8 ms·

How has the science evolved on GMOs? I think it's pretty horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient to some sort of vendor lock-in to a giant ag

How has the science evolved on GMOs? I think it's pretty horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient to some sort of vendor lock-in to a giant agribusiness, but what about modifying a plant to be more drought or pest resistant?

docgonzo 5y ago
Non-GMO still uses herbicides. Glyphosate is comparatively very safe [0] [0] https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyphosate https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyp...
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  Glyphosate and aspartame are probably two of the most vigorously studied compounds in the world.
  - Shorel 5y ago
    Lobbied. That research money is not free.
    - gruez 5y ago
      Are you also against the covid vaccine because the trials were funded by the vaccine makers?
      - pacija 5y ago
        Yes
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  Just ignore the lymphoma
  - valec 5y ago
    glyphosate is safe. on it's own it's not carcinogenic. however, the supporting ingredients and solvents are very carcinogenic.
    - blix 5y ago
      Glyphosate has demonstrated a very significant potential to impact gut microbiome. Imbalance in the gut biota has been linked to an extraordinary number of negative health conditions, including many cancers as well as modern epidemics such as obesity, depression and auto-immune illness. For example, glyphosate has been specifically linked to Celiac's, which is increasing significantly in prevalence. I don't know if I'd be so quick to call it 'safe.' It requires an infinite number of experiments to prove any chemical is perfectly safe. It requires only a few to demonstrate the opposite.
      - bserge 5y ago
        Bad public transportation is also linked to depression. Nothing's safe lol
        Inate_Hikkers 5y ago
        https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/859926579836354604/874784806871891968/rootcauses_2.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/859926579836354604/87...
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    you trust safety based on headlines?
  - SquareWheel 5y ago
    The EU just released an 11,000 page report on that topic. Their findings contradict your four word comment. https://ec.europa.eu/food/system/files/2021-06/pesticides_aas_agg_report_202106.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/food/system/files/2021-06/pesticides_aa...
- efficax 5y ago
  Whether glyphosate causes cancer or not, there is much less doubt that it has a harmful impact on insect populations and on aquatic wildlife from runoff. Hundreds of thousands of tons of glyphosate soaking into the ground and into the water table, reaching our rivers and lakes, year after year. How can it be safe?
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Glyphosphate has a pretty short persistence in the environment. It breaks down relatively quickly. It has a half-life in the environment from as little as 15 days to a couple of months. One of the significant problems with earlier pesticides and herbicides where the chemical in question would stay in the environment for decades (DDT, an insecticide, had a half life of 10-15 years and tended to accumulate in biological tissues). Glyphosphate is also not very acutely toxic. I would have to eat an entire pound of pure glyphosphate to have a 50% chance of survival. (I consume many things every day much more toxic) There are some questions about long term carcinogens but the signal there is not particularly strong. As opposed to some other, especially older agricultural chemicals, many of which got their start as actual chemical weapons used in war.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      Can you get pure glyphosate? Is that what gets spread on crops? I'm glad we are using it and not older chemicals, but unless you are actually in the habit of eating it recreationally, maybe don't use that example.
      - colechristensen 5y ago
        I believe you have to do some minor training and get a like certification, but yes, it comes in about a fifty percent concentrated solution with water. The LD50 of that solution is about a quart as far as I can determine. The point of the example is that it is not acutely toxic unless you ingest a sizable amount while dealing with concentrations only available to certified farmers. The lethal amounts come up to around how much you would apply to half an acre of cropland. Glyphosphate is also biodegradable.
sbierwagen 5y ago
>vendor lock-in Note that the original Roundup Ready patents expired in 2014, so you can buy generic glyphosate tolerant GMO seeds https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/generic-roundup-ready-seeds-ready-for-market/ https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/generi...
ethbr0 5y ago
> horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient You know why we use selective herbicides? Because they improve yield. Farmers are practical people.
- yarky 5y ago
  And that's exactly why they're doing it, because there are more important things than yield, e.g. food sovereignty. Italy did something similar to target the cheap (high yield) canadian grain imports, but using labelling instead of an outright ban on glyphosate.
  - JamisonM 5y ago
    Sorry, what Canadian grain imports have anything to do with glyphosate? There are no varieties of Wheat, Oats, or Barley registered in Canada that a resistant to glyphosate.
    - yarky 5y ago
      [here](https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/italy-canada-durum-wheat-dispute-1.4191615 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/italy-canada-durum-wheat-dispu...) is the story. The point being glyphosate is widely used in Canada to increase yield and italians didn't like that either.
      - JamisonM 5y ago
        Yeah, in oats now the harvest is managed in terms of if a pre-harvest desiccant was applied crops are binned and handled separately. I dislike this being spelled out in terms of "increasing yield" as it is actually more about managing quality. Pre-harvest applications of glyphosate are mostly a thing of the past in wheat anyway, the varieties dry down better now - it was mostly a artifact of the Canadian transition from drying crops in windrows to leaving them stand. The genetics have caught up now.
    - bobsmooth 5y ago
      They're comparing Mexico banning GMOs to stop Us corn imports to Italy requiring labelling to stop Canadian grain imports.
gravelc 5y ago
Yes, it's evolved significantly. For example, plants expressing a Snf7-targeting double-stranded RNA to control western corn root worm are now commercialised. dsRNA does not have the toxicity issues associated with many synthetic and organic insecticides, and is far more specific (so doesn't impact on beneficial species). There are no additional applications of anything required for the effect.
- crmrc114 5y ago
  Where do you learn this, and can you please point me to some books or website. I really am excited about this kind of biotech
  - grepfru_it 5y ago
    I like to reverse engineer, I googled “snf7 corn” which yielded this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883649/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883649/ Only you know how far this rabbit hole goes
  - watchdogtimer 5y ago
    Here's a research paper on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5626700/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5626700/
  - gravelc 5y ago
