Seed Concerns Donate Data on Corn Gene

Very cool thing to do. Via the NY Times: bq. The nation's two leading seed companies have agreed to make a vast amount of information about corn genes available to government and academic scientists, an effort that the companies and outside scientists said could greatly accelerate improvement of one of the nation's most important crops. bq. The move by the companies, Monsanto and the Pioneer Hi-Bred International unit of DuPont, is at least partly aimed at persuading the government to undertake what could be a complex and expensive project to determine the entire DNA sequence of corn, something that could aid in efforts to develop crops with higher yields, resistance to drought or other desirable traits. We are able to engineer for some traits but we still don't know the entire sequence. Getting a publicly funded government project to do this would be awesome - paid for by taxpayers dollars, the information would be public domain so people in other countries would be able to benefit as well. For people who complain about genetic engineering, they should try to eat the original corn our ancestors had to deal with and see how much they like it. To excerpt from this source bq. It is so changed from the ancestral wild grass that its original form has not been identified with certainty, and it has been so adapted to cultivation that it cannot sustain itself without human cultivation.