Hi ya, Mulio.

Thankfully, there are some movements afoot to separate science from the hijacking of science to advance an agenda.

By the way, I forgot to mention that I thought the author's use of the words "hybrid" and "heirloom" was very misleading. Or, inaccurate, to say the least.

But I was too busy ranting about the trend of junk science. :-)

Why is it every time the subject of genetic research comes up, some folks get all bent outta shape and start waving "Monsanto Is The Devil" placards around

Can't resist -- because they are.

Biotech corn

GM Crops do not increase yield

Monsanto Sues Percy Schmeiser when his crops were contaminated by their pollen

Thanks, I commented.

I skimmed the first page and that was enough for me. What has gone wrong with people these days.

Carolyn, if you want to post a link, you can do it during the preview like Trudi suggested, or you can use the code

<a href="http://www.example.com"; target="_blank">Link Text Here</a>

and you can insert a link anywhere in the body of the message, and with the target="_blank" attribute, you can have the link open in a new window.

Anney,

I understand the potential dangers of GM and bio-engineering.

I understand the evils of corporate greed.

I understand how lawyers make a living representing their clients.

And I assume you do too.

What I was saying, and if you took the time to read and comprehend it, is that the researchers cited in this article were exploring the gene that enabled tomatoes to evolve from tiny berries to a useful food crop. And they obviously had no intent to develop a GM tomato to release to the public, pollute the environment or exploit for corporate profit (in my opinion).

Furthermore, I think there are many benefits to be realized through genetic research, and I think ninnies who generally holler foul every time genetic research is discussed or promoted are simply Chicken Littles.

Now, if you want to use your time and talents tilting at windmills, so be it. The research will go on. Development will occur. Benefits will be realized. Hopefully, the environment will be protected, and your and others' sensibilties won't be terminally bruised.

Shalom,

Bill

If anyone hasn't seen the documentary 'The World According to Monsanto', you should.
Remy

As Hoosier said, SUN research was not something released.

I'd like to state that I am not opposed to selecting a gene from one organism of the same genus and inserting it into another. I think that can be a useful and time saving tool. There are some concerns I have about potentials from that process but I wont go into that. Crossing in the convential way is really the same thing but more genes are transfered (creating more work to seperate them out).

One of my main concerns is when one starts taking genes from one distantly related organism and placing them into aonther (like fish genes into watermelons). I have some concerns about that especially if it's used for food.

But as for why the concern over genetics:

First I think it comes from ignorance (remember ignorance doesnt mean stupid it's simply not informed).

after teaching some and watching student reactions

1-genetics involves terms which confuse people easily. Mitosis and meiosis come to mind
2-genetics involve math (probablities - for most Pungent's squares come to mind)

Those two things in particular seem to bring up negative associations for MANY. I think it takes them back to middle-school/high school biology. Maybe they blew this part of the test or just found it frustrating. I think because of that some people just seem to want to blot out genetics rather than try to understand it. It's not really a black and white issue just like hybrids and heirlooms are not.

IN addition, Monsanto bought Seminis Seeds in 2005 b'c it was a good investment for them. Monsanto has no expertise in tomato breeding; that's not their thing.

What they bought was Seminis seeds which is a conglomerate of many companies as the link below shows. Petoseed is the one that has done most of the development of new varieties, at least for the US.

I've posted this link before but now might be another time to do it re the remarks being made about Monsanto.

Monsanto and Syngenta are not all bad, you know.

And please let's not turn this thread into an anti-Monsanto rant b'c I'd prefer to think that it's what's being written about tomatoes themselves that's most important here.

Carolyn

So will you be looking forward to trying Dr Heath's new line next year Carolyn?

I won't even read this article. It gets me too angry to see all the garbage that Monsanto is convincing the world of......Not worth reading and getting upset over.
I feel good planting heirlooms, I like heirlooms, I save seeds, other people save seeds, this will in time save the world from the GMO takeover. I can hope anyway...
Martha/zucchini

remy

Thanks for the link.

OH NO!!!

Humans are genetically engineered ... probably from monkeys or something.

