Whatever happened to...
... all those anti-GM crop protestors who were forever destroying farmers' fields and agitating outside research laboratories some years back?Perhaps having saved Mankind from yet another deadly peril, they've moved on to 5G, via vaccines and Covid-19 conspiracies...Anyhow, I was reminded of this when listening to the Head of Research(?) at the John Innes Institute the other day, and amongst other things, he made two interesting points.1. When he tried to open dialogue with the protestors outside the Institute, they wouldn't even talk to him to explain their own concerns, never mind hear his views; and2. An example he gave of their work concerned potato blight. We shouldn't think that this died out eg with the Irish famine. Potato blight is still a very serious disease, necessitating farmers spraying crops with fungicides as much as 10 or 12 times a season.So the JII researched some ancient potato varieties from S.America (where potatoes originated) and isolated two particular blight-resistance genes. They then inserted these in some common cultivated varieties, and found they had become completely blight-resistant. Whereas the control crops which were not modified all rotted.
Richard Cathcart ● 2261d8 Comments