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After mosquitoes, the spearhead of the Oxitec company, it is now the turn of agricultural parasites to be targeted. Oxitec now aims to reduce the population of a tick, Rhipicephalus microplus, which infests livestock just about everywhere in the world. Oxitec has just received a new grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of […]

  Almost seven years have passed since the publication of our issue « Saving cultivated biodiversity » (No. 141, October 2016). Since then, the degradation of biodiversity, i.e. the entire diversity of living organisms, has accelerated, as evidenced by recent reports from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (better known by its acronym IPBES), […]

  The collapse of biodiversity (both wild and cultivated) is essentially due to human activities. Among these, industrial agriculture, with its range of fertilisers, pesticides and other harmful practices, plays a key role.   The collapse of biodiversity was once again highlighted at the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) at the Convention on Biological […]

Patents and plant breeders’ rights (PBR) are two types of intellectual property right. Both have a major impact on both cultivated and wild biodiversity. Certain intellectual property rights (IPRs) affect cultivated biodiversity, agriculture, but also wild biodiversity, which provides genetic resources [1] such as stevia or the neem tree [2]. These are patents and, for plant crops, […]

With a notable acceleration from 2018 onwards, the biotech industry has financed part of the research community to obtain, under the guise of “scientific consensus”, a revision of the regulations applied to GMOs. This work has made it possible to give a blank cheque “according to science” to the European Commission’s recent proposal to deregulate […]

Oxitec is developing transgenic mosquitoes, while Google prefers mosquitoes inoculated with the wolbachia bacterium. Trials have already been carried out in several countries, with little long-term impact on the presence of malaria. University research into ways of reducing the mosquito population is legion. A new article announces that a genetic technology has just been developed […]

On July 5, 2023, the European Commission adopted a proposal to deregulate GMOs. In particular, it proposes to change the definition of a GMO. As a result, most current GMOs will no longer be considered as such. They will therefore be exempt from the (much-discussed) risk assessment, detection and traceability methods, labelling and post-marketing monitoring […]

GMOs are certainly plants… but not only. Many micro-organisms (bacteria, yeast) are used as factories for producing molecules. And many of these micro-organisms have been genetically modified to produce enzymes, vitamins, amino acids, etc. that they do not produce naturally, or to give them characteristics specific to industrial needs. In a series of articles, Inf’OGM […]

In its quest for the ultimate protection, the “life sciences” industry has invented ways of drafting its patents that are more or less legitimate and solid. Here we look at the main ones. Genetic sequences (of DNA or RNA [1]) are a succession of “letters” (or nucleic basis or nucleotides) whose translation produces a protein. The […]