New GMO Wheat

Oh boy here we go again. A recent article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch had the headline GMO wheat in the works again. Are we ready? It turns out that Monsanto is trying to develop wheat that’s resistant to three different herbicides. The article reported that there is an intensive effort on the part of Monsanto to use breeding and gene manipulation to make a new kind of wheat. I wonder how that’s going to go over with the Chinese and all of our other trading partners throughout the world, to say nothing of our own public. Listen to a recent statement by Oklahoma State professor Dr. Jayson Lusk who found a comparison to the famous Las Vegas ad campaign. “ What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that, at least historically, production agriculture has operated in much the same way… what happens on the farm stays on the farm.” Not so much anymore what with social media, a distrusting public and the like. Is this new venture even more GMO than the GMO we already have? Genetically modified organisms or GMO’s are called transgenic because genes are altered through the insertion of foreign DNA. What about the work I recently discovered in a company called Cibus Global where they are working on non-transgenic gene editing. Dave Voss, Vice President of Commercial Development at Cibus: “While we do not insert any foreign DNA into the plant. Some people are looking for non-transgenic alternatives for food stock.” I don’t have a strong opinion on any of this, but a lot of people do.