His work was funded by the US Government, the Mexican Government, and the Rockefeller foundation among others. Seeds, like software, do more good for more people when they're free. But if we want more Norman Borlaugs, we (the public) need to support their research and their outreach to the farmers who need their help. Otherwise all the new breakthroughs will be made by for-profic companies like Monsanto with the negative intellectual property consequences you mention.
The best example of this I can think of is golden rice, which would be fighting vitamin A deficiency around the world, but still hasn't been released because of a lack of public funding for safety trials and introgressing the trait into the kinds of rice best adapted to different parts of the world.
1. Borlaug's wheat wasn't GM. He was saving hundred of million of people in the 1960s. GM crops weren't developed for another 30 years. 2. Seeds aren't organic. It's what you do to the them after you plant them that makes food organic or conventional. 3. Ask any of the Indian cotton pickers, who despite living on less than a dollar a day won't pick non-GM cotton because of the huge amount of pesticides they're exposed to, if they don't want GM crops. 4. Not having anything to eat (called starvation) has been proven by scientists to be bad for your health. Borlaug's wheat wasn't more nutritious, it produced more food on the same land, so people who otherwise would have starved didn't. 5. Most of current GM crops don't increase yield (though there's really cool stuff coming out over the next five years). BT crops reduce the use of toxic insecticides. Herbicide resistance crops let us switch from more toxic herbicides like atrazine to less toxic ones like glyphosate and also promote no-till agriculture which reduces the erosion of the top soil we'll need if we ever want to feed our grandchildren.
In conclusion, you seem to know nothing about these topics (food and agriculture and genetic engineering). If you're interested, educate yourself, I wish more people were engaged. Otherwise don't be surprised if no one takes you seriously.
And crop yields are still going up (thank you technology). Overpopulation is bad. But since we keep expanding the number of people we can support without overpopulating the planet, and Paul Ehrlich was wrong about the population bomb, there's still hope to save the planet and not be party to mass starvations that exceed anything we've seen up till now in human history by an order of magnitude.
If you feel like it would be an unacceptable invasion of your privacy, it's an invasion of a teenager's privacy too. Seems like every time I turn on the radio I hear ads pushing ATTs ability to GPS track your teenager's cellphone or a banks advertising their service to e-mail you with the details of every purchase your teen makes using their debt card in real time. I'm adding this car camera to the same category.
I wouldn't want it in my car so don't put it in a teenager's either.
I think I may know exactly the room you're talking about. Spent two weeks a few summers ago at ISU doing basic computational biology on quad core beasts, though nothing we did would have even taxed an old Pentium 4.
I read somewhere the average bill only lasts 12-18 months in constant circulation (can't cite source, so take this with a grain of salt). Of course there's still cross contamination, I'm just pointing out that our nation's currency supply is not a closed system.
If the police want to frame you, and they happen to have a stash of cocaine in their car, all they have to do is plant it on you. No high tech detectors or spit-mixing required.
He'd been invisible for more than two weeks. Once you're in a position of responsibility like that the longest you can disappear without making prior plans is maybe a long weekend. Which sucks because sometimes you're going to want to crawl into a hole and ignore what has gone wrong with the world but you don't have that freedom when people are counting on you.
Nope. Distribution of copyrighted works without permission is illegal. Possession isn't.That's why in all the p2p trials they have to argue the distribution to others angle.
The publisher who released the book to amazon without permission should be liable for damages, but customers bought them in good faith.
Does anyone here think that if this had been a hard copy, Barnes and Noble would track you down from your credit card number, and send someone to knock on your front door demanding you return the book?
Hey sopsaa. I don't have any mod points but I just wanted to thank you for the points you're making throughout this thread.
Sustainability is good, but the answer isn't to throw away the technology that has, thus far, allowed us to keep ahead of the famines and disasters predicted by people like the guy who wrote the population bomb back in the 60s.
It's a busy day at work so I don't have time to debate all the misinformed and misguided on this thread, but I'm glad to see someone keeping up he good fight.
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be. Till that time... there is always the sun..
I once tried to write a python script. Instead of doing what I wanted it crashed my computer. I've decided I'm not ready for the power of programming. Once I'm a good programmer, I might try writing code again.
