Using technology to solve technology's problems

Filed in archive Biotech on January 24, 2006

From the world of biotechnology comes word that scientists at the UK"s leading plant science centre have uncovered a gene that could help to develop new varieties of crops that will be able to cope with the changing world climate.

Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have identified the gene in barley that controls how the plant responds to seasonal changes in the length of the day. This is key to understanding how plants have adapted their flowering behavior to different environments.

Dr David Laurie, the research leader at the John Innes Centre, said, "Growing crops will become more difficult as the global climate changes. The varieties of crops grown in the UK are suited to the soil, seasons and traditional cool, wet summers. Later flowering in barley means it has a longer growing period to amass yield. If British summers get hotter and drier we will need types of wheat, barley and other crops that flower earlier, like Mediterranean varieties, to beat summer droughts."

But as interesting as climate-adaptive plants may be, let"s not forget that this is a case of using technology to solve problems created by technology. If it weren"t for global warming, we wouldn"t need to redesign plants to adapt to a hotter, drier climate. Certainly there is plenty of admirable work going on in biotechnology and nanotechnology to try to reduce the causes of global warming; let"s just make sure we"re not creating problems with these technologies and then patting ourselves on the back for inventing solutions that wouldn"t even be necessary if we hadn"t created the problems in the first place"because more often than not, our new solutions create yet another wave of unforeseen problems.