GE wheat: Pulitzer Prize winner gets things wrong on the Colbert Report

The following is an edited excerpt.

Near the beginning of an interview about GE wheat, Colbert asks (humorously) how the wheat survived, wondering if it had been “doing a Rambo out there, living on mud puddles and grubs?”

Laurie Garrett immediately goes completely off-topic and responds:

Garrett: “The one thing we know, is that there are 24 strains of so-called superweeds. These are giant weeds that are very hard to kill, because they’ve absorbed these strange genes that make them resistant…”

Colbert:  ”In some wheat, there’s a gene in there that keeps Roundup from killing it, and that can jump to the weeds its trying to kill?”

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Garrett:  ”Exactly.”

Exactly?? I don’t know what Laurie Garrett’s area of expertise is. But she obviously knows very little about genetics, crop science, or weed management.

Read the full post here: Laurie Garrett gets things surprisingly wrong on the Colbert Report