Interesting Article from Scientific American

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by Barbee

I appreciate the info about SolCAP. It's always nice to have background information about how things begin.

I realize that OSU and other universities have to get their funding from somewhere to keep going. I realize that Monsanto provides a lot of fellowships and scholarships, along with large $$ grants to these universities. It's what Monsanto does with these field trials and studies that bother me terribly. And that's all I'm going to say on the subject, because it bothers me that much.

Barbee, SolCAP was funded by a $5 million dollar Federal grant to Michigan State University which is currently the headquarters to SolCAP as the website shows.

Having spent my entire career in academia teaching/researching at two Medical Schools and a private Liberal Arts college I would say that soft money grants to same used to be common, but from what I know, no longer are as common b'c of conflict of interests.

[lumierefrere]

I guess anything I say, and most of us, is anecdotal because we don't have the holy grail of a scientific degree behind us. I read lots of dopey stuff everyday--don't ask why--but this is some of the dopiest material I've suffered through.

I started with hybrids and was very attached to them, it took two seasons of growing hybrids and heirlooms side by side to realize (duh to me, if I'm qualified to reason and realize) the superiority of heirlooms. In production alone I've never had a hybrid outperform certain heirlooms. Let's talk about the Momotaro hybrid producing 2 fruit. I won't even grow Robson Angolan anymore because of the overwhelming number of fruit. Anyone want me to discuss the lousy fruit to foliage ratio of the Carmello hybrid? Nothing I've grown beats the resilience to lousy conditions of the Kasachstan Rubin. Those F2s I'm growing? Mislabeled. Because I don't know what I'm talking about. My degree is in English.

We're stupid. The government/agribiz spokesmouth is here to tell us what's best for us.

Any wonder why we have no respect for them anymore?

[PaulF]

All the fancy verbage aside, SA has an article on astrophysics and it is written by an astrophysicist, computer programming by a programmer, biochemistry by a biochemist, etc ad nauseum.

So why would this scientific bastion have a slap dash lackey who has never grown or possibly eaten an OP tomato write a throwaway piece of junk as a space filler? At first I thought it was tongue-in-cheek but then realized the author was trying for a humorous stab in the back to non-hybrid, non-Monsantoists. Plots always start with humor, slow and steady escalation from the bottom up until we have lost and many do not realize what happened.

[Worth1]

I find it interesting that every time I see something on TV in a magazine or anyplace else where people talk about something I know about it is always wrong in some way.
It goes on in school too. I find the education of our society to be going down the tubes.
The history channel and others alike are just as bad, the terminology is way off or just wrong.

Case in point, they call a volcano extinct if it is not erupting, this could not be farther from the truth.
It is simply dormant; on one program they called Mount Rainier extinct.
I can’t expect anything to be any better with heirloom tomatoes so anytime I see anything about Tomatoes in a magazine I usually just skip it because I don’t want my blood pressure to go up.
Nothing tips my scale worse than misinformation.

Worth

[feldon30]

Originally Posted by Worth1

I find it interesting that every time I see something on TV in a magazine or anyplace else where people talk about something I know about it is always wrong in some way.

I can count on one hand the number of news articles on the typical T.V. newscast I've seen where they didn't get at least SOMETHING wrong. And that's in a 30 sec ~ 1 minute news article. I love it when the news media try to cover computers because it's almost always full of inaccuracies or some very old news article they are bringing to the surface.

[organichris]

Originally Posted by Barbee

Reading between the lines, it looks to me like the seeds of this tomato won't be sterile but patented. Which means you can't use them without paying Monsanto a "patent fee"

I didn't think about this the first time I read it, which is odd considering my suspicious nature, but I think you may be right. Or maybe if you grow out the F2s the tomatoes start tasting like fish...or monkey...or zebra.

[MikeInCypress]

When I first read the article I thought it was an April Fool's Joke meant to aggravate Heirloom growers. Now I don't know why a respected by many, mainstream magazine would allow such easily discredited information to be printed as fact. "Two fruit per plant", "sterile seeds from hybrid fruit" - any gardener that has ever had dirt under his nails knows these pontifications to be bunk. And if the Hybrid Seed Cabal thinks articles such of these are favorable to their cause they are sadly mistaken.

MikeInCypress

[Mischka]

There's a surefire way to get to the real reason why this article was written.

...follow the money.

Works every time.

[Ruth_10]

Genetics work will also point the way to sturdier, more flavorful tomatoes—albeit hybrid varieties whose sterile seeds cannot be passed down from generation to generation but must be purchased anew by growers each season.

I read this more as that the genetics being worked on will be designed to result in hybrids with sterile seeds. Sounds like terminator technology.

Simply an idiotic article, no matter how you slice it.

[organichris]

Originally Posted by Ruth_10

I read this more as that the genetics being worked on will be designed to result in hybrids with sterile seeds. Sounds like terminator technology...

Hmmm...and the plot thickens.

[Polar_Lace]

Originally Posted by Mischka

There's a surefire way to get to the real reason why this article was written.

...follow the money.

Works every time.

Yes Mischka, I hear ya. You can smell the money in it; kinda like manure eh? Or should I say Sump-pump?

~* Robin