If we give up nuclear power now we're never going to find a solution. With no nuclear reactors there isn't going to be any incentive. And that doesn't get into the definition of a solution. Yucca mountain and breeder reactors are both solutions, they just weren't acceptable solutions to people such as yourself.
Let's us be honest. You say not now but what that means is not ever.
Aside: I'd much rather live next to a nuclear plant than a coal fired one. If solar becomes economically viable that'd be great too.
There's definitely complexity, but there are also solutions that can be ruled out immediately. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Intentionally refraining from increasing the food supply because one was worried about population growth would be genocide by omission. Beyond that there are plenty of positions and plenty of arguments, from subsidized birth control, tax incentives, economic development, education campaigns. For that matter one could even argue in favor of forced sterilization before accepting mass starvation.
Beyond the moral implications (especially considering in the US we're still a food exporting nation, so many of the people who'd propose such a thing don't have to worry about anyone they've every met starving just faceless others people), consider the ecological damage a starving population does while it's suffering and dying. People aren't going to sit by and starve quietly with elephants roaming around in the nearby national park. Overpopulation isn't going to leave farmers to starve for lack of land to grow food with rainforests still standing nearby. One of the primary threats to endangered orangutans is poor Indonesia farmers who hunt them with blow guns for food.
It really is quite easy to rule out some solutions. It's like trying to make a car more fuel efficient. Making car body out of baby seals to lower the mass of the vehicle would be both inhumane, and there are alternatives that'd work better with fewer moral qualms.
Well it depends on what the limits are on natural resources, and there is a hope technology can decrease the resources required for a given increase in standard of living.
Regardless, we're caught between a fixed expenditure situation (increasing the standard of living around the world to the point where population size is static or decreasing), and an ever increasing cost situation where the population continues to increase and resource use also increases regardless of how low the cost per person is.
I'm not sure what the best solution really is. I just know casually condoning the idea of hundreds of millions starving to death as a solution (what drDugan was doing above) isn't something I or any feeling human being, should be able to live with.
So far there's on idiot down thread to turned this into "let's starve the masses to save the planet" but overall the response has been a lot more reasoned than I expected. Seems DNA altered Tuna is less threatening than DNA altered plants.
I'm drawing a blank, does anyone else have an idea why that would be?
I suppose there's no logical reason they couldn't eventually figure out a way to modify the Tuna to be herbivores. The whole reason they have such high mercury levels is they're at the top of a relatively long ocean food chain. Mercury accumulated in higher level predators because they accumulate almost mercury what was in the bodies of whatever they eat, which have in turn accumulated all the mercury from that ever their food ate and so on.
Of course I have no idea if Tuna raise of soybeans and rice would taste nearly as good, and plenty of people prefer good taste to avoiding toxins.
In many ways TFA sounds a lot like the mentality Monsanto has: make more food for more people with fewer resources. This is completely backwards, and will fail us in a devastating way long term. Food availability is the single most important factor that drives population growth.
Seriously, you do. I'm all in favor of trying to limit population growth, as the earth does have limited resources. Most of Europe has birthrates below replacement level, and I haven't heard of any food shortages over there. But you do realize how lack of food limits population growth right? It's not lower birth rates because people in some of the most food insecure nations of the world have the highest birthrates.
Starvation. Primarily of those too weak to defend themselves. That means small children, and often their mothers. Spend some time reading about what starvation does to the body sometime. It's a terrible way to die, and even if it weren't you're cheering for the death of children to stop the growth of population. How can you live with that?
Every field has its crackpots. Genetic already has some of our own, check out dnaperfection.com sometime if you don't believe me.
People who want to survive in the world have to be able to distinguish reality from a crazy persons fantasy. If you can't you'll end up going to homeopathic healers, or installing magnets that make the water in your irrigation system "more evenly polarized," or investing billions of dollars in mortgage backed securities.
The signal-to-noise ratio is already pretty bad, and this isn't going to appreciable worsen the ratio.
