There is an interesting article I came across here by Jeremy Rifkin in the Washington Post.
In recent years a lot of attention has been paid to GM technologies. At the same time GM crops are becoming less popular, in part because of public opposition and in part because the insects and weeds that GM crops are intended to compete with have been developing natural resistance to these technologies. There is also an increasing body of scientific evidence suggesting health, environmental and safety problems with GM technologies.
So what comes next? What do we do when it’s time to move beyond GM technology?
One likely contender is called Marker Assisted Selection (MAS). You know all of these genome projects we have been hearing about, the mouse, the human, insects, even H5N1 bird flu? So far it hasn’t had much meaning to us, because there haven’t been any real world applications. It turns out this technology has been developing slowly, and scientists are starting to be able to identify marker genes that are connected to specific traits.
If I am looking for the perfect tomato, and it doesn’t exist yet, I need to select two different tomatoes to cross pollinate and hope I get something closer to what I want. If however, I have a catalog of gene maps of different varieties of tomatoes and I can use this information to better select candidates for cross pollination, the process can go much faster. Indeed if it’s possible to do computer simulations and modelling, I may be able to predict in advance exactly what will happen if any given two tomatoes are crossed. This is like doing what people have been doing for centuries with their own plants, and what occurs in nature anyway, but using a computer to help it go faster. This sort of information will be easier to share via computer networks, and stores of ‘open source’ genetic information can be made available to everyone.
It turns out one of the greatest risks to being able to use this technology is GM technology as it is used now. It may prove very difficult to remove GM contamination from crops, and this contamination may make MAS much less effective. What is also critical for this kind of technology is biodiversity, something current seed laws and farming policies are putting under pressure.
