Open Source GM Crops?
Gina Miller writes "Genetically-modified crops spotlight issues of safety, openness, and intellectual property that will become even more important with molecular nanotechnology. Some similar concerns are reflected in the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology.
UK report says gene crops could create superweed. Cross-pollination of seeds spilt during harvest allowed three varieties of genetically modified rapeseed plants to exchange herbicide resistance genes, creating a "superweed" resistant to all three herbicides. To avoid these superweeds that would be difficult to eliminate, the recommendation is that only one variety of herbicide resistance be used in genetically modified plants.
Panel Urges U.S. to Tighten Approval of Gene-Altered Crops. The caution recommended by the UK panel was reflected by a panel convened by the US National Academy of Sciences. Noting that biotechnology companies are developing new plants containing combinations of genes, or genes that cause the plant to produce industrial chemicals or other exotic materials, the panel concluded that testing of genetically altered plants should be made "significantly more transparent and rigorous." The panel's conclusion implies that public access to data should take precedence over the ability of companies to keep data confidential.
Can a company still profit from data it releases to the public? Swiss Firm Unveils Plan for Sharing Rice Genome One company poised to publish a "draft" (not completely finished) sequence for the genome of a variety of rice announced a compromise in which the company 'would freely share the information with researchers, but keep the right to license and patent commercial developments'. Other companies preparing sequences of other varieties of rice have promised completely free access to the information. How access to scientific information developed by for-profit entities will be handled is clearly an issue very much in flux: from open source software to biotechnology and gene patents. What will be the trade-offs as nanotechnology matures?"
April 17th, 2002 at 8:47 AM
GM crops are essentially open source
I think putting this collection of articles together is confusing a number of issues. Generally speaking, almost all engineering industries (microelectroncs, chemical engineering, biotechnology, etc.) are open source. You invent something and you patent it. There is very little trade secret (~= closed source) information in such industries. I strongly doubt that GM crops are "licensed" for use in ways that prevent people from reverse engineering (sequencing) their genomes (unlike the software licenses used by some software companies). In fact I expect that to get approval from various governments you have to provide data regarding exactly what modifications have been made to the genome. What isn't required is that you provide all of the genome sequence data because its currently prohibitively expensive to produce that for each GMO. At some point in the future, when sequencing an entire genome gets cheap enough that it isn't a significant cost relative to producing and gaining approval for the use of a GMO, I expect the approval agencies might require the full genome sequence.
As far as dealing with the cross-pollination issues, the way to ultimately solve the problem is to produce all GM crops using a different genetic code that produces gibberish if it somehow made its way into natural organisms (discussed in more detail here. It will be at least several years, perhaps a decade or more, before we are able to do that unfortunately. Even when we get to that point, it seems likely that the greens will scream that it is unacceptable because using such extensively engineered organisms violates the precautionary principle. What is necessary is to develop guidelines for GMOs that can be considered "generally recognized as safe". At this stage of technology development I can see merit for a guideline that would seek to reduce the chances of the development of superweeds by limiting the herbicide resistance genes used to produce GMOs which are able to cross pollinate with each other.