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#2791 10/27/05 03:29 PM
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Can a plant for example corn be manipulated to produce its fruit twice a year instead of once? So that farmers could produce twice the harvest with half the seed thus increasing profits and lowering food prices.

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Yes. This has already been done with many crops.

But the problem here on this planet is not the quantity of food. We already have too much food and a lot is thrown away.

The problem is poverty. People too poor to purchase the food that exists.

Creating more corn, for example, would more likely feed pigs than people.


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Some people are experimenting with grains such as Quinoa and Amaranth that are perennials. You sow the seed once and just harvest the seeds; the plant is left to grow again the following year and so on.

This requires some very different techniques than corn, soybeans and milo. Part of the problem is harvesting equipment. Making it so it leaves the plant in the ground while harvesting the seed heads is the trick, and so far technology has lagged behind in that area.

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Food in incredibly cheap. Your government imposes price minima based on Great Depression prices, then compassionately gives away resulting huge surpluses to slum bunnies and the Third World - or burns the food.

Photosynthesis, the fixation of carbon dioxide into sugar, wholly happens at one enzyme - RuBisCO (ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase). 1/3 of all soluble leaf protein is RuBisCO. RuBisCO is the slowest (maybe one turnover/second vs. carbonic anhydrase at maybe a million/second) least efficient (about 3%) of all known enzymes.

If you gene-geneered a RuBisCO with 20 turnovers/second and 10% efficiency - that is still horrible crap for any enzyme - you would increase farm productivity by a factor of 67. What would you get? You would get 10 billion Third World parasites sucking charity. How much research is being conducted towards a better RuBisCO? None. It would be wrong.

There is no problem that science cannot solve short of a world overflowing with stupid and corrupt people.


Uncle Al
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Quote:
How much research is being conducted towards a better RuBisCO? None. It would be wrong.
Why would it be wrong? Wrong to manipulate RuBisCO because you interfere with God's creation, or wrong because it would ruin western economy?


Johan VS

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Franken-foods! Starving Third World scum have already turned away their bellies from gene-gineered grain charity. Send in the Reverend Malthus instead. If their local gods don't provide, call it a test of faith.

The US has dumped literal $trillions into its stinking mobs since President "Landslide Lyndon" Johnson's "Great Society" of jackbooted State compassion beginning in 1965 (speech in 1964). Washington simultaneously closed tight the taps on all aid to the Gifted because it was discriminatory.

35 years later we have purchased some 30% of the population being rendered beautiful, empowered, liberated, on the Dole one way or another, and unable to read a bus schedule. The Gifted are diagnosed as primary grade behavioral problems then drugged to shut them up. Objectively qualified high school graduates are specifically excluded from university admission in favor of diversity: slum bunnies, queers, cripples, single mothers, and the Officially Sad.

"The Great Society" may be the only government project in 50 years that has succeeded beyond specifications. Now we endure "faith-based initiatives" as though the Dark Ages were not warning enough. All that remains is for the last Baby Boomer taxpayer to retire. Then, the cities burn.

"Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"{/i] Entropy. And remember... [i]""cauta est et ab illis incipit uxor."


Uncle Al
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http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz3.pdf
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Would you care to translate that last bit, Al? It's not fair telling people off in a foreign language, even if it is a dead one.


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