I think you may be drawing too direct a comparison. It used to be that cloning a gene responsibly for a known phenotype was enough for a significant publication. (That was before my time). Now to get prestige in academia you need to map out the surrounding regulatory networks or at least do a lot more work to characterize WHY gene X is creating phenotype Y. I assume the level of complexity required to publish has expanded similarly in biochemistry
I see the benefits of this DIY work as twofold. First, a huge fraction of genes (in my field, plant biology) are still annotated only as unknown function. Figuring out those functions may not be the path to a career of academic fame and fortune, but I'd really appreciate any group of people who start making a dent in them. But I doubt they'll do a lot of this, they sound a lot more like synthetic biologists. So secondly, in the field of synthetic biology right now a lot of the work being done is very conservative. For example reconstituting a photosystem from an algae in another microbe. If that works it'll be really cool, and tell us a lot about the genetic regulation involved in the process, but it's not as risky as a lot of things these garage biologists are doing. Not risky in a threat-to-human-life-as-we-know-it way obviously, but risky in a this-probably-won't-work way. You try telling a grad student "here's your thesis project, there's a 90% chance it won't work and after four years in the lab you'll have nothing to show for it, you won't publish, you won't graduate, but good luck with that."
People in garages can afford to fail, and that means they'll potential develop a few useful things that would have been easy to do in a professional lab, but appeared so improbable no one would want to gamble on them.
I'd imagine we'd eat exactly the same stuff we eat today.
Remember terminator doesn't create plants that don't produce food, it produces seeds that won't germinate. So the farmer can still sell his corn (or wheat or tomatoes, or kiwis for that matter), but if he plants it next year nothing is going to grow.
As far as the idea of cross contamination goes, lets address your fears by taking them to the most extreme condition imaginable, 100% pollen contamination. (We can't achieve 100% crossing rate even when we're trying to make crosses to produce hybrids.) But in this beyond worst case scenario, what happens?
Treating the terminator trait as a recessive allele, in the next generation, every plant will be heterozygous for terminator. This is like being a carrier for a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis, the plants show no symptoms, but can pass the trait on to their offspring. In the second generation a quarter of the plants are homozygous for terminator, and produce seeds that won't germinate. A quarter are homozygous wild type, and half are still heterozygous. In the third generation, germination rates decline 25% (those are the seeds produced by terminator homozygous plants). Of the plants that germinate 50% are heterozygous, 33% are wildtype and 17% are homozygous terminator. So in the forth generation, germination is down only 17% from pre-terminator levels, and it continues to trend back up in each successive generation.
If we use a more realistic level of initial contamination (say 10% between neighboring fields which is still higher than I've ever seen), then that maximum drop in germination rates in 1%. If you treat terminator as a dominant trait, the germination rate drops in the first generation after contamination and then returns completely to normal in the second and beyond. And all this assumes contamination of every crop species in every region of the country or world... simultaneously. Terminator isn't a trait I'd want in and seed I was buying, but it's treat to our overall agricultural system is minor.
Does this address your concerns? If not, could you tell me why? Need to be able to teach this stuff effectively to college students.
And on a side note, if something did wipe out food production (global climate change, new disease, asteroid impact) we'd be in real trouble. Back in 2006 global food reserves were at less than two months demand, and as far as I know they've continued to drop since then. Food stops coming in from the fields, and people are going to start starving quickly. Which is another reason it makes sense for the government to get back in the business of funding crop improved to improve yields and make crops more resilient in the face of biological and non-biological stresses.
Sorry in advance for the long response, as a plant biologist I run into a lot of these questions again and again. Hopefully some of this is of interest to you.
I'm something of a libertarian myself, and yeah Monsanto has way too large a share of the seed market for my comfort. Competition is always a good thing and the seed market could use more of it.
That said, let me see if I can do anything to reduce the scariness of Monsanto. First thing you need to realize is that they do have significant competition. Pioneer Hi-bred and Syngenta, the number two and number three companies in the seed business (and to a lesser extent Dow and Bayer) are spending heavily on research to match Monsanto's genetic resources. Beyond those companies, there are still a number of significant companies focused on traditional plant breeding techniques. In critical crops such as grains Monsanto controls less than half of seed sales in the US, and a fraction of that worldwide.
The crops monsanto has the largest share of the market in are vegetables where total seed sales aren't enough to support much competition. Even for these crops, checks and balances exist, in the form of public university crop breeders, and the National Plant Germplasm System that preserves diverse crop lines from pretty much every crop species you could think of, so seeds are available from both these sources.
