Itheweatherman,

People have to STOP BELIEVING EVERYTHING THEY READ. Just because some wacko leftwing website tells you something does not mean it is true:)

All one has to do is look at the picture and you can tell quite easily it is a fake. Now the scientists did use the gene of the fish that part is true. The goal was to make a strawberry that resists cold better. The splice did not change the berries color though.........it is still red.

Yes I would try the berry......

Yeah but it must be true, it was on the internet!? :)

There are no legit sites stating this.. Godlikeproductions is taking about it, so is natural news. They arent reliable sources stating this...

However, they have implanted the glow gene in certain animals possibly food but nothing for production and nothing like the blue strawberry.....

This kind of research is super important. The technology could be used in medicine. I can think of many ways this kind of thing can be useful and save lives. Importing good chromosomes in people with cystic fibrosis. I know 4 people with this disease. One Julia, is so special. She just turned 21. She is a senior at MSU in Special Education. One of her lungs no longer functions at all. She is the nicest, most kindest person I have ever met. She never complains. Currently she is expected at best to live 16 more years. I doubt she will make it that far. An article about her was just published in the State News of MSU. I have known her her whole life.
Other uses could be possible like beta cell insertion in diabetics. Pig insulin is close to ours, and we do now use their heart valves, we may be able to harvest the beta cells from the pancreas. And again functioning cells in people with cycle cell anemia, or Thalassemia. So developing this technique is super important IMHO. One of my best friends past away this summer at 47 from complications of Thalassemia. I have been very upset all summer about it.
Yet people call Monsanto an evil company when the techniques they have developed may save many people's lives. That righteous know everything, close mindedness attitude makes me sick. Ignorance abounds in the world.

Here is a link that might be useful: Article on Julia

Drew,

Great post and great article. I agree completely.

Wow, it took me a long time to find an article about this in a scientific journal. The best I could find was from 2005 out of Thailand. No mention of the blue. If something new has come out, I haven't found it.

That is one of the many problems with blogs, especially these nutty blogs and pseudo health sites--no citations.

Bamboo, I agree that that website is wacko and probably the people there are leftwing, but there are plenty of wacko fake health sites on both sides of the political spectrum. Many times, you get fringe people from both ends of the spectrum agreeing on the same wacko things.

The article I found is "Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of modified antifreeze protein gene in strawberry" by Khammuang et al. in Songklanakarin J. Sci. Technol., 2005, 27(4) : 693-703. There is no mention of the blue, however they do use a plasmid as part of the cloning of the antifreeze gene (AFP) called pT7blue. If this is where the idea of the blue strawberry is from it is totally off base. The 'blue' used here is to indicate that the plasmid contains a common gene used in cloning. The gene does cause things to turn blue (only when a specific chemical is added), however the act of cloning disrupts the gene and it is no longer functional at that point.

One thing that I wanted to point out is that in this article, they use Agrobacterium tumefaciens (a common plant bacterium) to deliver the AFP gene to the strawberry plant. As I mentioned in the previous GMO thread, viruses are not the only method of transferring genes (not that there is anything inherently bad about using viruses.) Agrobacterium is an example of nature doing its own GMO sort of thing. In nature, the bacterium transfers its own genes to the plant in order to make the plant produce nutrients for the bacterium. My point here is that humans are not the only ones swapping genes around (that is in no way meant to imply that it is either good or bad--it all depends on the context.)

Drew, unfortunately because Monsanto focuses on plants, most of their technology doesn't have much relevance to human (or any animal) genetic disease; but you do make a good point that biotechnology has the potential to help a lot of people with a variety of diseases. I'm no Monsanto fan, but advancing technology gives us more tools at our disposal to fix problems (even if we created them in the first place) if use them responsibly.

Here is an article in the NYT from 13 years ago mentioning the antifreeze strawberries.

Here is a link that might be useful: NYT article from 2000

bamboo_rabbit ,

That's what I suspected--- the (blue) berries are probably photo-shopped; I would try them too.

