Posts by Bart Janssen
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Field Theory: All Blacks v South Africa…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I like the coloured shoes, especially the sparkly red ones which remind me of Dorothy's.
And I find them jarring and distracting. I'm not normally wedded to tradition but the shoe thing annoys me.
Good game from the bits I saw. It looked like a team that has been practicing well together more co-ordinated than I remember them being.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Joe Wylie,
The real doozy is the claim that “any plant that sets only two fruits, as heirlooms sometimes do, is bound to produce juicier, sweeter and more flavorful fruit than varieties that set 100, as commercial types do.”
Seriously, growing tomato varieties purely for flavour isn’t something akin to bonsai cultivation.
The relationship between yield and flavour is nothing new. The fewer fruit you have the more flavour you get in those fruit. There is also a relationship (very often) between fruit size and flavour eg big tasteless strawberries or apple. But the best example is from the wine industry where it's been known for hundreds of years that vigorous high yielding vines produce weak insipid wine. The white Zinfandel produced in the Central Valley of CA versus the big rich meaty red Zinfandel produced in Amador County or Russian River. Or closer to home cheap Aussie Shiraz versus Hawkes Bay Syrah.
What is authors are really saying is it is important to figure out if the flavour difference comes from cultural practice - vine ripe and low yield versus high yield and picked green - OR from differences in the genes that produce flavour. If you can show a particular variety has better flavour from the genes then you can use that in breeding programs and expect to get improved varieties. It's one of the difficulties in studying a trait like flavour where so many things like environment affect the trait in which you are interested.
BTW I've said this before but it's worth saying again. I have a good friend who works on tomato flavour genes and he has shown that those genes all stop working when the fruit is put at 4 C and never start working again So never never never put your tomatoes in the fridge, the flavour will disappear and never come back even when they are warmed.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Joe Wylie,
ill-informed puff piece
Huh? I read it somewhat differently Joe. What Steve Tanskley's work has shown is that because tomato has been inbred for some 500 years a lot of the diversity we see in heirloom tomatoes is not "real". Instead of being a visual display of genetic diversity it is instead a few mutations in what is otherwise a fairly narrow genetic range.
As a result heirlooms have some problems. They have lost some of the disease resistance present in the wild progenitors. You could get that back by a program of cross breeding which would take about 20-50 years or you ca pull the genes directly from the wild species to improve the heirloom varieties.
In practice, cracking and splitting of fruit is rarely if ever caused by “fungal infections”.
So that bit was not well written. Yes Joe cultural practice affect disease susceptibility, but what they are referring to is experimental comparisons that show some of these varieties do not have resistance genes present in wild progenitors and in some of the commercial varieties.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
but it has been known that growers of that plant claim to clone.
Cloning plants is usually really easy. Any time you take a cutting in your garden you are cloning the plant. So it has exactly the same genetic material as the parent plant you took the cutting from.
The plus compared to seed propagation is you get (usually) exactly the same as the parent. The plus for seed is you usually get a lot more plants a lot quicker when you grow from seed.
Things like apple, kiwifruit, orchids are all clonally propagated. Partly because when you take seed from Royal Gala apples and plant them you get pretty much the full range of diversity back, everything from little crab apples to big juicy tasteless watery things that nobody wants.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Sacha,
virtually no one re-uses seed now anyway
Except farmers in poorer countries.
Just a note that this is much less common than you think even in poorer countries. Seed even hybrid seed is cheap and produces much higher yields. The cost versus benefit is so good that even in the poorest countries it works out better to use hybrid seed to feed your family.
BTW hybrid vigour which is the observation that the progeny from parents that are different are more vigorous than either parent is an old observation that we still don't understand. It is the reason nobody saves seed from the progeny, instead they cross the parents and use that seed.
It works for almost every plant species, especially for inbred species like modern high yielding crops. It seems to involve changes in gene expression across the whole genome all at once. If we could understand it and/or control it we could shorten the breeding and selection process for new crops by decades.
