GEO Watch | ‘Come to Jesus’ moments in the history of transgenics
Agricultural scientists ‘discover’ diversity-resilience link? AS TRANSGENIC TREADMILLS WEAR OUT, AGROECOLOGY LOOMS ON HORIZON Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | March 19, 2014 Even with biotech crops, farmers still need to make use of ageold practices such as crop rotation to fight insect pests. That’s the lesson to be drawn from the latest discovery of resistance to the pest-fighting toxins added to maize — also known as corn. - Brian Owens, Nature, March 17, 2014 The March 17 edition of Nature includes a review of recent research on rootworm resistance to transgenic corn (Gassmann et al 2014). The author of the Nature review Brian Owens opens with the comment that even biotech crop farmers “still need to make use of age-old practices such as crop rotation to fight insect pests.” I am intrigued by the implications of this statement as much as by rootworm resistance to Bt corn because this should open a window to the critique of biotechnology from the vantage point of a likely successor s...