"Torsten Brinch" wrote in message
snip
Gordon, hypothetical commercial GM seed potatoes of the future, which
have not yet been developed into existence are not very good examples
of short development time of GM seeds. I am pretty sure Novartis is
referring to actual experience from developing actually existing
commercial GM varieties, when they say GM varieties generally take a
bit more time to develop than new conventionally bred varieties.

They have been trying for years and genetic engineering methods got it
done
when conventional breeding had failed time and time again.

See above. It's gone in by either method, however, the development
time for commercially available seeds with _Solanum bulbocastanum_
late blight resistance genetics is just not known. You can't use an
unknown development time to exemplify short development time, that
ought to be selfevident.

You don't need to produce seed to get blight restance into GM potatoes and
it is very difficult to get potatoes to produce seed and raise them from
seed for conventional breeding.

Gordon

Saving the Potato

Agweb.com
August 21, 2003
by Dean Kleckner

Biotechnology means there doesn't ever have to be another potato
famine--in Ireland or anywhere else.

More than one million Irish men, women, and children died when a deadly
disease ripped through their potato fields in the middle of the 19th
century. Another two million fled the country. Many of them became
immigrants to the United States.

The human toll of the Irish potato famine was ghastly. According to one
account, "Parish priests desperate to provide for their congregations were
forced to forsake buying coffins in order to feed starving families, with
the dead going unburied or buried only in the clothes they wore when they
died."

Even today, Ireland's population of nearly 4 million people is less than
it was before the terrible fungus called Phytophthora infestans wrought
its destruction on poor farmers.

A current legacy of the Irish potato famine is that Irish farmers don't
plant nearly as many potatoes as they once did. That massive crop failure
of 150 years ago has written itself into Irish culture so completely that
farmers on the Emerald Isle almost instinctively turn to other crops.

They've also learned the lesson of genetic diversity. The potato famine
was catastrophic in Ireland because farmers had unwittingly become
dependent on a single variety of potato. When disaster struck in the form
of a fungus, it wiped out just about every potato plant, rather than just
one kind among many.

Yet potato blight remains a problem almost everywhere potatoes are grown.
In the United States, some 1.5 million acres are devoted to potatoes, and
every kind of potato plant grown on them is vulnerable to fungal
infection.

That may soon change. Just last month a team of scientists at the
University of Wisconsin announced that they had found a gene in a wild
Mexican potato that protects against blight.

But they didn't just find the special gene and leave it alone. Instead,
they spliced it into new plants. They created genetically modified potato
plants that resist fungal infection.

"We think this could be very useful," said John Helgeson, a University of
Wisconsin professor who is also a research scientist with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.

Now that's a huge understatement.

This amazing discovery has the potential to revolutionize potato farming,
just as biotechnology has revolutionized corn and soybean farming in the
United States. If this technology had been widely available in the 1840s,
the history of Ireland, the United States, and even the world would be
drastically different.

Another Wisconsin professor, Jiming Jiang, pointed out that the commercial
applications of this discovery would rely upon genetic modification. "It
is almost impossible to create another Burbank variety, for example,
through conventional breeding," he said. "Your odds of getting the one
gene in would be like winning the lottery."

That's where biotechnology comes in--it's like rigging the lottery so that
everybody can win.

Some critics of biotechnology will say all this talk of genetic
modification sounds "unnatural." But they fail to realize that the history
of agriculture is nothing but the history of genetic modification. For
eons, farmers have crossbred their plants to create better crops.

This desire is what brought potatoes to Ireland in the first place. Potato
plants are native to South America--they arrived in Ireland sometime
during the 17th century. Anybody who wants to argue about "unnatural"
crops should start by acknowledging that there isn't anything "natural"
about potatoes in Ireland--or Idaho, or any of the other places we
associate with the plant.

The miracle of biotechnology is that we can continue to do what farmers
have done for untold generations--except that now we can make bigger leaps
in shorter spans of time.

Without biotechnology, we may not ever breed a potato that isn't
vulnerable to fungal epidemics, triggering the starvation that killed
millions of people in the past. With biotechnology, we're on our way to
getting there.

Some might say it's 150 years too late. I say it's better late than never.
..