As background, I’m not one of those anti-science anti-GMO activists who think that GMOs are going to kill us all in some unspecified genetically-engineered bioapocalypse. But neither am I some breathless biotech cheerleader who thinks that GMOs are the only way to prevent a world population crash due to global mass starvation and that anyone who opposes GMOs is de facto anti-science. (For one thing, the simple Malthusian model that predicts unlimited exponential growth until resources run out is unrealistic. Verhulst’s sigmoidal curve from the logistic equation is a more realistic way to model population growth, but that never really enters into arguments on Facebook anyway.)

But regardless of how you feel about GMOs, it’s really not a far stretch to imagine that life will find a way around genetically engineered defenses.

Worm Now Thrives in GMO Corn Designed to Kill It, Study Says • 2014 Mar 18 • Newsweek (via A. Scoble)

One of industrial agriculture’s biggest GMO crops may have just backfired. Scientists have confirmed that corn-destroying rootworms have evolved to be resistant to the Bt corn engineered to kill them.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a disaster for biotech companies. They can probably cheaply and easily create a new variant of resistant corn with a trivially different defense mechanism, patent it, and charge big bucks, with the oft-heard claim that they need to make a return on their R&D investment (reminiscent of the way some pharmaceutical companies have taken racemic drugs that are now off-patent, purified the active enantiomer, and re-patented the enantiomer) and wait for nature to quickly work around that defense, too. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a great business model!