    Here's a good review by very well regarded experts in the field: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00451/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00451...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
542458 5y ago
How is it vendor lock in?
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  Glyphosate resistant genetically engineered corn is patented and only available from the inventor (Monsanto, now owned by Bayer) of glyphosate (Round Up) herbicide. Spraying a field of glyphosate resistant GE corn with glyphosate kills the weeds and leaves the corn which improves yield since weeds use nutrients and moisture. To put it mildly, Monsanto has been very aggressive at enforcing their patents.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    This is dated. The patents on the original roundup-ready corn expired six years ago: https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/07/30/166919/as-patents-expire-farmers-plant-generic-gmos/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/07/30/166919/as-patent... Farmers can plant roundup-ready corn without paying any royalties to Monsanto, and keep + redistribute the seeds as they wish.
    - dev_tty01 5y ago
      Thanks for the correction and update. I had not followed it closely in a while.
    - surfingdino 5y ago
      Which is why in Europe they have created a system for protection of rights to modified plants outside of the realm of patents and copyright definitions. See https://cpvo.europa.eu/en https://cpvo.europa.eu/en
      - sampo 5y ago
        CPVO is just an EU agency coordinating plant breeder's rights at the EU level. But plant breeder's rights are nothing new. The way you describe CPVO as something new and sinister, is quite dishonest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Plant_Variety_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Plant_Variety_Office
a_bonobo 5y ago
Vendor lock-in is due to hybrid vigor, not due to GM technology. Many modern crops are high-yielding due to hybrid vigor, when you cross two distantly related cultivars their offspring will outperform their parents. However that vigor disappears on self-crossing, so you can't reuse your own seeds. That's why the seed company has a license to print money, they have to keep on remaking these hybrids. Farmers can do that themselves which is where seed co-ops come from, but these usually don't have the internal cultivars that the seed companies use to remake the hybrids. Could be that parent A has a useful resistance and B has the high yielding variety, and both parents themselves were made in a long breeding process. This goes back to the 1900s but had its big breakthrough with Norman Borlaug's green revolution in the 60s. He crossed Japanese dwarf wheat and Mexican 'regular' wheat to get smaller high-yielding varieties he had to keep on remaking. There was no GM involved. Edit: there's a very good critical essay from Lewontin on the politics of hybrid corn: https://monthlyreview.org/1986/07/01/the-political-economy-of-hybrid-corn/ https://monthlyreview.org/1986/07/01/the-political-economy-o...
- jcims 5y ago
  There's also a safety benefit. It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora and you'd have a landscape of corn and beans.
  - ericd 5y ago
    I don't know the veracity of this, but when I've seen concerns about this raised, usually it's mentioned that something that pours so much energy into the edible part for no reproductive benefit would have a hard time outcompeting something that doesn't do this.
  - sampo 5y ago
    > It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora This is absolutely not plausible. It's also not plausible that high-yield broiler chicken would outcompete local birds, and it's not plausible that high-yield cows would outcompete local moose, elk and deer. It is interesting that with animals, people intuitively usually understand that high yield food producing breeds would not outcompete anything in the wild nature. But with plants, people are ready to believe scifi horror movie stories.
n8cpdx 5y ago
The ag/biotech space is fascinating. There are several varieties of insect-resistance traits, multiple brands of herbicide resistance (off the top of my head there’s Roundup Ready and Liberty Link), drought resistance, and several more. I was last deeply interested around 2008 so my knowledge is stale. I found this USDA data sheet that lists a bunch of varieties for corn; others exist for the other GMO crops: https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/BECornCropSummary.pdf https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/BECornCro... Watching the path-dependent nature of technology is fascinating. It seems Monsanto has largely given up on GMOs, due to public backlash, just as crispr and the like are set to make the whole endeavor a lot more precise. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/01/monsanto-gmo-technology-genetically-modified-organisms/ https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/01/monsanto-gmo-techno... The hot new thing these days (as I understand it, I am not a farmer) is precision ag - better use of maps, sensors, drones, robotics, etc to make better use of resources and better target chemical application. Bayer’s marketing site is probably a good place to get the farmer’s perspective: https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/innovations/data-science/digital-farming https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/innovations/data-science/d...
- JamisonM 5y ago
  I don't think "Monsanto" has given up on GMOs, now they are Bayer and they sell a lot of GMO products. The article linked does highlight a very important point without really enlightening readers about the history, GMOs were never about higher yields. Higher yields have always come from conventional plant breeding. The common misconception is that plant genomes are simple and we can manipulate them at will but the truth is that plant genomes are way, way more complex than animal genomes and we mostly have no idea how plants work. GMO's are about specific pathways that we can understand that dictate the reactions is specific conditions, very narrow manipulations of a plant's metabolism, that we mostly discovered by accident. The incredibly complex genomes of plants coupled with the incredible variety of plants out there to cultivate means that it will take a giant leap of technology geared towards understanding plant genomes that will in turn allow the effective application of technologies like CRISPR for manipulating plant genomes.. and that is decades away at best. I hope to live to see it!!
colechristensen 5y ago
>what about modifying a plant to be more drought or pest resistant? This is mostly done with breeding and hybridization as opposed to genetic engineering, though there have been some transgenics where anti-pest genes from other organisms have been spliced into corn. There have been more herbicide resistance genetics recently.
jjoonathan 5y ago
> I think it's pretty horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient Last time I looked, Monsanto was not using terminator genes and promising they would never use terminator genes while the green press was running stories that were precision-engineered to give you the impression that Monsanto was using terminator genes. Has that changed? Did Monsanto start actually using terminator genes? Or is the story still, uhh... "speculative"?
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  They will still sue you if you plant their patented seeds without paying though.

