Don't bet against the birds and the bees

Or, for that matter, against the mosquitoes and the weeds.

New research has determined that a single, easily inherited gene can make mosquitoes indifferent to the insect repellent DEET.

And on a growing number of farms around the world, including many here in America, genetic engineering has turned out to not be such a miracle after all. Heavy use of Roundup since Monstanto introduced genetically modified crops that were impervious to the herbicide has demonstrated, once again, how quickly evolution can work:

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”

Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.

One of the qualities that made Roundup unique is that it degrades quickly in the environment. Farmers are now having to turn to older herbicides that are much more toxic.

And what's Monsanto doing now? In it's apparently infinite lack of wisdom, it's working on new crops that are resistant to other herbicides. You gotta wonder how long it'll take them to produce a generation of weeds that nothing will kill.

Oh, and by the way, thirty-eight years after DDT was banned, it's still present in our food supply:

Recent studies sketch a complex profile of legacy contaminants in U.S. food - a profusion of chemicals in trace amounts, pervasive but uneven across the food supply, occurring sometimes by themselves, but more often in combination with others. Included are DDT and several lesser-known organochlorine pesticides as well as industrial chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which were used until the late 1970s in electrical equipment.

This picture raises a host of equally complicated questions: Are small amounts of these chemicals dangerous, by themselves or in mixtures? Why are they still around and how are they getting into our food?

And how about: Will we ever learn?