As for terminator technology (sterile crops), that's the one thing I don't get people worrying about. Sure Monsanto could deploy this technology, there are still going to be plenty for fertile crops around from their competitors, universities, and seed blanks, and by definition, sterile plants can't cross contaminate other plants. That'd be like inheriting sterility from your father. If your father were truly sterile you'd never have been born. (Recessive alleles make the picture a little more complicated, but the bottom line remains, sterile plants are always going to quickly and simply selected against by either natural or artificial selection.)
So in summary, while Monsanto has more control over the seed market than should ever be concentrated in a single company, this doesn't give them the power to take over the world/cut off our food supply. Other sources of crop seeds would simple expand into their market share. It gives them the power to charge too much for their products, treat farmers poorly, and keep technologies that could be live-savers out of the hands of the third world farmers than need them the most.
I'm not familiar with and government money going to Monsanto. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, I'd just be surprised to learn about it.
Yes Monsanto does a lot of research in house, (and so do Pioneer and Syngenta) but like the pharmaceutical companies, the issue the arises is the most profitable areas of study are not the same as the areas of study with the biggest impact on human suffering. Think the difference between viagra analogs and treatments for drug resistant malaria.
The real benefits for the majority of the world come out of places like the CGIAR centers. Especially IRRI (the international rice research institute) and CIMMYT, and those are the places that are losing government support right as food prices are rising around the world.
The US funding for international plant breeding projects has dropped dramatically in the last decade. Dollar for dollar I'm pretty sure nothing else provides the same mitigation of human suffering as breeding crops that yield more, and fail less often (with greater tolerance or resistance to pests, drought, flooding, you name it).
And the great thing is when the government funds the research, the seeds go for almost or completely free to the people who need them the most around the world, instead of getting entangled in webs of patients and trade secrets.
Once I have the hard copy it's definitely hard to get rid of, so I definitely sympathize. When I graduated college, my parents informed me I couldn't continue to store my old books at their place (needed the space for my dad's books), and moving across country I couldn't take them with me.
Since then I try to get digital copies, even if they cost more. Less space, and easier to find things. I'm also not a terrible organized person, so trying to find a book I knew I had a year ago could be frustrating.
Slashdot Mirror
His work was funded by the US Government, the Mexican Government, and the Rockefeller foundation among others. Seeds, like software, do more good for more people when they're free. But if we want more Norman Borlaugs, we (the public) need to support their research and their outreach to the farmers who need their help. Otherwise all the new breakthroughs will be made by for-profic companies like Monsanto with the negative intellectual property consequences you mention.
The best example of this I can think of is golden rice, which would be fighting vitamin A deficiency around the world, but still hasn't been released because of a lack of public funding for safety trials and introgressing the trait into the kinds of rice best adapted to different parts of the world.
1. Borlaug's wheat wasn't GM. He was saving hundred of million of people in the 1960s. GM crops weren't developed for another 30 years.
2. Seeds aren't organic. It's what you do to the them after you plant them that makes food organic or conventional.
3. Ask any of the Indian cotton pickers, who despite living on less than a dollar a day won't pick non-GM cotton because of the huge amount of pesticides they're exposed to, if they don't want GM crops.
4. Not having anything to eat (called starvation) has been proven by scientists to be bad for your health. Borlaug's wheat wasn't more nutritious, it produced more food on the same land, so people who otherwise would have starved didn't.
5. Most of current GM crops don't increase yield (though there's really cool stuff coming out over the next five years). BT crops reduce the use of toxic insecticides. Herbicide resistance crops let us switch from more toxic herbicides like atrazine to less toxic ones like glyphosate and also promote no-till agriculture which reduces the erosion of the top soil we'll need if we ever want to feed our grandchildren.
In conclusion, you seem to know nothing about these topics (food and agriculture and genetic engineering). If you're interested, educate yourself, I wish more people were engaged. Otherwise don't be surprised if no one takes you seriously.
And crop yields are still going up (thank you technology). Overpopulation is bad. But since we keep expanding the number of people we can support without overpopulating the planet, and Paul Ehrlich was wrong about the population bomb, there's still hope to save the planet and not be party to mass starvations that exceed anything we've seen up till now in human history by an order of magnitude.
If you feel like it would be an unacceptable invasion of your privacy, it's an invasion of a teenager's privacy too. Seems like every time I turn on the radio I hear ads pushing ATTs ability to GPS track your teenager's cellphone or a banks advertising their service to e-mail you with the details of every purchase your teen makes using their debt card in real time. I'm adding this car camera to the same category.
