Mendel in the Kitchen A Scientist's View of Genetically Modified Foods (2004) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
1 Against the Ways of Nature
1 Against the Ways of Nature
Pages 1-22
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 1... ...
Golden Rice is a rice rich in beta carotene, the substance that gives carrots their color. Its creator, Swiss scientist Ingo Potrykus, wasn't trying for a colorful garden curiosity like the Iceberg blackberry, a paradoxically white blackberry created in the 1890s by plant breeder Luther Burbank (better known for creating the Idaho potato and Shasta daisy)
|
From page 2... ...
Beta carotene is a precursor of vitamin A Yellow rice, Potrykus knew, could help the hundred million children who risk blindness and death from vitamin A deficiency each year in countries where rice is the staple food.
|
From page 3... ...
Maize produces beta carotene in the endosperm with no deleterious impacts on other parts of the plant." And maize and rice, both grasses, are quite similar in many ways. Toenniessen funded a study at Iowa State University to clone the maize genes needed for beta carotene to form in the kernels.
|
From page 4... ...
Still, it seemed feasible that Golden Rice could eventually provide 20 to 50 percent of a child's daily requirement of vitamin A, enough to make up for the typical deficiency and to prevent a child who ate it every day from going blind. According to one collaborator, "We are aiming the benefits of Golden Rice at the poorest of the poor who cannot get anything other than rice,green chilies, and salt,if at all." Ingo Potrykus is typical of many modern plant scientists around the world.
|
From page 5... ...
(It has since been eclipsed by a little weed in the mustard family, Arabidopsis thaliana or mouse-ear cress.) In 1984 Potrykus's lab, then in Basel, Switzerland, published "an ironclad demonstration" and "the first incontrovertible evidence," according to Paul Lurquin, an American scientist who reviewed the work, that plant cells could take up and incorporate foreign genes directly.
|
From page 6... ...
for its "negligent oversight" and "unethical" handling of genetically modified foods. But Golden Rice, Potrykus thought, was GM with a difference.
|
From page 7... ...
Word of Golden Rice reached Peter Raven, head of the Missouri Botanical Garden and organizer of the International Botanical Congress planned for St. Louis in August 1999.
|
From page 8... ...
I could have used the same funds for studying why the hairs on the leaves of the small weed Arabidopsis thaliana are sometimes two- and sometimes threeforked." If he had done so, he mused, perhaps no one would have complained. The term"Frankenfoods," with its power to call up the mad scientist Frankenstein and his unnatural monster, was first applied to genetically modified food by a Boston College English professor in a letter to the New York Times in 1992.
|
From page 9... ...
Nor do we recall that the original pink grapefruit was a mutant that appeared as a sport on the limb of one grapefruit tree in a Florida orchard in 1907 and has been cloned countless times since then to make all the pink grapefruits in the world. Proponents of genetically modified foods often argue that the molecular techniques lumped under the term genetic engineering or genetic modification are simply an extension of conventional plant breeding.
|
From page 10... ...
By 1860, for instance, German botanist Julius von Sachs was growing crops hydroponically -- in water, not soil. Though his technique was "much disputed at first," he successfully grew garden beans, field beans, corn, and buckwheat in water, "in a sunny window or in a suitable greenhouse,"produced fertile seeds, and planted and grew the offspring.
|
From page 11... ...
Miller, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, when, in desperation, after trying everything else, he squirted drops from an old bottle marked "Herring Sperm DNA" onto his culture medium, and noticed that it caused his tobacco cells to divide. Miller and his mentor, Folke Skoog, had, like Steward, originally
|
From page 12... ...
The technique came to be known as tissue culture cloning. One of Morel's graduate students,Walter Bertsch,"happened to be an orchid fancier and also happened to be dating a girl who worked at a famous French orchid company," writes Susan Orlean in her book The Orchid Thief."This is how orchids came to be the first ornamental plant to be cloned on a large scale." Orchids had been prized not only for their rare beauty, but also for the skill it took to grow them.
|
From page 13... ...
Mori of Hokkaido University in Japan reported in 2002 on their efforts to cross cultivated rice, Oryza sativa, with its close relatives in the genus Oryza in order to bring in "important genes for sustainable agriculture, such as resistance to brown planthopper, bacterial leaf blight, and grassy stunt virus." First they treated the protoplasts they had taken from rice seeds with certain chemicals, then chilled them at 4ºC, a temperature just above freezing. This kept the cells from dividing.
|
From page 14... ...
They placed 50 anthers in each of 10 test tubes containing some jelled growth medium, and incubated them at room temperature in the dark for 30 days. Then they irradiated the test tubes with gamma rays.
|
From page 15... ...
This practice is popularly thought to be limited to Roundup Ready crops that are genetically modified by molecular techniques.
|
From page 16... ...
In 1927 Hermann Joseph Muller proved that irradiating plants did cause mutations, and in 1928 Louis Stadler published the first paper on the effects of X-rays and radium on plant seeds. Soon other types of radiation, including gamma rays, fast neutrons, and thermal neutrons, were being used to cause mutations in plants.Chemicals were also used to induce new mutations, as well as to allow hybridization of varieties that would not naturally crossbreed.
|
From page 17... ...
And, as Swiss botanist Klaus Ammann hinted, of the hundreds of varieties of bread wheat grown around the world almost 200 were created using X-rays, gamma rays,neutrons, or various chemicals to cause mutations. The latest variety, a hard red winter wheat called Above, was mutated so that it would tolerate an herbicide produced by the
|
From page 18... ...
Yet, although the end result is the same as the Roundup Ready crops sold by Monsanto, Above is not considered genetically modified. Several new crops, including a tasty little lettuce called Icecube and a number of varieties of barley used for making fine beers, were created by exposing seeds or plant parts to the chemical ethyl methanesulphonate.
|
From page 19... ...
4X. And at the Carlsberg Research Laboratory in Copenhagen, as of 1995, Dieter von Wettstein and his colleagues had screened 18.5 million chemically mutated barley plants, looking for one that did not cause chill haze in beer.
|
From page 20... ...
Yet in order to continue developing Golden Rice, scientists must work inside a Biosafety Level Four greenhouse, the same level of biosafety required of those who work with the deadly Ebola virus or anthrax.At the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, Karabi and Swapan Datta, the Indian couple who first urged Ingo Potrykus to work on rice, are breeding the golden color -- and the genes coding for beta carotene -- into 10 rice varieties currently grown in Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, the Philippines, and Mozambique. They chose "popular and successful plants within particular environments, plants with which we are totally familiar,"explains Swapan Datta.
|
From page 21... ...
Therefore he is free. The professor of horticulture would consider it beyond all bounds of academic and botanical propriety to try to cross an apple on a blackberry; but Luther Burbank would make the attempt as naturally as he would dig a new lily from the fields.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.