We are the world?

[Patrick Foley]

Bruce and others,
    Richard Lewontin has made an interesting case that the whole enterprise of
hybrid corn production was a shuck benefitting seed companies, not the farmer and
not the average citizen. If the the same academic resources had gone into a
diversity of high yielding non-hybrid lines, farmers could grow their own seed
and there would be more genetic diversity today. Your tax money spent on
University professor salaries went into research to essentially screw farmers.
The seed companies levereged a little grant money (but not the expensive
salaries) into complete domination of an industry.
    Before any one accuses me of being either a Libertarian or an "extreme
green", let me admit to deep sympathies with both "extremes" while I reluctantly
admit the need to find practical solutions in the real world. I do hate to see a
good resource (Bacillus thuringensis genes capable of mutating on their own,
abundantly available for all to find and use) turned into a licensed chemical
commodity by a company that depends on publicly funded research for its
intellectual underpinnings. And the farmers screwed again. If federal or
university agricultural researchers want to produce true-breeding lines of
genetically altered organisms that, after careful screening, farmers can have
free access to, that seems a good use for my tax dollars. But how much of the
screening process involves ecologists, evolutionists and others with big-picture
understandings of the possible problems?

Patrick Foley
patfoley at csus.edu

Bruce Walsh wrote:

> Actually, the firewalls between species are extremely poor, at best, in
> bacteria --- current estimates are that bacterial genomes have turned over
> their genes about five times already, taking in genes from the environment
> and using them.
>
> Likewise, much of "traditional" breeding involves breaking firewalls ---
> for example, we can cross two different species and get a sterile plant,
> but if we make that plant a tetraplod by disrupting meiosis = viola!  most
> of our current crops (some even involve matings between three, or more,
> different species -- wheat for example).
>
> Of course, one can always argue that these "racial barriers" should not
> be breached, but simply look at the 1930's-40's to see what happens if one
> is too strict about THAT viewpoint.
>
> The bottom line is that most of the nonGM plants that are organically
> grown are the result of wide-species crosses, crosses that are not "natural"
> (i.e. would not occur in nature) and are forced by the breeder, who picks
> out rare genotypes from crosses that mainly fail.
>
> One wonders what the view of extremes "greens" would be regarding hybrid
> corn in the 1930's.  Would this be seen an affront to nature?  After all,
> since these are F1 hybrids, and the seed companies control the two
> parental stocks, farmers must buy seed each generation.
>
> What distinguishes species is selection against hybrids, which usually
> are much less fit, due to all sorts of gene interactions.  Breeders work
> hard to remove these interactions by backcrossing to one particular strain to
> remove all the genes of one of the species except for those that improve
> plant performance --- sort of like what is done with GM organisms, but
> this requires a lot more generations (and hence a lot more land use and nasty
> pesticides).
>
> Peace
>
> Bruce