Chindogu plant breeding

In the late 1990s my nephew Michael (then aged 10 or 11) introduced me to the amusing concept and practice of Chindogu. Chindogu is Japanese for 'unusual tool', and Chindogu inventions have the interesting quality of seeming to be useful, but actually being more trouble than they are worth.

A classic example is a toilet roll mounted on the head, dispensing tissues straight to the nose of someone suffering from a cold. More convenient? Maybe. Silly? Definitely. A lot of trouble for little reward? Undoubtedly.

A classic chindogu.

Michael and I had a lot of fun thinking up our own Chindogus, such as sports shoes with hollow soles which you could fill with cream. Then while you did aerobics you would churn the cream into butter.

The Chindogu craze passed (although it still has its aficionados), and I hadn't thought much about it until the other day, when I saw yet another article in New Scientist magazine claiming that nature is deficient, and we need genetic engineering to 'fix' it. The on-line version of the article is headed 'Supercrops: fixing the flaws in photosynthesis' and continues ''Many vital crops capture the sun's energy in a surprisingly inefficient way. A borrowed trick or two could make them far more productive.'' The Australia New Zealand print edition of the magazine (No 2777, 11 September 2010) heads the same article ''Supercrops! With ever more mouths to feed, we really need to pull something special out of the hat, says Debora Mackenzie.''

The article is typical of most popular science accounts of genetic engineering, in that it conflates producing more crops and animals with feeding more people, when there is no necessary connection at all. Whole books have been written on this subject, and I won't reprise them here. (You can my read my review of one of the latest, Jack Heinemann's Hope Not Hype in My Back Garden).

The diversion of human and natural resources from ensuring food security for all, to profiteering from genetic engineering for a few, is a tragedy of global proportions. The technology of genetic engineering itself, however, is a true chindogu - it works, it looks like it is useful, but it is really far more trouble and not as effective as the usual alternatives.

I just wrote a letter on this subject to New Scientist (below). Let's see if they publish it.

Whenever I read articles like 'Supercrops!' (No 2777, p. 40) I think that the magazine needs a Chindogu section. It should go just before Feedback, since although Chindogu inventions do actually work (unlike the scams covered in Feedback), like those scams they involve a lot of effort and ingenuity aimed at solving a problem which we don't actually have. The world does not have a plant breeding problem for which genetic engineering is a good solution; it has hunger, malnutrition and over-population problems which have political, economic and social causes and solutions.


As far as improving plant breeding goes it is the science of epigenetics, not the technology of genetic engineering, which has the most to contribute to producing crops that are optimally adapted to rapidly changing climatic conditions. Scientists need to be working in the field with producers to catch up with what nature is already doing, not stuck in labs second-guessing which genes might be useful. This is a clumsy, expensive and wrong-headed way to proceed. Yet this is what states and corporations are funding to the tune of billions of dollars, while field work is desperately under-funded. The reasons for this are political - which is why New Scientist should not give Chindogus like genetic engineering the space that should be reserved for real science with real uses.