Biotechnology

December 2, 2008December 2, 2008

Onion tears

A Kiwi researcher laments that regulations make it pointless to work on GMO’s in New Zealand. He mentions a particular sad case in point: the obstacles to testing tearless onions. There is no reference to this in the trade-journal for this type of news, the Onion ¹. What to say? Perhaps there is nothing wrong with making onions tearless, but I feel it would be a loss. Not having rational objections, I search for a metaphysical answer. Something like Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poem about an opposite case:

Mal do SÃ©culo

Como se nÃ£o bastasse o mundo de tristezas
entre cÃ©u e terra,
principalmente em terra,
vem o agrÃ³nomo, descobre
o vÃrus da tristeza nas laranjeiras.

My translation:

Times of Sorrow

As if there wasn’t enough sadness
between heaven and earth
particularly on earth
comes the agronomist, discovers
the sadness virus in the orange trees

November 25, 2008November 27, 2008

Flood-tolerant rice hits primetime

You remember Robert’s entry for last year’s competition? Well, now check out this piece from MSNBC. And there’s a video too:

Always nice to see a genebank on the evening news.

November 21, 2008November 21, 2008

Nibbles: Radishes, Fungi, Genomics, Bagel, Eels, Barack Hussein, Pomegranate

Vavilov does radishes.
“How would you describe the smell and taste of a fresh white truffle?“
“The gene … is in an identity crisis.”
“The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old.”
“He slid her gently into a nylon sack and hung her from a scale on which she clocked two kilograms, then slid her out and into the V of a varnished plywood measuring board, where she lay quietly, like a metre-long slab of tenderloin.”
“Activists” buttonhole Obama.
The Afghan pomegranate to hit supermarket shelves.

November 16, 2008November 26, 2008

Yes, maybe, no, yes: Transgenes in Mexican maize, after all

Update: The link below was behind a paywall. A new one, via SciDev.net, seems to be open access.
Elena Ãlvarez-Buylla and co-workers have found transgenes from genetically modified maize in landraces in Mexico. Their paper is to be published in Molecular Ecology, but for now we have this news article in Nature.

The evolving story has multiple layers, including the science ethics controversy. Quist and Chapela published the same finding in Nature in 2001, but their methods were questioned, and the journal made an unprecedented statement saying there had been insufficient evidence to justify the publication. Some saw the hand (and money) of Big Biotech in this ², and in the subsequent denial of tenure to Chapela at the University of California, Berkeley (that was later overturned). Now Nature reports that the Ãlvarez-Buylla paper was not published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) because the journal’s editor-in-chief Randy Schekman, also at Berkeley, considered that “the report could gain undue exposure in the press due to a political or other environmental agenda.”

We’ll see if the current paper settles the scientific controversy. Ortiz-GarcÃa and colleagues did not find any transgenes in a large sample in 2003/4; a result that was found worthy of publication in PNAS. The Nature news article suggests that Ãlvarez-Buylla found the transgenes in only one field (out of more than 100 sampled), and that this field was also sampled by Quist and Chapela. So are we talking about a single farmer with a cousin in Iowa sending seed remittances? Or about a relatively small fraction of maize plants across the country?

It seems entirely obvious that if there are transgenes in U.S. maize, these will spread down to Mexico. Someone needs to find them first, for sure, but the more relevant question is not if transgenes spread, but rather: which, where, what mechanism(s) (long versus short distance dispersal), how fast, how much, how persistent, and what are the consequences, if any? The term “pollution” is used a lot in this debate. Me, I do not believe in pure races.

November 14, 2008November 13, 2008

Who Owns Nature?

There is a new report, “Who Owns Nature? Corporate Power and the Final Frontier in the Commodification of Life” from the ETC group.

It talks of corporate concentration in:

farm input (from thousands of seed companies and public breeding institutions three decades ago, 10 companies now control more than two-thirds of global proprietary seed sales);
food output (supermarkets);
pharmaceuticals; and
the New Post-Petroleum sugar industry (“the so-called ‘sugar economy’ will be the catalyst for a corporate grab on all plant matter â€“- and destruction of biodiversity on a massive scale”).

Their (not so new) bottom line on seeds:

So-called climate-ready genes are a false solution to climate change. Patented gene technologies will not help small farmers survive climate change, but they will concentrate corporate power, drive up costs, inhibit public sector research and further undermine the rights of farmers to save and exchange seeds.