The Fool 's Gene
Oleg Artamonov(The most expressive formulations are left on the author's website – VM :)
For about 10 thousand years, humanity has been eating genetically modified foods. For several hundred years, such products can make up to 100% of the diet. For several years now, humanity has begun to understand exactly what it modifies in genes.
The first gene modifications began with the transition from gathering to agriculture: starting to plant plants for cultivation, humanity discovered, firstly, selection and began to select for planting seeds of plants that accidentally received a mutation that made them more attractive, and secondly, hybridization - plants planted in neighboring fields sometimes crossed, and it turned out interesting.
About genetics, linked signs and similar things, for about 9900 years out of these 10,000, humanity did not suspect, in the cultivation of plants it focused mainly on external signs, so the result sometimes turned out to be only partially successful – for example, it is widely known that domesticated corn reached a decent size over several millennia of breeding, but at the same time lost in specific nutritional value values.
However, the product of the size of corn on its value has increased enough for any advocate of organic food, seeing a real, untouched organic corn – a mature cob which could reach 4 cm in length – disgustedly wrinkled and refused to eat it.
Sometimes, however, the result was not so successful. The most popular example is the Lenape potato bred by breeders in the USA in the 1960s, which was great from all points of view, except one: this variety suddenly remembered that it belongs to the poisonous nightshade, and increased the solanine content in the tubers a dozen times, as a result of which the first tasters had severe diarrhea, and plans for commercial use, it had to be curtailed. Interestingly, in the 1980s, a similar story happened in Sweden with a variety that had been successfully grown there for a long time - its next crop suddenly gave out a concentration of solanine in tubers a couple of times higher than normal, as a result of which it had to be withdrawn from stores. No one really understood why, they blamed the cold and wet weather for everything. In principle, there is nothing particularly new in this behavior – it has long been known, for example, that meadow grasses, under conditions that they consider unfavorable, can accumulate cyanide in themselves so that no one eats them. And, accordingly, an organic cow that has chewed this organic grass in an organic meadow can easily throw off its hooves very organically. Precedents have happened repeatedly.
Sometimes the result was, on the contrary, too successful, and it turned out delicious not only for humans. About a hundred and fifty years ago, for example, a small striped beetle discovered a new food – human-grown potatoes. Not only did the food seem very tasty to him, but the potato's belonging to the nightshade turned out to be in the beetle's favor: the solanine contained in the leaves is not poisonous for the beetle, but it is poisonous for birds. Therefore, for a hundred and fifty years the Colorado potato beetle has been eating potatoes, and practically no one eats the beetle itself (pheasants eat, but they are relatively rare in potato fields).
But it was all flowers. Berries began when humanity discovered chemistry and physics, or rather, chemical mutagens and X–ray, and a little later neutron irradiation. Since the late twenties of the twentieth century – that is, almost a hundred years ago – breeders realized that, in principle, you can not wait for centuries until the plant itself grows a fruit a little redder and larger than usual, but take a bucket of seeds, pour them with colchicine or ethylmethanesulfonate, and then try to plant (NB: do not try this at dacha, because all the substances used are mutagenic, carcinogenic, teratogenic, and also simply poisonous). To be sure, you can take a second bucket and put it under a more powerful neutron source, and then also drop it off. Most of the seeds will die, most of the remaining ones will be born frail mutants, but there is some chance that one seed out of thousands will still acquire some more or less useful mutations.
That is, to describe it briefly, the methods of chemical and radiation selection work like this: you need to take a sledgehammer, violently crumble her DNA, and then see if she can get back together. There is something in common with hammering nails with a microscope.
Nevertheless, despite the complete unpredictability of the result and the overall low efficiency of the method, it turned out to be more effective than sitting and waiting for millennia for the necessary mutants to grow themselves. A significant part of what you are currently eating, including very, very organically grown varieties, is obtained in this way.
And, of course, right now, when, instead of furiously hammering nails with a microscope, humanity finally figured out from which end they look at this microscope, and from which sample they put it, and learned how to carefully embed genes with exactly the right properties into DNA instead of just crushing this DNA into trash in the hope that it would accidentally come back together in some interesting way, now is the time to start protesting against GMOs.
For the return of the microscope to the hands of professional carpenters!
* * *
In principle, in the logic of fierce fighters against GMOs, stupid and ridiculous – about every first point, in the whole range from "products must be checked by generations of ancestors" (generations of your ancestors checked tobacco and never ate Ecuadorian bananas – do you really think that smoking is harmless, and bananas are dangerous?) to the insane paranoid theories of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy to create biological weapons that will destroy Russians and Negroes. Well, all this against the background of a total misunderstanding of even a school biology course.
But there is one thing for which I personally already want to just take and... this is the expression "salmon gene".
What is, excuse me, the salmon gene? Is this the gene that makes salmon salmon? Encodes his gills, fins, or what? Salmon has something like tens of thousands of genes, which one is the salmon gene? All? And what to do with the genes that occur simultaneously in salmon, hedgehog and human – whose are they?
Remember, children, once and for all: the gene does not encode gills, fins or scales. The gene encodes a protein. Repeat these three words as many times as necessary so that you would answer the question "what does the gene do?" without hesitation, being woken up at six in the morning on the first of January.
So, the gene encodes a protein. A complex organic molecule, which may then be needed either by itself or for the synthesis of other complex organic molecules. And it doesn't encode anything else.
When creating a GM product, it is determined which protein is responsible for the property we need or participates in the metabolic chain we are interested in, after which the gene encoding it is either embedded in the genome of the desired product, or, conversely, it turns off (interestingly, opponents of "wheat with the salmon gene" generally guess that GM engineering is not only embedding new ones, but also turning off existing genes)? What kind of protein it is, what it does, what substances are produced with its participation, where the gene encoding it should be embedded is determined in advance, so the result is relatively easy to control – unlike conventional breeding, where unknown stuff happens to the genome, roughly controlled only by basic external signs. The difference is about the same as between using a puncher and dynamite for a device in the wall of a doorway.
The "species identity" of a gene in this case is an extremely conditional thing, since, firstly, many genes are common to many species, secondly, they could have been introduced into this particular species by horizontal transfer, and not from its salmon ancestors, thirdly, it does not matter at all the values are for no one except anti-GMOs, because the desired gene is selected not by species, but by the protein encoded by it.
However, the ideological ones still do not understand, it's easier for them to paint and walk, shake the poster "the salmon gene in wheat kills us". The salmon gene in salmon, as I understand it, is for some reason less scary to them.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru28.01.2014