Quoting Drew:

"This kind of research is super important..."

I agree 100%.

I just don't understand why some people attack Science ( not you guys) so much.

Back to the blue strawberry topic:

I would love to create a natural blue strawberry hybrid. It could work. I would start by crossing a blackberry x strawberry, the result would be a 50-50 hybrid. Then I would cross the B x S hybrids back to a strawberry and the result would be 75% strawberry and 25% blackberry, and finally I would cross the 75% strawberry, 25% blackberry hybrid with the 50-50 hybrid. This cross will yield a 62.50% strawberry and 37.50% blackberry.

In theory, the F3 generation could possibly yield some blue hybrids. Who knows, but a blackberry x strawberry hybrid did exist---Luther Burbank created them, but they were sterile.

Out of topic, here is quick fact: Flavor king is 62.50% plum, and 37.50% apricot.

Apparently there is a black strawberry out there, although googling it seems to have a lot of hits about people asking if they are real or not...

Could be interesting to check out.

r

Here is a link that might be useful: From amazon.com

Those black strawberries look photoshopped.

Hey Drew51, why don't you ask the folks in Anniston, Alabama what they think of Monsanto?

Sorry poolecw , you're a perfect example of how ignorance abounds. Our government did a lot worse. Should we throw away our system? OK, so some bad people used to work for them, same with many companies. We go after those people, but what does that have to do with their ground breaking research? I give up! Ignorance wins! Dow Chemical polluted the river I swim in with mercury in the 70's. I now eat the fish from that river. Do I think Dow Chemical is evil? Absolutely not. Did some people make some bad decisions over money? Of course! Do you think those people still work for Dow? No way!
poolecw you're a perfect example of what I was talking about. Thanks for making my point crystal clear.
That mistake of buying the company that made PCB's cost them 700 million. So it is obvious anybody involved in that purchase was fired. It was a huge financial mess. Doing the wrong thing never pays off. Lesson learned! People did that under the company name, but that does not mean the whole company is evil or bad, that is so silly!
Take this scenario of what you're trying to say. The US government exploded an atomic bomb and let the soldiers endure the shock wave. Many died from cancer. Obviously we should impeach Obama over it. That is what you're saying we should do with Monsanto's current board of directors? Not give them any credit for their ground breaking discoveries, but punish them for what other people did?
Again a crystal clear example of how ignorance abounds!
Monsanto stopped making PCB's in Anniston 42 years ago.
It's terrible what they did, what our government did, but people did that really, and the people involved are long gone.

This post was edited by Drew51 on Wed, Oct 2, 13 at 6:43

Well people are going to be passionate about their food. Monsanto is anything but innocent (and really I think the point here is what business is innocent? Not many)

A company in itself cannot be "evil", just like a religion cant be bad, or a "weapon" cant be dangerous without the persons mindset behind it. The same tool used to farming was used by monks to defend themselves.

The problem here is the fact that they basically have the agricultural market cornered. They admitingly do not to long term testing on their products because "there is nothing different", and they are more sue happy then most companies Ive heard about.

Does this mean monsanto is evil? Nope just means the asshats at the top making desicions only care about money, which in reality is what owning a business is about...

So at least our food shouldnt be seen as a business. Its starting to remind me of privitized health care......

Also to be fair drew, while its been 40 years for anniston, I think lots of people may still hold some grudges (and to seome degree rightfully so. Funny how we will remember somthing that like, but forget the damages storms liek katrina could do

Drew,

I don't know specifically what happened with the people at Monsanto you are referring too, but one of the things that really ticks me off is that these execs/politicians that do or sanction crappy things (at whatever company) always seem to land on their feet at some other company. It usually seems like every disgraced company yields 1 or 2 people that go to jail/get fined (if we are lucky), but I'm willing to bet that there are plenty of other responsible jerks that just take their money and run.

Just my impression of these things.

r

Someday soon we may have no choice but to eat the "blue strawberry".....

Here is a link that might be useful: attempted ban on seed saving in columbia