Word: cornelis
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...study published in Nature, Cornell entomologist John Losey and his colleagues reported that pollen from corn made pest-resistant by the addition of bacterial genes could spell trouble for monarchs. In his experiments, Losey scattered pollen from the genetically modified corn onto milkweed--the butterfly's only food during its larval or caterpillar stage--and watched what happened with alarm. Most of the caterpillars that ate these leaves either died or were stunted...
Approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1996, so-called Bt corn has become enormously popular with farmers, and now accounts for up to 25% of the U.S. corn crop, or about 20 million acres. By splicing DNA from the common soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis into the corn's genes, scientists have created a plant that turns out the same toxin as the bug. While the toxin is deadly to the corn borer, which costs U.S. growers more than $1 billion annually, it is harmless to humans--as well as to such beneficial insects as ladybugs and honeybees. Indeed, organic...
With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, agritech companies aren't eager to draw sweeping conclusions from the Cornell experiments. "Obviously the work is preliminary and inconclusive," says Monsanto spokesman Randy Krotz, minimizing the possibility that corn pollen could ever be 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...
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...
Measures are being considered to avert such calamities--for example, ringing cornfields with patches of plain, old-fashioned corn so that not all pests become resistant. But these efforts haven't silenced critics, especially in Britain, where a noisy debate is raging 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...