Alex Daley's  Instablog

Water is not scarce. It is made up of the first and third most common elements in the universe, and the two readily react to form a highly stable compound that maintains its integrity even at temperature extremes.

Hydrologist Dr. Vincent Kotwicki, in his paper Water in the Universe, writes:

"Water appears to be one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe. It dominates the environment of the Earth and is a main constituent of numerous planets, moons and comets. On a far greater scale, it possibly contributes to the so-called 'missing mass' [i.e., dark matter] of the Universe and may initiate the birth of stars inside the giant molecular clouds."

Oxygen has been found in the newly discovered "cooling flows" - heavy rains of gas that appear to be falling into galaxies from the space once thought empty surrounding them, giving rise to yet more water.

How much is out there? No one can even take a guess, since no one knows the composition of the dark matter that makes up as much as 90% of the mass of the universe. If comets, which are mostly ice, are a large constituent of dark matter, then, as Dr. Kotwicki writes, "the remote uncharted (albeit mostly frozen) oceans are truly unimaginably big."

Back home, Earth is often referred to as the "water planet," and it certainly looks that way from space. H₂O covers about 70% of the surface of the globe. It makes all life as we know it possible.

However it got here - theories abound from outgassing of volcanic eruptions to deposits by passing comets and ancient crossed orbits - water is what gives our planet its lovely, unique blue tint, and there appears to be quite a lot of it.

That old axiom that the earth is 75% water... not quite. In reality, water constitutes only 0.07% of the earth by mass, or 0.4% by volume.

This is how much we have, depicted graphically:

Credit: Howard Perlman, USGS; globe illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution (©); Adam Nieman.

What this shows is the relative size of our water supply if it were all gathered together into a ball and superimposed on the globe.

The large blob, centered over the western US, is all water (oceans, icecaps, glaciers, lakes, rivers, groundwater, and water in the atmosphere). It's a sphere about 860 miles in diameter, or roughly the distance from Salt Lake City to Topeka. The smaller sphere, over Kentucky, is the fresh water in the ground and in lakes, rivers, and swamps.

Now examine the image closely. See that last, tiny dot over Georgia? It's the fresh water in lakes and rivers.

Looked at another way, that ball of all the water in the world represents a total volume of about 332.5 million cubic miles. But of this, 321 million mi³, or 96.5%, is saline - great for fish, but undrinkable without the help of nature or some serious hardware. That still leaves a good bit of fresh water, some 11.6 million mi³, to play with. Unfortunately, the bulk of that is locked up in icecaps, glaciers, and permanent snow, or is too far underground to be accessible with today's technology. (The numbers come from the USGS; obviously, they are estimates and they change a bit every year, but they are accurate enough for our purposes.)

Accessible groundwater amounts to 5.614 million mi³, with 55% of that saline, leaving a little over 2.5 million mi³ of fresh groundwater. That translates to about 2.7 exa-gallons of fresh water, or about 2.7 billion billion gallons (yes billions of billions, or 10¹⁸ in scientific notation), which is about a third of a billion gallons of water per person. Enough to take a long shower every day for many lifetimes...

However, not all of that groundwater is easily or cheaply accessible. The truth is that the surface is the source for the vast majority - nearly 80% - of our water. Of surface waters, lakes hold 42,320 mi³, only a bit over half of which is fresh, and the world's rivers hold only 509 mi³ of fresh water, less than 2/10,000 of 1% of the planetary total.

And that's where the problem lies. In 2005 in the US alone, we humans used about 328 billion gallons of surface water per day, compared to about 83 billion gallons per day of water from the ground. Most of that surface water, by far, comes from rivers. Among these, one of the most important is the mighty Colorado.

Horseshoe Bend, in Page, AZ. (AP Photo)

Or perhaps we should say "the river formerly known as the mighty Colorado." That old Colorado - the one celebrated in centuries of American Western song and folklore; the one that exposed two billion years of geologic history in the awesome Grand Canyon - is gone. In its place is… well, Las Vegas - the world's gaudiest monument to hubristic human overreach, and a big neon sign advertising the predicament now faced by much of the world.