If we could bypass it by controlling apomixis (fancy word for causing mommy plant to produce exact copies of herself rather than bothering with daddy's genes aka cloning) then we'd shorten the breeding process and probably capture traits we can't get any other way.
Both breeding improvements would allow more different crops to become high enough in yield to be used widely. That would start to give us the diversity we need in food crops without sacrificing yield.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Lilith __,
Lilith, thank you for asking the questions. Strong opinions aren't a bad thing. And not knowing something is not a bad thing either - there is so very much I don't know.
Science has always been a tool for good and bad in society and societies have always struggled to keep up with science. I want to avoid that bad as much as anyone, the trick is always to capture the good while avoiding the bad.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Joe Wylie,
I believe that Monsanto in particular has been given too much credit here in the past as a genuine innovator.
This is a classic case of the difference between Monsanto the company and Monsanto the group of scientists who worked there in the 80s. The story is interesting (to me anyways). In the early 80s some executive decided it would be good if more people would pay Monsanto to use Round-up (glyphosate) and it would be especially good if some crops were resistant to glyphosate. So very oddly he set up a team of molecular biologists to work on the problem, Rob Frayley, Rob Horsch, Stephen Rogers, Harry Klee and others. They focussed on the possibility of transforming plants with new genes, specifically the possibility of a glyphosate resistance gene. They were amongst the folks who discovered the earliest pieces of the mechanisms Agrobacterium used to transfer it’s DNA into plants. the same mechanism used to make many of our GN crops now. They made many of the early vectors and developed selection systems. They really did do much of the early work in the field.
By the late 80s some of them had moved on or up or sideways but there is no question that those scientists made some of the key innovations.
So yes Monsanto does deserve some of the credit. Not all by any means and there were others in different labs around the world who contributed as much.
Does Monsanto the company deserve that much credit? Does the fact they bought up some of the patents they didn’t have make them better or worse? Does the fact they bought seed companies so they could supply seed with their innovation and make more money make them better or worse?
I don’t have answers for any of those questions and I suspect each person’s answers will be coloured by their own experiences.
However, for whatever reason Monsanto assembled a really cool group of folks who did some pretty neat work that made really significant progress at that time. For that I’ll give them credit.
Edit - oh and Monsanto let them publish!
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Hard News: Vanilla Buffalo Yoghurt, in reply to Russell Brown,
So it's ... fake fish?
and tastes a bit like ... chicken
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to recordari,
I’m pretty sure there are many scientists employed purely to extract more profit out of food crops who couldn’t give a GM monkey’s uncle for the greater good.
Yeah there are some I'm sure as well.
But I'm lucky enough to have started my career at exactly the time GM crops were first developed. And I've gone to meetings where I've met and had dinner with - and drunk nice Pinot Noir with - most of the folks involved in the early development. And over the years I've met a lot of the people doing GM science.
Of the scientists I'd say 80% are mostly doing what they do with the explicit intent of doing "good" for the planet. They also love the science and the discovery. But they believe that what they are doing will add to the greater good.
However, that said, most of the control of research funding is in the hands of accountants and MBAs. Those guys I'm less comfortable about the motivations. On the plus side if any of us scientists actually believed something was going to be released that was "bad" we'd scream loud and long.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to recordari,
the large scale corporate approach to GM has been to hold the future of global food supplies to ransom for greater economic return
Ok I really have to do some of my real work but I think there is some misunderstanding about just who uses GM. The dogma is, it's the big multinationals.
So in 2010 15.4 million farmers in 29 countries planted 148 million hectares of GM crops. 90% of those are resource poor farmers. Small scale farmers, NOT big multinationals. Yes they buy their seed from big seed companies but that has always been true and they buy GM seed because it produces better yields using less pesticides. The small farmers are the ones making the biggest gains from GM. they make the choice to grow GM because it is better for them.