General Article The GM debate in context

Topic Selected: Biotech and Bioethics
This article is 10 years old. Click here to view the latest articles for this topic.

By Helen Birtwistle

What’s new about GM technology?

For thousands of years farmers and plant breeders have been changing the genetic makeup of crops to improve characteristics like size, resistance to disease and taste. They started simply by sowing only those seeds that came from plants with desirable traits. Later, knowledge about plant reproduction enabled crossbreeding of plants to create new crops, with scientists using chemicals and radiation to introduce favourable mutations. Now gen...

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