It's well to remember that most of the US west of the Mississippi ranges from relatively dry to very arid, to desert, to lifeless near-moonscapes. The number of people that could be supported by the land, especially in the Southwest, was always small and concentrated along the riverbanks. Tribal clusters died out with some regularity. And that's the way it would have remained, except for a bit of ingenuity that suddenly loosed two powerful forces on the area: electrical power, and an abundance of water that seemed as limitless as the sky.

In September of 1935, President Roosevelt dedicated the pinnacle of engineering technology up to that point: Hoover Dam. The dam did two things. It served as a massive hydroelectric generating plant, and it backed up the Colorado River behind it, creating Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country.

Early visitors dubbed Hoover Dam the "Eighth Wonder of the World," and it's easy to see why. It was built on a scale unlike anything before it. It's 725 feet high and contains 6 million tons of concrete, which would pave a road from New York to Los Angeles. Its 19 generators produce 2,080 MW of electricity, enough to power 1.75 million average homes.

The artificially created Lake Mead is 112 miles long, with a maximum depth of 590 feet. It has a surface area of 250 square miles and an active capacity of 16 million acre-feet.

Hoover Dam was intended to generate sufficient power and impound an ample amount of water, to meet any conceivable need. But as things turned out, grand as the dam is, it wasn't conceived grandly enough... because it is 35 miles from Las Vegas, Nevada.

Vegas had a permanent population in 1935 of 8,400, a number that swelled to 25,000 during the dam construction as workers raced in to take jobs that were scarce in the early Depression years. Those workers, primarily single men, needed something to do with their spare time, so the Nevada state legislature legalized gambling in 1931. Modern Vegas was born.

The rise of Vegas is well chronicled, from a middle-of-nowhere town to the largest city founded in the 20th century and the fastest-growing in the nation - up until the 2008 housing bust. Somehow, those 8,400 souls turned into a present population of over 2 million that exists all but entirely to service the 40 million tourists who visit annually. And all this is happening in a desert that sees an average of 10 days of measurable rainfall per year, totaling about 4 inches.

In order to run all those lights, fountains, and revolving stages, Las Vegas requires 5,600 MW of electricity on a summer day. Did you notice that that's more than 2.5 times what the giant Hoover Dam can put out? Not to mention that those 42 million people need a lot of water to drink to stay properly hydrated in the 100+ degree heat. And it all comes from Lake Mead.

So what do you think is happening to the lake?

If your guess was, "it's shrinking," you're right. The combination of recent drought years in the West and rapidly escalating demand has been a dire double-whammy, reducing the lake to 40% full. Normally, the elevation of Lake Mead is 1,219 feet. Today, it's at 1,086 feet and dropping by ten feet a year (and accelerating). That's how much more water is being taken out than is being replenished.

This is science at its simplest. If your extraction of a renewable resource exceeds its ability to recharge itself, it will disappear - end of story. In the case of Lake Mead, that means going dry, an eventuality to which hydrologists assign a 50% probability in the next twelve years. That's by 2025.

Nevadans are not unaware of this. There is at the moment a frantic push to get approval for a massive pipeline project designed to bring in water from the more favored northern part of the state. Yet even if the pipeline were completed in time, and there is stiff opposition to it (and you thought only oil pipelines gave way to politics and protests), that would only resolve one issue. There's another. A big one.

Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam's turbines shut down - less than four years from now, if the current trend holds - and in Vegas the lights start going out.

Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).

You can always build more power plants, but you can't build more rivers, and the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.

Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It's critical to the whole country. The Colorado is the sole source of water for southeastern California's Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.

The Valley is fed by an intricate system consisting of 1,400 miles of canals and 1,100 miles of pipeline. They are the only reason a bone-dry desert can look like this:

Intense conflicts over water will probably not be confined to the developing world. So far, Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado have been able to make and keep agreements defining who gets how much of the Colorado River's water. But if populations continue to grow while the snowcap recedes, it's likely that the first shots will be fired before long, in US courtrooms. If legal remedies fail… a war between Phoenix and LA might seem far-fetched, but at the minimum some serious upheaval will eventually ensue unless an alternative is found quickly.

Water scarcity is, of course, not just a domestic issue. It is far more critical in other parts of the world than in the US. It will decide the fate of people and of nations.

Worldwide, we are using potable water way faster than it can be replaced. Just a few examples:

• The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest freshwater lake in the world; today, it has shrunk to 10% of its former size and is on track to disappear entirely by 2020. Watching what has happened just since the turn of the century is stunning.

