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Round-Up Ready and Terminator Seeds are two of the sickest inventions that humans have ever dreamed up. The idea of engineering seed so that new seed which com

Round-Up Ready and Terminator Seeds are two of the sickest inventions that humans have ever dreamed up. The idea of engineering seed so that new seed which comes from its crop will not germinate is just beyond wicked and evil. But we've had that for something like a quarter century now. $332M seems like peanuts.

BenjiWiebe 3y ago
Wikipedia claims (not very current claims though) that terminator seeds are not commercially available? They are different than the common case of infertile hybrids, which have good reason to exist and the infertility (IIUIC, not a botanist) is a side effect.
- throw3823423 3y ago
  There was an old patent about making generations completely infertile, but yes, never used. Bayer's corn seeds are optimized enough that, while the next generation grows just fine, the yield loss makes it not worthwhile over just buying new seed.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Its been that way for a lot of crops for almost a century at this point. This phenomenon is called hybrid vigor. Many things we grow are clonally propagated at this point to maintain these hybrid genetics.
throw3823423 3y ago
This tells me you don't know much about Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science. Roundup Ready is a relatively good idea: Roundup applies easily, and after the first few generations, when the control of how to add the GMO genes was so bad yields were impacted, it's a very narrow change to plants that makes farmers a lot of money. The vast majority of soybeans in the world are running Roundup-ready genes for a reason. Terminator seeds sounded like a scary patent, but it was mostly useless. In corn, for instance, you'd never want to run it at all, as the seeds that are sold are almost perfect hybrids of 2 inbreds, which lose a whole lot of yield in the next generation without anyone really trying. There's no need for a gene when the next generation yields worse naturally. If you want a sick situation with Bayer, forget Roundup, and look at what's been happening with Dicamba, the next generation of pesticide that GMOs are protected from. It's not a new pesticide, but it's very aggressive and it drifts: You spray a field, and many other fields around it are going to get hit. Supposedly Bayer is telling everyone that, on tests, the new formulations of it, when applied properly under the right weather conditions, there's no drift... but reality disagrees. Therefore, a whole lot of fields that aren't planting seeds protected from dicamba are getting wrecked by not-so-close that haven't mastered the really difficult ways to spray dicamba in the calmest of days. We aren't talking a pesticide that drifts 50 feet here, or 100, but people relatively far away that have their crops ruined. This is happening often enough that we'll see bans, while more and more generations of roundup GMO are going out of patent. I am pretty sure that this one is what is scaring Bayer's lawyers, not Roundup.

BenjiWiebe 3y ago

Wikipedia claims (not very current claims though) that terminator seeds are not commercially available? They are different than the common case of infertile hybrids, which have good reason to exist and the infertility (IIUIC, not a botanist) is a side effect.

throw3823423 3y ago
There was an old patent about making generations completely infertile, but yes, never used. Bayer's corn seeds are optimized enough that, while the next generation grows just fine, the yield loss makes it not worthwhile over just buying new seed.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Its been that way for a lot of crops for almost a century at this point. This phenomenon is called hybrid vigor. Many things we grow are clonally propagated at this point to maintain these hybrid genetics.

throw3823423 3y ago

This tells me you don't know much about Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science. Roundup Ready is a relatively good idea: Roundup applies easily, and after the first few generations, when the control of how to add the GMO genes was so bad yields were impacted, it's a very narrow change to plants that makes farmers a lot of money. The vast majority of soybeans in the world are running Roundup-ready genes for a reason. Terminator seeds sounded like a scary patent, but it was mostly useless. In corn, for instance, you'd never want to run it at all, as the seeds that are sold are almost perfect hybrids of 2 inbreds, which lose a whole lot of yield in the next generation without anyone really trying. There's no need for a gene when the next generation yields worse naturally. If you want a sick situation with Bayer, forget Roundup, and look at what's been happening with Dicamba, the next generation of pesticide that GMOs are protected from. It's not a new pesticide, but it's very aggressive and it drifts: You spray a field, and many other fields around it are going to get hit. Supposedly Bayer is telling everyone that, on tests, the new formulations of it, when applied properly under the right weather conditions, there's no drift... but reality disagrees. Therefore, a whole lot of fields that aren't planting seeds protected from dicamba are getting wrecked by not-so-close that haven't mastered the really difficult ways to spray dicamba in the calmest of days. We aren't talking a pesticide that drifts 50 feet here, or 100, but people relatively far away that have their crops ruined. This is happening often enough that we'll see bans, while more and more generations of roundup GMO are going out of patent. I am pretty sure that this one is what is scaring Bayer's lawyers, not Roundup.