The Next Great GMO Debate
By Antonio Regalado,
MIT Technology Review
| 08. 11. 2015
Untitled Document
The Colorado potato beetle is a voracious eater. The insect can chew through 10 square centimeters of leaf a day, and left unchecked it will strip a plant bare. But the beetles I was looking at were doomed. The plant they were feeding on—bright green and carefully netted in Monsanto’s labs outside St. Louis—had been doused with a spray of RNA.
The experiment took advantage of a mechanism called RNA interference. It’s a way to temporarily turn off the activity of any gene. In this case, the gene being shut down was one vital to the insect’s survival. “I am pretty sure 99 percent of them will be dead soon,” said Jodi Beattie, a Monsanto scientist who showed me her experiment.
The discovery of RNA interference earned two academics a Nobel Prize in 2006 and set off a scramble to create drugs that block disease-causing genes. Using this same technology, Monsanto now thinks it has hit on an alternative to conventional genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. It can already kill bugs by getting them to eat leaves coated...
Related Articles
By Carey Gillan, UnSpun | 03.18.2024
A Mexican standoff with the United States turned into a Mexican smack-down this month with the release of Mexico’s formal rebuttal to US efforts to overturn limits Mexico has ordered on the use of genetically modified (GM) corn and the...
By Greg Allen, NPR | 01.26.2024
MIAMI — In the age-old war of human versus mosquitoes, the bugs have been winning.
At least 700,000 people die every year from mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, West Nile and yellow fever.
Global trade and climate change...
By Michael Marshall, Nature | 01.09.2024
Part of the image collection of the
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
In the space of just a few years, Jiayang Li is trying to achieve something that once took people centuries. He wants to turn a wild rice species...
By GMWatch Contributors, GMWatch | 11.21.2023
Open letter to UK's FSA is published
A group of experts representing business, farming, certification, academia, science and civil society have lodged a formal complaint against the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA), raising serious concerns about its public consultation process...