News in perspective

Upfront–

week at the Bio2008 convention in San Diego, California.

Environmental groups remain unconvinced. “The main driver of genetic engineering is to make it possible to patent crop strains. That won’t help farmers in developing countries who need to keep back seeds for their next year’s crop,” says Louise Sales of Greenpeace Australia in Sydney.

Australian farmers may yet be persuaded. The forecast for this year’s wheat crop has just been trimmed by 9 per cent because of dry conditions, although it may still be up by 10 million tonnes compared to last year’s drought-devastated crop.

THE controversial move to shut out commercial and recreational fishers from vast areas of the Great Barrier Reef has led to a rapid increase in fish populations.

“Everyone is a little surprised. We’ve seen a consistent pattern of recovery of coral trout over an extraordinarily large area,” says Garry Russ of James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland.

In 2004, the Australian government re-zoned the Great

A CLONING dogfight is brewing, pitting disgraced cloning pioneer Woo Suk Hwang against former colleagues at Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea.

Hwang faces charges of fraud, embezzlement and bioethics violations relating to his faked research on human stem cells. But his claim to have cloned dogs still stands up, and he is now working on animal cloning at the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Yongin, South Korea.

There he is cloning dogs for BioArts International, a firm based in Mill Valley, California. “He was a controversial choice,” admits BioArts CEO Lou Hawthorne. “But he’s the world’s undisputed master at cloning dogs.”

Meanwhile, back at SNU, former colleagues of Hwang are working with a spin-off company called RNL Bio, which has its own cloning plans. In February, RNL Bio said it had signed up its first customer, a woman in California who wants to

clone a dead pit bull called Booger. The company also says it has created four clones of a dog with the ability to detect patients with cancer through its sense of smell.

This is not playing well at BioArts, which has acquired exclusive rights for dog and cat cloning under patents awarded to the creators of Dolly the sheep at the Roslin Institute in the UK. BioArts and Start Licensing of Austin, Texas, which controls the Roslin patents, say they will take legal steps to challenge RNL Bio’s cloning activities.

RNL Bio counters that its cloning method is covered by separate patents awarded to SNU.

WILL Australia’s farmers fall for the charms of drought-resistant wheat, even if it’s genetically modified? Faced with climate change and a growing food crisis, enthusiasts certainly hope such traits will help overcome aversion to GM technology.

Of 24 strains of GM wheat tested in field trials, two lines exceeded the yield of the non-GM variety by 20 per cent under drought conditions, according to German Spangenberg of the Victoria Department of Primary Industries in Melbourne, Australia. The results were presented last

Want to salve your conscience and offset your holiday carbon emissions? You might want to rethink that trip to the tropics. A typical flight there has a greater impact on global warming than a flight in temperate latitudes.

As well as producing carbon dioxide and contrails, planes also produce nitrogen oxide, which triggers both the creation of the warming gas ozone, and the destruction of another greenhouse gas, methane (Journal of Geophysical

Research, DOI: 10.1029/2007/JD009140). In mid-latitudes, these ozone and

methane reactions cancel each other out and you get zero net warming from nitrogen oxide emissions, says Keith Shine of the University of Reading, UK. But the brighter sunlight in the tropics is very efficient at converting nitrogen oxide to

BETTER TO STAY AT HOMEozone – in fact it creates ozone five times faster than in the air of mid-latitudes, according to Shine’s calculations – whereas methane destruction only increases marginally. Worryingly, the warming effects of ozone are particularly strong at a plane’s typical cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, he adds.

The research raises the question of whether future attempts to control aircraft emissions should consider extra penalties for flights in tropical countries where air travel is booming. India, for instance, has the fastest growing airline fleet in the world.

For now aircraft emissions are excluded from international treaties on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. But the European Union has plans to control aircraft emissions from 2011.

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–No worries for coral trout–

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“He was a controversial choice, but Hwang is the undisputed master at cloning dogs”

–More heat than you bargained for–

Dog clone face-off Wheat treat?

Reef fish rebound

6 | NewScientist | 28 June 2008 www.newscientist.com