The Anunaki Genetically Engineered Human Slaves!

At 6:00 - 7:00 in that video, they explain how Adam was created in a test tube!

Hey Guysd; Just because carolyn137 says that Seminis isn't evil doesn't make it true.
Monsanto is a multi-billion dollar corp. They didn't purchase Siminis just to sell seeds.

Then again, just because Monsanto is a multi-billion dollar corporation does not necessarily make them evil (full disclosure, I am not a multi-million dollar corporation). I hate when I see people painting with such a broad brush.

Sure there may be room in that article to disagree with any of the statements made, but, it is not impossible for a hybrid to taste good, or an open pollinated tomato to taste bad, it is all relative.

Now if you like the idea of saving seed, preserving certain varieties and you believe this is making our food sources more secure, more power to your ventures. But, if we are to believe that there is no need for factory farming, or the types of crops necessary to feed the number of people we have put on the globe, I applaud the idea that there may be better tasting hybrids that will be highly productive and affordable.

Carolyn

Are you thinking of replying to Borrell's erroneous claims somewhere? Or were you just annoyed to see so much wrong information in a scientific publication?

It seems to me that every country in the world that can grow tomatoes has its own "heirlooms" or open-pollinated tomatoes with their own characteristics, and sometimes they end up in our OP seed supplies.

Some of the hybrids improve on the OP characteristics that home gardeners are interested in, even though the difference between saving seeds and buying them is important to some people. IOW, they'd rather save the seeds and know what they've got.

We also know that many hybrids were developed with commercial growers in mind, and taste has come in below shelf-life and shipping characteristics. These characteristics are of less interest to home gardeners.

Seed companies are sometimes bridging the gap between commercial and home gardeners or have accepted the gap and develop hybrids for both customers. That's to everybody's advantage.

That reporter needs to have his head set straight about some of the claims he made and straighten out his source for that information, too!

(If Monsanto hadn't been mentioned, the discussion wouldn't have mushroomed the way it did!)

"But, if we are to believe that there is no need for factory farming, or the types of crops necessary to feed the number of people we have put on the globe ..."

But Lando, didn't you already realize that we're all in here bloggin' in the tomato room on little brief breaks from our real life jobs of feeding the world with heirloom produce organically grown in our backyard and rooftop gardens?!?

What I found disturbing about the documentary was that the Monsanto BT was finding its way into the Mexican and other South American indigenous vegetables like a cancer invades the human body.

I think the future of the human race has taken a giant step in the wrong direction. It's the classic case of "all our eggs in one basket". It would seem that we are destained to only have the Monsanto basket.

I take exception to anyone who supports the efforts of Monsanto and its subsidiaries in any fashion. Nothing they do is for the good of the community. If they buy another company, they have a hidden agenda that only serves their total plan which certainly seems to be the domination of the world's food supply.

God help us, because it doesn't look like our government will.

JMO

Ted

... apparently Scientific American is embarassed and has taken the article down because the links posted here and at two other gardening site no longer work ... at least at the moment. Hmmmmm.

HC

It still comes up on my computer.

Okay, but to be fair I thought there was some interesting information in the article. The idea that a few genes account for most of the differentiation between heirlooms is interesting. It also makes sense that inbreeding for appearance and flavor is responsible for some of the weaknesses of our beloved heirlooms.

Sillius
The idea that a few genes account for most of the differentiation between heirlooms is interesting.

I wonder where he got that information.

[T]he tomato genome encodes ~35,000 genes, which are sequestered largely in euchromatic regions corresponding to less than one-quarter of the total DNA in the tomato nucleus."

Pretty scientific language, but the point is that with that many genes "corresponding to less than one-quarter of the total DNA in the tomato nucleus", it's going to take more than a casual "claim" on a science writer's part to convince me that the genetics of all open pollinated and hybrid cultivars of tomatoes have been identified, and only only a "few" genes make the differences. Even more complex, genes pair up with other genes to create specific and unique characteristics in living organisms. Genes don't usually operate singly in nature.

