1. Rice genome seen bringing seeds revenues in 5 years
2. SEEDS OF DISSENT - what's wrong with genome sequencing?
For the limitations of genome sequencing see item 2. Also it is, of course, entirely possible to use genomics to assist and speed up conventional plant breeding without any of the risks of transgenes.
As to the real face of the "charitable" Syngenta - see the following Action Aid reports available as pdfs:
Syngenta: Switching off farmers' rights? Traitor Technology threatens the rights and interests of poor farmers in the developing world. http://www.actionaid.org/pdf/syngenta.pdf
AstraZeneca [part of Syngenta] and its genetic research: feeding the world or fuelling hunger? A comprehensive critique of one of the world's largest companies and its involvement in GM crop research. http://www.actionaid.org/pdf/astrazeneca.pdf
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1. Rice genome seen bringing seeds revenues in 5 years
ZURICH, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Syngenta International AG and Myriad Genetics Inc, announcing on Friday they had finished mapping the rice genome, said they expected the findings to bring revenues from new seeds in about five years.
"We expect plant breeders to use this information, to have an impact on new varieties, in the next approximately five years," Steve Briggs, President of the Torry Mesa Research Institute where the research was done, told journalists in a conference call.
Syngenta was formed last year by merging the agribusiness activities of Novartis AG and AstraZeneca Plc.Syngenta is the world's largest crop protection company and number three in the market for important commercial seeds. The findings unveiled on Friday are expected to create new seeds which could increase plant yields and allow certain plants to grow more easily in hostile climates.They will also help to develop new pesticides for specific problems in plants.
David Evans, head of Syngenta's research and technology, said that while revenues from new seeds were possible in five years, revenues from "chemicals" like pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, derived from findings may take seven years or more.Evans said that "revenues from new seeds (are possible in) five years (and) revenues from chemicals, from this particular discovery (in) seven years plus."
He said much of the time needed to approve chemicals used in crop protection were taken up with testing their safety. The completion of the rice map will make it easier for researchers to pinpoint targets for chemical products, including those which could be safer to use."What it does do, is produce better targets, enabling us to 'navigate' our chemistry into important areas," Evans said. Revenues are also expected to come from new ventures "based on plants but outside conventional agribusiness," as well as from licencing the findings from all of these activities to other companies, Evans said, without giving any time frame.
Regarding patents, Briggs said that the companies would not seek to patent the rice genome. "However, based on our functional studies, we will seek to protect inventions which we believe could be useful and marketable," he said.
Reuters Limited
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2. SEEDS OF DISSENT
[excerpt from New Scientist interview with Richard Jefferson,head of CAMBIA: http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/8.htm]
A: There’s a tendency in science to ignore the development of methods and make it secondary to the elite act of gathering knowledge. Even a cursory inspection of the history of science will show that the vast majority of scientists exhibit a lemming-like tendency””which I’m told that lemmings do not have””to define problems in terms of what they can solve, not what needs to be solved...
Q: You’re a critic of that other holy grail: sequencing the genes of important crops like rice. Why?
A: Imagine the keys of a piano. There are 88 keys on a piano. But they tell me absolutely Nothing. I know what every key means but it doesn’t tell me how to do Beethoven. It doesn’t tell me how to do Brahms or Mozart. Yet all of that is locked up in those keys. The secret is not in the keys by themselves, but their combinations, the order, the duration and intensity. It’s the same way for genes. We’re not going to get to the secret that’s locked up in the genome from DNA sequencing. That’s just like looking at the keys of a piano. I sometimes liken DNA sequencing and the hugely fashionable work lumped into the term "genomics" to a drunk guy underneath a street light late at night. He’s crawling on his hands and knees looking for his car keys, when someone walks by and says, "Hey buddy, what are you up to?" The guy looks up at him and slurs. "Well, I’m looking for my car keys." The passer-by bends down to help and they both spend 10 minutes looking, when he says to the drunk: "Are you sure you dropped them here?" The drunk guy says, "Jeez no, buddy, I dropped them farther down the street but it’s too dark to see there." We’re doing DNA sequencing because we can do it, not because it’s going to necessarily give us what we want.
Q: But what about all the effort going into sequencing plant genomes, like rice and maize. Can’t it be put to good use?
A: Of course it will be put to use. But the question is: is it anywhere near as useful as having a different style of doing science? People will say: "Look at all the things that have come out." But that’s because you have got lots and lots of people doing sequencing, and lots and lots of money being thrown at it. I’ll give you another example. There’s a great maize geneticist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison called John Doebley””I don’t even know him but his work’s great. He’s looking at the genetics of maize and teosinte, the ropy little weed-like thing that happens to be the very same species as the big, proud corn plant of the American Midwest. It turns out that almost all the differences between the two are caused by only a few genes, and a huge amount of the difference in shape between the two plants is associated with just one, single gene. After exhaustive back-crossing, Doebley sequenced that gene and what did he find? Much to everyone’s amazement, he found that the protein sequence of the teosinte gene is exactly the same as in the maize gene. There was a difference between the two, of course, and that was in the way each gene was expressed. In other words, how each gene regulates other genes. But you’d never find that information from a gene sequence.