Word: bt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...technology that renders seeds sterile after the plant has ended its growth cycle. The boys down in the Monsanto accounting department saw this as an ingenious way to protect the company's investment by forcing farmers to buy new bags of their super-productive seeds ? such as the bioengineered Bt corn ? instead of planting seeds culled from the previous year's crop...
...blown far enough to affect monarch habitats. But it was just such a discovery--of pollen-dusted milkweed 200 ft. from the edge of cornfields--that prompted Losey's study in the first place. Says he: "We asked ourselves, 'What would happen if the milkweed would be dusted with Bt [corn pollen]?'" His experiments quickly gave an answer: within four days, 44% of monarch larvae placed on the dusted leaves were dead, while controls survived unscathed...
Losey is eager to take the experiments into the field, to measure pollen density at various distances from its source so as to determine risk to monarch larvae at each site. Says Losey: "We have to weigh the costs and benefits [of Bt corn], then decide as a society what we want." But that decision may already have been made. The Bt gene is now regularly spliced into potatoes (as protection against the Colorado potato beetle) and cotton (against the boll weevil...
...Ellstrand of the University of California at Riverside, calls "a weedier weed"--a species, such as the superweed that turned up in France when sugar beets crossed accidentally with a wild relative, that is both harder to control and more ecologically disruptive. Scientists also fear that as use of Bt crops increases, so will resistance in the very pests they're aimed at, depriving organic farmers of a natural pesticide they'd come to trust...
...over what the London tabloids like to call "Frankenstein foods." Last week the British Medical Association called for a moratorium on commercial planting of all transgenic crops until scientists agree on their safety. In India, Monsanto is running into a p.r. buzz saw in its efforts to introduce a Bt cotton called Bollgard--even as it wrestles with continuing protests over its stalled plans to include in its new crops so-called terminator technology that would compel farmers to buy fresh seed for each planting...