I believe that the concerns that many sincere people have about “genetic contamination” by GMO crops could be dispelled with a little knowledge of basic plant biology.   I base this opinion on the comment-streams for my posts that touch on the topic of GMO crops and from the websites of organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists, Econexus and GreenPeace.  The pattern I see is that people are extremely concerned about something that is actually a very old and very manageable issue that doesn’t really change with the GMO crops we have today.

Birds and Bees

Plants, being stationary, need to use a variety of dispersal mechanisms to move pollen and “mate” with each other.  Some plants work hard to attract pollinators like bees, butterflies, bats… to carry the male pollen from one a male part of one flower to a female flower part on another flower.  Many simply make vast amounts of pollen that will be carried on wind currents.  In any case the entire natural purpose of these processes is to “contaminate” related plants with their genetics (I will continue to use the emotive term “contaminate” that is favored by anti-GMO groups even though biologists would normally say “cross pollinate“).  GMO crops do absolutely the same things as unmodified crops in this regard.

The Up-side of “Contamination”

Humans have been using the “contamination” process for millenia to improve crop species.  For a very long time they did it simply by selecting the variants they liked better and having no idea how this occurred.  We have been harnessing the power of the “contamination” process with increasing sophistication since Mendel first described “genes” in 1865.  So genetic “contamination” can be a good thing.  It can also be a problem, but not one that is as frightening as this terminology implies.

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