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posted by janrinok on Wednesday December 28 2016, @11:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-your-5-a-day dept.

Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space.

For nearly 20 years, Morton's work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding. The patents weren't just for different types of lettuce, but specific traits such as resistance to a disease, a particular shade of red or green, or curliness of the leaf.

Such patents have increased in the years since, and are encroaching on a growing range of crops, from corn to carrots — a trend that has plant breeders, environmentalists and food security experts concerned about the future of the food production.

https://ensia.com/features/open-source-seeds/


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 30 2016, @06:09AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday December 30 2016, @06:09AM (#447315)

    I do not for a moment dispute that it would be wonderful to have as much digital-format code as possible - but that's strictly a research tool and a convenience for a very narrow selection of expert-class "programmers". If you have the knowledge to edit the DNA directly, and access to DNA synthesis tools needed to bring your digital edits to life, then you almost certainly have ready access to the sequencing tools as well. The process is completely non-transformative in either direction, it's just format shifting. A slightly more complicated version of copying the same data from CD to hard disc, made more complex only by the fact that very few computers have the hardware necessary to read or write DNA.

    There is no reverse engineering involved, at least not in a software sense. The "machine code" is in fact the original source, and the preferred format for editing - all pre-bundled with the entire toolchain. It's only if you want the precision of direct analysis or editing of the code that you need to convert the data to to the electronic domain. And there is no "higher level" language to "decompile" into if you do so - it's just a great big snarl of poorly understood spaghetti code written in bio-hexadecimal by billions of years worth of random transcription errors.

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