Golden rice is expected to prevent eye disease in millions of children in developing countries. It will also benefit the environment by reducing pesticide use, cleaning contaminated sites and allowing plants to grow in droughts or regions high in salt. Genetic modification has been going on for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Recombinant DNA is a new technology for doing this. Today s tomatoes and corn are the result of extensive plant breeding or genetic modification programs.
Tomatoes come in a wide range of varieties from which breeders can select the best characters.
The traditional corn plant is nothing like what we eat now. Only five or six genes contribute to the plant s important qualities. A gene is a DNA recipe for a single protein. The DNA code is like 1700 books of 1000 pages each. One gene is only one or a few pages.