GM crops created superweed, say scientists

[Pert_UK]

"Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant "superweed", the Guardian can reveal.

The cross-fertilisation between GM oilseed rape, a brassica, and a distantly related plant, charlock, had been discounted as virtually impossible by scientists with the environment department. It was found during a follow up to the government's three-year trials of GM crops which ended two years ago.

The new form of charlock was growing among many others in a field which had been used to grow GM rape. When scientists treated it with lethal herbicide it showed no ill-effects.

Unlike the results of the original trials, which were the subject of large-scale press briefings from scientists, the discovery of hybrid plants that could cause a serious problem to farmers has not been announced."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,1535428,00.html

[LisaL]

1. Oops!

[fasttense]

10. Great line lizzy

I hate weeding, I have to do it every other day here in East TN, even with the scorching weather. Great, now we got a super weed to have to pull. It can join with the Kudzu and take over the South.

[quisp]

2. where can I score some "superweed"?

:smoke:

[sweetheart]

12. Yea! and what would that be?

Maybe they could engineer a cannabis that reproduces by runner roots
like crabgrass, one that would remain dormant in the winter and sprout
anew with intense vigour. .. where are those superweeds!!! :-)

[Pystoff]

37. Oh shit yeah!

A cross bred cannabis-bermuda grass hybrid sweet! Let the feds try to stop that stuff here in the south...good freakin luck haha.

[fob]

42. You can play 18 holes on it in the morning and get stoned to the bejeezus

in the afternoon!

Carl the Groundskeeper has gone legit!

[Pystoff]

59. Hell yeah!

LOL freakin sweet!

[rabbit2484]

68. CANNONBALL!!!!!

[alfredo]

44. Isn't cannabis and hops from the same family?

[seemunkee]

47. Yes but no narcotic compounds in hops

[alfredo]

52. What would happen if you graft hops to cannibis, then use

the hops in beer.?

[seemunkee]

69. How the hell would I know. I'm just a home brewer

[alfredo]

72. How about some open source beer?

http://www.voresoel.dk/main.php?id=70


English info

What's this "Vores Øl"?
Vores Øl (Our Beer) is a great tasting energetic beer and it's the world's first open source beer! It is based on classic ale brewing traditions but with added guarana for a natural energy-boost.

Version 1.0 is a medium strong beer (6% vol) with a deep golden red color and an original but familiar taste.

Why Guarana?
The South American Guarana beans are a natural source of energy and health. Their stimulating effect nicely balances the drowsiness that is associated with beer. (The caffeine contents in each beer, approx. 35 mg, is lower than in a cup of coffee so you shouldn't have to worry about possible side effects.)

Is it a real beer?
Yes and no. You can't buy it in stores (at least not yet) and by the time you read this we have probably drank all the beer we brewed in the first batch. (It tasted good.)

But somewhere in the world someone might be using our recipe right now, and as long as they publish their version of the recipe they are free to sell it in a store near you...

[seemunkee]

77. Terrible recipe

[alfredo]

80. Make changes and submit it to them.

That's what it is all about.

[Pystoff]

60. Dunno

But if they are a weedbeer would be cool!

[kodi]

53. cross it with kudzu

you could sit on your porch stoned and actually watch the plant grow

[mom cat]

57. OK! All of you mad scientists get to work! Kudzu-juana! Bet it would make

good brownies.

[Pystoff]

61. Hehehe

Yeah or atleast swear you saw it grow Hahaha.

[acmejack]

15. Actually some was developed once.

They showed it in the second (I think) Cheech & Chong movie. Everyone who smoked it turned into a reptile...

[dArKeR]

81. Yes, it sure had a different meaning back in college!

[billbuckhead]

3. A culture of lemmings

[Pert_UK]

5. I know GM is bad, but I don't think there's a lemming/mould hybrid...

just yet!

Coming soon - Hamster Yoghurt...

:evilgrin:

P.

[Supersedeas]

20. it's a somewhat 'controlled' jump

[meganmonkey]

4. Reason #8,354,981

to BAN GM SEEDS!

BUY ORGANIC!!!

[tanyev]

6. Nobody could have ever predicted something like that happening....

:eyes:

[KurtNYC]

16. Here are the scientists who said it couldn't happen...

They have a map of the universe - what could go wrong?! (Time Bandits)

[Sparkman]

25. Now I do believe I have seen c o n c e n t r a t e d eeeevvvillll

DONT GET ANY ON YA!

[donco6]

31. Mum! Dad! Don't touch it! It's EEEEvil.

Love that movie.

[mtnester]

21. Murphy's Law

nuff said

[SpiralHawk]

7. "D'oh" - Global Geno-Chem Corp

Corporate slogo: "Mutation for the Masses; Megabucks for Republican Corporations."

