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Gene editing could create spicy tomatoes, say researchers
Spicy tomatoes could soon be on the menu thanks to the rise of genome-editing technology, say researchers. It is not the first time experts have claimed the techniques could help to precisely and rapidly develop fruits and vegetables with unusual traits: scientists have already been looking at changing the colour of kiwi fruits and tweaking the taste of strawberries.
But researchers in Brazil and Ireland say such methods also could offer practical advantages, with spicy tomatoes offering a way of harvesting capsaicinoids, the pungent chemicals found in chilli peppers.
[...] Tomatoes and chilli peppers developed from a common ancestor but diverged about 19m years ago. "All the genes to produce capsaicinoids exist in the tomato, they are just not active," Zsögön said.
Capsaicinoids: Pungency beyond Capsicum (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2018.11.001) (DX)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 08 2019, @08:43PM (1 child)
Well...there's the size of the bucket (native capacity for intelligence, "g-factor") and then there's the effort put into filling said bucket. I have no doubt that millions of geniuses have lived and died behind a ploughshare somewhere, and equally that plenty of people are holding positions and being showered with intellectual accolades far beyond their actual capacity due to just being in the right place at the right time.
Wouldn't it make the most sense to help everyone become the best human s/he can be, up to capacity? I'd rather work with a good-hearted janitor with an IQ of 80 than some entitled, sociopathic C-suite parasite with an IQ of 150. There is a reason INT and WIS are separate dice.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 09 2019, @12:44AM
I fall pretty far over towards the "we'd all be better off if people were smarter" side of these issues.
I certainly have no beef with "find a better way to educate them", and even have what I think is a reasonable list of things I would like to see changed in the educational and social systems to facilitate that. But the odds of them actually changing... not high. Too many entrenched hooks drawing blood cast by the religious, the morally constipated, the sports-afflicted, and the "OMG we can't let kids enter the work force" crowd. Just for starters.
OTOH, the odds of genetic engineering becoming able to provide more intellectual capacity without otherwise screwing us up... I think those are actually pretty high, as in, if we don't actually blow ourselves up, destroy the climate, or meet an interstellar object in an unfortunate manner, it'll happen. Fundamentally, it's a technical challenge, and most likely a simple implementation once perfected. Not saying that the NIMBYs and reincarnated Luddites won't try to get right in there and piss all over everything. Pretty sure they will. Pretty sure they'll fail, too. There's far too much to gain here. Longevity, same thing.
Well, it remains to be seen how much of what we see as a natural divide between wisdom and intelligence is just another genetically guided characteristic. That whole "nurture vs. nature" thing has taken so many arrows it seems like psychobabble's most prominent cactus to me. It seems it isn't all that much about nurture, as long as you're not way out on the extremes. Either that, or it's factors we simply have no understanding of. IMHO.
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If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?