Corn is one of humankind's earliest innovations. It was domesticated 10,000 years ago when humans learned to cross-pollinate plants and slowly turned a scraggly nondescript grass called teosinte into plump, productive modern corn. Genetically modified (GM) crops have the fastest adoption rate of any new technology in global agriculture simply because farmers benefit directly from higher yields and lowered production costs. Corn has been the second most widely tested genetically modified crop, soy is the first. However, one of the central issues is the genetically modifed corn can spread to and damage native wild species of corn.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. The Internet and electronic publishing enable the creation of public libraries of science containing the full text and data of any published research article, available free of charge to anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the first article that I have seen from this brand new journal that hopes to make a major dent in bringing open-source health science news to the public.
Public Library of Science (PLOS) Biology October 13, 2003