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Oddly, “genetically modified” has come to mean an organism, usually a crop plant, to which an extra gene or short piece of DNA has been added using molecular techniques,  often called “recombinant DNA techniques.”  Changing organisms, including plants, using recombinant DNA (rDNA) techniques is often called “genetic engineering.” So today the term GMO is used just for molecular modification using recombinant DNA techniques. But genetic engineering is a rather off-putting term.  We don’t have a problem with engineering cars or bridges or computers, but food? Hmmmm….isn’t that fooling with Mother Nature?  Well……as you just just saw, over a few tens of thousands of years, we’ve done a pretty good job of cajoling mutants from Mother Nature to provide a vast array of plants that produce appealing and nourishing foods for people.  During the 20th century, we learned how to use mutagens -- chemicals and radiation -- to hurry along Mother Nature’s slow pace of making mutations.  So what about the new molecular techniques? Well, here too, we’ve learned some of Mother Nature’s tricks and put them to work to improve crops.  In the following, I call this MOLECULAR CROP ENHANCEMENT.