docgonzo 5y ago

Non-GMO still uses herbicides. Glyphosate is comparatively very safe [0] [0] https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyphosate https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyp...

ComputerGuru 5y ago
Glyphosate and aspartame are probably two of the most vigorously studied compounds in the world.
- Shorel 5y ago
  Lobbied. That research money is not free.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Are you also against the covid vaccine because the trials were funded by the vaccine makers?
    - pacija 5y ago
      Yes
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
Just ignore the lymphoma
- valec 5y ago
  glyphosate is safe. on it's own it's not carcinogenic. however, the supporting ingredients and solvents are very carcinogenic.
  - blix 5y ago
    Glyphosate has demonstrated a very significant potential to impact gut microbiome. Imbalance in the gut biota has been linked to an extraordinary number of negative health conditions, including many cancers as well as modern epidemics such as obesity, depression and auto-immune illness. For example, glyphosate has been specifically linked to Celiac's, which is increasing significantly in prevalence. I don't know if I'd be so quick to call it 'safe.' It requires an infinite number of experiments to prove any chemical is perfectly safe. It requires only a few to demonstrate the opposite.
    - bserge 5y ago
      Bad public transportation is also linked to depression. Nothing's safe lol
      - Inate_Hikkers 5y ago
        https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/859926579836354604/874784806871891968/rootcauses_2.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/859926579836354604/87...
- ekianjo 5y ago
  you trust safety based on headlines?
- SquareWheel 5y ago
  The EU just released an 11,000 page report on that topic. Their findings contradict your four word comment. https://ec.europa.eu/food/system/files/2021-06/pesticides_aas_agg_report_202106.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/food/system/files/2021-06/pesticides_aa...
efficax 5y ago
Whether glyphosate causes cancer or not, there is much less doubt that it has a harmful impact on insect populations and on aquatic wildlife from runoff. Hundreds of thousands of tons of glyphosate soaking into the ground and into the water table, reaching our rivers and lakes, year after year. How can it be safe?
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Glyphosphate has a pretty short persistence in the environment. It breaks down relatively quickly. It has a half-life in the environment from as little as 15 days to a couple of months. One of the significant problems with earlier pesticides and herbicides where the chemical in question would stay in the environment for decades (DDT, an insecticide, had a half life of 10-15 years and tended to accumulate in biological tissues). Glyphosphate is also not very acutely toxic. I would have to eat an entire pound of pure glyphosphate to have a 50% chance of survival. (I consume many things every day much more toxic) There are some questions about long term carcinogens but the signal there is not particularly strong. As opposed to some other, especially older agricultural chemicals, many of which got their start as actual chemical weapons used in war.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    Can you get pure glyphosate? Is that what gets spread on crops? I'm glad we are using it and not older chemicals, but unless you are actually in the habit of eating it recreationally, maybe don't use that example.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      I believe you have to do some minor training and get a like certification, but yes, it comes in about a fifty percent concentrated solution with water. The LD50 of that solution is about a quart as far as I can determine. The point of the example is that it is not acutely toxic unless you ingest a sizable amount while dealing with concentrations only available to certified farmers. The lethal amounts come up to around how much you would apply to half an acre of cropland. Glyphosphate is also biodegradable.

