Like government healthcare, besides being anti-Constitutional, lets see it work before jumping off an unknown cliff, like the proverbial lemming, and committing trillions to another astronomical government boondoggle that you will be paying many times over for the rest of your life. Let’s do the due diligence and see what works.

There is no question that this statement is true. Most of the world outside of the Americas, animal fat is just a flavoring and meat for special occasions.

I would add another that is, unfortunately, gaining acceptance and that is ethanol production. It motivates industrial farms to put ever more land under cultivation and convert it fuel for automobiles. Ethanol production requires 20 times more water than gasoline, uses much valuable phosphorus, and produces an astonishing amount of CO2 and other waste. It simply is a technology that is not even close to being perfected. It certainly should not be subsidized by the government, especially on such a vast scale. If you think of all those automobiles in traffic as being vast herds of land mammals you will see that it is, indeed, a really bad idea. Ethanol production is just more carnivorism. It is also raising the price of food and causing starvation in Latin America and Africa. If Cap and Trade passes it will here too.

It works by shooting the gene into the cells, some of which arrive in the nucleus, and some of those get hooked up in the cell’s chromosomes.

There is also another bacterium similar to agrobacterium that someone has found that can perform the same function, but I forget the name.

But I can’t find something about biolistics:(
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To Karl: Escherichia coli is a one species, isn’t it. But let set aside E.coli. Can we transform plant without any help from Agrobacterium? I mean ANY help.

The kind of E. coli that gives people diarrhea and the kind of E. coli used in labs are two different animals, err, prokaryotes. The former is a virulent pathogen while the latter is a tame, domesticated cell with its virulence removed. It has become the lab-rat of molecular biology, able to make copies of circular pieces of DNA containing your gene, indefinitely, until you need to use it. Usually, genetic engineers will make their genetic construct in an E. coli bacterium, and then transfer it to Agrobacterium to then transfer it into the plant.

There is always the small possibility that a piece of bacterial DNA could get into the plant, which is why you have to prove to regulators that only your DNA of interest is inserted into the plant and nothing else. Even if something slipped through, the chance of it causing any harm is exceedingly small – DNA doesn’t itself make E. coli dangerous, it is how all of the DNA of the virulent pathogen together tells it how to infect our bodies. Given how difficult it can be to get the gene you want to insert into the plant and work properly, the chance of an intact, functional, dangerous gene from getting into the plant from the bacterium, and actually working in a completely different genetic environment is astronomically small. But it sure sounds scary.

I like this pictoral step by step from UC Davis about Agrobacterium a lot, but it doesn’t talk about things at the molecular level.

I’ll keep an eye out for a book. That would be helpful!