Healing Outside The Box

HOTB 254: is GMO food ever a good thing? Part 3

Informações:

Sinopsis

In part 3 of this 3-part series, I humbly attempt to put this GMO controversy into some perspective with two stories about the unintended consequences of manipulating genes in a plant seed. The first story, from Roundup to dicamba, describes the ability of weeds to become resistant to one weedkiller (roundup) and then the following weedkiller (dicamba). The resulting superweeds are more difficult to kill even with higher and higher doses of these herbicides. The answer was to bring back the active ingredient in Agent Orange, a deadly herbicide used to clear the jungles of Vietnam during the war. The NIH article I discussed can be found here. The second story involves what old-timers call the BT corn controversy. BT stands for a bacteria in the Bacillus family that naturally carries an insect-killing gene that produces a deadly protein (for beetles, anyway). But what about honeybees and Monarch butterflies? There is a publication that talks about the indirect consequences of trying to kill one animal without