genetic modification
jhalper | September 12, 2011Last month, Penn Medicine put out a press release heralding a "cancer treatment breakthrough 20 years in the making." In a small clinical trial, three patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) were treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells. Just a few weeks after treatment the tumors had disappeared, and the patients remained in remission for a year before the study was published.
The release didn't, however, explain those "20 years in the making." In 1989, Prof. Zelig Eshhar of the Weizmann Institute's Immunology Department first published a paper…
sciencepunk | July 28, 2011In the early hours of a Wednesday morning two weeks ago, three Greenpeace activists made their way past the perimeter fence at Ginninderra Experiment Station in Canberra, Australia, and destroyed a crop of GM wheat using weed strimmers. A spokeswoman for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the national science agency which runs the station, said the damage was estimated to run A$300,000. In a statement released by Greenpeace Australia Pacific, activist Laura Kelly stated that "We had no choice but to take action to bring an end to this experiment".
Both…
edyong | May 1, 2009For centuries, farmers have been genetically modifying their plants without even knowing it. That's the message from German scientists who found that grafting, a common technique used to fuse parts of two plants together, causes the two halves to swap genes with each other.
Grafting can involve fusing the stem of one plant (the scion) to the roots of another (the stock), or a dormant bud to another stem. There are many reasons for this - sometimes it's the most cost-effective way of cultivating the scion, sometimes the stock has properties that the scion lacks including hardiness or…
edyong | April 19, 2009
A large study weighs up the existing evidence on the impact of GM crops on local insect life, providing some much-needed scientific rigour to the GM debate.
In Europe, the 'GM debate' about the merits and dangers of genetically-modified (GM) crops is a particularly heated one. There is a sense of unease about the power of modern genetic technology, and a gut feeling that scientists are 'playing God'. These discontents are stoked by the anti-GM camp, who describe GM crops with laden and fear-mongering bits of unspeak like 'Frankenstein foods' and 'unnatural'.
In a debate so fuelled by…
edyong | October 21, 2008
Fighting malaria with mosquitoes seems like an bizarrely ironic strategy but it's exactly what many scientists are trying to do. Malaria kills one to three million people every year, most of whom are children. Many strategies for controlling it naturally focus on ways of killing the mosquitoes that spread it, stopping them from biting humans, or getting rid of their breeding grounds.
But the mosquitoes themselves are not the real problem. They are merely carriers for the true cause of malaria - a parasite called Plasmodium. It suits neither mosquitoes nor humans to be infected with…
edyong | October 1, 2008
The world is currently home to 6.5 billion people and over the next 50 years, this number is set to grow by 50%. With this massive planetary overcrowding, Band Aid's plea to feed the world seems increasingly unlikely. Current food crops seem unequal to the task, but scientists at Texas University may have developed a solution, a secret ace up our sleeves - cotton.
Cotton is famed for its use in clothes-making and has been grown for this purpose for over seven millennia. We do not think of it as a potential source of food, and for good reason. The seeds of the cotton plant are rife with…
edyong | September 19, 2008Genetically modified crops have received a frosty welcome in the UK, and more widely in Europe. Those opposed to such crops worry (among other things) that they could affect the flora around them by outcompeting them or by spreading their altered genes in a round of genetic pass-the-parcel. Now, a new study shows that genetically-modified crops does affect surrounding plants - but in a positive way.
Kong-Ming Wu from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences found that genetically modified cotton designed to kill an insect pest can also protect other species plants from its jaws. In…