To help educate people about the many methods that are used to generate new traits in plants, Biology Fortified has created an infographic on six different crop modification techniques, with examples of crops generated with each method.
This infographic was made by Layla Katiraee together with Karl Haro von Mogel and we hope that it will be the first of many graphics that Biology Fortified will develop to help people understand and relate to the science!
We are providing these graphics for non-profit educational use by anyone, in multiple formats. Please attribute them to us when you use them, and do not modify them without the permission of Biology Fortified, Inc.
Around the world there are “Skeptics in the Pub” events that gather folks from the local community who are interested in issues of science, technology, health, and sometimes explore the more ephemeral things like the paranormal – ghost busting and Bigfoot sorts of discussions might ensue. You should look around and see if there are folks in your area that host these evenings, and you’ll find folks interested in hearing about and discussing these wide-ranging and fascinating topics, with beer or cider or perhaps a soda. Personally, I hang around at the Boston Skeptics events, but these exist world-wide. Look for one around you. They are fun and interesting and can help support local venues.
Earlier this year I asked if the Boston Skeptics would be interested in hearing about GMOs – but from the Monsanto side. Like good skeptics, they were open to hearing this side of a controversial topic, even if they didn’t quite agree on the issues. I had met a neighbor of mine who works at the Cambridge MA Monsanto labs, Larry Gilbertson. And he was willing to present at the pub. With all agreed, we set it up for an evening of conversation. Continue reading “Skeptics Ask Monsanto”→
Many consumers today feel out of touch with how their food is produced and are disturbed by a lot of what they hear about it through their social networks or other sources of information. If it is necessary to assign fault for this phenomenon, I think we could blame Jethro Tull.
Hi, I started this series to explain a little more background behind the news and opinion articles you may have seen about Bt-resistant corn rootworms, with scary titles like Voracious worm evolves to eat biotech corn engineered to kill it and Evolution one-ups genetic modification. I started out talking about the system as it was originally developed for moths, but I wanted to come back to talk about why rootworms are so good at developing resistance to Bt crops. Part I of this article talked about refuges and how they are used to slow insect resistance, so I’m assuming you know how a refuge works. If you don’t, check out Sex and death in the cornfields: What is a refuge? Western corn rootworm. Image by S Gorski.
There are several different pestiferous species of rootworms, but they are often lumped together because their larvae are difficult to tell apart. The Western corn rootworm (Diabrotica virgifera virgifera) is the most damaging and most studied.
As you may recall, transgenic Bt-expressing corn targeting rootworms has only been around since 2003, and there are already reports of resistance. Resistance has been confirmed in Iowa. Reduced susceptibility has been reported in Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska, and South Dakota. (Reduced susceptibility is basically the same idea as resistance, but is defined more loosely; there is a lower standard of evidence to meet.) So it looks like there will be more resistance occurring in the near future.
It looks like we haven’t been as effective in slowing resistance development with rootworm-active transgenics as with moth-active transgenics. Why? There are lots of things about the rootworm system that make it less simple and less elegant than the moth system. Continue reading “Sex and death in the cornfields, Part II- Why rootworms?”→
Last week, Dr. Pam Ronald gave a lecture about genetically engineered crops in Michael Pollan and Raj Patel’s Edible Education 101 class. After the 1-hour lecture, she sat down with Pollan and Patel to debate and discuss the issue. The New Yorker wrote a story about it, and now you can watch the video!
Dr. Ronald surveyed the students in the class during the lecture which had some interesting and dramatic results.
What did you think? Let’s discuss it in the comments.
My dorky “OMG It’s Dennis Gonsalves!” shot
Last August, I was invited to speak about genetically engineered crops at a GMO Summit organized by the Hawai’i Crop Improvement Association. The event was held on the big island of Hawai’i, known for its enormous volcanoes, long beaches, and coffee and papaya farms. The HCIA flew me in to speak (honorarium declined), I stayed at people’s houses, and while I was in the state I knew I really wanted to see a papaya farm and to meet Dr. Dennis Gonsalves, who developed the genetically engineered ringspot virus-resistant papayas known as SunUp and Rainbow. So I sent him an email, and he was delighted to show me around, and even took me to his home to cook with his papayas!
Early on a Sunday morning, I met Dennis on the side of the road in Puna. My host Eric was driving, and Jon Entine and his host Judi met us at the same intersection. Not far away, protesters were walking with signs objecting to hydrothermal power. I had only seen pictures of Dennis before today, so I did not know what to expect. I had seen his picture in a wall of famous agricultural scientists in the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry, but now here he was! Continue reading “GMO Papayas are about People”→
The Anti-GMO movement has been around since before GM technology first walked across the world stage. The mere hint of it initiated the creation of activist groups against it, and the ideology of anti-GMO began before the public really knew anything about the science. The pervasive question here is why?
It should come as no surprise that the majority of anti-GMO sentiment comes from the left portion of the political spectrum. The common thought process is that the right supports GMOs because they support big business. This may be true to some extent, but I don’t think the causation is supported. I think that the right, because they don’t automatically hold a dislike for big business simply doesn’t have a reason to buy into the fear mongering about the science in this case. Continue reading “Political Ideologies and the Anti-GMO Movement”→
In 1898, the chemist and physicist William Crookes devoted his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science to “a life and death question for generations to come.” At existing rates, he argued, the world’s wheat crop would cease to be able to feed the world’s wheat-eating people within a few decades. Crookes based his forecast on an estimate of the amount of nitrogen available for the growth of wheat crops. For centuries, farmers had observed that land would become less productive when it was planted year after year. With the advent of modern chemistry, scientists came to understand that these declining yields resulted from dwindling levels of nutrients in the soil as these substances were taken up by crops and removed from the land at harvest. Rhizobia fix nitrogen in nodules of the roots of legumes (soybean pictured). Photo copyright International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. Used under Creative Commons License.
All life requires nitrogen, which is an important component of many vital molecules, including DNA and proteins. Elemental nitrogen makes up nearly four-fifths of the earth’s atmosphere, but plants and animals can’t use nitrogen in that form. Before atmospheric nitrogen can be used by plants or animals, it must be converted to the biologically available form, or “fixed.” In Crookes’ day, virtually all of the biologically available nitrogen had been fixed by microorganisms known as diazotrophs, such as the bacteria of genus Rhizobia in the roots of legumes like beans, clover, and alfalfa. European and North American farmers had begun augmenting yields by importing nitrogen-rich bat guano from Peru and sodium nitrate from Chilean mines. However, these were not unlimited resources, and Crookes reasoned that unless something were to change, the lands available for wheat cultivation would cease to be able to produce enough wheat to meet world demand by the 1930s. Continue reading “An Unlikely Fix: nitrogen fertilizer and organic agriculture”→
Here’s a catchy tune – about coexistence! Back when genetically engineered canola was new in Canada, there was a conversation between two farmers – one who grew organic canola, and the other, GE. That conversation turned into this song:
As an added bonus, two of the performers are weed scientists, and the third is a former editor of Weed Technology. (H/T Andrew Kniss)
I think the next time I give a talk about the spillover effects of different farming systems, I will just show this video. What do you think?
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