What may be true instead is that hybridizers have identified only a "few" genes that are used for plant hybridization at the present, not that only a "few" exist (was it ten?). Maybe a little bit of sleight of hand (or tongue) there.

Sillius

Here's a bit more research I found. It's about the genetic differences between ancient tomatoes and modern tomatoes Tanksley has been working to understand the genetic changes that allowed humans to transform wild tomatoes -- which are naturally about the size of a blueberry -- into modern varieties such as the beefsteak tomato, which can weigh a pound (half a kg) or more.....

To understand this process, Tanksley first mapped the tomato's roughly 30,000 genes, looking for differences between the wild and modern tomato. That turned up about 10 genes, which they winnowed down by checking different gene databases to see if these gene changes were common to other plants.

I wonder if these are the ten genes to which the writer of this SA piece refers, those identified by this researcher who was not comparing ancient tomatoes to hybrids especially but only one characteristic, the comparative size of the original tomato to the size of "modern" tomatoes.

Now THAT evolutionary change over the milennia is pretty amazing. Certainly it was aided by human selection!

Interesting stuff, Anney. Those probably are the ten genes in question. I have done some reading on the history of pepper cultivation and the difference between the wild, primordial pepper and the modern ones which we eat is similar to that found in tomatoes. Anyone who thinks that ancient peoples were stupid or short-sighted could take a lesson from those prehistoric breeders.

That said, I am also a believer in the modern food revolution (just not so much in my garden.) If Monsanto can put a better-tasting tomato on the supermarket shelf, I'll applaud that development despite my feelings about the patenting of proprietary cultivars. I especially dislike the idea of taking action against some poor farmer who saves his own seed corn, never bought their damned corn and wound up with a neighbor's genes in their crop.

I used to love Scientific American, Discover, etc years ago.
I also stopped reading all of those types of magazines when they stopped the science,
and started the political agendas.
Now they are just depressing, lying, sad comic books.

I'm going to continue growing my hybrids, which are no different than heirlooms, and not worry about it. ;-)

Corrie

"The idea that a few genes account for most of the differentiation between heirlooms is interesting."

Well I guess the fact that two genes account for ALL the differentiation between humans and chimps is even more interesting, huh?

Drat! One more comment.

Carolyn, this one's for you with a question at the end. In my previous comments, I misunderstood what Borrell was writing. He was quoting Steven D. Tanksley in the Scientific American piece: Borrell quoting Tanksley: "The irony of all this," says Steven Tanksley, a geneticist at Cornell University, "is all that diversity of heirlooms can be accounted for by a handful of genes. There's probably no more than 10 mutant genes that create the diversity of heirlooms you see." But rather than simply debunking a myth about the heirlooms diversity, Tanksley's deconstruction of the tomato genome, along with work by others, is showing how an unassuming berry from the Andes became one of the world's top crops.

Tanksley isn't discussing how hybrids and open-pollinated tomatoes differ genetically at all. (I don't know how I got that idea.) In another link, Tanksley is talking about the 10 mutant genes he says changed the small fruit size of wild tomatoes to the large size of the modern tomato. Tanksley focused on the genetic changes that give rise to a large number of compartments or locules inside the tomato, a plant that originated in the Americas.

"If you take a beefsteak tomato from the supermarket and cut it open inside you'll see these compartments in there that have wells between them. They may have anywhere from 10 to 20 of these compartments," said Tanksley, whose research appears in the journal Nature Genetics.

A true wild tomato may have only two to four of these.

"Somehow, something made the plant start making these compartments, and by making more compartments, you can get larger fruit."

To understand this process, Tanksley first mapped the tomato's roughly 30,000 genes, looking for differences between the wild and modern tomato. That turned up about 10 genes, which they winnowed down by checking different gene databases to see if these gene changes were common to other plants.

They were left with a handful of genes. After comparing the sequences of these, they found one called "fas" with a large mutation. "It was a smoking gun," Tanksley said.

None of the wild tomatoes they studied had this mutation.

When they took the "wild" version of this gene from a wild plant and put it into a modern plant, it started to make tiny tomatoes.

