Anda di halaman 1dari 1

1920s an average acre sown with maize in the corn belt of North America

might have yielded 35 bushels per acre, today it can yield 125 bushels. This
is widely regarded as one of the greatest triumphs of basic genetics as
applied to human welfare. But the truth is more interesting.
Hybrid corn is produced by crossing two true-breeding inbred varieties and
planting the seed from that cross. These true-breeding inbred varieties are
created by a long process of self-pollination to make each variety
completely uniform genetically. A seed company will spend a certain
number of years self-pollinating lines of corn until it gets uniform lines, and
it will then sell to the farmer the seed that comes from crossing two of these
lines. The inbred homogeneous lines themselves give rather poor yields,
whereas the hybrid is superior in productivity both to the inbred lines and to
the original open-pollinated population of corn from which the inbreds came.
It is not the case that a cross between any two inbred homogeneous lines of
corn will produce a hybrid with high yield. It is necessary to search among
many such homogeneous inbred lines to find pairs that will do the trick.
The hybrid cross between the inbred lines has another quality, which is not
much spoken about, a quality with a unique commercial value. If a farmer
has a high-yielding variety of some crop, one that is resistant to disease and
produces high commercial output as compared to the cost of inputs, his
normal way of carrying on his business would be to save some of the seed of
this high-yielding variety and plant it next year to again achieve high yields.
Once the farmer acquired the seed of this wonderful variety, he would no
longer have to pay again to reacquire it, because plants, like other organisms,
reproduce themselves. But this self-reproduction presents a serious problem
to someone who wants to make money by developing new varieties of
organisms. For how will he make a profit if the moment he has sold the seed,
its further production is in the hands of the person who bought it? He will
get to sell it one time only, and then it will be distributed everywhere for
nothing.
This is the problem of copy protection that also exists for computer software
programs. The developer of computer software will be unwilling to devote
time, energy, and money to developing a new program if the first purchasers
can copy it and pass it around to their friends for virtually nothing. That has
always been the problem of plant and animal breeding. Plant breeders and

Anda mungkin juga menyukai