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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

Disputes like this are why companies like Monsanto engineer in terminator genes to make the business model viable.

No, that's why those companies have PROPOSED terminator genes. There is no commercially available product that actually contains them.

I sit corrected. Instead, the current typical approach is to use cross-breeding to produce seeds that grow well the first generation and don't produce reliable seeds themselves.

That is misleading, as the goal of that cross-breeding is not to produce unreliable seeds, but in order to produce better results. Look up "hybrid vigor" for details on this. Nothing about the cross-breeding is done in order to hinder re-use of the seeds, it's just that naturally non-hybrid seeds are less effective.

As I understand it, the idea is to have two parent lines that when produce the desired traits in heterozygous offspring but not in second-generation offspring. Sort of a Mendelian DRM.

This is incorrect. As I already stated: the cross-breeding is to take advantage of hybrid vigor[1], it is not an effort to intentionally hamper successive generations. This same practice occurs in non-GMO, non-patented plant breeding, and has been done for over a hundred years[2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_plant_breeding#Gree...

Can you use CRISPR to remove the terminator genes?

Why would anyone bother, even if such terminator genes were present? Your development costs would far exceed the cost of additional licensing, to say nothing of the eventual lawsuits that you would lose. Even with the licensing costs, the benefits of the modified seeds are significant. That's why farmers started using them in the first place.

Are your costs really that high? This was a Kickstarter I participated in several years ago working on plants that glow in the dark. Total cost was ~$484k.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla...

Put $1-2 million together, knock out the terminator genes, profit. How are you going to sue? The plant is no longer they same biological entity Monsanto rights apply to.

If you modify Windows, it's still Windows.

Good luck sequencing plants from visual inspection.

I don't think that's the issue, here

I never thought the ship of Theseus discussion would come up in the context of licensing.. Yet here we are!

Well, first off, there are no terminator genes in use. Second, any licensing agreement would naturally prohibit any effort to modify it to remove them. There's no getting around the fact that you'd be willfully violating your agreement by starting from the licensed seeds. And even if you could manage it somehow (which you can't), you'd run right into the same regulatory process that Monsanto has already gone through. It'd be much more than $484k for that process alone, to say nothing of development costs.

Small farmers could never fund that sort of effort, and large industrialized farms would be sophisticated enough and have access to legal counsel to know better.

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