Genetic Sleuths

I don't know how that information translates to ten mutant genes determining the various characteristics of open-pollinated tomatoes. There are certainly differences among them in addition to size -- color, fruit-shape, taste, plant size, growth habit, determinate, indeterminate, leaf-form, etc. No mention is made of these other characteristics. The two reports mentioning ten mutant genes don't give the same information.

Carolyn, I'm ignorant about genetics, and that's a very confusing article to me for several reasons, including my ignorance! You've studied and know heirlooms six ways from Sunday. Maybe you can explain "ten mutant genes account for the differences in 'heirloom' tomatoes" when another report about what looks like the same the Tanksley research focuses only on fruit size? Or maybe not. :-)

Wow, now that I know all of my plants will only produce 2 fruit each I guess I should plant another 100. I want to know what to do about the company that obviously scammed me last year and sent me hybrid seed instead of the heirlooms I ordered! I got trash bag fulls of tomatoes from my supposed heirlooms last year. Apparently that's impossible LOL. Did this guy call Burpee for his "research"? I think we should all send the author pics of various heirlooms loaded with tomatoes just to point out how ridiculous the entire article is.

Lets start out by understanding the genetic bottleneck that the common tomato came through. The first tomatoes were small green berries on herbaceous sprawling plants somewhere in the highlands of Peru and environs. They were carried from Peru through Central America to Mexico where they were grown by the Maya and later native peoples of that area. These early tomatoes can be reasonably proven to have been a small yellow and/or red berry not much bigger than a pearl. There was a mutation for size that occurred in these early tomatoes that resulted in a significantly larger fruit. These were then propagated extensively while the original small fruited tomato basically disappeared from cultivation. Now let several hundred years pass. More mutations accumulate in the tomato genome at a statistically significant and predictable rate of about 1 major new mutation every 300 to 400 years in the early years and at an increasing rate as the number of plants mushroomed after 1500 when Europeans got hold of them. The problem here is that we started with a very limited genome and the only changes we introduced over a period of hundreds of years were visible mutations which affected traits like fruit size, shape, color, etc. The underlying genome of 35000 or so genes is still highly conserved yet thousands of generations have been grown. The result is our modern tomato which is severely limited from a genetic viewpoint.

I'm going to posit one thing re the Tanksley statement re 10 genes control most of the variation in modern tomatoes. I have reason to believe he is referring to genes that affect the shape and/or color of the fruit. If we start on that basis, then 10 genes become plausible. If I consider all the variations in tomato plants that I am aware of, then the number of genes involved must be much higher. Taking a few as examples, there is the yellow skin vs clear skin gene, the green stripe gene such as is expressed in Green Zebra, the regular leaf vs potato leaf gene, a gene complex that controls green when ripe that can mask a yellow, pink, orange, or Red when ripe in the background, genes that control flower structure, genes for plant flower expression (Ildi comes to mind), at least three genes that contribute to tomato flavor, a gene for sweetness, and I could go on quite a ways. What I am pointing out is that heirloom tomatoes express more than the 10 genes that Tanksley was limiting himself to.

Another consideration is that a single gene can have multiple forms. So of the 10 genes that Tanksley discusses, there might be 40 different variations of the beefsteak gene and there can be modifier genes that affect each of those 40 variations. Try combining heart with beefsteak sometime. It is a real stretch to get it to work! The result is that 10 genes could have thousands of different expressions.

One of the more interesting things to know about any genome is that some genes are turned off and never expressed. The genome goes on reproducing itself and to all intents and purposes, this deactivated genetic material is not present. Under some conditions, these existing genes will be patched to other genes, or some other event will activate them. The result is a radical change in the genome that really is not new, it was there all the time, but it could not be seen because the gene(s) affected were always turned off.

The major question we all have for tomato researchers is "When will you start breeding tomatoes that taste good?" Well the answer is now. Significant research has identified genes that have major contributions to flavor. These genes include fureaneol (google it and read), and fructose/sucrose for sweetness (Momotaro and Sungold have enhanced sweetness).

