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Pros and Cons of Tinkering With Crop Genetics |
| Section: NATURAL SCIENCE / SCIENCE AND ETHICS |
| Author: Shelley Widhalm |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2006 |
| Size: 1,011 Words, 6,546 Characters |
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Seventy percent of the food American consumers eat has a genetically engineered ingredient in it, mostly from modified corn and soybean crops, says Galen Dively, professor of entomology at the University of Maryland in College Park.
In the mid-1990s, the agriculture industry commercially introduced four crops to farmers--corn, soybeans, cotton, and canola--that, through gene splicing, have become herbicide-tolerant and resistant to the crops' main predator pests.
"It's very easy for [farmers] to use, because it comes in a seed. It increases yield, and it's not that expensive," says Dively, extension specialist for pest management for the Maryland Extension Service in College Park. He holds a doctorate in entomology.
Farmers responded enthusiastically to the new crop varieties, eve...
. . .
...genes in crops can interact with other proteins and genes or predict how they will interact, he says. "When you put new genes into a plant, they can inadvertently turn on a gene that could produce a toxic substance," Gurian-Sherman says. "It's fundamentally exposing us to proteins and other chemicals that have not been in the food supply before."
Copyright © 2005 The Washington Times, LLC.
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