Fighting Mother Nature with Biotechnology - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 441

Let's turn to investigate the alternate path, namely, dependence on judicious applica-
tion of human ingenuity.
History of Agriculture
Homo sapiens are, under Mother Nature, nomadic hunter-gatherer omnivores.
About 10,000 years ago, our ancestors first threw down Mother Nature's gauntlet by
putting down roots, both figuratively, by settling on one spot, and literally, by sow-
ing seeds of local plants chosen as having “desirable” (in the eyes of our ancestors)
attributes.
In the intervening millennia, human ingenuity developed additional technologies to
increase agricultural productivity, many of which continue in use today. For example,
irrigation—the diversion of rivers and streams from their natural courses to provide
water to otherwise naturally arid farmlands—was a very early human interference that
is still being exploited and expanded today.
Techniques of plant breeding and animal husbandry were explored, adapted,
expanded, and honed long before Mendel described genetics, and they involve far more
unnatural and intrusive technologies than simple mating between male and female of
the same species. The result is an ever-increasing “tool box” of breeding technologies
offering a spectrum of options that breeders continue to use and adapt today. Grafting,
for example, was recorded as early as 7,000 years ago in China when courtier Feng Li
took scions (small branches) from various fruit trees and attached them to rootstocks of
others (Wheeler 2011). Today, grafting is standard practice for many fruit, nut, and other
crops to gain, for example, better disease resistance or water and nutrient delivery than
is available naturally.
Hybrid crops can increase yields substantially via the robust vigor known as hetero-
sis. Hybrid seed technology, less than one hundred years old, now claims the majority
of corn and many other crop acreages, even though the technology requires farmers
to purchase fresh seeds each year, a sea change from traditional seed-saving practice
in which farmers set aside a portion of the harvested grain to use as seed the following
season.
A more recent innovation, mutation breeding with irradiation or chemical mutagens,
arose out of the atomic “Atoms for Peace” program following World War II. What muta-
tion breeding does is disrupt the natural DNA of a plant sufficiently to result in nonle-
thal heritable changes, some of which are useful to human consumers (if not to the plant
species itself ). More than 2,700 registered crop varieties were developed using mutation
breeding in the last half century, including many major crops used by conventional and
even traditional and organic farmers (Ahloowalia et al. 2004 and website at http://mvgs.
iaea.org/default.aspx ).
Curiously, mutation breeding is known to cause disruptions to the DNA, from minor
changes, such as single base “point” mutations, through more substantial physical cyto-
genetic mutations, inversions, and translocations to massive destructions, deletions of