Bt-by-Bt assessment
On November 10, 2002, people wearing 'Bollgard' caps visited cotton farmer R Narsimha Reddy at his home in Aleru, a village in Nalgonda, Andhra …
Manipulating Research
Private funding has given a new meaning to scientific research today. With rising corporate research budgets, academic institutions are leaning …
Long yarn
The cotton story is a tangled tale. In many parts of India, farmers are committing suicide. It's been a while Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and now …
"The UK has to live by its wits"
DAVID ANTHONY KING has been chief scientific advisor to the United Kingdom government for 3 years now. Prior to this, he was head of the …
"It happened by sheer accident"
More great discoveries in the realm of science get stumbled upon by the unprepared mind than untangled by methodical research. dna fingerprinting,…
"We are close to crisis point"
Agriculture and its subsequent effect on the environment, rapidly depleting natural resources like arable land and water, the slackening of the …
Everyone is stealing germplasm
When agronomist Ralladoddi Hampaiah was advisor to the Russian government, he discovered how easy it was to take genetic resources out of India. …
Private sector is profiting from vacuum left by ICAR
In the agriculture research hierarchy, Swapan Kumar Datta occupies the second rung, one of eight deputy director generals (DDGs) in the Indian …
Dealing with crop stresses and scandals
Subbanna Ayyappan has made history in the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (IACR) by becoming the first non-crop scientist to head this …
The hunt for benefits
India is hailed as a pioneer in implementing the third objective of the Convention on Biological Diversity—fair and equitable sharing of …
Causing a flutter
The safety of genetically-engineered crops comes under a cloud after the deaths of the monarch butterflies in the US
Pink bollworm a potent threat to GM cotton
The quest to promote Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton may suffer a serious setback with scientists from the US-based University of Arizona …
Seeds for Iife
Scientists and NGOs find common ground in ensuring that farmers possess the divers they can use and conserve
Weed menace
Careless dumping of genetically modified canola plants triggers an outcry in South Australia
Book review: Seeds of Contention
The good thing about this book is that it makes a clear attempt to scale down the shrill rhetoric of the gm debate. The sharp language and …
Debating GM crops: Let sound science, and so good sense, inform it
The Paris-based International Council for Science, a federation of more than 100 national science academies, has come out with the biggest review …
The original Mus
Researchers zero in on the Indian subcontinent as the possible birthplace of that most evasive of pesky mammals - the house mouse
I won't and you can't
The bureaucracy does nothing to conserve India's invaluable animals and plants. But it knows how to cry wolf when private agencies want to use these
Sexual distinction
A new technique enables the determination of the sex of cattle and goats at the embryonic stage
Leaders in agony
A recent theory which says that the dominant animal in a pack bears the proverbial cross might lead to more systematic studies of relationships …
Cutting it short
The Biosafety Protocol has just been adopted. In some ways it is a step forward. But it may turn out to be powerless to check trade in …
Food safety
In the wake of genetically-modified food flooding the Indian markets, 25 farmers' groups call for a 10-year moratorium on such food
Beware the modified wolf
Will bureaucrats choose to throw farmers and ecology to the mercy of multinational corporations by preparing the way for cultivation of …
The like and the unlike
Using cells as building blocks, scientists in Israel successfully regenerate an entire higher animal
The age of discovery
Research in rice genomics could be the key to eradicating hunger through environmentally sustainable methods, says Latha Rangan