[KittyWampus]

24. CReating A Master Race Is Never A Good Idea, Be It Human Or Plant

:(

[ixion]

8. gee, didn't see something like that coming

:eyes:


Humans: amazing powers of conception, but absolutely no vision. :-(

[elehhhhna]

9. Nom'd. n/t

[Richard Steele]

11. Super-Nomm'd!

[Spider Jerusalem]

13. Well, that's just lovely...

and 'the discovery of hybrid plants that could cause a serious problem to farmers has not been announced'? Um...so were they planning on not saying anything until the West Country was overrun with this stuff? Sounds like a brilliant plan, there...

[enough]

14. What did they expect?

[Village Idiot]

17. Hmmm....this isn't the topic I thought it was....

[Walt Starr]

18. NAture alwasy has a way... n/t

[leesa]

19. As predicted by nearly everyone. Where are the genetic

modification worshippers now?

[DavidDvorkin]

22. "Greener than You Think"

A terrific science-fiction novel that was published 50 or so years ago. As I remember, it was about a guy who comes up with a super growth formula for plants, and the result is a super grass that takes over the world.

I hope I'm remembering the title correctly. It seemed a bit far out at the time, but, gee . . .

[NYC]

71. Written by Ward Moore, 1947?

Starting with Greener Than You Think (1947), a comic disaster novel in which a commercially mutated form of grass proliferates until it takes over the entire world, Moore established himself as a remarkable and thoughtful writer.

Breathe the Air (1942) mainstream novel
Greener than You Think (1947)
Bring the Jubilee (1955) (we highly recommend this)
Joyleg: A Folley(1962) with Avram Davidson
Caduceus Wild (1978) with Robert Bradford
Lot & Lot's Daughter (1996) recommended

http://www.tachyonpublications.com/author/Ward_Moore.html?Session_ID=new&Reference_Page=/authors.html

[DavidDvorkin]

74. That's it!

A terrific novel. At least, so I remember, not having read it for decades.

[Pert_UK]

23. Some further info, e.g. there are no commercial GM farms in the UK

"No GM crops are currently grown commercially in the UK. Companies who wish to introduce them face a series of licensing hurdles in Britain and Europe and interest has waned in recent years amid public opposition.

Other firms have dropped applications in the wake of the government field scale trials that showed growing two GM varieties - oilseed rape and sugar beet - was bad for biodiversity.

The EU has approved several GM varieties and the UK government insists that applications will be considered on a case-by-case basis...

Where are GM crops grown?

Extensively in the wide open spaces of the US, Canada and Argentina. In Europe, Portugal, France and Germany have all dabbled with GM insect-resistant maize. Spain plants about 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of it each year for animal feed."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,1535428,00.html

[nolabels]

26. It only takes one mutant to change an entire species

http://www.thismodernworld.com/pages/prospectarc.html

o.j. stupid: bush's iraq gambit

The Bush White House is either Stupid Stupid or OJ Stupid. Stupid Stupid if they are genuinely protecting vital US interests while not muzzling Karl Rove and Andrew Card (and not hiding a clearly uncomfortable Colin Powell). OJ Stupid if all of that chaos was meant to make us suspicious of the administration's motives, while dismissing the obvious because it's just too skeevy to be contemplated.

While presently enjoying a 70% job approval rating, George W. Bush has, for me, been an at best mediocre president. At worst, he is a menace to this Great Society. A man who causes the Dow Jones to tailspin every time he makes a major speech. Literally. I'm not kidding. Since taking office, when I wrote this essay, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost 27% of its worth, investors losing $5 trillion (yes, with a "T") in wealth. The unemployment rate has gone from 4.2% to 5.7%, and the nation's $281 billion surplus has become a $157 billion deficit. Not all of that can or should be laid at the feet of Bush, mind you, but a good deal of our economic malaise can be directly attributed to the Blunderer In Chief, a man who almost single-handedly plunged the country into recession with careless and, frankly, untrue statements during his Florida wrestling match with Al Gore (Bush, trying to position himself as the more deserving contestant, downplayed the Clinton market boom and created doubt about the economy that became a self-fulfilling prophecy once the Supremes awarded him the Oval Office. I mean, what was the man thinking? Of course, if the man who says, "We're in financial trouble," is seated in the White House, the markets would respond, creating as fact Bush's jumbled, paranoid hyperbole).

No one wants to believe the president is an incompetent boob. Nobody really believed Gerald Ford was a stumblebum or Ronald Reagan was reading off cue cards, and Richard Nixon, despite cruel caricatures, was a great intellectual and great statesman. George W. Bush has yet to demonstrate any of those qualities. He lacks the fatherly reassurance of a Bill Clinton— as imperfect as Bubba was, I still find comfort in his rational exploration of the issues. Bush has yet to learn how to inform without panicking us. How to lead without bull-in-China-closet collateral damage
(snip)
http://phonogram.us/viewpoint.htm

[Pert_UK]

28. That's my best chat-up line......

:evilgrin:

P.

