The Mono

I now know so much about the mechanism behind making transgenic (GMO) food crops that I can no longer engage in public discussion about it. Sigh.

Let it be noted, however, that after all this education, my only objection to crops modified to resist pests and diseases is the public reaction... there is no scientific basis I can determine for blocking such transgenic-resistance plants. Ditto for making plants used in pharm-acology. I'm not so sanguine about Roundup-Ready crops, which seem largely like a bid by Monsanto to lock in their Roundup market without a huge impact in effectiveness... but that's the minority of modifications looking for approval. Most of them are either used solely in lab research (for genomics and such), modified to make a foreign substance (such as a medicine), or given a gene conferring resistance to a disease or insect. And in almost all cases, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks (many of which exist even with normal crops).

That doesn't mean they should be forced down people's throats, so to speak. Public resistance is a very good reason to hold back on introducing such things to the food supply, and I think a lot of the pro-GMO folks have been ignoring that. I just wish they'd wake up and start working with the public on education and assuaging public fears, rather than screaming that the objectors are simply stupid Luddites. Until the public can have its fears rationally addressed, there's going to be backlash, and quite rightly so.

When I showed up at the plant clinic this morning, I was sure that it would be a long morning -- I was greeted with the news that neither of the pathologists was coming.

Now, we did have Dr. Nick, and Emma, our erstwhile entomologists... but the pathologists are the main diagnosticians, and the backbone of the plant clinic. Without them, we're kind of fumbling in the dark. Ann was on vacation, and Dr. Raabe wasn't feeling well enough yet to come, but the show must go on...

We all chipped in: the Master Gardner assistants (of which I'm one) fielded incoming supplicants as usual, and then the people were simply seen by whoever was free at the time. We had a group of Liz (an assistant who's been around for a long while but who has no formal training), Dr. Nick, and occasionally me who would brainstorm on what was laid before us, and Alice tried to assist Emma as she took on any case that came her way. I got tapped for a couple of cases and did my best, which was fortunately quite adequate for the problems that came in.

We came out of it quite grateful that the problems we saw were so straightforward: yellowing citrus, signs of lack of water, lots of scale insects, mealybugs, codling moth... lots of insects, so the entomologists were confident, and very few mysteries. Everyone seemed to come away feeling like they had an answer, whether it was positive news or not. I even saw Dr. Nick taking a stab at diagnostic questions, and he usually defers all the disease issues to the pathologists on sight.

The clinic volunteers came together and did much better than I had expected; I've been rather dreading the situation of "what if neither Bob nor Ann could make it?" Now I know. Having Dr. Nick there was reassuring, but I think we could have managed without him if we had to. The lack of a lab was frustrating -- we couldn't tell people "oh, we'll culture this and find out for sure" -- but in most cases a culture isn't really necessary. We told people what to look for in their own yards, and what to do with what they saw.

We had the weirdest thing come in -- it looked like a series of tiny champagne flutes without stems, stuck upright in the ground, maybe a centimeter tall. They had what seemed to be seedlike organs inside, but the outside looked like either a mushroom or a cell from a wasp's nest. We couldn't figure out whether they were fungal, insect-created, or a primitive sort of plant (though with the seedlike constructions I'd almost bank on the latter, with things like liverworts). The unopened buds looked like fungal fruiting bodies, but there were no hyphae at the base. We didn't manage to identify it, and several people took bits of it home.

Someone came in with a sprig of what looked like a citrus rootstock, if the 1.5" thorn was any indication, with a small green fruit on it. He said that all it produced were these small, fuzzy orbs that were more pith than fruit, though they did eventually turn orange. I took a look at the fruit (it really was fuzzy) and cracked, "It must be a fuzzy navel!" I then had to assure the man that no, really, it wasn't. (At least I thought it was funny.) We agreed that it would be excellent to use if he wanted to practice his grafting skills, as he thought he might.

I do hope Bob is feeling well enough to come soon, but he's very old and getting rapidly more fragile. I was worried that the clinic might fall apart without him... today was a good sign that it may survive even then.

I usually take information from the Pesticide Action Network with a grain of salt; even though I've been chemically injured and deal poorly with many of the pesticides they campaign against, their tone has always struck me as overly hysterical. That said, they sometimes do a good job of aggregating other news reports and summarizing studies, and this one seems like a good read.

Carbaryl: One Poison for Another in Urban Creeks

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This caught my eye, mainly because it has to do with plant pathology. It is, however, also a tale of the same sort of corruption that pervades the current White House. Which makes sense, given who Katherine Harris is.

Pressure was put on Florida officials to test "Celestial Water" as a cure for citrus canker

I haven't researched citrus canker specifically, but I remember hearing that it's been a real scourge in Florida over the last four years or so. It's a bacterial disease, and the combination of wet weather (which helps it spread from tree to tree) and hurricanes (which injured the trees, making wounds where disease could enter) has made a serious impact on the citrus orchards. The only treatment for most cankers is to cut off the affected parts, which in many cases in Florida has meant taking out trees entirely. Everyone's looking for some other way, but I don't know of any.

When Katherine Harris, who knows absolutely zip about plant disease, hooks up with a New York Rabbi and a cardiologist to suggest a cure, it makes me angry that scientists have to comply with ignorant superstitious beliefs just because of who she is. Other quacks are brushed off with a quiet "do the research and let us know". Yet this Kabbalist dreck gets tested by the state, because a U.S. Representative is breathing down people's necks.

Gah. I get irritated by politicians messing with climate change data, but I guess when they mess with my profession, it gets personal.