Bart:
You said: I suspect that a shift in outcrossing has occured as the result of
conventional breeding as well. Nobody looked for it because they
weren't freaked out by the breeding method. Your point about not
knowing what to look for, though well taken, is not particularly
cogent because nobody has been looking for this stuff in conventional
breeding.
I respond: I am not a breeder, but I have asked crop breeders about the relative
probability of these types of wholly unrelated events (pleiotropy, epistasis, gene:gene
interactions) occurring in conventional vs. transgenic breeding. The responses ranged
from "don't know" to "more likely" to "much more likely" for transgenic breeding-
specifically because what the transgene does is upset the ordering/interactions of
existing genes. This, apparently happens to a much lesser degree in conventional
crossingover and recombination events. Just intuitively, this made sense to me because
unless a given genome actually benefitted from horrifically diverse trait expression
occurring with each crossover/recombination event, normal crossingover would retain the
inherent "orderliness", upon which status quo gene expression depends. Order is ignored
with transgenic breeding.
I will also mention, from breeders with colleagues in the industry, that an inordinant
amount of breeder time is spent in weeding out the visible "off-types", the unintended
trait expressions that are an inherent feature of transgenic breeding. Of course the
invisible or facultative traits would go unnoticed, except by the farmers who have to
deal with the "misses" in their own fields (see Laird talk for examples). I don't think
I've heard of fundamental "off-types" from conventionally bred cultivars affecting large
numbers of farmers, analogous to the 30,000 ac of RR cotton that had the bolls fall off
in 1997 - have you?
I am out of my depth on this, so will not comment further on this specific issue, and
would refer you to the numerous papers I cite in the Laird talk, already noted. I would
ask breeders on the list for their comments as well.
> *My* biggest concern about GMO food is that the most common "truck" for
> moving genes around seems to be cauliflower mosaic virus, the genetic
> make-up of which bears enough similarity to HIV that certain nightmare
> scenarios can't be entirely dismissed.
You've provided a good illustration of yet another inherent "process" feature which
distinguishes GMO from conventional breeding, and another reason to distance ourselves
from all GMO's until such issues can be addressed. Ann
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