Peter Goldsbrough, professor of horticulture at Purdue, says that recent well-publicized failures of biotech crops have led some people to mistakenly think that agricultural biotechnology is struggling to gain acceptance. That isn't the case, he says.
"Biotechnology has had setbacks recently," Goldsbrough says. "Flavr-Savr tomatoes, which were the best-known biotech product, were pulled from the market, and so was a virus-resistant squash. But this is not the death knell of agricultural biotechnology."
According to Goldsbrough and Martin, Flavr-Savr tomatoes failed not because of concerns over biotechnology but because of the unexpected requirements of a new product.
Introduced in 1994, the Flavr-Savr tomatoes promised the taste of home-grown tomatoes from the grocer's cooler. Typical store-bought tomatoes are picked while they are green and hard so that they will not spoil while they are shipped. The tomatoes then have their red color brought out by spraying them with the plant hormone ethylene, but they still have the lackluster flavor of unripe tomatoes.
Flavr-Savr was supposed to change that. Because it had a longer shelf-life, it could ripen on the vine and then be shipped to the supermarkets. "The problem was that they were using the same equipment to pick and ship the ripe, soft Flavr-Savr tomato has they had the hard, green tomatoes," Martin says. "The loss from damage to the crop was as much as 30 percent. By the time they tried to adapt peach-packaging equipment to handle the tomatoes, it was too late."
Biotechnology holds great promise for agriculture, Goldsbrough says, and for that
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