Ann: I checked out your homepage and I am just printing one of the papers;
it will take some time to read them all!
I've found the reference to Bergelson et al., Promiscuity in transgenic
plants, Nature 395, 25 (1998). I was unable to access the full text on the
Nature web site, so I don't have the whole paper, but only the first
paragraph, whose last sentence is
"Here, however, we report results of a field experiment in which transgenic
A. thaliana showed a dramatically increased ability to donate pollen to
nearby wild-type mothers compared with A. thaliana mutants expressing the
same mutant allele as the transgenic plants."
Without having studied the whole paper, I can say nothing. I hope that "the
same mutant allele" means that the mutant allele in the mutants has been
sequenced and then inserted in the transgenic; however, the *real control*
of the experiment is mutants transformed with the construct *without* the
allele, I cannot know if it has been used.
I say pseudo-science when the control is not given. In your web paper you
wrote "Per-plant outcrossing rate was 0.3% for mutant fathers compared to
6% for transgenic fathers [...]", and this is NOT pseudo-science, but the
correct way to expose the results.
I really enjoyed the cow!
Maurizio
"Be part of the solution,
not the problem."
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