Suicide genes already exist, and if you do a google search you will find that there is much tragedy among second and third world farmers who are used to “saving seed” from their harvests only to find that the seed doesn’t sprout, in order to keep the farmers buying seed from Monsanto. My daughter spent the last year in India, and not a day went by without headlines in some regional paper about a family being financially ruined, thus forcing the farmer to commit suicide to save his families honor. This is a huge problem that does not solve a small problem—and I am familiar with the Percy Schmeiser story. He is not alone as a victim of GMO’s run amok.
Link: www.ianwelsh.net/how-owning-genetic-materials-drives-farmers-into-bankruptcy-and-suicide
I feel compelled to reply here, as the above message melds together two or three different streams of commentary on GMOs, multinational companies and Indian agriculture. Terminator technologies are not in use. Period. Hybrid seed always yields more heterogenous material, but it does not affect seed germination per se.
The problem with cotton in India was the tremendous about of bogus seed sold, with fairy tales about universal insect resistance. Also the few hybrids available at first were not adapted to the Indian climate, or agricultural systems so they had poor yields. The past couple years, yields in India have taken off with Bt cotton a great success for those sufficiently educated to understand how to use it. That is a major caveat in introduction of such technologies- there must be education. There are quite a few substantial websites providing detailed credible information on this topic. I wrote a review that was published this year for a book on Genetics and Genomics of Cotton in which the effects of Bt cotton world-wide are thoroughly assessed.
Indian agriculture is in deep trouble in general, not just from cotton, but from overpopulation. Unscrupulous corporations are mostly home-grown there, not multi-national. It is very difficult for us, living in a quite different culture, to say what needs to be done and we ought not to pass judgment on them anyway.
All of this has little to do with the relative merits of GM roses. The worldwide cut flower trade is so unnatural that we can scarcely talk about it as anything other than another factory driven by consumerism. The GM technology is, and likely will remain, a minor part of the whole weird scene.
Larry is right: terminator technologies if considered many years ago are not in use. In fact it was not even developed.
About Genetical Manipulation there is nothing to be scared about. It is just another breeding technic. And not unatural at all. It is a known fact for unicellular beings. And actually feared enough for swine flu…
Only problem is that GM beings and all its progeny are privately and exclusively owned.
A complete legal novelty.
Something that has its hazards. As general interest and health may be a lesser concern for private entreprises.
Private appropriation of combining nature made genetical parts is not good. It is something that has to be supressed as soon as possible.
Contamination of our food is a fact… as well as it is a fact that to date it is definitely harmless. When GM crops are eaten for tens of years by millions of beings (human and animals) without inconvenient other than when we discover another food source.
Actually with infinitely less inconvenients than housing cats drinking milk or eating peanuts.
For your information, the colour of Applause is 85b of R.H.S. colour chart.
That means the colour is not blue but bluish violet.
Though, this 85b is far more blue than traditional blue-tinted mauve roses, like Sterling Silver and Blue Skies.
And yes, this genetically modified rose is patented by Suntory, and the patent includes all blue/violet roses which are decendant of Applause.
Surely, many rose-breeders try to create bluer ver. of rose by crossbreeding Applause.
But they must talk over with Suntory for commercial production of their bluer roses.
I think it looks funny. I find that the mauve range of roses in the florist trade look cheap and fake. To me, they lack grace and class. My point being, other than my snobbery of aesthetics(lol), is that in order for a blue-toned rose to be accepted and usable in any aesthetic sense, is that it must also be able to not look like a plastic pink flamingo in an astroturf lawn.
Leonidas is a good example of aesthetics and an outlandish color working well together. Some may not like the color. A lot of people love the color. But what is more, is that it is completely usable in a variety of schemes. In other words, it is able to look striking on it’s own, but it is also capable of being mixed and matched with other things and roses.
So, if a blue color class of roses were to exist, then a lot of other things other than a novelty color would have to exist. If not, it would simply become a trinket.
On the other hand, it would be interesting to see what different cultures would find in such a color class in terms of “meaning” if such a color class became acceptable.
In terms of personal interest, I would want to see what types of earth-tones could be created from the new-found pigment expression. For example, could sky blue and ochre-brown be found in the same bloom like they can be found in pansies and violas?
ps. I am not going to get into the genetic/patenting discussion. I am specifically interested in what you all think of the color class if that issue was bypassed in the future.