Word: wheats
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...EATING Consuming wheat germ, sardines, whole grains and other foods high in vitamin E may protect your heart better than taking vitamin E supplements. A study out last week found that women whose diet was naturally high in E were more resistant to the presence of dangerous oxidizing chemicals in their blood than were those who took vitamin pills. It seemed that the supplements blocked some of the benefits of vitamins found in food...
...English economist Thomas Malthus calculated that the world's population would soon outstrip its food-growing capacity. What he didn't anticipate was Norman Borlaug. Working in Mexico from 1944 to 1960--long before the advent of modern biotechnology--the U.S. biologist developed a hybrid strain of wheat that was enormously more prolific than its natural cousins. Borlaug's "miracle wheat" allowed Mexico to triple its grain production in a matter of years, and when his hybrid was introduced in south Asia in the mid-1960s, wheat yields there jumped 60%. Miracle strains of rice and other grains followed...
...Lysenko was a peasant-born agronomist and Marxist ideologue who rejected Mendel's ideas because they contradicted the doctrine of dialectical materialism. He offered instead to solve the Soviet Union's chronic crop failures through a process he called vernalization, by which he would "train" spring wheat to be winter wheat and thus increase the number of annual harvests. Lysenko believed all living organisms passed on to succeeding generations characteristics acquired in their lifetime. This untested theory was at odds with what Lysenko scathingly called "alien bourgeois" genetics, but Soviet scientists who dared disagree risked being sent to the gulag...
...plant that biotech engineers wish to alter in some amazing way. Then, after patient cultivation to bring out the inserted trait, a prodigy is born. The transformed crop may be corn or cotton with a built-in insecticide, tomatoes that retain their fresh-picked texture on the shelf, or wheat with extra gluten, making for lighter, bouncier bread. The new crop of doctors has been so busy re-enacting the Creation in the past few years that Americans, at least, no longer pay much notice. If genetic engineers had envisioned a quick conquest of the world, however, they have experienced...
...pleasant living amid this. Just ask Julia Howell and her husband Bob. The couple live on a farm near Hooker, about midway between Guymon and Liberal, where four generations of Howells have grown wheat and raised families. Now feisty Julia Howell, 69, talks about her "40,000 neighbors" and explains why she seals the farmhouse windows, stuffs pillows into the chimney and seldom ventures outdoors without a face mask...