• The legendary Jordan River is flowing at only 2% of its historic rate.

• In Africa, desertification is proceeding at an alarming rate. Much of the northern part of the continent is already desert, of course. But beyond that, a US Department of Agriculture study places about 2.5 million km² of African land at low risk of desertification, 3.6 million km² at moderate risk, 4.6 million km² at high risk, and 2.9 million km² at very high risk. "The region that has the highest propensity," the report says, "is located along the desert margins and occupies about 5% of the land mass. It is estimated that about 22 million people (2.9% of the total population) live in this area."

• A 2009 study published in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate analyzed 925 major rivers from 1948 to 2004 and found an overall decline in total discharge. The reduction in inflow to the Pacific Ocean alone was about equal to shutting off the Mississippi River. The list of rivers that serve large human populations and experienced a significant decline in flow includes the Amazon, Congo, Chang Jiang (Yangtze), Mekong, Ganges, Irrawaddy, Amur, Mackenzie, Xijiang, Columbia, and Niger.

Supply is not the only issue. There's also potability. Right now, 40% of the global population has little to no access to clean water, and despite somewhat tepid modernization efforts, that figure is actually expected to jump to 50% by 2025. When there's no clean water, people will drink dirty water - water contaminated with human and animal waste. And that breeds illness. It's estimated that fully half of the world's hospital beds today are occupied by people with water-borne diseases.

Food production is also a major contributor to water pollution. To take two examples:

• The "green revolution" has proven to have an almost magical ability to provide food for an ever-increasing global population, but at a cost. Industrial cultivation is extremely water intensive, with 80% of most US states' water usage going to agriculture - and in some, it's as high as 90%. In addition, factory farming uses copious amounts of fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides, creating serious problems for the water supply because of toxic runoff.

• Modern livestock facilities - known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) - create enormous quantities of animal waste that is pumped into holding ponds. From there, some of it inevitably seeps into the groundwater, and the rest eventually has to be dumped somewhere. Safe disposal practices are often not followed, and regulatory oversight is lax. As a result, adjacent communities' drinking water can come to contain dangerously high levels of E. coli bacteria and other harmful organisms.

Not long ago, scientists discovered a whole new category of pollutants that no one had previously thought to test for: drugs. We are a nation of pill poppers and needle freaks, and the drugs we introduce into our bodies are only partially absorbed. The remainder is excreted and finds its way into the water supply. Samples recently taken from Lake Mead revealed detectable levels of birth control medication, steroids, and narcotics... which people and wildlife are drinking.

Most lethal of all are industrial pollutants that continue to find their way into the water supply. The carcinogenic effects of these compounds have been well documented, as the movie-famed Erin Brockovich did with hexavalent chromium.

But the problem didn't go away with Brockovich's court victory. The sad fact is that little has changed for the better. In the US, our feeble attempt to deal with these threats was the passage in 1980 of the so-called Superfund Act. That law gave the federal government - and specifically the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - the authority to respond to chemical emergencies and to clean up uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous-waste sites on both private and public lands. And it supposedly provided money to do so.

How's that worked out? According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), "After decades of spearheading restoration efforts in areas such as the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay, improvements in these water bodies remain elusive … EPA continues to face the challenges posed by an aging wastewater infrastructure that results in billions of gallons of untreated sewage entering our nation's water bodies … Lack of rapid water-testing methods and development of current water quality standards continue to be issues that EPA needs to address."

Translation: the EPA hasn't produced. How much of this is due to the typical drag of a government bureaucracy and how much to lack of funding is debatable. Whether there might be a better way to attack the problem is debatable. But what is not debatable is the magnitude of the problem stacking up, mostly unaddressed.

Just consider that the EPA has a backlog of 1,305 highly toxic Superfund cleanup sites on its to-do list, in every state in the union (except apparently North Dakota, in case you want to try to escape - though the proliferation of hydraulic fracking in that area may quickly change the map, according to some of its detractors - it's a hotly debated assertion).

About 11 million people in the US, including 3-4 million children, live within one mile of a federal Superfund site. The health of all of them is at immediate risk, as is that of those living directly downstream.

We could go on about this for page after page. The situation is depressing, no question. And even more so is the fact that there's little we can do about it. There is no technological quick fix.

