Have you ever seen a wild cornfield having sex with a bacterium? Do you think the people who planted and selected strains of hybrid corns in the 1950’s convinced those strains to have sex with a bacterium?
These ain’t Gregor Mendel’s hybrids.
In both open-pollinated and hybrid seeds,we have always been breeding crops that were genetically able to breed, like two types of stone fruit,or two varieties of squash,or two breeds of dog. But,unlike open pollinated seed selection or hybridization,GMO technology allows us to “play God” in a way that even Mother Nature hasn’t dared.
Today,with sophisticated and very expensive lab techniques (like retroviruses and gene guns),we can now manipulate and combine the DNA of species that could never,ever breed in nature—like fish and tomatoes, Brazil nuts and soybeans,or bacteria and corn. We can even genetically engineer cows to produce human breast milk
GMO corn developed by Monsanto,for example, includes genetic material from the bacterium Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), which kills European corn borers by punching holes in its gut lining....
Combining or splicing together genes from different organisms in the lab (without actually sexually breeding them) is known as recombinant DNA technology,and the resulting organism is said to be “genetically modified,” “genetically ..link