rich compound, also known as cork, that protects roots and resists decay. Coastal grasses make a lot of it to keep water out of their roots. It is one of the most stable substances around, persisting in soil for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. One of Chory’s goals is to develop perennial plants that make more suberin than existing varieties.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Yes, I know the original poster was being foolish, but it is a little more complex than this also.
When plants die, some of their carbon can compost to soil, some of their carbon is released as methane, etc and some of it as CO2 if they get burnt.
So, the benefits are much more complex.
One interesting factor that is rarely talked about is the grasses actually absorb and compost large amounts of CO2, by some estimates more than common trees.
People get all 'green' about trees, and you ignore grass, most likely because trees are 'big' and 'nice' and grass is just too common?
Then they tend to want more treesplanted, however they also often plant nice pretty SLOW GROWING trees... which contribute very very little.
Could this 'super plant' contribute more? sure, DEPENDING ON HOW IT WAS USED. It is common to burn the straw left over from processing chickpeas..
That would reduce its contribution to very little.
The larger question is not about how it is created, how will suitable care be taken about evaluation if its actual environmental impact.
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?
Unless the bastards are made of asbestos, I think there's a pretty simple countermeasure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
- 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
Are you suggesting that soybeans can fertilize tomato plants?
Because... they can't.
God and Nature, by giving them brains and hands to use.
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.
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.
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.
The opinion column that you have linked to does not say what you claim it says.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
If you look at the literature, the specific meaning of the 97% claim is: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that there is a global warming trend and that human beings are the main cause--that is, that we are over 50% responsible.
Did you even read your own link?
"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.
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?
Unfortunately, if there's a increased amount of suberin in the soil, it's only a matter of time before some bacteria evolve to feed on it, and turn it all back to CO2.
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
Could happen but hasn't in millions of years.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Firstly, deniers gunna deny.
So why didn't you link to any of those before? Because when we look at the links we will find out your are misrepresenting those too...
Why do you constantly link to sites that don't agree with what you claim they say?
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.
??? That is a cut from the link I posted. Apparently you don't like to follow and read links?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The first link says this...
Climate contrarians accidentally confirm the 97% global warming consensus A new paper by GWPF's Richard Tol accidentally confirms the results of last year's 97% global warming consensus study"
The second is paywalled
The third link ...
Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.
etc etc
....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.
Again, you stumbled upon a paper you thought would back your claims without reading it.
Now upon being shown it is in fact the opposite, and confirms the first result with another study. A study specifically designed to solve the problem you claimed in the first one. Whats the chance you now accept 2 independent studies that show 97% agree with manmand climate change? And that the agreement is increasing.
I can almost guarantee you will go with option 2. Pretend you never saw or just dismiss out of hand all evidence that doesn't already fit what you want to believe.
It's clear you just don't understand science, and cling to any crazy idea you can so you can keep being a true believer/denier.