Comment Early experiments (Score 1) 267
What???
As anyone whith any knowledge of ecology and evolution will tell you, you don't have to go round transforming individual plants and or insects to fill a given population with a novel gene. If the gene is sufficiently beneficial to the organism, it will spread through the population very rapidly. Furthermore, speed is not too much of an issue. If the gene escapes across speicies there is no way of 'putting the genie back in the bottle'. There are ways of lowering the incidence of gene leakage. If you put the gene close to the centromere of a chromosome, crossover frequency is reduced and thus the gene is kept in the correct environment and under the correct controllers and promoters. Also the gene can be kept away from mobile regions of DNA that can lead to gene leakage and also be kept away from the regions of DNA that can make it susceptible to moving to another plant by means of viruses or bacteria (e.g. A. tumeficans - a bug that causes tumours in plants by inserting its dna into the plants dna). Unfortunately, scientists haven't perfected targetting techniques yet - it's all random. So you can get a plant with a gene that is ok to 'good' insects in generation one(but kills the 'bad' insects, then ten generations down the line, a crossover event has taken place that places the gene under different controller sequences and suddenly its concentrations are 100x higher and the ladybird population is vanishing. If the biotech companies weren't in such a hurry to make money on their patents, then the correct research could be done and the dangers vastly reduced.
Basic rule of plant biotech:
If its being done by a multinational, worry because its unlikely to be beneficial to the consumer and will be rushed to market with too few tests and shoddy work. Be afraid.
As anyone whith any knowledge of ecology and evolution will tell you, you don't have to go round transforming individual plants and or insects to fill a given population with a novel gene. If the gene is sufficiently beneficial to the organism, it will spread through the population very rapidly. Furthermore, speed is not too much of an issue. If the gene escapes across speicies there is no way of 'putting the genie back in the bottle'. There are ways of lowering the incidence of gene leakage. If you put the gene close to the centromere of a chromosome, crossover frequency is reduced and thus the gene is kept in the correct environment and under the correct controllers and promoters. Also the gene can be kept away from mobile regions of DNA that can lead to gene leakage and also be kept away from the regions of DNA that can make it susceptible to moving to another plant by means of viruses or bacteria (e.g. A. tumeficans - a bug that causes tumours in plants by inserting its dna into the plants dna). Unfortunately, scientists haven't perfected targetting techniques yet - it's all random. So you can get a plant with a gene that is ok to 'good' insects in generation one(but kills the 'bad' insects, then ten generations down the line, a crossover event has taken place that places the gene under different controller sequences and suddenly its concentrations are 100x higher and the ladybird population is vanishing. If the biotech companies weren't in such a hurry to make money on their patents, then the correct research could be done and the dangers vastly reduced.
Basic rule of plant biotech:
If its being done by a multinational, worry because its unlikely to be beneficial to the consumer and will be rushed to market with too few tests and shoddy work. Be afraid.
