Transgenic Mustard Cleans Up Soils 66
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers have genetically modified a common plant, the Indian mustard, to absorb more selenium, a toxic heavy metal found in soils polluted by irrigation wastewater. The transgenic plants were four times more efficient at swallowing selenium than natural ones in a contaminated area of California's Central Valley, according to articles from Nature and Wired News. These field tests are only experiments, but the researchers also want to add genes to other plants to remove different toxic materials from soils, such as mercury. What would happen if such transgenic plants filled with dangerous chemicals start to crossbreed with natural ones? Or if an insect eats these plants before being eaten itself in the natural food chain, leading to some selenium in our food? Read more and tell me what you think."
cross breeding (Score:5, Insightful)
Um a plant filled with dangerous chemicals crossbreeding isn't the problem, but a plant with the GENES that make it more likely to suck up chemicals is a problem. You can also engineer the genes so that they can't breed, and that solves the problem, although it makes it more expensive to replunish the plants.
I'm personaly a bit nervous about GMO in the food supply, but I think this kind of thing, if properly controled, good do great things for the enviroment
Re:Selenium in the human diet (Score:5, Insightful)
All organisms are genetically modified in one fashion or another. Humans have been selectively breeding crops for growth rate, productivity and so on for thousands of years. So should we only eat wild plants? Before that, the plants were bred by the environment. Plus, natural hybridization is responsible for gene exchange in wild plants, while gene uptake from other organisms such as viruses is responsible for foreign DNA getting into plants. That's been going on for hundreds of millions of years. To an evolutionary biologist, the idea of keeping the genes pure is nonsense. Think about it. You have the nucleic acid sequence
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in a plant. So it's automatically safe and OK and doesn't need testing if it got inserted naturally from a virus or mutation, but it's automatically dangerous and not-OK if humans put it there? That's the assumption a lot of anti-GMO people make. I'm not saying there aren't risks, but there are also risks with organic organisms. Rattlesnake venom, the HIV virus and cocaine are all organic, that doesn't make them good for you. It's all a question of carefully weighing the risks against the rewards.