I wouldn't want it in my car so don't put it in a teenager's either.
I think I may know exactly the room you're talking about. Spent two weeks a few summers ago at ISU doing basic computational biology on quad core beasts, though nothing we did would have even taxed an old Pentium 4.
redhaired hippie girlfriend ...The sex is fantastic
I read somewhere the average bill only lasts 12-18 months in constant circulation (can't cite source, so take this with a grain of salt). Of course there's still cross contamination, I'm just pointing out that our nation's currency supply is not a closed system.
If the police want to frame you, and they happen to have a stash of cocaine in their car, all they have to do is plant it on you. No high tech detectors or spit-mixing required.
He'd been invisible for more than two weeks. Once you're in a position of responsibility like that the longest you can disappear without making prior plans is maybe a long weekend. Which sucks because sometimes you're going to want to crawl into a hole and ignore what has gone wrong with the world but you don't have that freedom when people are counting on you.
Nope. Distribution of copyrighted works without permission is illegal. Possession isn't.That's why in all the p2p trials they have to argue the distribution to others angle.
The publisher who released the book to amazon without permission should be liable for damages, but customers bought them in good faith.
Does anyone here think that if this had been a hard copy, Barnes and Noble would track you down from your credit card number, and send someone to knock on your front door demanding you return the book?
Hey sopsaa. I don't have any mod points but I just wanted to thank you for the points you're making throughout this thread. Sustainability is good, but the answer isn't to throw away the technology that has, thus far, allowed us to keep ahead of the famines and disasters predicted by people like the guy who wrote the population bomb back in the 60s. It's a busy day at work so I don't have time to debate all the misinformed and misguided on this thread, but I'm glad to see someone keeping up he good fight.
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be. Till that time... there is always the sun..
I once tried to write a python script. Instead of doing what I wanted it crashed my computer. I've decided I'm not ready for the power of programming. Once I'm a good programmer, I might try writing code again.
If we give up nuclear power now we're never going to find a solution. With no nuclear reactors there isn't going to be any incentive. And that doesn't get into the definition of a solution. Yucca mountain and breeder reactors are both solutions, they just weren't acceptable solutions to people such as yourself.
Let's us be honest. You say not now but what that means is not ever.
Aside: I'd much rather live next to a nuclear plant than a coal fired one. If solar becomes economically viable that'd be great too.
There's definitely complexity, but there are also solutions that can be ruled out immediately. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Intentionally refraining from increasing the food supply because one was worried about population growth would be genocide by omission. Beyond that there are plenty of positions and plenty of arguments, from subsidized birth control, tax incentives, economic development, education campaigns. For that matter one could even argue in favor of forced sterilization before accepting mass starvation.
Beyond the moral implications (especially considering in the US we're still a food exporting nation, so many of the people who'd propose such a thing don't have to worry about anyone they've every met starving just faceless others people), consider the ecological damage a starving population does while it's suffering and dying. People aren't going to sit by and starve quietly with elephants roaming around in the nearby national park. Overpopulation isn't going to leave farmers to starve for lack of land to grow food with rainforests still standing nearby. One of the primary threats to endangered orangutans is poor Indonesia farmers who hunt them with blow guns for food.
It really is quite easy to rule out some solutions. It's like trying to make a car more fuel efficient. Making car body out of baby seals to lower the mass of the vehicle would be both inhumane, and there are alternatives that'd work better with fewer moral qualms.
Well it depends on what the limits are on natural resources, and there is a hope technology can decrease the resources required for a given increase in standard of living.
Regardless, we're caught between a fixed expenditure situation (increasing the standard of living around the world to the point where population size is static or decreasing), and an ever increasing cost situation where the population continues to increase and resource use also increases regardless of how low the cost per person is.
I'm not sure what the best solution really is. I just know casually condoning the idea of hundreds of millions starving to death as a solution (what drDugan was doing above) isn't something I or any feeling human being, should be able to live with.
So far there's on idiot down thread to turned this into "let's starve the masses to save the planet" but overall the response has been a lot more reasoned than I expected. Seems DNA altered Tuna is less threatening than DNA altered plants.
I'm drawing a blank, does anyone else have an idea why that would be?
