James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

“We know it will hasten the demise–it will hasten the demise of organic farming, a rapidly developing business in this country.” – Lawrence Robbins (one of the lawyers arguing before the supreme court in the herbicide resistant alfalfa case)

As quoted here

Is there any real risk of the organic food business will be disappearing any time soon? Not so far as I can see. It really is a rapidly growing sector of agriculture,* and pollen contamination is an issue farmers have had plenty of experience dealing with long before genetic engineering ever entered the scene. If you’ve ever tasted an ear of sweetcorn that was pollinated by field corn, you know what I’m talking about.**

So here’s my question. Using only current trends (ie it’s fair to assume more genetically engineered crops are introduced in the future, but not that congress will pass a law requiring all farmers to plant them), can you make an argument for how the organic industry could be wiped out in the US, by genetic engineering or anything else?

*Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on whether you think the environmental benefits of organic farming outweigh the long-term downsides of defining good farming not with science, but with what feels natural.

**The majority of the corn kernels we eat are made up of the endosperm and embryo. Both of these get DNA from the mother plant (the one the ear grows on) and the father plant (the one whose tassel shed the pollen grain that fertilized the single corn silk attached to where that kernel of corn would later develop). A kernels of an ear of sweetcorn can each have different fathers, but if enough of those fathers were field corn, you’ll know it, because the father’s DNA will provide a working copy of the gene that lets corn kernels turn all that sugar that makes sweet corn sweet into starch, so your sweetcorn would’t taste sweet at all. The vast majority of the corn grown in the US is fieldcorn, yet I don’t think anyone would argue the sweetcorn industry is being hastened towards towards its immident demise. For more about the genetics of what makes sweetcorn sweet, read this discussion of the shrunken2 gene.

I’m out in the hallway while the first of my two sections fills out their reviews of me as a GSI (graduate student instructor).

Late last night the National Science Foundation announced the graduate students who recieved the prestigious NSF-Fellowship. I was not among them, but I’m still pretty happy as my own average rating from reviewers climbed almost two points (consider Poors 1, Fairs 2, Goods 3, Very Goods 4, and Excellents 5). I certainly haven’t gotten any smarter or more diverse in the past year — which was why I didn’t have high expections for my application this year –, the main thing that changed was that I found (and was able to join) a lab where I could do science I was excited about, and I’m guessing that excitement came through in my research proposal and personal statement.

There’s a lesson here for anyone entering grad school in the near future or currently rotating through labs: being exciting about the research you’re doing is important. It can make the difference between grad school being the hardest most miserable years of your life, or some of the best.

It was certainly a successful year for my department (Plant and Microbial Biology), with four current graduate students and several new incoming students recieving the award! Congratulations to everyone who got great news last night (or woke up to the news this morning).

If you’d like to search the awardee and honorable mention lists, they can be found here.

Was pointed at a website for popped sorghum marketed under the name popghum. The greater supposed advantages over normal popcorn are:

It’s got fewer calories and less fat than popcorn, and best of all, it has no hulls to get stuck in your teeth!

Website is very slick with lots of text recycled from page to page and without many confirmable details and you can’t actually place an order but the story stops just short of the being outrageous enough to be an obvious april fools prank.

I’d like this to be true (even though they use organic sorghum) because I’m almost as pro-sorghum as I am pro-corn, but I don’t even know if sorghum can be reliably popped. If you were ever been bored enough as a kid to try popping sweet or field corn, you too know what an unrewarding experience it is.