Frankenfood? Designer Wheat in the Works

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Bayer CropScience wants to breed a better version of wheat, Reuters reports.

And the chemical concern plans on using a speed-dating-meets-seed-selection technique to make the world's most important crop drought and heat resident.

The way it works?

The method, named "marker-assisted breeding," lets botanists genetically screen for desired traits among large numbers of seeds.

In the past, they had to cultivate the plants manually to check for preferred characteristics.

"It's basically just turbo-charging traditional, classical breeding," a Bayer staffer told reporters.

This doesn't sound all that bad. In fact, it seems like more wheat could help feed the billions of people expected to overpopulate the earth in the coming years.

We just hope that all goes according to plan, and that the new varieties don't result in an I Am Legend/28 Days Later/12 Monkeys-type situation.

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