New Sources of Germplasm: Lines, Transgenes, and Breeders

There have been many claims that plant breeding would be radically altered by genetic engineering and genetic erosion. There is little doubt that both will affect breeding procedures in the long term; their short term effects are probably minor. A more relevant and immediate concern is the lack of newly-trained Ph.D.s with hands-on experience in plant breeding. Neither public nor private institutions seem to have yet recognized this dilemma or its potential impact. Several important institutions that historically trained many plant breeders have all but abandoned plant breeding education. Fewer than a half-dozen maize breeding Ph.D.s are produced each year in the US and even fewer in Europe. Many administrators, private and public, have decided that the future of plant breeding lies in genomics, relying on claims that molecular genetics has revolutionized the time frame for product development. ‘Seldom has it been pointed out that it is going to take as long to breed a molecular engineering gene into a successful cultivar as it takes for a natural gene’ (Bingham, 1983, p. 223). Additionally, claims often suggest simple solutions to very complex problems (‘Agricultural biotechnology is already having an impact’ [on starvation!]; Theil, 2001). Such claims are often made with little knowledge of the problems of selecting germplasm, conducting multiple year/location performance trials, genotype x environment interactions or even the concept of epistasis that an allele may have different effects in different genetic backgrounds. The surprising point is that these claims are often accepted at face value by upper management of seed companies whose breeders certainly know that the claims of quick solutions are highly unlikely to reach farmers’ fields for well over a decade. ‘The public must be cautioned that the simplest advances take, on average, 10 years from inception of breeding effort to placement on the farm in quantity’ (Duvick, 1982, p. 583). All breeding organizations have experience with ‘new’ sources of germplasm and know that deployment is slow, difficult, but, on rare occasions, highly rewarding. With adequate long-term investment, however, new elite, germplasm can yield unique and productive hybrids. The time needed to place a new transgene into a commercial hybrid is approximately the same as moving a new source of tropical germplasm into a commercial US hybrid. The relative advantages and issues associated with the two approaches vary, but the relative financial costs are clearly very different.