I’m thrilled to announce that I’m up for two Aurora Awards this year! Fireboy is on the ballot for Best Young Adult Novel, and The Worldshapers is once again on the ballot for Best Fan …
I spent a good chunk of today at Wordbridge, the annual writers’ conference in Lethbridge, Alberta. My main reason for coming was to launch a Shadowpaw Press title (Broken Realm by Jenna Greene, a Lethbridge …
This is Easter weekend; last weekend, I sang in the Easter concert of First Baptist Church here in Regina as a guest soloist and chorister. The whole concert is worth listening to, but if you’d …
I put a link to this in the previous post on my Aurora-eligible work for 2025, but wanted to highlight it. This was my contribution to the Shapers of Worlds Volume V anthology, and it …
The Aurora Awards are Canada’s best-known science fiction and fantasy awards, voted on by fans every year. I’ve been fortunate enough to win twice, for Marseguro (DAW Books) (soon coming out in a new edition from Tuscany …
Put this under the category of “things I’ve meant to do for a long time”: I finally published (under my Endless Sky Books imprint) a new edition of The Haunted Horn, a modern-day middle-grade ghost …
Previous
Next
Genetically modified grapes
Would you drink wine from genetically modified grapes?
I would. They’re not talking about putting in genes from spider monkeys or some such; just speeding up the kind of genetic development that would otherwise take decades of work, trying to get genes for, say, disease resistance from one kind of grape to another without altering the wine-making characteristics of the recipient grape.
The grapes wine are made of are already the result of, in some cases, centuries of cross-breeding. There’s nothing particularly “natural” about most of them, in that they didn’t evolve to their present state purely through natural processes; they had help from humans.
So what’s the difference?
(Via Fermentation.)
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2006/06/genetically-modified-grapes/
2 comments
Paula,
Good points. But I’d still be willing to give wine from genetically engineered grapes a try. I think the risk is vanishingly small. As I suspect is the risk from GMO corn.
Hi Ed
The difference between genetically modified food organisms and cross-bred food organisms can be considerable.
You missed our discussion on “FrankenFood” at ConVersion last year. We had a lab tech in the crowd, from a company that produces genetically modified food organisms. She kept the discussion from heading off into rants and foaming at the mouth.
Put simply, Ed, if you have a mother plant and a father plant, you end up with a seed. We’re used to that process. Choosing the parents and selecting among the offspring gets some pretty damned good results.
But if you insert genes into the chromosomes of an existing cell, you do NOT necessarily put ’em where they work best. Genes serve multiple purposes in a living cell or organism, not just the one we selected. That “insertion” used to be pretty much a shotgun affair, but lately (according to that lab tech) they get pretty precise about location.
Genetically modified food organisms are probably okay to eat. We need way more testing to figure that out for sure. Some GMO foods are going to be fine, but others may not. And after many mouse generations have eaten GMO corn, I’ll feel way better about how much of it is in processed food. (that is, pretty much all processed food has corn products, and most of it these days is GMO corn)