I became aware of this story published April 8th in the BioFuelsJournal website [See Link] titled “Enzyme From Cow’s Stomach Allows Corn Stalks and Stover to be Utilized for Ethanol Production”. Ok, when I heard that fertile land is being used up for feed for the ethanol and bio-fuel industry, destroying forests, diverting farmers attention from growing food crop to fuel crops, increasing the price of food globally, I thought that was not very forward thinking and fraught with greed(not green) but this has to take the cake. Now scientists at Michigan State University have inserted a gene from a cow’s stomach that essentially breaks down the corn, removing the need for additional enzyme in the bio-fuel preparation. Where were these scientists during the last 2 or so decades when countless people and organizations around the world fought GMO’s not only because they are bad for human health but because of cross pollination and destruction of bio-diversity? I’m still amazed that in the name of profit, engineers and scientists overlook this very simple reality. The last thing we need is cross pollination of this newly engineered corn with corn in the food supply. It will make the diarrhea caused from the original batch of GMO corn taco shells that hit the supermarket to seem like a minor irritation. It is sad but today I’m seeing more and more signs of short-sighted thinking in the part of the “green”/clean-tech industry, overlooking natural processes in the name of CO2 reduction and access to the ballooning green investment money. We can do better.

[See my retraction] 

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Green stuff, business, cleantech, energy, environment, food supply, health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
 Print This Post  Email This Post