MEMES
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Pollen – gets around doesn’t it?
Our editor's hay fever . . .
Ever suffered for hay fever? I’m having a temporary respite at the moment, but I used to get it, regular as clockwork, every year in the second week of April. Obviously, pollen is the culprit. The pollen grains are microscopic packages of ‘foreign’ DNA , so, in my view, the immune system has every right to get on the defensive when it detects some in the air. The air is obviously swimming in the stuff. We can’t see the grains, but they’re there all-right - by the trillion, and our immune systems know it.
What’s my point? My point is that when politicians argue about the correct distance to separate GM crops from conventional ones, they usually talk about a few tens of metres. The correct response to this is a hearty laugh tinged with utter despondency. The bone-heads have recently been upping the separation distances from 20 Mtrs to 60 Mtrs and now are talking about a few hundreds of Mtrs. Purleese !
Of course the on-the-payroll scientists who advise the politicians know perfectly well that these separation distances are a joke. Just about any pollen can, and does, travel thousands of Kilometres.
It’s everywhere, that’s the idea with pollen. In fact, very high altitude research balloons can detect pollen quite easily in the upper atmosphere, thousands of metres higher than any aeroplane can venture. If you drill a deep core-sample out of Antarctic ice, you’ll find pollen grains in the compacted snow from tens of thousands of years back. I’d be willing to bet that if, some time in the future, a team of astronauts could analyse Buzz Aldrin's’ footprints on the moon, they could find one or two pollen grains there which were stuck to his boots.
Exactly why would a GM firm care if their product ‘leaked’ ? The more of their spray-resistant product that’s ‘out-there’, the more money they can make. At the same time, they know that the anti GM lobby will eventually have to give up, because there won’t be such a thing as a ‘conventional’ plant anymore. It only takes 1 pollen grain to reach and fertilise one plant in a conventional crop to ‘contaminate’ the entire batch - for ever. Next year, and every subsequent year, that batch can go on to contaminate other fields, and so on and so on. The grain’s DNA is, in a sense, a programme, which allows it to behave, almost indistinguishably from a virus. ( hence our immune system’s interest )
The directors of the GM corp’s must inwardly chuckle every time they see a TV news broadcast showing the tech-blind politicians earnestly discussing the crop separation-distances - with wool pulled very firmly over their eyes, ears, and it would seem, their common-sense.
By the way, after years of deduction, I finally tracked down the culprit
of my hay fever. Oil-seed rape. The nearest plantation ? About 20Km away
. . .
