Zombie

seeds.

European scientists are going to try to develop zombie seeds.
For real... from EU tax money, it seems.

Have they gone stark raving bonkers???
Can you imagine the effects of contamination?

Now, I dont know the nuts and bolts of thow they plan to get this specific functionality in the plant but I imagine there would be at least one gene that needs to be switched on with a proprietary chemical, before the plant will grow.
If that gene were to sneak out of there and live in other plants, those would also need that chemical switch to be flipped before it would grow. Anyone who thinks this is not very probable, hasnt taken a good look at the staggering level of GM contamination in American crops these days.

What damn bunch of fools thought this would be a good idea, huh?
Bloody irresponsible bastards... and I include our politicians who wont regulate this shit.

"Zombie" GM crops - so called because farmers will have to pay biotech companies to bring seeds back from the dead - are being developed with British taxpayers' money.

The highly controversial development - part of a £3.4m EU research project
... (snip)

Zombie crops would also be engineered to produce sterile seed that could be brought back to life with the right treatment - almost certainly with a chemical sold by the company that markets the seed. Farmers would therefore have to pay out, not for new seeds, but to make the ones they saved viable.

(snip)

The three-year EU research programme, called Transcontainer, which involves 13 universities and research institutes and is partially funded by taxpayers in Britain and other EU countries, says that it is developing the technology to try to "reduce significantly" the spread of GM genes to conventional and organic crops.

Such contamination - long denied and downplayed by the industry and its supporters - is now accepted to be one of the main obstacles to the advance of modified crops.

(snip)

The Transcontainer project insists that it is "specifically targeted at European agriculture and European crops". But it admits that such technologies "may become a problem for farmers in developing countries."


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