Category: Featured

Luigi wondered why there was no back-up of a favoured banana in a global collection. Anne Vezina thinks there’s no need, and suggests that GM could conserve banana diversity.

Indian scientists are exploring GM to make hill bananas, which also have a GI designation, resistant to the bunchy top virus. For Fusarium, a neat system to make bananas resistant to the fungus is being developed in Australia.

In a previous post, you argued that GM bananas threaten crop diversity. Here’s one example how it would actually contribute to conserving a piece of diversity, especially given the difficulty of controlling Fusarium using management measures.

Ah, but would it be the same variety?

Cary Fowler clarifies matters:

Just to be clear, Svalbard does NOT impose SMTA requirements on countries that deposit. (Cases in point: the 69,000+ samples deposited by the U.S. and the 2,000+ deposited by the Seed Savers Exchange, an NGO.)

Treaty Parties and non-Parties alike are making use of the Seed Vault and use by non-Parties does not change the legal status of those deposits at all.

You can believe that if you want to.

Jeanne Osnas is not content to rest on her leaf-eating laurels:

I would love to know more about the plant species composition of regional diets around the globe. It would be amazing to put this information into a “master greens tree,” so we can evaluate the relative contributions to the greens tree of cultural history of plant use and the organismal and evolutionary biology of the plants themselves.

There has to be a way to make this a crowd-sourced effort …

Ford Denison points out that genes may be easier to trace than ideas:

As DNA sequencing gets cheaper (see “Son of Moore’s Law,” by [Richard] Dawkins [reprinted in the Devil’s Chaplain]), identifying the source of germplasm could indeed be automated. Identifying the source of ideas is trickier. If I cross two plants, each leaves a clear fingerprint in the DNA. But if I combine two or more ideas, even I may not remember where they came from.

Which gets perilously close to Matt Ridley’s argument about how ideas make progress.

RachaelL tells us to dry our eyes:

Giving a varied diet a “fair crack” IS being done: fundamentally that’s what any development program is trying to do because if you’re wealthier you’re going to chose a varied diet. But it’s not happening very fast in some regions. Should children be harmed while we wait for the long process of the entire world becoming sufficiently wealthy?

Read the whole thing.