North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[road's end farm <organic101@linkny.com>]

On Monday, February 9, 2004, at 10:57 PM, Rodney Eveland wrote:

> The people who genetically modify plants to get a desired result have
> already developed a PPV resistant plum. Interestingly enough, if you
> use google and search on a lot of common serious plant diseases and
> add the word biotechnology to your search you will find that they are
> trying to solve many of the major diseases by using genetc
> modification. I don't know where this will take us, but I'm hoping for
> a tasty, zone 3, indeterminate, perennial tomato that produces half a
> bushel of ripe tomatoes by the 4th of July in all of zone 4 and is
> resistant to every known tomato disease.
>
> _______________________________________________

In addition to other comments made on this list: judging by previous 
behaviour of the companies currently working with this technology, if 
you give any seed to your neighbor (even inadvertently) you'll both wind 
up in court.

I agree also with those who are saying that, while the technology has 
promise, we don't know enough yet about how to use it safely or wisely. 
Among other things, we don't yet know how to consistently insert the new 
gene in a specific place in a chromosome; so problems can be caused by 
disruption of other genes that weren't intended to be changed.

--Rivka
Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly