"Creso" wheat, which is a popular cultivar in its native Italy and has been used around the world to create other variants, was obtained from seeds irradiated with neutrons and gamma rays.
I always mention this to people irrationally worried about eating GMO food featuring precise edits.
I'm only vaguely familiar with the GMO debate, but isn't the primary concern that they make food into controllable IP, locking farmers into a SaaS-like subscription lock in, not allowed to replant their own seeds?
Although I'm sure there are people who are just worried about the scary-sounding nature of "genetic modification", the IP angle struck me as a reasonable concern when I heard it.
What you mention is a genuine concern (however as far as I understand the issue is not precisely that one - it's not generally efficient for farmers to use their own seeds anyway), but I'm talking about people that think that GMO food is going to harm their health for nebulous reasons.
The other concern is about genetically engineered glypohsate-resistant "Roundup Ready" crops, which facilitate increased and imprudent usage of glyphosate.
* GMO tend to be “pesticide resistant” (eg roundup-ready) and more pesticide is bad for humans and the environment
* GMO has not been proven to be safe for human consumption
* GMO turns agriculture into IP which threatens the sovereignty of farmers
So yes, the IP concern is a big one for anti-GM campaigners, but I’d not say it’s the primary one.
(As an aside, I think the pesticide concerns are quite strong, but not all GM crops encourage pesticide use, so I’d rather restrict pesticides than GM. I don’t find the human safety concerns convincing. And the IP concerns are quite compelling to me, but again I think these could be better fixed elsewhere in the system, for example by state funded GM research or IP law reform, rather than banning GMOs.)
For modern industrial farming (ie not you on a patch of ground you manage with tools you can pick up and carry) seeds are usually anyway purchased in bulk from a specialist. What you've described is a problem, but it's coincidental to the existence of GM.
AIUI The spectre of GMO preventing seed saving got into the picture by the following route:
1. GMO opponents feared a GMO could spread in the wild, which sure enough can happen, and as with the whole "Vaccine might turn me into a chimp" (the Astrazeneca vaccine is based on a virus that infects Chimpanzees) thing they exaggerated the resulting risk, they argued that it's possible for genetics from the GMO to be copied into other things. So, maybe your weedkiller resistance gene gets copied into the weeds by some means.
2. GMO developers went OK, we can make a "terminator" feature so the modified plants don't reproduce, mitigating the problem. Nobody relies on self-seeding of crops for industrialised farming anyway and that'll fix your concern right?
3. Terminator is now an excuse to say the GMO seeds are deliberately broken to prevent seed saving.
This is especially remarkable because Terminator is a specific feature, not included in most GM organisms, so, if that's really what you're afraid of then you'd only be opposed to those GMOs not the whole concept.
Regular old hybrids also don't grow true from harvested seed. That's pretty much the whole point of heirloom plants. For example, it's not as if Big Apple intentionally sells apples with worthless seeds, that's just how fruit trees work.
It would be pretty cool though if some scientists actually did engineer plants with desirable properties that grow true from seed, but with the perverse incentives currently in place I'm not holding my breath on that one.
And just to expand on the above, modern farming heavily exploits heterosis (1) for greatly improved yields and healthier crops, even when not using "GMO" crops.
This means that while seed saving is, strictly speaking, possible, it is uneconomical -- properly fully heterozygotic seeds coming from an organization dedicated to making them will yield so much more than the second generation descending from those seeds (or any other natural seed stock) that everyone will gladly pay for them.
> isn't the primary concern that they make food into controllable IP, locking farmers into a SaaS-like subscription lock in, not allowed to replant their own seeds?
That's a concern (along with IP trolls suing farmers for infringment after cross-pollination and "terminator" features of GM crops's pollen interfering with self-seeding of said cross-pollinated crops), but IME it seems like the primary concern (ie, of most people complaining about it) is the stupid scary-soundingness one. (Which is annoying, because the former is a very real and serious problem, as it exacerbates existing centralization of food production.)
Ionically [0], if you take a sample of your crisp genome-edited tomato from your biosafe lab and plant it near the roses outside the lab building, plants that have been chemically mutated in some Chinese backwater, you're going to be in trouble.
Oh, just a frankenword I stitched together on the whim.
Made from inoization and ironically.
I know it's rough on the edges, but you have to work with what the body snatcher catches.
The quarantined r in the footnote is a pun on sometimes unnecessary safety routines.
It also lacks as the last letter of crispr...
Since I see gen-editing as a form of wordplay, I thought it fitting.
Ionized radiation is one method of mutation breeding.
Atomic Gardening was just an extrem and sometimes whimsical form.
See Muriel Howorth.
I always mention this to people irrationally worried about eating GMO food featuring precise edits.