3 ms·

Creating new crop varieties using radiation is a thing, here are some wiki articles discussing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wi

Creating new crop varieties using radiation is a thing, here are some wiki articles discussing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding#New_mutagen_techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding#New_mutagen_... I also remember seeing a news article about using radiation to breed new rice variants that have more nutrients, but I can't find it anymore.

larssorenson 5y ago
You're right, it is done. I worded my comment carefully to leave room for this because it's hard to prove a negative, but I stand by my statement, specificay in refuting the implication from the original comment: we aren't haphazardly blasting plant genome with radiation, at scalr, and guessing it's safe enough to feed to the world. I don't have numbers but GMO crops today are by and large the result of non-radiation genetic engineering.