"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...

Marcus Williamson wrote in message
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GM cotton is less likely
to suffer yield losses than non-GM cotton when bollworms are the
yield-limiting factor.

Except that it doesn't work...


lot of talk of pests but no comment as to whether these pests were
susceptable to the GM cotton in the first place. If you want I have no
doubt monsanto can engineer the cotton to have a wider resistance to
even more pests.

A lot of conditions have to be met. The substance must be toxic to the bug,
non toxic to the plant and safe to the environment. Cotton already has
gossypol that is toxic to some insects and conventional breeding had bred
high gossypol cotton but it was not enough advantage to be worth the loss of
value in the seed. There have also been efforts to breed gossypol free
cotton for human consumption.

A new BT cotton is due out this year or next that is more toxic to worms and
should do better in areas with high worm pressure. There are a large number
of BT proteins that are toxic to worms and those proteins can be modified as
well. So that technology has just been scratched. There is also a new RR
cotton due out in 2006 that can be sprayed all through the season.

A toxin that was environmentally safe that killed sucking insects would be
extremely valuable in fighting aphids in many crops. But those are not
simple off the shelf solutions like BT and round up resistance were.

In the future they will probably find some other insecticide traits but in
the case of BT they took a protien that was well know and know to be safe
and went after the number one pest in the world. They took the easy ones
first. Round Up Ready was the same sort of thing. They could test for it by
spraying everything and if it lived is was resistant.

Gordon