Research

Using Biotechnology to Create Super Organics

Researchers are beginning to understand plants so precisely that they no longer need transgenics to achieve traits like drought resistance, durability, or increased nutritional value. Over the past decade, scientists have discovered that our crops are chock-full of dormant characteristics. Rather than inserting, say, a bacteria gene to ward off pests, it's often possible to simply turn on a plant's innate ability. The result: Smart breeding holds the promise of remaking agriculture through methods that are largely uncontroversial and unpatentable. Think about the crossbreeding and hybridization that farmers have been doing for hundreds of years, relying on instinct, trial and error, and luck to bring us things like tangelos, giant pumpkins, and burpless cucumbers. Now replace those fuzzy factors with precise information about the role each gene plays in a plant's makeup. Today, scientists can tease out desired traits on the fly - something that used to take a decade or more to accomplish.

What Is Genetically Modified Food (And Why Should You Care?)

All living things contain genes. Genes contain information that helps shape how each living thing works. In genetic engineering, new genes are added that come from a different kind of living thing. These new genes confer certain desired characteristics, such as resistance to frost or to pesticides. The goal is to give these new characteristics to a living thing that couldn’t do those things before.

"Frankendrugs" with Human Genes Spliced into California Rice

London/Washington, 7th September, 2001 - Open field trials of genetically engineered (GE) rice containing human genes are being carried out in the heart of the California's traditional rice growing region, according to Greenpeace. The experiment is being carried out to produce pharmaceuticals. Activists from the international environmental group marked out the field with giant syringes to highlight the risk of growing drug-producing GE crops outdoors. No special effort to protect the environment and the food chain had been made.

APHIS Field Test Permits for Bio-Pharm Crops

This site contains a list of all biotech crop field trials that have or are taking place with genetically engineered plants. Over 10,000 of them total and nearly 1,200 in California.

GE Products "in the Pipeline"

Biotech companies are experimenting with virtually every plant food on earth. Many of these tests are still in laboratories or greenhouses. But when a new GE variety gets nearer to commercialization, the plants are released into the environment first in field tests, where the companies can observe the crops as they grow and can analyze them when they are harvested. Unfortunately, these tests are rarely, if ever, established to collect data for determining the environmental effects of GE crops. Instead, companies use these trials to promote their GE crops to farmers and to propagate seed for future commercial sales. Most of the University-based field trials consist of a single plot or a few small plots (often half an acre or less) planted just one season, while industry conducts hundreds of larger field tests throughout the world every year.

Californians for a GE Free Agriculture

The Californians for GE-Free Agriculture Coalition is unique in that it brings together farmer-based organizations with consumer and environmental groups to halt the introduction of economically and ecologically destructive genetically engineered (GE) crops. The mission of Californians for GE-Free Agriculture is to stop new GE crop plantings in California.

50 years since the double helix: Genetic Engineering is crude and old-fashioned

50 years ago the structure of DNA was determined and hailed as the “secret of life”. The determination of the structure of DNA made it seem as if the complete understanding of living organisms was possible, even though fundamental questions regarding DNA function were unanswered, and remain so today.