I suppose there's no logical reason they couldn't eventually figure out a way to modify the Tuna to be herbivores. The whole reason they have such high mercury levels is they're at the top of a relatively long ocean food chain. Mercury accumulated in higher level predators because they accumulate almost mercury what was in the bodies of whatever they eat, which have in turn accumulated all the mercury from that ever their food ate and so on.
Of course I have no idea if Tuna raise of soybeans and rice would taste nearly as good, and plenty of people prefer good taste to avoiding toxins.
In many ways TFA sounds a lot like the mentality Monsanto has: make more food for more people with fewer resources. This is completely backwards, and will fail us in a devastating way long term. Food availability is the single most important factor that drives population growth.
Seriously, you do. I'm all in favor of trying to limit population growth, as the earth does have limited resources. Most of Europe has birthrates below replacement level, and I haven't heard of any food shortages over there. But you do realize how lack of food limits population growth right? It's not lower birth rates because people in some of the most food insecure nations of the world have the highest birthrates.
Starvation. Primarily of those too weak to defend themselves. That means small children, and often their mothers. Spend some time reading about what starvation does to the body sometime. It's a terrible way to die, and even if it weren't you're cheering for the death of children to stop the growth of population. How can you live with that?
Every field has its crackpots. Genetic already has some of our own, check out dnaperfection.com sometime if you don't believe me.
People who want to survive in the world have to be able to distinguish reality from a crazy persons fantasy. If you can't you'll end up going to homeopathic healers, or installing magnets that make the water in your irrigation system "more evenly polarized," or investing billions of dollars in mortgage backed securities.
The signal-to-noise ratio is already pretty bad, and this isn't going to appreciable worsen the ratio.
I think you may be drawing too direct a comparison. It used to be that cloning a gene responsibly for a known phenotype was enough for a significant publication. (That was before my time). Now to get prestige in academia you need to map out the surrounding regulatory networks or at least do a lot more work to characterize WHY gene X is creating phenotype Y. I assume the level of complexity required to publish has expanded similarly in biochemistry
I see the benefits of this DIY work as twofold. First, a huge fraction of genes (in my field, plant biology) are still annotated only as unknown function. Figuring out those functions may not be the path to a career of academic fame and fortune, but I'd really appreciate any group of people who start making a dent in them. But I doubt they'll do a lot of this, they sound a lot more like synthetic biologists. So secondly, in the field of synthetic biology right now a lot of the work being done is very conservative. For example reconstituting a photosystem from an algae in another microbe. If that works it'll be really cool, and tell us a lot about the genetic regulation involved in the process, but it's not as risky as a lot of things these garage biologists are doing. Not risky in a threat-to-human-life-as-we-know-it way obviously, but risky in a this-probably-won't-work way. You try telling a grad student "here's your thesis project, there's a 90% chance it won't work and after four years in the lab you'll have nothing to show for it, you won't publish, you won't graduate, but good luck with that."
People in garages can afford to fail, and that means they'll potential develop a few useful things that would have been easy to do in a professional lab, but appeared so improbable no one would want to gamble on them.
You don't like what 6.5 billion people are doing to the world now? Wait and see how badly we'd treat it if we were all starving to death.
What do we eat in the meantime?
I'd imagine we'd eat exactly the same stuff we eat today.
... simultaneously. Terminator isn't a trait I'd want in and seed I was buying, but it's treat to our overall agricultural system is minor.
Remember terminator doesn't create plants that don't produce food, it produces seeds that won't germinate. So the farmer can still sell his corn (or wheat or tomatoes, or kiwis for that matter), but if he plants it next year nothing is going to grow.
As far as the idea of cross contamination goes, lets address your fears by taking them to the most extreme condition imaginable, 100% pollen contamination. (We can't achieve 100% crossing rate even when we're trying to make crosses to produce hybrids.) But in this beyond worst case scenario, what happens? Treating the terminator trait as a recessive allele, in the next generation, every plant will be heterozygous for terminator. This is like being a carrier for a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis, the plants show no symptoms, but can pass the trait on to their offspring. In the second generation a quarter of the plants are homozygous for terminator, and produce seeds that won't germinate. A quarter are homozygous wild type, and half are still heterozygous. In the third generation, germination rates decline 25% (those are the seeds produced by terminator homozygous plants). Of the plants that germinate 50% are heterozygous, 33% are wildtype and 17% are homozygous terminator. So in the forth generation, germination is down only 17% from pre-terminator levels, and it continues to trend back up in each successive generation.
