From N. W. Simmonds
Edinburgh
Ian Anderson’s piece about ryegrass resistance to glyphosate (This Week, 6
July, p 6) simply provokes the question: so what’s surprising? Darwin assured us
long ago that living organisms undergo natural selection. Offer any plant a
recurrent chemical insult and it will, sooner or later, develop resistance to
it. Recall, for instance, that elegant work of years ago about grasses that
withstood toxic metals on mine tips. If all those clever chemists at Monsanto
had just looked around, they might have noticed ivy, which in my experience is
unkillable. And if ivy survives, plenty of other plants must do so too. Why
should Monsanto chemists expect universal and permanent effectiveness?
