Word: monarchical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With its flamboyant orange-and-black wings and incredible 1,000-mile migratory flights, the monarch butterfly is one of the world's best-known and most beloved insects. And like a miner's canary, it has become a kind of biological early-warning system, succumbing to environmental changes long before humans notice them. Last week the monarch sounded another alert--fanning new fears about bioengineered crops...
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...
...very good, since it produced a natural toxin that killed corn borers, and allowed farmers to forgo the use of insecticides. On Thursday, however, a Cornell University laboratory study published in the journal Nature announced some bad news: The corn produces a wind-borne pollen that can kill monarch butterflies if they ingest it. As for the future of genetically engineered crops, the finding has raised concern, but scientists are not yet ready to sound the alarm bell full blast...
...problems of unintended consequences," says TIME senior science reporter David Bjerklie. The issue now is to find out through field research how significant those consequences are. For instance, how far can the pollen travel from a cornfield? Can it travel far enough to nearby fields of milkweed, the monarch?s food source, in significantly harmful quantities? Some other questions: Does the pollen travel during the same period that the monarchs feed on the milkweed? How much milkweed is near cornfields as opposed to other areas? And can Bt corn be modified further? Clearly the Cornell study has flashed an amber...
When the royal couple returned to Jordan in mid-January, they did not expect the King to die. Contrary to speculation, Noor says the 63-year-old monarch believed he was winning his battle against non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His physicians believed as much when they sent him home. But a week after, the King began to grow weaker. He was working on a draft of a document that would rewrite Jordanian history--a letter replacing his 51-year-old brother Hassan as heir with his son Abdullah, 37. When doctors advised him to return to the U.S., Hussein quickly...