Zombie Seeds?

This gives new meaning to the vegetative state of biological life without function. Bodily function, mechanically assisted, cerebral function absent. And, it appears, it's not only badly damaged humans who can attain to that state, but vegetables, agrarian crops themselves. Now who is giving whom a bad name?

For people we have crusaders for human rights, railing against the exploitation and abuse of defenceless humans by their exploiters. For farm crops we have environmentalists alarmed over all the latest developments in genetically modified foods. Now we appear to have a new generation of modifications; those designed to be sterile until such time as a particular chemical is applied to spring them into life.

Not bad enough that Monsanto and cronies let loose on an unsuspecting and too-trusting world their Terminator seeds. And managed to successfully sue farmers whom they claim were using their seeds in an unqualified manner; qualification being linked to paying up front. For expensive seeds that were resistant to pests, but incapable of reproducing. Farmers could no longer purchase seeds with the option of planning the following year's crop on seeds they could glean from their mature crops.

Now plants are in the design stage to allow their genetic modification to enable them to produce drugs like antibiotics and insulin. And industrial chemicals. Isn't that a nightmare scenario? Escapees entering the food chain? There's big money to be made from designing special crops for biofuel technology. And the seed companies plan on total control of seed supply.

The thing of it is, with seeds whose genes are manipulated to be sterile, farmers are a captured market - they've got to go back to the industrial producers each and every year to purchase very expensive seeds. We end up with a dangerous monoculture. Without diversity, crops with similar genetics are far more vulnerable to new types of predatory insects and viruses that can swiftly cause great havoc in production.

And if the trait to sterility itself spread to other, normal, traditional, non-modified crops, what then? Cross pollination would have done its work as nature intended it to. Nature not having counted on mankind's scientific interference in the work she has performed so admirably without our stumbling attempts to do her one better.

If crops such as those designed to produce pharmaceuticals, as far fetched as that seems, contaminate food crops there's another source for a nightmare scenario. Innovation is such an intriguing concept.