[H5N1]

27. Franken Berry

Sweet strawberry flavor cereal AND marshmallow bits.
How bad can it be?

[Mairead]

29. "discounted as virtually impossible by scientists"

I sometimes think some scientists don't really understand the concept of probability and randomness very well! To say something has only a 1 in 1G chance doesn't mean it can't happen ten minutes from now, but rather that if it does happen ten minutes from now, then we should be fairly safe from it happening again for awhile. But not perfectly safe--it could happen ten or a hundred times running, with all the non-happening pushed out into the future such that after those ten or a hundred times, it never happens again within the lifespan of the universe.

There's a vanishingly small probability of a giant asteroid striking the earth and obliterating the dominant lifeform...but it happened all the same, 65M years ago.

We need to have laws to prevent money-hungry nitwits from dicking around with the food supply.

[PATRICK]

34. " million to one that anyone could cheat"

One "scientist" advocate for touchscreens talking scientific turkey about the security of voting. It seems when you buy a scientist you get his mouth but not his brain or the proper scientific method.

It is a separate issue but for the requisite PR inclusion of "experts" and scientists who give a meaningless seal of approval without credible thought or evidence being needed after that.

If your health, food, air and water and civil government is decided by this kind of shoddy business method, I can scientifically guarantee we will be dying in spectacular fashion in great numbers all through this century, distracting wars aside.

[Inland]

73. You would think that biologists with a working knowledge of evolution

would understand that a small probability times millions of organisms times years equals all sorts of amazing things.

[DemBones DemBones]

79. They get too sure of themselves, think they can outwit evolution.

Bad idea.

[IA_Seth]

30. Oh man...

This is bad news, and who would have ever thought "Superweed" could be a bad thing

[anotherdrew]

32. this should be the end of GM crops hopefully...

the weed isn't red by any chance is it?

[54anickel]

33. "Feed Me!!!" Was all I could think of when reading this.

[youspeakmylanguage]

35. Biotech is Godzilla!

Cut-throat corporations
Don’t give a damn
When lots of people die
from what they’ve made!

Biotech
Biotech
Biotech
Is Godzilla!

(The unholy alliance of Jello Biafra and Sepultura. Not exactly Shakespeare, but it works.)

[SheepyMcSheepster]

36. cool! pack up the bong!

.......oh, wrong kind of super weed......

:silly:

[sakabatou]

38. Hands up to how many saw this coming?

[Mairead]

40. You'll get a smaller number of hands if you ask how many DIDN'T (nt)

[MountainLaurel]

39. X-Post to Environment/Energy forum thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x27455

[slutticus]

41. !

:smoke:

[Zorra]

43. Not Good. Very, very bad. Junior needs strict supervision when he plays

with matches.

[moondust]

45. Bionic kudzu!

:scared:

[rayofreason]

46. Website for Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

This is the center mentioned in the Gaurdian article

http://www.ceh.ac.uk/index.html

I've looked, but have been unable to find the paper refered to by the article. Anyone else had luck finding the original source?

[MisterP]

48. it's The Colour Out of Space! run!

[NickB79]

49. How do they know the superweeds developed from cross-pollination?

I read the entire article, and there was no mention of the specific genes inserted into the rapeseed to make it herbicide-resistant being found in the charlock. All it says is that the charlock is resistant to the herbicide used to kill it.

Halfway through the article one researcher stated:

"Unlike the researchers I am not surprised by this. If you apply herbicide to plants which is lethal, eventually a resistant survivor will turn up."

The glufosinate-ammonium herbicide used in this case put "huge selective pressure likely to cause rapid evolution of resistance"."

This sounds more like he is attributing the resistance to naturally occurring mutants rather than hybrids.

I also noted that at the bottom of the article it states:

"Farmers in Canada and Argentina growing GM soya beans have large problems with herbicide-resistant weeds, though these have arisen through natural selection and not gene flow through hybridisation."

They haven't offered any evidence yet that it was due to cross-species gene transfer and not natural mutations and selection of that mutation. I wish they would have made that more clear in the news story; hopefully more info, such as definitive DNA testing, will be released soon to clear this up.

[arikara]

50. Something like that is swept under the rug

here in Canada. The canola itself which has been engineered to withstand spraying by Monsanto's roundup has spread all over the place where it is not wanted on the prairies. Its considered a superweed.

I went and saw Percy Schmeiser speak about this. He's one of the farmers that Monsanto went after and he's the one who fought back.

http://www.percyschmeiser.com/

[Spinzonner]

51. Anybody wanna rent "Day of the Triffids" ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids

[BiggJawn]

54. We're fucked! All your BASF belong to Monsanto...

Wanna bet they start pushing Charlock as the next Arigula?

