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Comment by logfromblammo | Hacker News Reader

We've known this could happen for decades, just due to the way bananas are propagated. The same thing happened to the Gros Michel cultivar in the 1950s. Plantations will have to scramble to get up to speed on a new cultivar, and some people will go bankrupt.

It's even the same species of fungus. Back then they called it Panama Disease.

But now we have genetic technology. This fungal disease may spell the end of non-GMO bananas in supermarkets. If there were another natural cultivar resistant to the latest strain of the fungus, it would already be in use. It was a stroke of luck that they even found the Cavendish before bananas disappeared entirely from the food supply.

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If the genetic engineering works out, can we go back to the Gros Michel cultivar? They were sweeter and much bigger than Cavendish.

Edit: The article mentions that the wild Asian banana Musa acuminata malaccensis seems to be resistant, but I'm betting they're small and/or not very tasty.

Edit2: aw man, this is addressed right at the bottom of the article. "For his part, Dale is trying to engineer Gros Michel bananas for resistance to the original Foc strain."

Isn't the main benefit to Cavendish that it transports really well?

Wow - So are you saying this is a case for GMO (create a resistant banana) or against it (for killing biodiversity)?

It's a shame because bananas are very cheap. On the one hand they're cheap enough to double in cost and many can handle it. On the other hand, they're a cheap staple for low income folks.

There's no biodiversity in bananas. All Cavendish plants are sterile genetic clones.

It was the same for Gros Michel.

Edit: what more, GMO are not inherently bad.

Monsanto gave them a bad name, because of their commercial practice (terminator gene), and the catastrophic environmental consequences of glyphosate-resistant crops.

They can be used wisely. For example, did you know that the insulin diabetics use is produced by GM yeast?

Yes, but that's not the only way bananas propagate. The fruit is how genetic variability gets introduced, but they also develop shoots from the root system, which eventually grow into trees themselves.

I believe traditionally bananas are grown as the main trunk, then 2 baby shoots at differing maturity. Once the main stem has fruited, it is removed and the next one takes over, at which point another shoot is allowed to develop.

The extra shoots that are removed can be used to start another "family" elsewhere, but has the risk of spreading disease. These days tissue culturing is used, with a much lower risk of spreading disease.

Offshoots are non-artificial clones. They are genetically identical to the main stem... It's just the same plant.

I'm impressed with the bananaknowledge here. Is there a limited amount of times you can do this?

I don't think there's a limit, as its part of the natural growth pattern of bananas. Some other species have similar habits - I believe there's an entire forest that is one plant - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

> It's a shame because bananas are very cheap

Why they are cheap is interesting: http://freakonomics.com/2008/06/19/the-economics-of-bananas/

That's a pretty damning article. I know the history was bad. Is it still that way?

I don't think I'd have a problem with GMO that inserted genes from one Musa cultivar into another. You could find a natural strain with resistance, isolate the resistance genes, and insert them into the production monoculture strain in a manner that is impossible for traditional techniques to accomplish, because the production cultivars are seedless and triploid.

I am much less accomodating for inserting genes from a completely different kingdom, like the Bt gene and associated promoters. Also, since the triploid bananas are sterile, there is a smaller likelihood that the alterations will escape into the wild and ruin fertile diploid bananas.

> You could find a natural strain...

The way "natural" is commonly defined is misleading. Humans are apes, mammals, animals. We're part of nature, and so is everything we create and produce.

Artificial is a subset of natural.

I know which meaning of natural you are talking about and it would indeed include everything artificial, but I disagree that that is the common meaning of natural! I hear natural more often used to mean "not caused or created by humans". Isn't that the definition people usually have in mind?

> I hear natural more often used to mean "not caused or created by humans". Isn't that the definition people usually have in mind?

I find the common definition misleading, because it implies that humanity is not part of nature. It is technically false, and causes confusion in the mind of most people.

The "natural good, artificial bad" meme needs to die.

We're currently facing ecological problems of immense scale, and not having a proper basic mental model of the situation is detrimental.

This is a really silly argument. There is a wide variety of definitions of “nature”, which has gone through dramatic changes in its meaning though the centuries. Criticizing definitions you don’t like because the generally positive connotation of “nature” lets those definitions serve a rhetorical position that you disagree with is tilting at windmills.

In particular, the sense of “natural” having to do with something’s unaltered/innate condition – as compared to some result of human interference – dates back at least to Plato [well, there the word was the Greek phusis, whereas natura is the Latin word used to translate it, but you get the idea]. Or if you want examples in English, at least to Chaucer.

Note, if you want a much fuller idea of what “nature”/“natural” means and meant in the past, I highly recommend the CS Lewis book Studies in Words which devotes a 50 page chapter to comprehensively exploring the subject.

Plato's world view is completely backwards. A good example of the pitfalls of speculative onanism. His influence on occidental culture is still very pervasive, though, but anthropocentrism is as idiotic as geocentrism.

> ... the generally positive connotation of “nature”.

"Nature" is inherently hostile (see Thermodynamics, 2nd law). What's currently marketed as "natural" is a carefully vetted subset, the result of thousands of years of humanity influence on its environment.

As you mention, the definition of the word has been evolving. I think the current meaning is misleading. It causes people to reject man-made things arbitrarily, and, more generally, it perpetuates an anthropocentric view of the world.

Wishing it had (and advocating for) a saner definition is not silly.

Your post seems to recognize that the definition of the word "nature" has changed over the years, as words often do.

Why do you think it is "tilting at windmills" for me to want the definition to change to something that pleases me?

Fine. You could find a fertile strain, either in the wild or as a result of traditional breeding practices. It's longer than "natural", but less ambiguous.

To my knowledge, some varieties of plantain are already resistant. So identify that gene complex, pop it into the infertile triploid Gros Michel, and let the cloning commence.

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