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Nearly 800 million people worldwide depend on cassava for survival — but this critical food source is under attack by entirely preventable viruses, says computational biologist and TED Senior Fellow Laura Boykin. She takes us to the farms in East Africa where she's working with a diverse team of scientists to help farmers keep their crops healthy using a portable DNA lab and mini supercomputer that can identify viruses in hours, instead of months.
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FIRST
Second
More like Big Ag patenting crops
Watch out. Monsanto is going to copyright that stuff before you have a chance to and legally prevent you from using it unless you pay them a huge fee.
Golden rice might have saved world children…
gmo?
My wife’s knickers were stolen.
Thanks to DNA technology
300 blokes have been arrested.
Your necklaces are gorgeous in that plant looks amazing I want some I’d love to help
Aka GMO.
If you want to know what a healthy diet is, look at what your ancestors evolved eating. We are all different because of this. Some groups of people are lactose intolerant because their ancestors never drank milk, ate cheese and other “dairy” products, into adulthood. Some peoples don’t digest fats efficiently and their bodies store them more than other peoples. Asians cannot tolerate the amounts of alcohol that descendants of Vikings can. One man’s diet, is another man’s poison. Understanding this relation between health, food, and ANCESTRY is fairly new, and has not made its way into medical doctors education, or practice, unfortunately.
So, what does this have to do with GMO food? Well, NONE of our ancestors evolved eating this laboratory food; that is a fact.
Humans have been modifying food for as long as they have been farming, genius
@DeoMachina First of all, some people only started farming very recently, in terms of evolutionary biology (actually, some people still do not farm). Second, farming practices also differ tremendously between groups of peoples and regions. Thirdly, GMO crops are so new, they aren’t even registered in our evolutionary past yet.
Thank you for your interest in learning about evolutionary biology.
@Víðarr Kerr You aren’t able to accurately differentiate between lab-induced genetic modification and crossbreeding over generations to achieve the same result. It’s the same science, but with different tools.
Thanks for your interest in learning about the most absolute basic facts of biology that the rest of us learned in elementary.
I’m European, yet potatoes don’t kill me. How is that possible?
Instead of complaining about your circumstances, get busy and create some new ones.
Science doesn’t need to be “more inclusive”. Saying such things make you sound moronic.
Patrick B this scientist, myself, disagrees.
@Michael Oldham
If you’re trying to push ideology, then you’re not a scientist.
@Patrick B A person can be more than one thing..
This messing about with dna in food is going to have long term detrimental consequences who eat them
Animal products waste about 75 % of all ressources.
We would have 400% more food if no one would farm animals.
So is this open source? Can we do this too, using your technique?
F@%#+ng Monsanto! Seems they bought bulk spots on TED!
Amazing
> Scientist on stage literally trying to solve world hunger.
> Morons in the comments arguing over GMO and social justice conspiracy theories.
Stay classy, humanity.