The problem lots of us have is that hybrids typically have been developed to meet specific goals such as firmness, thick skin, shipping ability, slow ripening, etc. These traits are counter to the desires of most home gardeners.

There are several statements in the article that I have a major problem with. heirlooms are actually feeble and inbred, the defective product of breeding experiments... This is a significant but seriously misleading statement. Heirlooms are not feeble, but they do lack genetic resistance to many of the diseases that can affect tomatoes. I could as easily make a statement that hybrids are feeble and inbred because they have little or no flavor and they are hard as baseballs. Restoring Heirloom's Health Now, Monsanto wants to do the same for the heirloom. Monsanto does not WANT to do anything with heirlooms except make money. They will do whatever is required to divert the revenue that heirlooms represent into their own pockets. If you have any idea that Monsanto is altruistic, go beat your head against a brick wall, maybe you will lose the idea. He claims he is also able to maintain a comparable flavor and sugar profile even on productive plants. I have big issues with this one. Lots of heirlooms produce heavily and maintain excellent flavor. That is why we grow heirlooms.

Now lets get down to the nitty gritty of monsanto's reason for growing hybrids such as a hybrid Mr. Stripey. By and large Mr. Stripey is a rather bland, mushy, sometimes mealy textured tomato that can be sweet under some conditions. There is a lot of room to improve on that. The problem Monsanto faces is that they have to make money from selling seed. It is impossible to make money selling open pollinated seed. I'm not talking about the money a business like Sandhill Preservation or Tomato Growers Supply makes. I'm talking about money by the millions of dollars. Open pollinated seed is just too easy for people to grow and save for a big business to make a profit. This leaves monsanto with only one viable option at present, to grow hybrids which only reproduce true to type from monsanto's seed. Long term, monsanto would be happy as could be to have a seed that would grow a healthy tomato plant but that produced only sterile seed. This would ensure their revenue stream indefinitely.

DarJones

Someone at another message site asked why a link to Ohio State U was in the article and I responded as written below. And I'm cutting and pasting it here b'c I think it's important to know that efforts to improve tomato taste and other traits are also being done outside of what was discussed in the article I posted to start this thread.

******

___________, the link to OSU is b/c the article discusses the work of Dr. Esther van der Kaamp, whom I know, who did a lot of work on the genes that alter shape and size of tomatoes in an effort to better understand how they developed. There's a series of academic books being done on Solanaceae and I was asked to help write a short piece on heirlooms b'c many researchers still don't know what they are. And it was in Dr. van der Kaamp's section of one book that what I wrote will appear, so we got to know each other quite well.

Also at OSU although not mentioned in the article is Dr. David Francis, who is the person who is heading up aquisition of tomato varieties for those who are involved in SolCAP.

SolCAP, meaning the Solanaceae Coordinated Agricultural Project has as its mission:

"......bringing together an integrated team of researchers, educators and extension specialists at Michigan State, Ohio State, Cornell, U of CA at Davis, and Oregon State to incorporate emerging DNA sequence data into efforts to improve vegetable crops. Potato and tomato are the two most important vegetable crops in Solanaceae, a taxonomic family that includes peppers, eggplant, and petunia. The project will identify DNA sequence variation in genes associated with with high value traits such as carbohydrate and vitamin content and link these traits with breeder friendly markers. SolCAP will support centralized facilities ( at Ohio State and UC Davis) for generating transcribed sequence data and then characterizing DNA sequence variation in tomato and potato lines. Colleagues at Oregon State, USDA/ARS Idaho, Harris Moran, U of FL, Ohio State, USDA/ARS WI, Cornell , U of MN, NC State and USDA/ARS Maryland will manage the field trials of these potato and tomato lines........" and that's the most relevant part, I think.

I was referred to Dr. Francis at OSU, where Dr. Van der Kammp also is, by a researcher at the Geneva Station at Cornell. Craig and I have been listed as consultants for grant requests by these two researchers doing DNA sequence analysis for several years now. And it was Joanne who put me in touch with Dr. Francis.

