3 ms·

So just go through your cornfield, examine each stalk of corn if it's carrying the gene, and if so, pull it out? It's not competing the same way a weed competes

• whatshisface 8y ago
  You can't just jump straight to the end state of the air being completely packed with compromised pollen. The gene would have to work its way through the seed distribution system, and that's where it would be stopped. Here's how a country could control an attack: If a field contains the gene, burn it (don't bother discriminating between carriers and non-carriers). Don't plant seeds that came from fields that had the gene. As a result, the initial attack will last only for one generation, no worse than if the attacker killed the plants. This is practical because the initial attack will be limited to a small number of fields that the country will be able to afford to loose.
  • deogeo 8y ago
    How do you know when the attack has begun? If < 1% of a field carries the gene, you won't know it's infected. You re-use the seeds, and the wind blows the pollen, into multiple fields, so now you have many fields, each with a tiny proportion of infected. What do you do when 10% of the fields has 1% infected plants, and the remaining 90% has an unknown, but smaller % of infected?
    • whatshisface 8y ago
      In order for that to work, the gene would have to be designed so that it spread across the nation before it became significant in any one cornfield. Pollen gets spread inside of a single field a lot more than it gets spread from field to field, so that would be difficult. It's similar to how an extremely deadly virus won't spread as far as a strain of the common cold.