If we use a more realistic level of initial contamination (say 10% between neighboring fields which is still higher than I've ever seen), then that maximum drop in germination rates in 1%. If you treat terminator as a dominant trait, the germination rate drops in the first generation after contamination and then returns completely to normal in the second and beyond. And all this assumes contamination of every crop species in every region of the country or world
Does this address your concerns? If not, could you tell me why? Need to be able to teach this stuff effectively to college students.
And on a side note, if something did wipe out food production (global climate change, new disease, asteroid impact) we'd be in real trouble. Back in 2006 global food reserves were at less than two months demand, and as far as I know they've continued to drop since then. Food stops coming in from the fields, and people are going to start starving quickly. Which is another reason it makes sense for the government to get back in the business of funding crop improved to improve yields and make crops more resilient in the face of biological and non-biological stresses.
Sorry in advance for the long response, as a plant biologist I run into a lot of these questions again and again. Hopefully some of this is of interest to you.
I'm something of a libertarian myself, and yeah Monsanto has way too large a share of the seed market for my comfort. Competition is always a good thing and the seed market could use more of it.
That said, let me see if I can do anything to reduce the scariness of Monsanto. First thing you need to realize is that they do have significant competition. Pioneer Hi-bred and Syngenta, the number two and number three companies in the seed business (and to a lesser extent Dow and Bayer) are spending heavily on research to match Monsanto's genetic resources. Beyond those companies, there are still a number of significant companies focused on traditional plant breeding techniques. In critical crops such as grains Monsanto controls less than half of seed sales in the US, and a fraction of that worldwide.
The crops monsanto has the largest share of the market in are vegetables where total seed sales aren't enough to support much competition. Even for these crops, checks and balances exist, in the form of public university crop breeders, and the National Plant Germplasm System that preserves diverse crop lines from pretty much every crop species you could think of, so seeds are available from both these sources.
As for terminator technology (sterile crops), that's the one thing I don't get people worrying about. Sure Monsanto could deploy this technology, there are still going to be plenty for fertile crops around from their competitors, universities, and seed blanks, and by definition, sterile plants can't cross contaminate other plants. That'd be like inheriting sterility from your father. If your father were truly sterile you'd never have been born. (Recessive alleles make the picture a little more complicated, but the bottom line remains, sterile plants are always going to quickly and simply selected against by either natural or artificial selection.)
So in summary, while Monsanto has more control over the seed market than should ever be concentrated in a single company, this doesn't give them the power to take over the world/cut off our food supply. Other sources of crop seeds would simple expand into their market share. It gives them the power to charge too much for their products, treat farmers poorly, and keep technologies that could be live-savers out of the hands of the third world farmers than need them the most.
I'm not familiar with and government money going to Monsanto. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, I'd just be surprised to learn about it.
Yes Monsanto does a lot of research in house, (and so do Pioneer and Syngenta) but like the pharmaceutical companies, the issue the arises is the most profitable areas of study are not the same as the areas of study with the biggest impact on human suffering. Think the difference between viagra analogs and treatments for drug resistant malaria.
The real benefits for the majority of the world come out of places like the CGIAR centers. Especially IRRI (the international rice research institute) and CIMMYT, and those are the places that are losing government support right as food prices are rising around the world.
The US funding for international plant breeding projects has dropped dramatically in the last decade. Dollar for dollar I'm pretty sure nothing else provides the same mitigation of human suffering as breeding crops that yield more, and fail less often (with greater tolerance or resistance to pests, drought, flooding, you name it).
And the great thing is when the government funds the research, the seeds go for almost or completely free to the people who need them the most around the world, instead of getting entangled in webs of patients and trade secrets.
Once I have the hard copy it's definitely hard to get rid of, so I definitely sympathize. When I graduated college, my parents informed me I couldn't continue to store my old books at their place (needed the space for my dad's books), and moving across country I couldn't take them with me.
Since then I try to get digital copies, even if they cost more. Less space, and easier to find things. I'm also not a terrible organized person, so trying to find a book I knew I had a year ago could be frustrating.