As far as I know are two ways to make a crop resistant to an herbicide. Either the way you describe, or substituting another enzyme that can do the same job as the one inhibited by the herbicide (IIRC the second is what has been done to produce crops resistant to roundup but I believe both have been used). I guess my point is that if you do either of those things in the absence of that specific herbicide the GM crops should perform a lot like the same variety without the transgene.

This discussion got started as a response to a fellow who was saying companies had engineered crops to do worse in the absence of specific herbicides (made by the same companies) than non-GM varieties. To me that's a very different thing from engineering plants to resist specific herbicides.

Thank you.

Let me start out by saying the parts I completely agree with. Modern breeds of most crops have been selected to identify varieties that use fertilizer efficiently, converting as much as possible of it into extra food instead of, say, longer stalks (an issue that crops up when you heavily fertilize older varieties of wheat and rice). So in the absence of fertilizer, older varieties developed prior to the development of cheap synthetic fertilizer will outperform varieties developed to take advantage of the fertilizer.

The trade off in investing energy in yield (usually in the form of starch and sugars) vs defense is a real one, and it wouldn't surprise me if there has been some accidental selection towards less investment in defense related compounds and more in yield during conventional breeding programs, since, as you point out, yield is a much easier thing for a plant breeder to measure. However this is where we part ways. I've read extensively on the small handful of traits introduced to plants by genetic engineering and none of them have been aimed at knocking out or reducing the plant's innate defenses. Maybe such a strategy might work (defining work as increasing yield), but if so, no one has successfully done so yet.

The original post I was replying to made it sound like plants had been crippled in order to require specific pesticides sold by the same company. Which would require an intentional act, not simply a focus on yield over immunity to disease and pests during the breeding process.

As all slashdotters know, no one EVER violates IP restrictions.

More seriously, yes intellectual property law is broken. But the one great thing about patents is that they still expire (in reasonable lengths of time, unlike copyrights).

Right when it first became possible to patent hybrid crops there was a big rush by the seed companies to do just that. But to do that one of the requirements was that they deposit seed with the ATCC, and now you can order all the inbreds you'd need to make your own copies of those hybrids from the ATCC website (which yes costs some money) but once you have the seed in had you can happily propagate the inbred parents and produce your own hybrid seed from now until the sun burns out without paying anyone a dime. Of course your hybrid seed would be a coupe decades out of date, so it won't perform as well as modern ones (and that's the reason not many people do this). But it'd be yours free and clear of any patents on plant variants or transgenes.

You're right that the technology to make such seeds has been developed (and patented). However no company is now, nor have they in the past, sold seeds genetically engineered to produce sterile offspring ("suicide seeds" "terminator technology" etc) and this is one of the most frustrating pieces of zombie misinformation to confront over and over again in the debate over GM crops.

There are patented seeds where you are not permitted to resow the seeds the next year (once more because of patents), but regardless of whether or not you think gene patents are a good idea (I do not), in the event of a series economic/social/natural disruption, farmers would just plant the seeds anyway and ignore the intellectual property laws.

I agree with you that selling plants that are designed to be sterile is indefensible on both pragmatic and ethical levels.

By that logic evolution itself is impossible since no traits not already present in the population could ever emerge. Selective breeding can also capture and spread new traits that arise by spontaneous mutation (the same way natural selection drives evolution by acting on the same kinds of new variation). Breeders even have ways of speeding up the process called mutagenesis, to increase how frequently new mutations occur. Most are bad, some are good. Dwarf wheat -- which uses fertilizer much more effectively -- and red grapefruits are two example of new traits produced before the era of genetic engineering by using radiation to knock whole chunks of DNA out of chromosomes (a form of mutation that happens in the wild, but at lower rates, given the lower levels of background radiation).
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/science/28crop.html?pagewanted=print

The safety tests already required of GM crops in the US mean it already costs ~$150 million dollars to get a single new GM trait in a single crop approved for human consumption which is one of the reasons only a handful of giant companies like Monsanto are still in the business of engineering crops. You're right, that's still less than a pharmaceutical company would have to spend to get a drug all the way through regulatory approval, but it's a lot less than the laissez-faire modify whatever they like and release it into the food supply approach many people seem to think is going on.

