| Monsanto, the creator of Roundup, engineered some crops that could resist Roundup. They made soybeans, cotton and corn that had a variant of the gene that held the template for the specific type of synthase which would not be turned off by Roundup. This allowed farmers who planted this type of crop to stop tilling and just spray Roundup on their fields. It was supposed to be a win/win, there would be less tilling and run off so there would be more yield with less fuel and environmental problems.
It worked too, but life is tenacious stuff and what one set of plants can do (even genetically modified plants) others can do as well. After all every species has variations in its populations and since the Monsanto genes were not whole synthetic, but just low instance variations, they could be come dominate in other plants, if there was enough incentive. Having huge fields with good water and soil and only one crop on them being sprayed with tons of Roundup is just the kind of evolutionary incentive needed.
This is not a rare occurrence; we have seen the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria evolve in response to the over-use of the medications. Anytime you wipe out most of a type of life, the variants that survive come back to claim the niche where they had to compete with the normal type of their species. So the bacilli of tuberculosis that die in the presence of penicillin are replaced by ones that do not.
Now, I am an unabashed and unapologetic technophile. I love the idea of being able to design life. Not only is the potential transformational for our species, it is wicked cool as well. The thing is we can't assume that life is just going to lie around and take it. If we introduce new evolutionary factors, like Roundup, then life, in the wily way of a billion year old survivor, is going to change to adapt.
This is, after all, the process of adapting and adapting again that allowed some apes who had big hands and long legs to develop and become the dominate species on the planet. If the process of adaption produced humans who could take an active hand in the environment, we should not be casual about what the process might also produce in response to us. A competitor does not have to be sentient or even mammalian to have a strong impact on our hegemony over the Earth.
Monsanto and other pesticide companies have reaped huge monetary rewards from Roundup and the Roundup Ready crops. They are now scrambling to find a way to keep this golden goose laying eggs. There are other enzymes that could be inhibited, though that would require further modification of their crops. There is also the potential of going back to more tilling intensive farming, though that will raise costs and bring back the runoff issues.
All in all this is a lesson that we should keep in our thinking as we move forward, just because a life-form is a plant does not mean its species will passively stand by for extinction. It will keep throwing out odd variants until it finds one that fits the current conditions and then it will fight for the niche it originally held. Perhaps a evolutionary arms race with genetic modification is not the best long term solution to dealing with life that competes with human interests. The next variation that survives might be more than just a weed with a resistant gene.
The floor is yours. |