And what was he looking for re germplasm? Great tasting OP's, mainly heirloom varieties. He already had a list and we went through it on the phone and I suggested that I didn't agree with many of them, but he said they were included b/c they had a certain gene marker important to them.

So he asked me to submit a list to him of what I thought was tasty, I did, and he selected several from that list. I sent him seeds for what I could and told him where he could buy the seeds for the others. And I ended up sending 12 varieties to his wife for their own home garden.

And I wrote all of the above b'c it offers an alternative way to go in terms of improving tomatoes that doesn't have the stigma, if you will, of the Monsanto name.

The list of SolCAP participants is broad and deep and some names that some will recognize are Jay Scott at U of FL, Roger Chatelet at UC Davis, Dani Zamir at the Hebrew U of Jerusalem and I know that Dr. Randy Gardner is also involved, probably for a source of germplasm as well as his expertise in using heirloom varieties in breeding hybrids.

I thought it was important for me to discuss SolCAP as an alternative to what was written about in the article currently under discussion.
__________________
Carolyn

And no, K, I'm not going to grow Dr. Heath's new hybrid. I have no systemnic tomato diseases here and I'll wait until someone has some varieties with high level tolerance, pardon that word, to the fungal foliage pathogens Early Blight ( A. solani) and Septoria leaf Spot, which are the main problems I have in some but not all years.

And yes, the 10 genes Tanksley refers to are those IDed as to shape and size that he and several of his former students have been working on in terms of evolution of the tomato.

And Yes Dar, several genes have now been IDed re taste, and as you can see from the SolCAP goals, as I just posted, I'm sure that many more will also be IDed and used via the extensive network that SolCAP comprises.

Carolyn

I totally forgot to link to the SolCAP website for those who might be interested in the participants and other aspects of the SolCAP project.

Carolyn

Time to start the NDC

Two notes re my post from above. I misspelled furaneol. If you search for "furaneol tomato" on google, you will get lots of references. Also, the list of genes that I gave includes Green Stripe with is derived from a wild tomato species. I was not attempting to list only genes from Solanum Lycopersicum, but rather a list of traits of which I am aware and that fall outside the Tanksley group. Should have been more awake when I posted. :D

DarJones

Carolyn/Dar

You really have to wonder why Borrell used Tanksley as his only source of information on "heirlooms" and referred only to Monsanto. Carolyn, I see now why you wanted people to read the other link.

[According to the editor's blurb, the SA article about tomatoes is the first in a series of six about food which are scheduled to be published. I wonder if the rest will have as many errors and how much they will support the goals and aims of agribusiness growth and gains rather than what other biotech developers and growers are doing that's equally as valid and important.]

I guess we'll just have to see what happens.

Ridiculous!

As far as posting a link, I've never had a problem doing so in the first post. You just have to hit the preview button before the link option becomes available :)

Vera

Ridiculous!
As far as posting a link, I've never had a problem doing so in the first post. You just have to hit the preview button before the link option becomes available :)

*****

Vera, I wouldn't say I was being ridiculous, rather, ignorant of the fact that one can do so by hitting the preview button.

I've been reading/posting at GW since maybe 2001 or so, I can't remember without checking My Page, but I seldom start threads myself and even less so with a link, rather, I try to answer questions where I think I can be helpful.

Carolyn, noting that you're the third or fourth person in this thread who has shared with me how to go about linking in a first post of a thread. ( smile)

I know Im not as knowledgeable as many folks on this forum, but this article has lots of inaccuracies that EVEN I picked up on! Some of the errors were laugh out loud funny.
I guess with all the info that is generated about how fabulous heirloom tomatoes are there has to be someone out there to tell us how fabulous hybrids are; although, dyssing heirlooms in the process is pretty bothersome (especially with such inaccuracies). That being said, most seed companies already push the hybrids anyway thats where the $$ is (I avoid those seed companies now) Im not sure what the point of the article is, unless it is solely to SELL HYBRIDS, or the fella writing it just wanted to get attention or look like a jack___.

