BASF and Monsanto in Terrifying Alliance
March 25th, 2007BASF, a descendant of the Third Reich’s extermination industries, is teaming up with Monsanto to put pHood on your belly, biofuel in your SUV.
Have a nice day.
Via: STLtoday:
Monsanto Co. and BASF AG, a German competitor, on Wednesday promised to work together to deliver higher-yielding crops to meet increasing global demand.
The companies announced a $1.5 billion research and development collaboration that, over a decade or more, could deliver hundreds of varieties of genetically modified corn, soybeans, cotton and canola.
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A unit of BASF uses computers and robotics to measure more than 1,000 important chemicals that plants produce. It can track changes in the chemicals to see how a plant functions differently with the addition or subtraction of a particular gene. And it can do so quickly on many plant samples, said Peter Oakley, a member of BASF’s Board of Executive Directors responsible for Agriculture, Health and Nutrition.
The company has compiled more than 1.5 million of these profiles for more than 35,000 genes. The resulting “genetic library” is a searchable database for researchers, he said.
The next important piece of the puzzle is a BASF Plant Science unit that rapidly measures about 20 performance characteristics in plant samples grown with promising genetic modifications. BASF can test 100,000 plants a year using this automated technology and those results, too, wind up in the database.
As a result, researchers can quickly find and characterize useful traits and prioritize their development, Oakley said.
With this technology, Monsanto “has just connected a firehose to our pipeline,” Grant said. He promised product development “more, better, faster.”
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Europe’s concern over global warming and demand for renewable fuels from plant sources could outweigh apprehension about biotech crops, said Christine Bruhn, director of the Center for Consumer Research at the University of California-Davis. “If the benefits are appealing, the people in surveys say they would consider biotech crops,” she said.
If the world is to produce enough crops to feed people and livestock, while providing corn for ethanol and soybeans for biodiesel, farmers will need high-yielding biotech crops, the companies said.
“This collaboration brings something to the table that European farmers need just as much as American farmers, and that’s yield increases,” Oakley said. “It will become very, very difficult long term for European farmers to remain competitive without access to these technologies. … It’s a door opener in Europe.”
Fraley called yield “the Holy Grail of agricultural research — in part, because it has historically been one of the most complex characteristics to dissect scientifically. Today, we have the tools to tackle that opportunity,” Fraley said.
The benefits could extend around the world, Grant said.
“Whether you’re in Schleswig-Holstein or Bangalore, the real dilemma in the next decade is going to be how do you grow more with less,” he said. “I think it’s going to be the challenge for the planet.”
Research Credit: ML
