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

As promised: pictures from the berkeley botanical gardens.

Check out the cool, the weird, and the gorgeous.

Bart’s a wonderful system. I caught the 6:15 train from Berkeley and by seven o’clock I’m at this quickly little bar/coffee shop in the Mission district of San Francisco called the Revolution Cafe. The place was standing room only to listen to a talented singer from Anchorage, Alaska named Marian Call.

I found out about her through a CD of songs themed around Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, but her songs (and singing voice) are wonderful even when they don’t have the geek bonus. Best geeky song she played tonight was definitely “Vera flew the coop”, with best non-geeky going to one of her new songs about living in a basement apartment in Alaska, you’ll have to forgive me for not placing the name. I ended up buying a CD in addition to the optional cover charge. It’s so much more rewarding to support artists who are willing to sacrifice for their work, and when the money actually goes to the singer, not a bunch of obsolete middlemen at a record label.

Here’s one of her songs, (this one is geeky, be warned):

The only problem was that the venue so small that I kept accidentally making eye contact with Marian during songs. I have no idea what the protocol is in that situation. Since my solution to break awkward eye contact has always been to take a drink, I ended up going through a fair bit more beer than I would otherwise.

“You guys don’t understand. You have already lost. My generation doesn’t care.”

The leader of the senate in Iowa, the state I was born and raised in, refusing to co-sponsor an amendment to the state constitution to ban gay marriage, and telling the story of his daughter confronting a bunch of old conservative men talking about how horrible marriage equality is, reminding them that her generation (my generation) has bigger things to worry about. Which is reflected in the fact that the Iowan demographic most in favor of marriage equity in Iowa is voters under 30 with 58% in favor, and only one in seven (around 15%) opposed.

In one week I’ve had my car and windows PC die on me. Last night the parts I needed to fix the computer came, and this morning it’s back up and running. I’m going to make an attempt at the car on Monday or Tuesday depending on when the equipment I need arrives (thank you Amazon!).

I thought it was interesting to look at the physical differences of the two graphics cards. Don’t worry, no jumble of technical specs coming.

My previous graphics card is the blue one on the right, and the new one is the red one of the left. Notice the difference? The old one is a beast of a machine. Its big, powerful, and has a frankly ridiculous looking heat sink. My newer acquisition is about a year newer, but rather than get a bigger, more powerful card, I was able to get one that was only about 90% as powerful, can output to HDMI (in case ever need to hook this computer up to the TV), is passively cooled (meaning less noise and less energy), and costs about a third of what I payed for the last one!

Just goes to show how you can do things differently when you focus on quiet, power efficient PCs instead of wanting the biggest baddest PC to brag to your friends about.

Now a friend of mine who shall go unnamed has a really cool desktop computer that probably beats all of my computers combined (for video gaming). He has to leave the side off his computer case or the whole thing overheats. Would you believe he almost never even turns it on because his wife doesn’t like what it does to their electrical bill? ‘Nuf said…

After a little experimentation to compensate for the fact that it didn’t seem worth it to go out and buy a cast iron pot, I’ve gotten the No-Knead bread recipe that was all the rage on food blogs two years ago to work for me. It’s a very simple recipe calling for only two ingredients flour and salt (four if you count water and the tiniest amount of store bought yeast for the first batch), and it makes a tasty and attractive bread:

It’s a starkly simple food. The sort of staple our ancestors depended on to stave off hunger and give them strength thousands of years ago. And it really is bread (well wheat really) along with a couple of other grasses that gave the human race the surplus food to build civilizations. Everything that has come since rests on the backs of wheat (and rice and corn).

A single pound of corn contains 2400 calories -presumably the figure for wheat or rice is comparable, but corn in what I know- and an acre of corn can easily produce 9000 pounds (4.5 tons!) of corn, enough to meet the caloric needs of 29 and a half people. Now those people still need a patch of vegetables as the big three staple grains aren’t great sources of micronutrients and some essential amino acids (although the latter can be partially addressed by treating the corn with alkali compounds, a trick used by the Mayans), but the energy needs an individual person can be met in a field of grain smaller than the average size of a newly built american house. (less than 1500 square feet vs 2,349) 

Today grains are under attack as “empty calories” in some parts of society, and considered good for nothing but animal feed in others, take a moment to consider all the aspects of civilization you’re grateful for, and how they can all trace their roots back to the surpluses of food and labor created by three grasses: wheat, rice, and maize.**

*Of course you have to use the King James version. The New International makes the phrase “all men are like grass” which ruins my attempt to tie it in with this entry.

**With apologies to the potato. I’ll write you your own post one of these days.

I was worried for a moment that the first plants grown on the surface of the moon were going to be arabidopsis. After all they were described only as “Seeds for a rapid-cycle type of Brassica plant – basically, mustard seeds”, but further digging turned up that these are just a breed of Brassica rapa marketed as “fast plants.” Kind of cool actually. A generation time of only fourteen days.

So it’s a day late and a dollar short but I wanted to mention to two bloggers I had the chance to meet at the Maize Meeting a couple of weeks ago. Anastasia Bodnar writes Genetic Maize, and Karl Mogel Karl Haro von Mogel writes Inoculated Mind, (and also makes his own corn pattern shirts!) and the two of them are both contributors to Biofortified along with Pamela Ronald, the author of Tomorrow’s Table, a book on the shared goals of genetic engineering and organic agriculture that I can’t recommend enough. 

