The most important ingredient in paper is wood, wood comes from trees, and trees can be grown as a crop. That's the view of Union Camp Corporation, as presented to the Trenton (NJ) Section of the American Chemical Society on 14 April 1998, by Steven R. Wann. And because Union Camp has already maximized the productivity of its tree growing from weed and nutrient control, he noted that further productivity increases must come from genetics. Biotechnology increases tree growth
They would rather clone the most desirable trees, he said, than breed seedlings. Trees, like all other species, show a Gaussian distribution in their measurements. Breeding can shift this Gaussian distribution to the right, he noted, but since a generation of pine trees is 40 years, this is very time consuming. On the other hand, cloning the best trees can change the Gaussian distribution to a peak all the way to the right -- and do it in one generation.
Biotechnology, he pointed out, has been able to produce plant cells that do nothing but reproduce. Union Camp has been able to achieve this state from embryonic matter in seeds from green pine cones, which has been reproduced without seed coatings. These embryonic cells can be kept indefinitely at liquid nitrogen temperatures and caused to grow into a seedling on cue. This has also been done with eucalyptus trees in Brazil, Wann added.
While Union Camp grows trees to make paper, other companies grow them to make drugs -- for example, Taxol¨ (see p. 2, Fall 1994 issue), which earned Bristol Myers Squibb $800 million last year. Wann pointed ouut that biotechnology had increased their yield by a factor of 360.
Wann was careful to emphasize that Union Camp does not advocate a single "supertree" but rather a variety of desirable clones. Increasing productivity through biotechnology, he noted, also reduces the acreage needed, thus freeing other land which could be kept in a natural state. Clones may have a lower life expectancy than their parents, Wann also observed. Those produced from trees more than 20 years old act more like five-year olds than seedlings. The oldest tree Union Camp has cloned has been the 500-year old "Treaty Oak" in Austin, TX.
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