Posts by Paul Campbell
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So do you think I should borrow my brother's stick? (mentioned upthread) I had an umbrella out it should have had the same effect
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Grrr - I was just run off the footpath by a cyclist, I'm soaked to the skin and (ever so slightly) bleeding. - where's the pedestrian vs cyclist thread again?
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Rob: yes apparently so
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while we're doing a pseudo-friday linkfest "Officially our best ever cease and desist"
(and scroll to the bottom of the page while watching the background for cool web-foo)
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Umm Kyle, that wouldn't happen to be a relative (of mine) with the stick would it?
and as we found out at last night's party yes it was .....
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Umm Kyle, that wouldn't happen to be a relative (of mine) with the stick would it?
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As I understand from the work of the International Rice Research Institute, this takes a long time, reaching into decades. And even then you've still got to deal with the traits from the target plant that you don't want, which causes further delays.
But now we have all these cool new tools - we can sequence the intermediate genomes, see which ones pick up which genes and only choose the ones you want to direct the next round of hybridisation - I'm thinking years rather than decades - which is how long a true-GE crop might take to be approved
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Seems to me there's a pretty simple middle-way solution to avoiding the whole green/GM issue - you know what gene you want in the white clover - and where it's going to come from - put a whole lot of both species in a box and have them breed like crazy - use your modern GE-fu to look at the results, you'll get some hybrids with the right genes you want - pick a nice one, put the white clover in a box with those guys - grab something appropriate, lather rinse repeat.
Now we all know that in the long run there's no real difference between breeding like that and snipping the gene out in a lab and shifting it over - but it's, umm, "natural" - natural breeding usually takes a really long time, you can use all those cool new tools to speed it up.
(count me in to the list of people who usually vote Green but can't really embrace them because of the irrational anti-GE thing - I'm all for holding the people who are doing it to a really high standard before stuff is released - but, there are people starving in the world)
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Oh no - I've just spent way too much time with patent lawyers over the years and sadly too much of it has rubbed off - plus I'm of the open source persuasion, you know - one of them, and I'm always looking for weaselly ways to void patents.
I might also point out that attempting to shock the opposition is also probably "obvious to one practicing in the field" assuming your field is arguing on blogs
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Giovanni - after further research I realise that you're going to have a really tough time with your patent .... there's prior art in those shock collars people put on dogs to stop them barking ....