Source: Minn. farmers warned not to plant Monsanto’s latest Roundup soybeans
The product in question is Roundup Ready 2 Xtend, a genetically modified soybean seed that is resisistant to a pair of herbicides called glyphosate and dicamba.
It was developed because weeds have become resistant to Roundup Ready varieties with traits that used glyphosate alone.
Excellent! I’ll bet you both herbicides are used full strength.
Doubling the amount of herbicides we are exposed to from these soybeans.
There’s an interesting little caveat about using multiple _antibiotics_.
In microbiology we teach students that without a complete understanding of how an antibiotic works that antibiotics should _never_ be combined. The reason is that there are different general categories. Antibiotics that work to simply prevent growth are called bacteriostatic. Antibiotics that kill the organism are called bacteriocidal.
Penicillin is bactericidal. Something that interferes with ribosome function is usually simply bacteriostatic. The problem occurs because in order to be bacteriocidal Penicillin requires a growing cell. The mechanism of penicillin action actually causes a growing cell to burst. If the cell is not growing it does not burst. So you can see that using penicillin and bacteriostatic antibiotic together would be ineffective. The body would tend to clear them both and once they are gone the cell would just start growing again.
In addition side effects can be dramatically worse if other antibiotics are present.
Wonder if the herbicide manufacturers have ever had a microbiology class.
:-)