USDA Bans GM contaminated Rice Seed

Thomas Lord

Thu Mar 15 18:49:27 -0700 2007

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This is no small part of the problem: how exactly is one supposed to perform a "recall" of a GMO crop?  

USDA Bans GM contaminated Rice Seed

Michael_K_Vegfruit

Fri Mar 16 08:01:47 -0700 2007

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You can't. You can, however, sue anyone who grows crops contaminated by your patented product.

There may well be a case to be made for developing GM crops to boost crop efficiency - letting private firms set the rules for how the technology is used, and by whom, is more of a problem.

USDA Bans GM contaminated Rice Seed

Thomas Lord

Fri Mar 16 15:50:54 -0700 2007

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I don't think it's a public/private issue.

On the one hand, the private investment has clearly been the main enabler of what may be some very important developments: GM for energy;  GM for emergency clean-up of already-existing toxics; etc.    Adjacent to GM-per-se:  the lower cost of sequencing these days is both the result of private investment and, for example, a fantastic tool for trying to figure out what's happening to the bees.

We know enough, these days, to model in some detail the cellular metabolism that "starts" with gene expression along some pathways.   People are building little "parts lists" from which they can take a set of requirements of a new cell and start to build it from off the shelf components.   There are plenty of applications for which this may play a large role in saving our collective butts in years to come.

Problems include:  we don't understand expression, evolutionary dynamics, cellular or organism metabolism, or ecological dynamics anywhere even vaguely close enough to feel very secure about uncontrolled release of these materials.   There's no serious appeal to be made to "oh, we're just accelerating what farmers have done for millenia using selective breeding" because genome manipulations in the lab are an entirely different beast from the natural process.   Even where we have really detailed, chem-phys models of certain processes, we're only just in the first few years of beginning to come to grips with secondary and tertiary modes of expression (i.e., yes, you traced out from gene to protein to etc. but did you know that the same sequence that spells the protein also effects stereospecificity in ways that have unclear effect on mutation rates, regulation of other processes, etc.?)   The analogy to disassembling little bits of a large computer program and then trying to modify it by binary patching are pretty good, especially if you assume that the very large computer program wasn't written by humans but is, instead, some automatically generated spaghetti code of the worst sort.)

In my personal experience, I'm working these days on some bioinformatics software used in sequencing.   The wet lab gets some cells, presumably mostly all of the same genotype.   They collect a bunch of data and hand it to the "dry lab" (the computer guys).   And they think they are getting back useful information about the sequence of the genome.   And they are .. BUT .. not they information they seem to think they are.   There is piss poor effort to characterize the computational outputs in such a way that would adequately explain where it is ambiguous.   And in my experience, you can politely explain, then politely insist, then jump up and down and shout and, in the end, the biologists are impervious to exploring these concerns.   The published literature doesn't address them.  And the net effect is a distinct possibility -- a likelihood -- that there's rapid efforts to commercialize and deploy sequencing technology that claims to say "THAT is genome XYZZY" when, in fact, what's really proven is that "THAT might be XYZZY or any other member of a large equivalence class which are indistinguishable under our procedures."     I would even assume that my experience was atypical until I started hearing off-the-record informal reports from other programmers and physicists and took another look at the biology literature.   So, not only is GM based on an insufficient understanding gene expression to be taking many risks by deplying in the wild, one of its cornerstones -- affordable sequencing -- appears to be highly suspect.

-t

USDA Bans GM contaminated Rice Seed

Dennis Kibbe

Fri Mar 16 10:56:38 -0700 2007

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Doesn't this story follow on the heels of the toxic GMO corn article where it is claimed that genetically modded crops can't contaminate others?

Dennisk
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