Carolyn,
"And please let's not turn this thread into an anti-Monsanto rant" I'm sorry, I didn't mean to add any fuel to the fire. When I read "Restoring Heirloom's Health
Now, Monsanto wants to do the same for the heirloom." in the article, I couldn't help myself. I was trying to show that Monsanto has a history of not being very truthful about their products and/or intentions.
As DarJones wrote:
"Monsanto does not WANT to do anything with heirlooms except make money. They will do whatever is required to divert the revenue that heirlooms represent into their own pockets. If you have any idea that Monsanto is altruistic, go beat your head against a brick wall, maybe you will lose the idea."

Oh and I think the "Ridiculous" posted by Vera was a comment to the article, not you, lol.

Anney,
You're welcome.
Remy
Remy

Still trying to picture a gourd-headed 1960's Yippie. Anybody other than HC got any clue what one might look like?
So many varieties of gourd--don't know which one to put on the 1960's Yippie's neck. Dipper? Bottle? Snake? Apple? Barrel? Swan? Turk's Turban? Luffa?

Please revisit the article and read the latest comments (56 and 57). Doug Heath and Mica Veihman of Monsanto have both commented and they're not happy with the article either.

Hmmmm.....

Anybody other than HC got any clue what one might look like?

{{gwi:1303596}}

Nope--heads look pretty much like normal people heads. These might be gourd-handed 1960's Yippies.

Oh the minute I saw "Monsanto" I knew where this was going. I have been a Monsanto boycotter since I read about Aspertame, the poison they have spread for 2 decades now.Then I read about their Roundup resistant raspseed (Canola) and the farmer they sued...What scoundrels. They are in the same society downgraders like Wal Mart. Yes, I have my tin foil hat on.
Ok now for real world.I am not heirloom snob. I do grow some Hybrids only for insurance...in case my Heirs fail.
But to only get 2 tomatoes on a plant. PUHLEASE! Did they measure the nitrogen in each plant's soil? Just a thought and I did not go to college and have no "scientific" degree.
Pathetic pandering for Monsanto.

So, Yummy, what hybrids do you grow?

Hey Yummykaz; If you are boycotting Monsanto you'll probably wsnt to Boycott hybrid Tomato seeds as well. Since Siminis is now owned by Monsanto.

Hooshire: I grow a Hybrid called JD's Early Texas Black. Some year a celebrity and Dona which I never know if it is French Hy or not.
Zebra...I get all tomato seeds from Baker Creek Heirlooms and sometimes from SSE. Also I think my local nursery get their seeds from the Tomatofest.I buy their starts.
I have followed the Monsanto takeover in the magazine Countryside and first read about their involvement in Animal, Veg,Miracle book. I have long boycotted them before the seed thing, after I saw effects and read about Aspertame.
Did not mean to sound offensive with use of heirloom snob...I felt that this is what the article was implying.

Yummy, I think Celebrity hybrid tomato is a Peto product and I think Monsanto owns Peto.

If you would READ the article ... the gene manipulation was only used to identify the effects of the gene.

"After 12 years of *****traditional breeding***** with the help of molecular markers, he has created a new rainbow-streaked tomato less prone to cracking and also endowed with 12 disease-resistant genes." That's TRADITIONAL BREEDING folks, traditional as in hand-pollinating the selected plants, growing the seeds, making more selections.

Advanced genetics does make the process easier, because you can test the plants to see which ones have th3e gene you are after, but the breeding is the old-fashioned pollen, stamen, pistil sort.

I think people read the article. What's implied is that Monsanto intends to get into the tomato hybridizing business involving heirlooms, and given their unfortunate record on many other of their agribusiness ventures, many people don't trust them or their motives.

I read the article which basically describes how retrotransposons (which are mobile genetic elements that insert themselves into the genome) may be one of the driving forces behind plant evolution and phenotype.
You should also take note that the article doesn't discuss heirloom or hybrid varieties at all.
I agree that Monsanto would love to find a way to get patents on heirlooms. And this may be the "slippery slope" that allows this.

bump to save from falling off the last page - too many good links to lose