sbierwagen 5y ago

>vendor lock-in Note that the original Roundup Ready patents expired in 2014, so you can buy generic glyphosate tolerant GMO seeds https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/generic-roundup-ready-seeds-ready-for-market/ https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/generi...

ethbr0 5y ago

> horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient You know why we use selective herbicides? Because they improve yield. Farmers are practical people.

yarky 5y ago
And that's exactly why they're doing it, because there are more important things than yield, e.g. food sovereignty. Italy did something similar to target the cheap (high yield) canadian grain imports, but using labelling instead of an outright ban on glyphosate.
- JamisonM 5y ago
  Sorry, what Canadian grain imports have anything to do with glyphosate? There are no varieties of Wheat, Oats, or Barley registered in Canada that a resistant to glyphosate.
  - yarky 5y ago
    [here](https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/italy-canada-durum-wheat-dispute-1.4191615 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/italy-canada-durum-wheat-dispu...) is the story. The point being glyphosate is widely used in Canada to increase yield and italians didn't like that either.
    - JamisonM 5y ago
      Yeah, in oats now the harvest is managed in terms of if a pre-harvest desiccant was applied crops are binned and handled separately. I dislike this being spelled out in terms of "increasing yield" as it is actually more about managing quality. Pre-harvest applications of glyphosate are mostly a thing of the past in wheat anyway, the varieties dry down better now - it was mostly a artifact of the Canadian transition from drying crops in windrows to leaving them stand. The genetics have caught up now.
  - bobsmooth 5y ago
    They're comparing Mexico banning GMOs to stop Us corn imports to Italy requiring labelling to stop Canadian grain imports.

gravelc 5y ago

Yes, it's evolved significantly. For example, plants expressing a Snf7-targeting double-stranded RNA to control western corn root worm are now commercialised. dsRNA does not have the toxicity issues associated with many synthetic and organic insecticides, and is far more specific (so doesn't impact on beneficial species). There are no additional applications of anything required for the effect.

crmrc114 5y ago
Where do you learn this, and can you please point me to some books or website. I really am excited about this kind of biotech
- grepfru_it 5y ago
  I like to reverse engineer, I googled “snf7 corn” which yielded this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883649/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883649/ Only you know how far this rabbit hole goes
- watchdogtimer 5y ago
  Here's a research paper on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5626700/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5626700/
- gravelc 5y ago
  Here's a good review by very well regarded experts in the field: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00451/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00451...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

542458 5y ago

How is it vendor lock in?

dev_tty01 5y ago
Glyphosate resistant genetically engineered corn is patented and only available from the inventor (Monsanto, now owned by Bayer) of glyphosate (Round Up) herbicide. Spraying a field of glyphosate resistant GE corn with glyphosate kills the weeds and leaves the corn which improves yield since weeds use nutrients and moisture. To put it mildly, Monsanto has been very aggressive at enforcing their patents.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  This is dated. The patents on the original roundup-ready corn expired six years ago: https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/07/30/166919/as-patents-expire-farmers-plant-generic-gmos/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/07/30/166919/as-patent... Farmers can plant roundup-ready corn without paying any royalties to Monsanto, and keep + redistribute the seeds as they wish.
  - dev_tty01 5y ago
    Thanks for the correction and update. I had not followed it closely in a while.
  - surfingdino 5y ago
    Which is why in Europe they have created a system for protection of rights to modified plants outside of the realm of patents and copyright definitions. See https://cpvo.europa.eu/en https://cpvo.europa.eu/en
    - sampo 5y ago
      CPVO is just an EU agency coordinating plant breeder's rights at the EU level. But plant breeder's rights are nothing new. The way you describe CPVO as something new and sinister, is quite dishonest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Plant_Variety_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Plant_Variety_Office

