Non-transgenic Technology

James Radtke, PhD is Senior Vice President of Product Development for a company called Cibus. The company has developed a non-transgenic herbicide tolerant canola which is not a GMO crop but has some of the same traits. "If one looks closely at what our technology does, we can't do anything that can’t happen naturally in nature. We do it more precisely and in less time than it would take if you just look for it in a breeding program or in a field of canola or something like that. But this non-transgenic technology could be used for potatoes, sugar beets anything that is produced with GMO technology, right? The thing is a number of traits have come through different versions of this approach and we are already consuming them. Seedless oranges, seedless grapes, different colored flowers, come through a process is typically called mutation breeding. You are creating changes in the DNA and in the past you used fairly harsh chemicals. Not with our technology.