WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States must pressure the European Union to stop dragging its feet on approving new imports of bioengineered food, senior U.S. lawmakers said in a letter released on Wednesday. "The EU has avoided for too long its WTO obligations ... The illegal discrimination against biotech products on nonscientific grounds must cease," a group of lawmakers said in a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab.

A San Diego company will on Thursday unveil a technology that can deliver the benefits of genetic modification without inserting foreign genes into a crop in move that could transform the multibillion dollar agricultural biotech market. Cibus, which has been funded quietly for several years by a group of biotechnology investors in the US, believes there is huge potential in its non-transgenic technology for introducing "traits" such as herbicide resistance into plants.

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones) -- It looks like U.S. farmers will be able to meet expected increases in corn demand from the booming ethanol industry, while also keeping up with food and livestock feed requirements, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said Tuesday.

WASHINGTON - November 15 - World Rainforest Movement and Global Justice Ecology Project have presented a demand to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Nairobi, Kenya to ban the use of genetically engineered trees under the Kyoto Protocol. GE trees have been proposed for use in plantations developed as climate sinks or for biofuels.

Genetically engineered corn that produces a Bt toxin effective against corn rootworms is now readily available and was widely planted in Iowa during 2006. Several seed companies have registrations, or will have shortly, and they will add additional Bt events and varieties to the choices for corn rootworm management.

You can hardly open up a major newspaper or national magazine these days without encountering the latest hype about biofuels, and how they're going to save oil, reduce pollution and prevent climate change. Bill Gates, Sun Microsystems' Vinod Khosla, and other major venture capitalists are investing millions in new biofuel production, whether in the form of ethanol, mainly derived from corn in the US today, or biodiesel, mainly from soybeans and canola seed. It's literally a "modern day gold rush," as described by the New York Times, paraphrasing the chief executive of Cargill, one of the main benefactors of increased subsidies to agribusiness and tax credits to refiners for the purpose of encouraging biofuel production.

Bay Area researchers and colleagues have decoded fragments of the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals, the human species that was our closest relative until vanishing from Europe about 30,000 years ago. [...] The research reveals that the fossil, belonging to a middle-aged man, is 99.5 to 99.9 percent genetically similar to homo sapiens, the new and more modern humans who co-existed with Neanderthal and eventually drove them to extinction. The tiny differences -- "a drop in the bucket," said Rubin -- are enough to distinguish the heavyset and thick-browed Neanderthals from taller, slender and smarter humans. Neanderthals are believed to have lacked the tool and art-making abilities of humans.

BENNINGTON — After Democrats attained a veto proof majority in the Vermont House and Senate last Tuesday, local legislators say they hope to minimize the use of that powerful advantage, but have identified at least one key issue to be challenged. [...] A seed liability bill vetoed by Douglas in the last legislative session could be revisited, said Sears, [...] The bill was designed to protect organic farmers from being sued when patented genetically modified seeds accidentally spread onto their property.

New measures adopted by the European Commission designed to streamline the approval of additives, colors, flavorings and enzymes, could result in longer approval procedures for US exporters, with some presently approved ingredients potentially restricted in the future, according to a US lawyer. Under the new proposed rules, harmonized Community rules would be laid down for the evaluation, approval and control of enzymes used in food. At the same time, the EU Executive proposes to review the current rules on food additives and flavorings and to introduce a simplified common Community approval procedure for food additives, flavorings and enzymes.

In 1983, when only three genetic diseases could be detected effectively by screening tests and scientists knew very little about how genes were controlled, Technology Review argued that anticipated clinical trials of gene therapy would need to follow stringent guidelines, given the technology's previous failures. As Horace Freeland Judson explains in this issue (see "The Glimmering Promise of Gene Therapy"), not much has changed. Caught up in the promise of curing debilitating, life-shortening diseases by giving patients good copies of defective genes--and, it seems, eager for the glory of being the first to make gene therapy work in humans--some gene-therapy researchers have conducted sloppy, and even fatal, human trials in the intervening two decades.