[Burried News]

55. Dayum - Let's cross Kudzu and Milkweed

Maybe we can get the Butterflies back.

Heeyel Merica can do anythang it sets a mind to. All that ruckus about Frankensteen Corn ... pure bullshit I tellya.

Or maybe Yasuppoze we could cross Kudzu and Poison Ivee and plant it all long our borders to keep the terrists out?

[applegrove]

56. This is exactly what we were worried about. We have no idea what

we will do to the environment. And super crops are for the most part not resistant to weeds - they can just accept 5 times more 'weed killer' than other plants. So now we have weeds that match that.

Plants are smart. Humans it seems are dumb as rocks.

[NuttyFluffers]

58. *sigh* back onto the "I TOLD YOU SO!" bus...

getting very crowded on there. and my ass is getting tired riding all the time. *sigh*

along with the report of GM corn in Mexico where its DNA ended up in everything from bees, other crops of corn, to essentially the entire food chain where it's grown now... y'know, it's like the dumbasses didn't realize that all these other living things *INTERACT* with the GM crop field. everything that is exposed to it is open to more chance of mutation by exposure of modified stuff mutating reproductive gametes, etc...

whatever, i'll just go back on the bus and hopefully we can switch up to 3rd gear and ram a clue into some people... some people just need to be smacked around a bit before any sense can enter.

[struggle4progress]

62. "It's perfectly safe. We know better than you. Don't worry your little ..

.. head about it. Nothing can go wrong. There's no reason to be concerned. You just don't understood this subject. We're the experts. Don't be so irrational. Every possibility has been thoroughly investigated. Mechanisms of speciation known in wild plants couldn't apply to GM plants. I haven't heard about any problems. It's just a minor problem. Of course, nobody said that nothing could go wrong. The fact that we discovered these weeds proves that our experiments have been successful. It's perfectly safe. We know better than you. Don't worry your little head about it. Nothing major can go wrong. There's no reason to be very concerned. You just don't understood this subject. We're the experts. Don't be irrational. We're thoroughly investigating every possibility. It's just a fluke. It won't happen again. Nobody ever said that this couldn't happen again. It won't happen that often. Everything's completely under control. This sort of thing has happened before. This sort of thing happens all the time. This is really a very common and nothing to worry about. It's perfectly safe. We know better than you. Don't worry your little head about it. We're keeping a watchful eye on these carnivorous daffodils. They're perfectly safe. We know better than you ..."

[Nothing Without Hope]

63. A very serious development. Nominated and bookmarked.

Part of the problem is the meaning of the word "never" in a natural setting where there are millions of opportunities for an unlikely event to occur. The exchange of DNA was probably a very rare event, but under selective pressure - the application of the herbicides - the resistant strains had an advantage and could spread rapidly. In this situation, "almost never" is vastly different from "truly never." Sounds like either the scientists were overconfident in their assumptions or - more likely, from my own experience as a biotech research scientist - management overruled their cautions as unnecessary. Would be interesting to look at internal documents/emails. I'll bet some scientists expressed concerns that were swept aside.

[Thor_MN]

64. Frame the argument properly!!!

Tell the conservatives that it has something to do with rape, and cross-fertilization. Since ANYTHING that involves sex is inherently evil, they will be protesting it in the streets.

[depakid]

65. It was obvious that brassica's would cross breed

They are- to put it in the vernacular- promiscuous plants.

I expect to see much more of this type of thing in the coming years, because if there aren't even the most basic AND SENSIBLE precautionary principles in place to deal with brassica's, then pretty much anything goes.

Sort of like not having a fire code and expecting that buildings won't burn down (with tons of people inside).

[pitohui]

66. don't get my hopes up like that dude EOM

.

[Endangered Specie]

67. Look on the bright side, maybe it will kill Kudzu

:sarcasm:

[barb162]

70. That's what I think is in my back yard

I swear you cannot dig deeply enough to get the entire root.

[kestrel91316]

75. REEAAALLLLL BIG surprise here kiddies ....... now move along

[Eugene]

76. Researchers: Nothing to see here. Move along!

Scientists play down 'superweed'

Scientists have urged caution over a study which may have found a
so-called "superweed" growing at a site where GM crops had been
trialled.

<snip>

But researchers said their work showed the chances of such transfer
were slim.

What is more, they argued, the study reinforced the view that the
environmental impact was negligible.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4715221.stm


Because the superweed failed to produce viable offspring (yet),
GM plants are perfectly safe. Suuuuure!

That plant produced many seeds and some of them may germinate
over the next 30 years.

[DemBones DemBones]

78. The defenders of GMO's seem to be absent

from this thread.

[meganmonkey]

82. I noticed that too...

usually at least one or two show, with links to Monsanto-funded research as back-up.

I like this thread better, full of pot jokes and no flame-wars! :)