Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Bart Janssen,
What Steve Tanskley's work has shown is that because tomato has been inbred for some 500 years a lot of the diversity we see in heirloom tomatoes is not "real". Instead of being a visual display of genetic diversity it is instead a few mutations in what is otherwise a fairly narrow genetic range.
As a result heirlooms have some problems. They have lost some of the disease resistance present in the wild progenitors. You could get that back by a program of cross breeding which would take about 20-50 years or you ca pull the genes directly from the wild species to improve the heirloom varieties.
Understood, and being something of a tomato appreciator I'd love to see it happen. Instead Tankley's work appears to suffer from the same ill-informed presumption that led to the Flavr Savr fiasco. The lesson from that exercise in scientific hubris would appear to be that GM varieties derived from unsuitable stock, developed with scant regard for the qualities that customers prize, can be inferior in most respects to the products of traditional breeding. An awful waste of resources.
Tanksley - and the article's author - appear to believe that afficionados of "heritage" fruit are misled by their quirky names and shapes into according them an almost mystical je ne sais quoi. In practice, no more so than wine grape varietals. What really bothered me about that piece is the casual suggestion that without GM assistance, flavour and yield are mutually exclusive. If he's really working with stock that only set two useable fruit per plant then he'd appear to be on a hiding to nowhere.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Hebe,
Thanks Hebe. As I'm dropping in there later today it'll be my pleasure to tell them so.
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So, no-one went to the Harbour Lights Festival? Neither did I, went hospital visiting instead. Cardiac ward all women of a certain age. Much lively discussion about the post-quake rebuild. Surprisingly unified opposition to Ian Athfield's involvement. Most original reason given: "He looks like he could be wearing women's underwear."
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Russell Brown,
. . . virtually no one re-uses seed now anyway.
It happens all the time with tomatoes. While many of the so-called "heritage" varieties and public domain hybrids could do with a bit of bioscience improvement - e.g. resistance to occasional virus hits and thinner skins - this kind of ill-informed puff piece only demonstrates that corporate science journalism can be every bit as subject to folk belief as the effete wholegrain straw people whose pretensions it cheerfully mocks.
In practice, cracking and splitting of fruit is rarely if ever caused by "fungal infections". More often it's a result of erratic irrigation. While a bit of gene manipulation could help produce better fruit, it's unlikely to happen when there's little serious effort made to identify the problem. The real doozy is the claim that "any plant that sets only two fruits, as heirlooms sometimes do, is bound to produce juicier, sweeter and more flavorful fruit than varieties that set 100, as commercial types do."
Seriously, growing tomato varieties purely for flavour isn't something akin to bonsai cultivation. I still have enough home-grown pasta sauce puree in the freezer from last summer's output to prove it. Given how great it tastes that's a testimony to how well these varieties can produce, rather than any forbearance on my part.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Sacha,
“decent people who are boiling with rage at being disenfranchised by an entire political class which seems determined to destroy their civilisation.”
Boiling for as long as it takes to read the Sun?
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OnPoint: Easy as 1, 2, 22.8 billion, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
... and Keating is mentioned in a more reasoned and recent assessment on the Austro-Indonesian relationship.
While Hugh White's a professor these days, his past career as a defense department official under mainly Labor governments tends to colour his views with a certain retrospective justification. Proof that getting it horribly wrong, as he did with Suharto and East Timor, is no barrier to taking the Murdoch shilling. Like Keating he pushes the line that Suharto's legacy is blighted by the inherent bias of Fairfax and the ABC.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Just thinking,
A little civil disobedience has been known to bring results.
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OnPoint: Easy as 1, 2, 22.8 billion, in reply to Sacha,
Any criticism by Paul Keating is bound to be driven by personal grudge, with analysis tacked on by way of justification. It's the way of the tribal ALP , where unflinching loathing and loyalty are as natural as breathing.
While there's no argument about Geithner's being a disaster, it's more than a little rich for Keating to use his handling of the East Asian crisis as an example. It was Keating who defied parody by emerging from his long post-election defeat back then to describe his old friend Suharto as a "constitutionalist" as the kleptocracy imploded.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Roger,
Thanks Bart... I do so like passion! And informative too.
Likewise. Appreciate the info, most generous.
Bart:
I think there is some misunderstanding about just who uses GM. The dogma is, it's the big multinationals.
I believe that Monsanto in particular has been given too much credit here in the past as a genuine innovator. From what I can gather they're more in the nature of a Microsoft, acquiring, publishing, and continuing to develop the work of smaller startups.
Like Microsoft their aim appears to be to maximise return while minimising R&D costs. Their GM products appear well suited to locking clients in, with little apparent alternative. If a soybean or canola grower of whatever size were to look for a better deal, what would be their options? And is there a GM equivalent of open source?
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Why aren't the media all over stuff like that Portabello Antique shop?
There's been a trickle of fragmented coverage in the Press, but like the Haywood family's plight, and that of Arie Smith-Voorkamp, the media seem only too happy to be willingly blindsided.
I get the impression that there's a level of frustration among some at newsgathering level at not being able to tell these stories coherently. While there's a lot of editorial noise made about ordinary people being able to "submit" their ideas for a risen Chch, the emerging reality is of a theme park for pettifogging bureaucrats.