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I own a home in Bloomington, Indiana, which is a wonderful college town that offers a great quality of life. Although the town is often bustling and offers many music venues and great restaurants, there is no doubt that Indiana sits smack in the middle of the corn belt.
Three days ago a paper was published in the prestigious journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper described how a lot of corn stalks and leaves end up in the local waterways after the harvest. In fact, 86% of the streams that they looked at (including many in Indiana) contained corn stalks, husks, leaves, or cobs. But, corn is biodegradable right? So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that a transgene called Cry1Ab that is inserted into the corn to serve as an insecticide was also found in the waterways for up to 6 months after harvest. This gene was also found in the water column in 23% of the sites that the investigators examined. Now, I recently wrote on how I planned to avoid cheese that had been treated with an anti-fungal drug. You know, I really don’t care to have a mutant gene in my drinking water either. So, I have to wonder - do we find this gene in the processed drinking water in addition to the water column? does the gene have any effects as it exists in the water? Oh yeah, another paper published in 2008 showed that the protein that is expressed by Cry1Ab in pollen appears to impair learning and food consumption in honeybees. So, just saying - this is not good news.Larry