Genetic Weapon Against Insects Raises Hope and Fear in Farming

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/business/energy-environment/genetic-weapon-against-insects-raises-hope-and-fear-in-farming.html?hp&_r=0

by mhb • 12 years ago

34 28 12 years ago

nytimes.com

adrianN• 12 years ago

Wouldn't a highly specific pesticide also be susceptible to quick resistance?

leobelle• 12 years ago

Yes, and that was brought up, a previous modification is facing resistance:

"Corn growers need a new tool. For a decade they have been combating the rootworm by planting so-called BT crops, which are genetically engineered to produce a toxin that kills the insects when they eat the crop.

Or at least the toxin is supposed to kill them. But rootworms are now evolving resistance to at least one BT toxin."

wehadfun• 12 years ago

Genetic pesticide No.

Some sort of contraption built by Google Boston Dynamics with "Weed OCR" software that yanked weeds and smashed bug called the Weedernater. Yes.

AJ007• 12 years ago

Ending monoculture would be another option.

cracell• 12 years ago

Yes! Is there anyone in the industrial farming industry that's actually pursuing industrial scale polyculture technology?

Monoculture is not nature and is not just not how plants evolved to grow. We can continue to force it as we have been but that obviously isn't working all that well.

mikeyouse2• 12 years ago

How about the "Hortibot" instead: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/408225/robotic-farmer/

amalag• 12 years ago

The next glyphosate?

Thats nice, we have glyphosate resistant Superweeds, now we need insecticide resistant Superbugs.

lublublub3• 12 years ago

I get the rather cynical impression that Monsanto may need to rethink the nature of the problem. Unless I'm mistaken this strategy is still going toe-to-toe with evolutionary biology and ends up causing individuals who are not succeptible to this target to flourish.

I also don't like the idea of spraying stuff around that is built to silence genes--I'd like to have some mention on how specific the targeting is i.e. are you knocking out specific codons, frame rewrite or transposons, and if it's that general how is it contained/delivered?

It's the vast crop monoculture that is the problem, not the "pest" who evolves and then takes advantage of it.

mjt02293• 12 years ago

I presume the RNAi described here targets regions of DNA of about ~20 nucleotides. Off-target effects are par for the course, but if you pick your 20 nucleotides carefully, you can get pretty precise. Common off-target effects also come from an orthogonal RNAi pathway that would would affect particular endogenous RNAs sharing the first ~7 nucleotides in that sequence.

Your argument about "toe-to-toe with evolutionary biology" is a little misguided. Everything about agriculture and pest control is going toe-to-toe with evolutionary biology. You either let evolution run all over you, or you try to keep up. Monoculture is a problem, but crop diversity wouldn't eliminate the evolutionary challenge - it's just another mitigating strategy.

mjt02293• 12 years ago

Far be it from me to defend Monsanto, though. They're a horrible, horrible corporation.

lublublub3• 12 years ago

Informative! thanks!

Though I never ment to suggest that the evolutionary challenge would be eliminated--it just changes the approach to the problem, rather than looking at specific pests and targeting them individually, (which is actually an endless fight--but may provide continued revenue for Monsanto) look at the systemic relationships and the patterns they create as they persist. If you eliminate one pest, you still have broad homogenous crop, which is a natural draw for all sorts of similar 'pest' problems.

In any case I see it as being symptomatic of our highly optimized food system--which has problems in all sorts of places (input/output and stderr), as I think we are optimizing for the wrong thing in the long term.

Slightly circular, and OT--sorry.

zzzeek• 12 years ago

I get the rather cynical impression that Monsanto may need to rethink the nature of the problem. Unless I'm mistaken this strategy is still going toe-to-toe with evolutionary biology and ends up causing individuals who are not succeptible to this target to flourish.

the "problem" is, Monsanto needs more profits. And they are doing a terrific job of solving the crap out of that problem, getting farmers hooked on ever more complicated and unproven techniques as each one fails, each one modifying nature further so that Monsanto's newest approaches are even more critical.

Monsanto has no ethical or environmental incentives beyond those which might damage their profit model. And so far, with secret treaties like TPP at their back, it looks like they can go super far before anything like that happens.

jerf2• 12 years ago

Evolution is not infinitely powerful. As we continue to develop our technology we will eventually reach a point where conventional (un-technology-assisted) evolution will be unable to compete with our directed attacks. This really starts getting close to that; this mechanism for gene silencing is not something that the organisms can afford to just "turn back off", for instance. This is extremely potent and going to be very difficult to evolve around. Not impossible, but very difficult; as soon as we identify something that has managed, we can probably find another sequence to throw at it. Since the organism is not unconstrained in what DNA sequences it can choose, since it is also the actual code the organism is running, it faces a lot more constraints than we do, which is a true reversal of the current situation.

Evolution qua evolution won't care, and will swiftly and smoothly move into the technology arena as much as ever, but it will be a different game at that point. Intelligences may spar at each other, but brute biology won't have a seat at the table anymore. And intelligences at least have a chance to compromise at something less that all out war, which is all brute biology has ever known and all it can ever know.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

This seems just a little too faith-in-technology for me.

I think that you are right about the tipping point between intelligence and natural selection. But given that we manage to share 20% or so of our genes with bananas, I would want to be very very sure of ourselves. I think the science needs to catch up with the commerce.

The general response most of us have to things like nuclear technology, bio-engineering is usually characterised by "gosh, that's an awfully big downside". To me that is a very rational response and a good understanding of the nature of risk.

Edit: bit less didactic

elipsey• 12 years ago

Maybe creating and selling temporary solutions is the problem that Monsanto chooses to solve.

As stated in TFA, BT corn deterred pests for a while, and now it apparently doesn't, but it seems to have been profitable in the interim. What is the ROI for this new thing?

b0rsuk• 12 years ago

Ultimately, it's not for us to decide. Things like these are always decided by economic viability and lobbying.

It's really hard to create an outrage strong enough that people will just stop buying it, and go to a competitor. But this is the only message big corporations understand.

leterter• 12 years ago

Evolutionary incompatible approach like this will lead to defeat in the end.

Co-existence is the only way that is compatible with evolution.

rsync• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

exit• 12 years ago

if anyone feels like indulging the fears this provokes, i recommend reading the windup girl by paolo bacigalupi

The Windup Girl is set in 23rd century Thailand. Global warming has raised the levels of world's oceans, carbon fuel sources have become depleted, and manually wound springs are used as energy storage devices. Biotechnology is dominant and mega corporations like AgriGen, PurCal and RedStar (called calorie companies) control food production through 'genehacked' seeds, and use bioterrorism, private armies and economic hitmen to create markets for their products. Frequent catastrophes, such as deadly and widespread plagues and illness, caused by genetically modified crops and mutant pests, ravage entire populations. The natural genetic seed stock of the world's plants has been almost completely supplanted by those that are genetically engineered to be sterile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl

throwwit• 12 years ago

The advancements in genetic technologies are dangerous because they deal in creating inherently extreme solutions. A lot of evolutionary stability is dependent on a statistical distribution of genotypic/phenotypic traits that have roots in a complex reservoir of genetic material. Personally I feel one cannot simply hinge an entire 'solution' on one inserted gene. The process can probably be considered analogous to 'monkey-patching' the genome IMO.

Genetic Weapon Against Insects Raises Hope and Fear in Farming

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