While Voters Here Must Decide on Initiative 522 to Require Labeling Any Genetically Engineered Food, three Monsanto scientists, Marc Van Montagu, Rob Fraley, and Mary Dell Chilton received this year’s prestigious Norman Borlaug Lecture and World Food Prize, Thursday, Oct. 17 in Iowa. They received the prize for their work on genetically modified organisms and the effect this has had on increasing the worl’s food supply.
Chilton is now with seed and chemical company Syngenta. After Mary Dell Chilton started her scientific career in the 1970s, she soon learned that bacterium and corn were able to exchange genetic code. He work began with a common plant infection called crown gall. Building on work by Belgian scientist Marc Van Montagu, Dell Chilton discovered that the crown gall umor is caused by a bacterium, “Agrobacterium,” inserting a piece of its own DNA into the plant cell’s genes. The plant then makes food for the bacteria. Chilton and Van Montagu, and Rob Fraley with the agribusiness company Monsanto, quickly realized that scientists could put these tiny genetic engineers to work making plant breeding more flexible and precise than ever.
People have used selective breeding strategies and ev en cloning methods to engineer plants and animals since the earliest days of agriculture. One of our most common food stuffs, corn, does not even exist in nature and is believed to have been engineered from grass by early geneticists. bad. Genetic engineering is a much more selective approach, allowing modern science to add specific genes.
Today, nearly all corn and cotton have been modified by Monsanto to produce insecticide resistant crops. Hugely increasing yield. ” good thing,” said Chilton. In the Philippines, test fields of rice have been modified to produce vitamin A.
From my perspective, the method of engineering a plant or an animal is far less important than the result. The Incan invention of corn was no more “natural” then the effects of the crown gall tumor or the more controlled efforts by scientists at Monsanto. The much bigger issue is corporatism …. the ability of one company to own an entire world crop is very, very scary. Readmore about the critics who note that adding genes for herbicide resistance – has increased the use of weed killers. while creating a monopoly for Monsanto.