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Zusatztext Robert M. Goodman Professor of Plant Pathology! University of WisconsinMadison Peter Pringle presents the most comprehensive and lucid account yet of the history! science! and politics of food made with genetic engineering. Along the way he tells many fascinating stories! among them an account of the great Russian botanist N. I. Vavilov and how his massive food-crop seed collection came to be spared from Hitler's bombardment of Leningrad. Informationen zum Autor Peter Pringle is a veteran British foreign correspondent. He is theauthor and coauthor of several nonfiction books, including thebestselling Those Are Real Bullets, Aren't They? He lives in New YorkCity. Klappentext For most people! the global war over genetically modified foods is a distant and confusing one. The battles are conducted in the mystifying language of genetics.A handful of corporate "life science" giants! such as Monsanto! are pitted against a worldwide network of anticorporate ecowarriors like Greenpeace. And yet the possible benefits of biotech agriculture to our food supply are too vital to be left to either partisan. The companies claim to be leading a new agricultural revolution that will save the world with crops modified to survive frost! drought! pests! and plague. The greens warn that "playing God" with plant genes is dangerous. It could create new allergies! upset ecosystems! destroy biodiversity! and produce uncontrollable mutations. Worst of all! the antibiotech forces say! a single food conglomerate could end up telling us what to eat.In "Food! Inc.!" acclaimed journalist Peter Pringle shows how both sides in this overheated conflict have made false promises! engaged in propaganda science! and indulged in fear-mongering. In this urgent dispatch! he suggests that a fertile partnership between consumers! corporations! scientists! and farmers could still allow the biotech harvest to reach its full potential in helping to overcome the problem of world hunger! providing nutritious food and keeping the environment healthy. Chapter One: Mendel's Little Secret One of the most cherished dreams of plant breeders has been to find a way to transform corn and other cereal grains into super-plants able to reproduce themselves....The term for this type of vegetative miracle is "apomixis." -- U.S. Department of Agriculture Press Release, 1998 Thinking about how our food is changing at the hands of the genetic engineers leads inevitably to the image of Gregor Mendel, the Moravian monk, breeding peas in his monastery garden a century and a half ago. Dressed always in a black robe, a pair of tweezers in one hand and a camel-hair paintbrush in the other, Mendel bent over rows of peas, cheerfully castrating the flowers by snipping off the pollen-bearing anthers and dusting on a different pollen from another row. He bred round peas with wrinkled peas, peas from yellow pods with peas from green pods, tall plants with dwarf plants, carefully separating each into breeding lines and then crossing and backcrossing them to watch how the traits appeared in future generations. In time the jolly amateur gardener scooped his fellow nineteenth-century botanists, including Darwin, with his insights into the basic laws of heredity. Mendel was the first to understand that characteristics such as height, color, and shape depend on the presence of determining factors (they were not called genes until much later) and that these factors could be either dominant or recessive. For his work Mendel was posthumously acknowledged to be the father of modern genetics. This popular image, however, misses another, less well known Mendel who becomes important today in the era of genetic engineering. The other Mendel was not so cheerful, a solitary monk still toiling in the monastery garden, but this time struggling without success to comprehend the strange reproductive p...
