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>Jackson believed that his vision was possible, but he imagined it would take 50 to 100 years of plant breeding—ambitious when you consider how many millennia i

by stult 9y ago

>Jackson believed that his vision was possible, but he imagined it would take 50 to 100 years of plant breeding—ambitious when you consider how many millennia it took to create the grains we have now. Less ambitious when you consider that it took millennia with a far smaller number of people who had less knowledge about genetics and breeding, were capable of farming far fewer plants per year, and did not employ a systematic experimentation program to develop their crops.

logfromblammo 9y ago
Honestly, 50 to 100 years sounds like overkill. Granted, some crop plants can be tougher to engineer since many of them are excessively polyploid, but it seems like 5 years in the lab, 10 years in greenhouses, and 20 years on test plots should be more than enough. And you could probably do it with only two partner universities, four tenured doctors, eight postdoc fellows, and 32 grad students. 50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating Vulpes vulpes, which started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can.
- gwern 9y ago
  > 50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating Vulpes vulpes, which started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can. A bull or stallion can't normally have thousands of offspring each year, but the miracle of modern cloning or insemination or surrogacy techniques allows it. :) The fox breeding program took as long as it did mostly because of budget limits. If they had had an unlimited budget, they could have had a much larger fox population allowing for much more extreme levels of selection each generation and used techniques like artificial insemination to make selection even more extreme, and of course today more money would also buy marker-assisted selection techniques... (I don't know if anyone has worked out insemination techniques for foxes but, well, that's probably just more money too.) If for some reason you wanted to redo the fox program now and had $1b to throw at it, I'd be surprised if it took more than 10 years (set up a population of 10k foxes, whole-genome all of them, start inseminating from the elite 1-10% for multiple assessments + GWAS, cycle as fast as they reach 1yr & sexual maturity; each generation gets you ~1SD behavioral change, 10 years get you ~10SDs). Fast, cheap, big changes, marketable on the EU/USA as 'not a GMO' - choose three.
woodandsteel 9y ago
>Less ambitious when you consider that it took millennia with a far smaller number of people who had less knowledge about genetics and breeding, were capable of farming far fewer plants per year, and did not employ a systematic experimentation program to develop their crops. When Jackson started out, no one had decoded a genome.

by stult 9y ago

logfromblammo 9y ago

Honestly, 50 to 100 years sounds like overkill. Granted, some crop plants can be tougher to engineer since many of them are excessively polyploid, but it seems like 5 years in the lab, 10 years in greenhouses, and 20 years on test plots should be more than enough. And you could probably do it with only two partner universities, four tenured doctors, eight postdoc fellows, and 32 grad students. 50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating Vulpes vulpes, which started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can.

gwern 9y ago
> 50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating Vulpes vulpes, which started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can. A bull or stallion can't normally have thousands of offspring each year, but the miracle of modern cloning or insemination or surrogacy techniques allows it. :) The fox breeding program took as long as it did mostly because of budget limits. If they had had an unlimited budget, they could have had a much larger fox population allowing for much more extreme levels of selection each generation and used techniques like artificial insemination to make selection even more extreme, and of course today more money would also buy marker-assisted selection techniques... (I don't know if anyone has worked out insemination techniques for foxes but, well, that's probably just more money too.) If for some reason you wanted to redo the fox program now and had $1b to throw at it, I'd be surprised if it took more than 10 years (set up a population of 10k foxes, whole-genome all of them, start inseminating from the elite 1-10% for multiple assessments + GWAS, cycle as fast as they reach 1yr & sexual maturity; each generation gets you ~1SD behavioral change, 10 years get you ~10SDs). Fast, cheap, big changes, marketable on the EU/USA as 'not a GMO' - choose three.

woodandsteel 9y ago

>Less ambitious when you consider that it took millennia with a far smaller number of people who had less knowledge about genetics and breeding, were capable of farming far fewer plants per year, and did not employ a systematic experimentation program to develop their crops. When Jackson started out, no one had decoded a genome.