The first transgenic plant was reported over 30 years ago in the journal Cell. This was in the laboratory of Mary-Dell Chilton, and what she and her colleagues did was they engineered a tobacco plant. Tobacco because it was an easy plant to transform with agrobacterium, and they transformed this tobacco plant with a t-DNA, which contained two genes. One was a gene from yeast, just to see if they could express a yeast gene in the transgenic plant, and the second was a bacterial marker gene, the selector gene. Why is the selector gene necessary? The selector gene is necessary because the transformation process is not very efficient. Only 1 in 100, or 1 in 1,000, or sometimes even 1 in 10,000 cells will be transformed., and we need to select for those that have the t-DNA. The way we do that is by adding the selector gene. What the Chilton map did was they added in a gene for antibiotic resistance. So they could take all the plants that had been transformed, add an antibiotic, and the one plant that had the t-DNA would both express the yeast gene, and express the gene for antibiotic resistance. And so it would continue to grow in the presence of the antibiotic. But remember, a gene is a gene is a gene. And so this has led to many possibilities for what we can do in genetic engineering. And the probably, the most obvious to a certain extent, proof of concept of this was carried out three years later. This was done from a laboratory in the University of California in San Diego. And what they did was they took the gene for luciferase from a firefly. This is a gene that allows fireflies to glow in the dark. They again, transformed a tobacco plant with a firefly luciferase, this was just a proof of concept, this was not to yield plants that glow in the dark. But what they yielded were transgenic plants that expressed the firefly luciferase and under the corrects conditions, these plants do glow in the dark. Why does this work? Because a gene is a gene is a gene. There's no difference between a firefly gene and a tobacco gene. And the tobacco can express the firefly gene. So does this mean if one of us were to eat this tobacco plant that we would also start glowing like a firefly? No, of course not. I need to re-emphasize that the fact that there's a firefly gene in this tobacco plant does not mean that when someone eats this plant, whether it be an animal or a human, that the gene is then transferred to them. No, of course not. Because when we eat vegetables, when we eat plants, when we eat meat, all of the DNA and all of the protein is broken down in our stomachs, absorbed and then rebuilt into our own genes and our own proteins. We don't transfer DNA. We don't transfer proteins by eating them. Which brings us back to the concept of natural. I've heard people say well, what this process is not natural. But the whole concept of natural is wrong. In addition to cultivation, which we talked about earlier, we need to understand that genomes are genes that we have in our bodies, evolve all the time. Genomes of different organisms exchange information all the time. The first example is agro bacteria, where we showed how a bacteria transfers some of its genes into a plant. But, this happens between other organisms. For example, this is a wonderful study that was published in 2014 in Nature. What they showed was horizontal gene transfer between two different species of trees. We know that there's natural grafting can occur between different species in the forest. And this can be an asexual path to the formation of new species. How? Because upon grafting, the mixing of the two trunks, there is a mechanism of plant/plant interaction that is widespread in nature. And entire nuclear genomes all of the DNA of one of the species can be transferred into the nucleus of the other species leading to new mixtures, which can eventually lead to the formation of new species. So genomes are involving all the time. Different species are exchanging DNA. There are different vectors such as bacteria which help exchange DNA, and there are also viruses which exchange DNA between species. If we look at our own genome, the human genome, we can see DNA that we know originated in viruses. We can see DNA that we know originated in neanderthals. We can see GNA that we know that originated in other species. But, remember the code, is the code, is the code. Whatever the order of the nucleotides that will encode a protein, which could be functional. There is no difference, at the basic level, between a gene of a plant, or a gene of an animal, or a gene of a bacteria