Peak oil we can handle. We find new sources, we develop alternatives, and/or prices rise. It's all but certain that by the time we actually run out of oil, we'll already have shifted to something else.

But "peak water" is a different story. There are no new sources; what we have is what we have. Absent a profound climate change that turns the evaporation/rainfall hydrologic cycle much more to our advantage, there likely isn't going to be enough to around.

As the biosphere continually adds more billions of humans (the UN projects there will be another 3.5 billion people on the planet, a greater than 50% increase, by 2050 before a natural plateau really starts to dampen growth), the demand for clean water has the potential to far outstrip dwindling supplies. If that comes to pass, the result will be catastrophic. People around the world are already suffering and dying en masse from lack of access to something drinkable... and the problems look poised to get worse long before they get better.

With a problem of this magnitude, there is no such thing as a comprehensive solution. Instead, it will have to be addressed by chipping away at the problem in a number of ways, which the world is starting to do.

With much water not located near population centers, transportation will have to be a major part of the solution. With oil, a complex system of pipelines, tankers, and trucking fleets has been erected, because it's been profitable to do so. The commodity has a high intrinsic value. Water doesn't - or at least hasn't in most of the modern era's developed economies - and thus delivery has been left almost entirely to gravity. Further, the construction of pipelines for water that doesn't flow naturally means taking a vital resource from someone and giving it to someone else, a highly charged political and social issue that's been known to lead to protest and even violence. But until we've piped all the snow down from Alaska to California, transportation will be high on the list of potential near term solutions, especially to individual supply crunches, just as it has been with energy.

Conservation measures may help too, at least in the developed world, though the typical lawn-watering restrictions will hardly make a dent. Real conservation will have to come from curtailing industrial uses like farming and fracking.

But these bandage solutions can only forestall the inevitable without other advances to address the problems. Thankfully, where there is a challenge, there are always technology innovators to help address it. It was wells and aqueducts that let civilization move from the riverbank inland, irrigation that made communal farming scale, and sewers and pipes that turned villages into cities, after all. And just as with the dawn of industrial water, entrepreneurs are developing some promising tech developments, too.

Given how much water we use today, there's little doubt that conservation's sibling, recycling, is going to be big. Microfiltration systems are very sophisticated and can produce recycled water that is near-distilled in quality. Large-scale production remains a challenge, as is the reluctance of people to drink something that was reclaimed from human waste or industrial runoff. But that might just require the right spokesperson. California believes so, in any case, as it forges ahead with its Porcelain Springs initiative. A company called APTwater has taken on the important task of purifying contaminated leachate water from landfills that would otherwise pollute the groundwater. This is simply using technology to accelerate the natural process of replenishment by using energy, but if it can be done at scale, we will eventually reach the point where trading oil or coal for clean drinking water makes economic sense. It's already starting to in many places.

Inventor Dean Kamen of Segway fame has created the Slingshot, a water-purification machine that could be a lifesaver for small villages in more remote areas. The size of a dorm-room refrigerator, it can produce 250 gallons of water a day, using the same amount of energy it takes to run a hair dryer, provided by an engine that can burn just about anything (it's been run on cow dung). The Slingshot is designed to be maintenance-free for at least five years.

Kamen says you can "stick the intake hose into anything wet - arsenic-laden water, salt water, the latrine, the holding tanks of a chemical waste treatment plant; really, anything wet - and the outflow is one hundred percent pure pharmaceutical-grade injectable water."

That naturally presupposes there is something wet to tap into. But Coca-Cola, for one, is a believer. This September, Coke entered into a partnership with Kamen's company, Deka Research, to distribute Slingshots in Africa and Latin America.

Ceramic filters are another, low-tech option for rural areas. Though clean water output is very modest, they're better than nothing. The ability to decontaminate stormwater runoff would be a boon for cities, and AbTech Industries is producing a product to do just that.

In really arid areas, the only water present may be what's held in the air. Is it possible to tap that source? "Yes," say a couple of cutting-edge tech startups. Eole Water proposes to extract atmospheric moisture using a wind turbine. Another company, NBD Nano, has come up with a self-filling water bottle that mimics the Namib Desert beetle. Whether the technology is scalable to any significant degree remains to be seen.

