|
Salt-tolerant rice 耐盐大米 Nuclear-powered crops. 核动力粮食。 Physics meets biology in a project to breed better strains of rice. 物理学与生物学的碰撞--优质大米培植。 THOSE who turn their noses up at genetically modified food seldom seem to consider thatall crops are genetically modified. The difference between a wild plant and one that servessome human end is a lot of selective breeding-the picking and combining over the years ofmutations that result in bigger seeds, tastier fruit or whatever else is required. 对转基因食物不屑一顾的人似乎忽视了一个事实：所有粮食都属于转基因食物。野生植物与供人食用的植物之间的不同之处在于后者经过了层层筛选和培植，也就是经过多年的突变，将优良品相进行选择并组合，以培育出更大的种子，更甜的果实，或者人类需要的其他结果。 Nor, these days, are those mutations there by accident. They are, rather, deliberatelyinduced, usually by exposing seeds to radiation. And that is exactly what Tomoko Abe andher colleagues at the Riken Nishina Centre for Accelerator-Based Science in Saitama, outsideTokyo, are doing with rice. The difference is that Dr Abe is not using namby-pamby X-raysand gamma rays to mutate her crop, as is the way in most other countries. Instead she issticking them in a particle accelerator and bombarding them with heavy ions-large atoms thathave been stripped down to their nuclei by the removal of their electrons. This producesbetween ten and 100 times as many mutations as the traditional method, and thusincreases the chances of blundering across some useful ones. | 
