How NPR Got It Wrong on Monsanto's Superweeds (or how NPR gullibly accepts industry apologists)

[salvorhardin]

For much of the 1980s ... scientists in Monsanto's budding agriculture-biotechnology wing struggled mightily to find a gene that would effectively confer Roundup resistance and also allow plants modified with it to grow robustly. After years of near misses and tantalizing failures in the lab, they "discovered that nature had trumped all of their efforts."

Their eureka moment involved a vast Luling, Louisiana, chemical factory where Monsanto manufactured Roundup...

There are glyphosate residues in the ponds, in the mud at the bottom pf the ponds, and in the soil alongside. Those residues exert a steady pressure on the population of microorganisms in the water and the soil, eliminating those that are sensitive to glyphosate and selecting for those that are less vulnerable.

People from the company's cleanup team collected sludge samples ... until the GMO team thought to look there. When they did, they found the gene they were looking for in that glyphosate-laced sludge from Luling— a gene that "proved to tolerate Roundup far better than any gene the scientists had created in the laboratory," and didn't interfere with plant growth.

...

All in all, I think Charles is being too generous to Monsanto scientists in uncritically reporting their claims that they were shocked, shocked by the emergence of superweeds. Their explanation reminds me of a famous quote from the writer who could be thought of as industrial agriculture's first prominent critic, The Jungle author Upton Sinclair: "It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding."
Full article: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/monsanto-scientists-superweeds-NPR

[Lionessa]

1. gullible or complicit, tough call, fine line

[salvorhardin]

2. Meh. I prefer to be generous.

[Lionessa]

3. Truly nothing personal meant here, but

that in a nut shell is why Democrats lose, imo.

The whole bleeding heart part of the liberal, progressive, Democratic POV just causes us to seem weak and motivated by emotions instead of logic.

Generosity instead of suspicion causes any type of counter measures to be deployed way too late.