And finally, what about seawater? There's an abundance of that. If you ask a random sampling of folks in the street what we're going to do about water shortages on a larger scale, most of them will answer, "desalination." No problem. Well, yes problem.

Desalination (sometimes shortened to "desal") plants are already widespread, and their output is ramping up rapidly. According to the International Desalination Association, in 2009 there were 14,451 desalination plants operating worldwide, producing about 60 million cubic meters of water per day. That figure rose to 68 million m³/day in 2010 and is expected to double to 120 million m³/day by 2020. That sounds impressive, but the stark reality is that it amounts to only around a quarter of one percent of global water consumption.

Boiling seawater and collecting the condensate has been practiced by sailors for nearly two millennia. The same basic principle is employed today, although it has been refined into a procedure called "multistage flash distillation," in which the boiling is done at less than atmospheric pressure, thereby saving energy. This process accounts for 85% of all desalination worldwide. The remainder comes from "reverse osmosis," which uses semipermeable membranes and pressure to separate salts from water.

The primary drawbacks to desal are that a plant obviously has to be located near the sea, and that it is an expensive, highly energy-intensive process. That's why you find so many desal facilities where energy is cheap, in the oil-rich, water-poor nations of the Middle East. Making it work in California will be much more difficult without drastically raising the price of water. And Nevada? Out of luck. Improvements in the technology are bringing costs of production down, but the need for energy, and lots of it, isn't going away. By way of illustration, suppose the US would like to satisfy half of its water needs through desalination. All other factors aside, meeting that goal would require the construction of more than 100 new electric power plants, each dedicated solely to that purpose, and each with a gigawatt of capacity.

Moving desalinated water from the ocean inland adds to the expense. The farther you have to transport it and the greater the elevation change, the less feasible it becomes. That makes desalination impractical for much of the world. Nevertheless, the biggest population centers tend to be clustered along coastlines, and demand is likely to drive water prices higher over time, making desal more cost-competitive. So it's a cinch that the procedure will play a steadily increasing role in supplying the world's coastal cities with water.

In other related developments, a small tech startup called NanOasis is working on a desalination process that employs carbon nanotubes. An innovative new project in Australia is demonstrating that food can be grown in the most arid of areas, with low energy input, using solar-desalinated seawater. It holds the promise of being very scalable at moderate cost.

This article barely scratches the surface of a very broad topic that has profound implications for the whole of humanity going forward. The World Bank's Ismail Serageldin puts it succinctly: "The wars of the 21st century will be fought over water."

There's no doubt that this is a looming crisis we cannot avoid. Everyone has an interest in water. How quickly we respond to the challenges ahead is going to be a matter, literally, of life and death. Where we have choices at all, we had better make some good ones.

From an investment perspective, there are few ways at present to acquire shares in the companies that are doing research and development in the field. But you can expect that to change as technologies from some of these startups begin to hit the market, and as the economics of water begin to shift in response to the changing global landscape.

We'll be keeping an eye out for the investment opportunities that are sure to be on the way.

While profit opportunities in companies working to solve the world's water woes may not be imminent, there are plenty of ways to leverage technology to outsized gains right now. One of the best involves a technology so revolutionary, its impact could rival that of the printing press.

Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

Traditional cancer treatment options are little more than a crude mix of "slash, burn, and poison" - that is surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There are radical new treatments in labs and trials all over the world that promise to throw out this trifecta; no other disease has received more of the research interest and funding that have defined modern biotechnology over the past three decades.

I'm not going to tell you about any of those here. Sure, many of them will be wildly successful and make many investors fabulously wealthy over the next few decades. But most will fail. And those that don't will take a long time to turn a profit for investors.

Yet, there is one small company whose unique twist on cancer treatment is proving to be a major upgrade. We profiled this company in a recent edition of Casey Extraordinary Technology, and it turned in a gain of over 167% for subscribers in just six months' time. It may yet make billions more still for investors.

You see, in recent years chemotherapy has become the core treatment for most cancerous malignancies. And while these toxic cocktails of chemicals have proven effective at destroying cancerous cells, they also have one problem. A big one.

Chemo, being essentially a poison, doesn't just attack cancerous cells - it attacks a broad range of healthy cells too. As a result, the treatment can sometimes be as harmful as the cancer itself in the short run. The side effects are awful, and its use can quickly erode patients' health. Some have even described chemo as a "cure that's worse than the disease."

