On May 7, I was in Calgary for the joint book launch of the first two titles of the Shadowpaw Press Spring/Summer list, The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer and The Traitor’s Son by the …
It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, turned to Crowdfundr to help ensure …
This year’s Kickstarter to fund Shapers of Worlds Volume V, the fifth in the series of anthologies featuring science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The Worldshapers, succeeded, reaching …
Well, I did it again: led the Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop (created by science fiction and fantasy author James van Pelt) at a writing conference, this time, Wordbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. Here’s the story I …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
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)