Can we engineer life? 4.6 Golden rice
Golden rice symbolizes the protracted trench war between proponents and opponents of modern biotechnology. The Swiss Ingo Potrykus of ETH Zürich is the golden man behind the golden rice. With great ardour he defends this controversial rice, and attacks the opponents of gene technology. With his colleague Peter Beyer of Freiburg University he developed the
Lost in translation: Calls for Proposals are determined by language
The Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking, abbreviated as BBI JU, is in the final stages of the procedure to award funding for new research and development proposals. BBI JU is a €3.7 billion Public-Private Partnership between the EU and the Bio-based Industries Consortium. I participated in the evaluation of the 144 proposals that were submitted in
Rob Baan (Koppert Cress): vegetables are healthy, but we’re not allowed to claim so
Five years ago, we visited the outstanding horticultural company Koppert Cress in Monster near The Hague in the Netherlands. Then already, general manager Rob Baan told us that horticulture should concentrate on fresh produce for a healthy diet; with ingredients that help overcome diseases like cancer, obesity and diabetes 2. But health claims are supposed
Biocomposites for cars
Every year the European car industry uses around 80,000 tonnes of wood and plant fibres to reinforce composites, instead of synthetic fibres like glass and carbon fibre. Biocomposites have become increasingly popular with car manufacturers because they can reduce vehicle weight, which improves performance and lowers CO2 emissions. They are used in car interiors for
Can we engineer life? 4.5 Novel plant breeding techniques
Plants have large and complicated genomes. Therefore, until recently, the insertion of foreign DNA was a kind of roulette: where will DNA be modified, will the insertion work, and will there be side effects? But by now, techniques have much improved and totally novel plant breeding techniques have been developed, carrying names like ZFNs, TALENs
Productive soils as a carbon sink
We know that plants grow faster in CO2-rich environments. Horticulturalists enrich the atmosphere in their greenhouses with CO2 to ensure better productivity. Can we imagine fast growing plants that would capture CO2 from the air, and on a large scale? A carbon sink, as it were? Yes we can, and we can do it in
Tetraethyl lead, the scandal that never erupted
Modern history is full of stories of new chemicals sold on a large scale and afterwards causing problems. Sometimes, this causes a major upheaval. But by far the largest poisoning in history, that by tetraethyl lead, never ended in a scandal. It just faded away, even though oil and motor car companies neglected well-known dangers,
Modern biotechnology: does it develop too fast?
The birth of the hiv-resistant gentech twins Lulu and Nana in China has stirred up the debate on methods and results of modern biotechnology. Rightfully so. The gap between what science can do, and what is ethically responsible in the human domain, is getting too wide. In fact, we even don’t know how to wage
on: 30 December 2018