| No Kidding |
17 November 2003
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GM Foods Are Millennia Old
Turns out that that organically grown corn in the supermarket is actually genetically modified, every last kernal. Last week's Science magazine reported on a study of corn cobs recovered from various sites in Mexico and the southwestern US that proves three key variants were deliberately bred by farmers over thousands of years. While they weren't engaged in gene splicing, ancient Americans were deliberately modifying their crops for certain desirable traits.
One almost wants to say, "No kidding!" Farmers have been doing it forever, but the knee-jerk greens that worry about "Frankenfood" are so removed from the land that they need to be reminded of the agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago. So, in a nutshell: human beings are part of nature, their artifacts are completely natural (even the fast-breeder nuclear reactors), and evolution happens whether mankind takes a hand in it or not.
Originally, teosinte was a grass that had a lot of stems and smallish cobs with kernels covered in a hard sheath. That was some 9,000 years ago -- in a mere 3,500 years, the size of the edible kernel was appreciably larger. Around 2,400 BC, the genetic variants in modern corn were in the gene pool of the crops grown in Mexico. One genetic change made it a single stalk plant, another change softened the outer shell of the kernel (meaning it no longer passed through the gut of animals, which means it had to be deliberately planted by man), yet another change caused the kernels to stay on the cob more tightly. A further change made it easier to form it into tortillas because the starch structure was altered.
The study was undertaken by the Max Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany; the U.S. Department of Agriculture at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom; and the University of Wisconsin. It was financed by the Wellcome Trust, the US National Science Foundation, the German Ministry for Education and Research, and the Max Planck Society. A very impressive collection of scientific minds -- much like the MesoAmericans who modified teosinte into maize.
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