Ron Bailey at Reason Hit and run Blog:
Though poorly known, radiation breeding has produced thousands of useful mutants and a sizable fraction of the world’s crops, Dr. [Pierre] Lagoda [the head of plant breeding and genetics at the International Atomic Energy Agency,] said, including varieties of rice, wheat, barley, pears, peas, cotton, peppermint, sunflowers, peanuts, grapefruit, sesame, bananas, cassava and sorghum. The mutant wheat is used for bread and pasta and the mutant barley for beer and fine whiskey.
Lagoda who irradiates plants to produce mutants is being somewhat disingenuous when he says, "I’m not doing anything different from what nature does." True, mutations occur in nature all of the time, but it seems somewhat doubtful that plants out in a field experience anywhere near the number of uncharacterized mutations produced in a lab by gamma rays.
But I couldn't just shut up - I had to ask:
If anti-biotechies are so afraid of genetic changes in their foods, why aren't they out protesting varieties produced by means of mutation breeding?
Now French anti-biotech activists, filled with pent up antinomian fury over something or other, have now heeded my question. They are now destroying "hidden GMOs" - that is crop varieties produced by mutation breeding. French biologist Marcel Kuntz reports:
Having no GM crops or trials to destroy in France (since there are almostno GMO culture any longer in this country, apart from two small field trials), anti-GMO activists have found a new enemy: on Saturday July 24 2010 at Sorigny and St. Branchs (Indre-et-Loire, France), they vandalized plots of sunflowers they termed as « mutated » and herbicide tolerant.They are not GM, but opponents call them "hidden-GMOs" to continue to use the arguments successfully developed against GMOs and to mobilize their supporters...@ French Anti-Biotech Protests Achieve A Glorious State of Sheer Lunacy - Hit & Run : Reason.com:
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