Word: cottone
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TEXAS STATE FAIR, Dallas. Grab your 10-gallon hat for the largest (1989 attendance: 3.5 million) and splashiest state fair in the U.S. Texas-scale events include laser shows, pig races, college football in the Cotton Bowl and the entire touring company of the musical Cats. Through...
...past, desirable properties were introduced into plants and animals through simple crossbreeding, but for the most part scientists merely reshuffled genes within a particular species. Corn could not be crossed with soybeans, nor cows with pigs. Now plants as diverse as tomatoes and cotton have been equipped with genes that scientists have borrowed from bacteria. Shrimp may soon be given disease-fighting genes taken from sea urchins. Eventually, crops and farm animals may be raised to produce not just food and clothing but also a wide array of chemical compounds and human proteins like insulin. While research on plants...
Even bioengineered plants are not immune to criticism, particularly those * that have been designed to tolerate herbicides. Monsanto, for example, developed strains of soybeans and cotton that grow well when sprayed with the company's Roundup herbicide. Such research may be intended to benefit society, but some environmentalists see it as a cynical play for profits...
...balance, however, bioengineering is likely to be more a benefit than a bane. In the case of cotton, which is heavily sprayed with chemical insecticides, the addition of a bacterial gene that poisons budworms and bollworms could help farmers and the environment alike. Similarly, the discovery that plants can be "vaccinated" against disease by equipping them with viral genes ought to reduce reliance on chemical insecticides. Currently, farmers battle such diseases by spraying the insects that carry them. Genetic engineering could also be used to give livestock more resistance to bacteria, reducing the need to feed antibiotics to farm animals...
...History people are neat," says a Robinson Hall staffer wearing a blue blouse ("cotton," she notes), a white skirt ("linen") and Barbara Bush-esque pearls...