a_bonobo 5y ago

Vendor lock-in is due to hybrid vigor, not due to GM technology. Many modern crops are high-yielding due to hybrid vigor, when you cross two distantly related cultivars their offspring will outperform their parents. However that vigor disappears on self-crossing, so you can't reuse your own seeds. That's why the seed company has a license to print money, they have to keep on remaking these hybrids. Farmers can do that themselves which is where seed co-ops come from, but these usually don't have the internal cultivars that the seed companies use to remake the hybrids. Could be that parent A has a useful resistance and B has the high yielding variety, and both parents themselves were made in a long breeding process. This goes back to the 1900s but had its big breakthrough with Norman Borlaug's green revolution in the 60s. He crossed Japanese dwarf wheat and Mexican 'regular' wheat to get smaller high-yielding varieties he had to keep on remaking. There was no GM involved. Edit: there's a very good critical essay from Lewontin on the politics of hybrid corn: https://monthlyreview.org/1986/07/01/the-political-economy-of-hybrid-corn/ https://monthlyreview.org/1986/07/01/the-political-economy-o...

jcims 5y ago
There's also a safety benefit. It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora and you'd have a landscape of corn and beans.
- ericd 5y ago
  I don't know the veracity of this, but when I've seen concerns about this raised, usually it's mentioned that something that pours so much energy into the edible part for no reproductive benefit would have a hard time outcompeting something that doesn't do this.
- sampo 5y ago
  > It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora This is absolutely not plausible. It's also not plausible that high-yield broiler chicken would outcompete local birds, and it's not plausible that high-yield cows would outcompete local moose, elk and deer. It is interesting that with animals, people intuitively usually understand that high yield food producing breeds would not outcompete anything in the wild nature. But with plants, people are ready to believe scifi horror movie stories.

n8cpdx 5y ago

The ag/biotech space is fascinating. There are several varieties of insect-resistance traits, multiple brands of herbicide resistance (off the top of my head there’s Roundup Ready and Liberty Link), drought resistance, and several more. I was last deeply interested around 2008 so my knowledge is stale. I found this USDA data sheet that lists a bunch of varieties for corn; others exist for the other GMO crops: https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/BECornCropSummary.pdf https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/BECornCro... Watching the path-dependent nature of technology is fascinating. It seems Monsanto has largely given up on GMOs, due to public backlash, just as crispr and the like are set to make the whole endeavor a lot more precise. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/01/monsanto-gmo-technology-genetically-modified-organisms/ https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/01/monsanto-gmo-techno... The hot new thing these days (as I understand it, I am not a farmer) is precision ag - better use of maps, sensors, drones, robotics, etc to make better use of resources and better target chemical application. Bayer’s marketing site is probably a good place to get the farmer’s perspective: https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/innovations/data-science/digital-farming https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/innovations/data-science/d...

JamisonM 5y ago
I don't think "Monsanto" has given up on GMOs, now they are Bayer and they sell a lot of GMO products. The article linked does highlight a very important point without really enlightening readers about the history, GMOs were never about higher yields. Higher yields have always come from conventional plant breeding. The common misconception is that plant genomes are simple and we can manipulate them at will but the truth is that plant genomes are way, way more complex than animal genomes and we mostly have no idea how plants work. GMO's are about specific pathways that we can understand that dictate the reactions is specific conditions, very narrow manipulations of a plant's metabolism, that we mostly discovered by accident. The incredibly complex genomes of plants coupled with the incredible variety of plants out there to cultivate means that it will take a giant leap of technology geared towards understanding plant genomes that will in turn allow the effective application of technologies like CRISPR for manipulating plant genomes.. and that is decades away at best. I hope to live to see it!!

colechristensen 5y ago

>what about modifying a plant to be more drought or pest resistant? This is mostly done with breeding and hybridization as opposed to genetic engineering, though there have been some transgenics where anti-pest genes from other organisms have been spliced into corn. There have been more herbicide resistance genetics recently.

jjoonathan 5y ago

> I think it's pretty horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient Last time I looked, Monsanto was not using terminator genes and promising they would never use terminator genes while the green press was running stories that were precision-engineered to give you the impression that Monsanto was using terminator genes. Has that changed? Did Monsanto start actually using terminator genes? Or is the story still, uhh... "speculative"?

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
They will still sue you if you plant their patented seeds without paying though.