As a molecular biologist, most of my work is done on a bench at or below room temperature. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been to a research field because I have more than two fingers. I’ve never taken a course in ecology, and I’ve rarely dealt with full, intact organisms. It is with just such a background that I absorbed a talk by Allison Snow at Rutgers ten days ago.

Snow* is an evolutionary biologist and ecologist who’s been running an interesting experiment on wild radishes for more than a decade now. In the 90′s, when transgenic crops like Bt corn and Roundup Ready soybean were beginning to dominant the market (and the landscape), there were concerns that wild relatives would incorporate the transgenes and spread as superweeds. Corn and soybean, with their lack of compatible relatives in the US, are exempt from this concern. However, as more and more transgenic crops with compatible relatives come down the pipeline (and with some, like canola, already here) there needs to be some hard data on just how easily transgenes can persist and spread in wild populations.

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