It was a real pleasure to meet a couple of people who are really dedicated to communicating what we do as scientists to the general public. It was something I’d intended to do part time with this blog, but writing articles that actually inform takes a lot of work. From the search terms that bring in traffic to this blog, I can tell some of my traffic really is coming here looking for information of research. So I’m going to be making a minor layout change to this blog and add a list of blogs by those who really are blogging about plant genetics. These will be the first blogs I enter on that list.

By this time I’m going to hope that anyone following the show has watching the series finale. If you do follow the show but haven’t watched the end yet, stop now.

If you have no intention of watching the show, here’s briefly what happened: In the final half hour of the show the survivors of an apocalyptic war arrive at Earth 150,000 years in the past, inhabited only by pre-lingual humans living in hunter gatherer tribes. They land and make plans for beginning to rebuild their civilization. But no, one guy has a great idea, why don’t they give up all their technology and go back to the land. And so that’s what they do. Burn their ships, throw away their computers, give up “their little luxuries” as one character describes their technology.

It’s easy to see human progress as nothing more than a desire for luxuries and a more comfortable life. To do so overlooks the far more fundamental motivator of technology and progress; battling starvation disease and death. The writers of Battlestar Galactica leave us with the implication that it’s simple enough to walk into a pristine wilderness with nothing but the clothes on our backs and, as long as we’re willing to give up the little luxuries, live a long and enjoyable life. And it frightens me to imagine how many people actually believe that. Because in the show people don’t make the decision individually. One group (a majority?) makes the decision for everyone in the fleet and all the unborn generations to come.

Imagine the man who depends for survival on a medicine that is synthesized in the medical department of one of the ships send callously into the sun. Or a newlywed woman from a family prone to difficult births. Or the parents of a handicapped child, who would be unable to hunt or grow food in a pre-technology society. But the society you belong to has not just renounced their “sinful” technology, but destroyed it root and branch to prevent any hint of dissent, and who cares if a few are sacrificed, willingly or otherwise, on the path to rightiousness.

But that’s just a few people, right? Most of them should be fine in this new life as farmer/hunter/gatherers, no? Except leaving aside the risk of dying from conditions that are completely treatable in modern society (bust appendixes, cuts that get infected, serious allergic reactions), what are they going to eat?

Farming is hard work. It requires specialized knowledge (that most of the members of a technological civilization don’t possess), doing it well requires proper tools (I was waiting for the scene where someone goes “d’oh! Why didn’t we make some practically indestructable plow blades and hoe heads out of modern alloys before we sent all our metal and tools to melt in the center of the sun!”), and most importantly it requires that one actually have crops to grow. 

No matter how hard you look, you won’t find corn growing in the wild. Or wheat. Or potatoes. The domestication of staple crops like these is one of the real gifts we receive from our ancestors*, a gift that was thousands of years in the making. Without domesticated crops, it doesn’t matter how good the tools you have are, it doesn’t matter how much you know about farming. Without those crops, there is no way to survive other than boom and bust life of a migratory hunter/gatherer, a niche the native humans already occupy.

In the end it’s just a TV show, but I fear that the ideals and ignorance put forward in that last half hour reflect the worldview of far too many of my peers who don’t that technology is the frail barrier between all of us and miserable deaths from disease, starvation, and injury, and idealize the idea of a more natural existence.

*Phrasing stolen shamelessly from an interview on Modern Marvels.

If you have a couple of free minutes, check out Pamela Ronald’s new post on Michelle Obama’s organic garden and the limits of organic agriculture as it is currently defined. If you do, be sure to scroll down to the bottom to see the comparison between organically grown sweet corn and sweet corn engineered to resist pests. Sweet corn is one of the crops where a significant fraction of consumers actually prefer to purchase GM over organic, because GM sweet corn will have substantially less worm damage than corn produced using organic or conventional techniques.

Still, I love the symbolism of it, and though it will be costly (vegetables harvested from showcase gardens such as the Obamas’ are much more expensive than produce from an organic commercial farm), it will provide a great education tool for the fifth graders that will help tend the farm and for White House visitors.

I hope one of her assistants plants some corn and teaches them about insects and disease. She can show them how to feel the tip of a mature ear to see if it is filled out. As we described in “Tomorrow’s Table”, they may discover some ears with hollow spots created where a corn earworm has been feeding. 

…

The corn earworm is not a picky eater and will eat almost any crop that we rotate in such as tomatoes, beans, or lettuce, and the adult moth is a good flyer. Even conventional breeding has failed to solve this problem because scientists have not yet been able to find a corn gene that gives protection from earworm. So organic controls dont work very well for the corn earworm making it difficult to control this pest on organic farms. Most organic farmers and consumers accept this problem in exchange for the benefits of not spraying insecticides. 

A friend of mine from back during my own years of torment recently sent an essay on why nerds (almost almost everyone else) are miserable in middle and high school.

I really recommend it to anyone who remembers there own unpleasant experiences from back then, or who remembers having to deal with their own offspring wasting their precious non-school hours explained repeatedly, and at long length just how terrible the whole process was.

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

…

Adults can’t avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don’t they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. … There’s nothing wrong with the system; it’s just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

I’m suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it’s physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I’ve read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century.