There is no natural (as in wild) corn anywhere in the world. The wild ancestor of corn, teosinte, can still be found in some places, but you would not have any luck trying to eat its seeds the way you would corn kernels. The beautiful photos illustration the vast genetic diversity of corn are all breeds of corn that have been under artificial selection for thousands of years by farmers from Chile to Canada.

You are correct that "The wheat and corn from 50 years ago is NOT genetically modified in the modern sense of the word" however I believe the point the GP was making is that the changes made by artificial selection were equivalent to, if not greater than, those that are now being produced with genetic modification "in the modern sense of the word."

The genome of B73, a completely un-genetically modified variety of corn, was published back in 2009 and I've had my head buried in it ever since. I've seen broken genes, moved genes, genes missing the sequences that should control when and where they are turned on, even frankenstein genes assembled from the pieces of other genes. All these changes occurred naturally in individual corn plants and are found today in B73 as the result of either artificial or natural selection.

Citation needed. I know there are GM crops resistant to certain herbicides, but in the absence of those herbicides they grow identically to their unmodified siblings. I don't even know how an effect like the one you describe could be produced. But if you can back it up I will certainly look into it.

Out of curiosity, what was your major within the natural sciences? I'm not asking to try to discredit you or anything. But it's been my observation at my current institution that undergraduates in two different departments, both within the college of natural resources graduate with wildly different views on the consensus of the scientific community about genetic engineering, both convinced all the evidence was on their side.

The two departments are Plant Sciences and Environmental Studies and Policy. I'm sure you can guess which is which.

Selective breeds often means altering the genetics of a plant by a transposon insertion or gene deletion. These changes are just as drastic and unpredictable as those produced by genetic engineering, occur in nature all the time, and produce much of the variation that is selected for in traditional breeding. It's just that since traditional breeds selects based on the effect, rather than the gene itself, no one can tell you what strange and never before seen genetic alteration has just been introduced into the food you are eating.

A great example of this is a lab at Cornell that has actually tracked down the genetic alterations behind those delicious purple and orange cauliflowers that started showing up in organic grocery stores across the US about a decade ago. Both were caused by transposon insertions (genomic parasites often related to plant viruses) that changed or broke genes. But nobody protests or rips up the fields because no one, not even the breeders at the time, know what was responsible for the change.

Sources:
Purple: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2971621/ Orange: http://www.plantcell.org/content/18/12/3594.full

Great point that point that these patents are starting to expire.

Out of curiosity I heard Monsanto had put out a second-generation round-up ready trait (that of course lets them reset the patent clock, but is also supposed to increase yield more). Do you have a sense that many farmers are going to shell out the money for RR2 or do you think will most stay with the first generation round up trait, either from saved seeds, or other seed companies like Pioneer?

Considering bananas are sterile, and propagated vegetatively (ie no sex, and the resulting plants are genetically identical) they're one of the few examples you could have picked that is NOT the result of centuries of selective breeding.

Bananas are one of the crops that stand to benefit the most from genetic engineering because there's no way to introduce disease resistance or other new traits through conventional breeding. In the US that's not a big deal, but bananas in Africa are the primary food source for whole countries, and are constantly being attacked by devastating diseases like Black Sigatoka. So there's an example of how the technique of genetic engineering stands to benefit someone other than Monsanto. (And note that the attempts to produce varieties of banana resistant to Black Sigatoka are being run by non-profits and government scientists, particularly those of Uganda).

The bananas you see at your local supermarket are already produced using vast quantities of highly toxic fungicides, which barely impacts the price you pay in the checkout lane, but can cause real problems in the banana producing countries, which are predominantly poor, generally have far fewer and less strictly enforced regulations on pesticides.

...of sex robots running linux? Because I can't, and I'm kind of glad.

Well they got the order wrong. For resisting arrest it's 1. arrest 2. beat. For an assaulting an officer change they apparently beat you first, then arrest you.

(I defy anyone to take a severe beating without doing SOMETHING that, out of context, could be described as assaulting an officer.)

An average of $3.3 million a year for ANY government program seems quite reasonably priced!

In response to any question: I'm not sure, let me consult my super computer and get back to you. In any presentation: After crunching a lot of numbers on my super computer I can tell you that ...