Sidd said:
When I read this, chills ran up my spine.
There is research in progress in using insects to disperse modified viruses to plants they feed on. These viruses will, in turn, modify plant genomes. The modifications extend to affecting the chromosomal germline so that the modified traits will be inherited.
The research is being touted as giving plants traits to resist stressors like drought, flood,frost,salinity or disease. In addition plants could get traits to resist herbicides.
The crops being targeted currently are maize and tomatoes. The insects are leafhoppers, whiteflies and aphids.
Most of this research could be done with sprays instead of insects.
Remember Roundup … and how the genemod for resistance wasn’t supposed to spread cross species. Well, here’s your worst nightmare. Those insects will feed on everything in the neighbourhood, and the virus they transmit will attempt to modify everything they feed on. And the insects and the virus will mutate. And the gene editing tech they will probably use is CRISPR which has been to misfire or fire in unexpected direction.
This is one of the stupidest and most dangerous experiments I can think of. And very easily weaponized, to boot.
And it’s my tax dollars at work. Funding agency is DARPA. I regret to say that two universities i have worked at are involved, Ohio State and Penn State.
My sister worked at UC Davis, who is a participant. And she is a biochemist, so this should get her dander up too.
From the paper:
“an ongoing research program funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aims to disperse infectious genetically modified viruses that have been engineered to edit crop chromosomes directly in fields.”
“the Insect Allies program is reportedly backed by more than $27 million”
“a core part of all the consortiaâ??s work programs likely includes plant chromosomal editing by means of virally encoded CRISPR proteins”
“the assumption that a plausible regulatory pathway exists by which possibly transgenic virus infected (and potentially genetically altered) food crops could enter national or international markets”
“it is likely that all current regulatory systems across the globe would require profound changes”
“easy simplifications (and not elaborations) of the described work program could be used to generate a new class of biological weapon”
“we are unaware of any publicly available assessments of the ethical, trade, biosafety, or international biosecurity implications that would normally accompany such a globally important program of work”