This sad state of affairs for the world's second most-prevalent chronic disease is why the cancer-research arena has been exploding over the past few years with the goal of developing more targeted, less-toxic therapies - in other words, to do a better job killing cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone.

That's exactly what Lawrenceville, New Jersey-based Celsion Corp. (CLSN) has the technology to do. And chances are the company is on to one of the biggest cancer-treatment breakthroughs in decades.

Our story starts with liposomes. These nanosized artificial vesicles are made from the same material as our cell membranes - natural phospholipids, i.e., a version of the chemicals that make up everything from fat to earwax, and cholesterol.

Not long after their discovery in the 1960s, scientists began experimenting with liposomes as a means of encapsulating drugs, especially cancer drugs. Why? Something called the "enhanced permeability and retention" (EPR) effect. This is a property of certain sizes of molecules - for example, liposomes, nanoparticles, and macromolecular drugs - which tend to accumulate in tumor tissue much more than they do in normal tissues. It's a useful feature for a cancer drug.

Thus, they offer a potential way to combat the two biggest drawbacks of traditional chemotherapeutics: systemic toxicity and low bioavailability at the tumor site. In other words, the drugs now employed are themselves are toxic to normal cells, and they tend to get largely used up before they even reach the tumor site.

Early attempts to encapsulate drugs inside liposomes did an okay job of dealing with the toxicity issue, but bioavailability at the tumor site was still limited. Our immune system saw to that. Just like virtually anything else artificial we put into our bodies, traditional liposomes were seen as invaders. Thus, they were rapidly cleared by the mononuclear phagocyte system, the part of the immune system centered around the spleen (yes, we do use it) that destroys viruses, fungi, and other foreign invaders.

However, a breakthrough arrived when scientists came up with a new way to sneak these artificial compounds into the body undetected by our defenses. The process gave us what are call "PEGylated" liposomes, with a covalent attachment of polyethylene glycol polymer chains. The effect of attaching these little plastic chains to the end of the liposome was to create a "stealth" liposome-encapsulated drug that was hardly noticed by the system.

Problem solved, right? Well, not exactly. A lot of hard work went into getting drugs into liposomes to reduce toxicity, then a bunch more into stopping our immune system from kicking in. But there was still yet another problem. The drug-release rates of these stealth liposomes were generally so low that tumor cells barely got a dose. Scientist had made them so stealthy that they even skated right by cancer cells, usually failing to kill off the tumors.

After decades of experimenting with liposome-encapsulated cancer drugs, scientists still had not been able to safely deliver therapeutic concentrations of the chemotherapy drugs to all tumor cells.

They had to devise a way to induce drug release when and where it would be more effective.

The next big idea came in more recent years, as scientists devised temperature-sensitive liposomes. Heat them and they pop, releasing the drugs just when you need them to. From stealth to non-stealth in a matter of seconds, and right on target.

Fortunately, they were able to make it work, but unfortunately, not at temperatures that didn't essentially cook patients from the inside - sort of defeating the purpose of keeping the chemo at bay to reduce collateral damage. They failed to perform at tolerable levels of heat or time. Fifteen minutes of baking and still only 40% or so of the drug was released, and it took temperatures up to 112° Fahrenheit. It might not sound like much, but it was enough to be intensely painful and damaging as well.

That's where Celsion came in. It's designed and developed a novel form of these temperature-sensitive chemo sacks - the first of their kind to work effectively and safely - otherwise known as a lysolipid thermally sensitive liposome (LTSL).

Celsion's liposomes are engineered to release their contents between 39-42° C, or 102.2-107.6° F (thus, another translation of LTSL has become "low-temperature sensitive liposome"). And they release the contents at an extremely fast rate, to boot.

These unique properties of Celsion's LTSL technology make it vastly superior to previous liposome technology for a number of reasons.

• For starters, the temperature range is much more tolerable to patients and won't injure normal tissue.

• Second, the temperature range takes advantage of the natural effect mild hyperthermia has on tumor vasculature. Numerous studies have shown that temperatures between 39-43° C increase blood flow and vascular permeability (or leakiness) of a tumor, which is ideal for drug delivery since the cancer-killing chemicals have easy access to all areas of the tumor. These effects are not seen at temperatures below this threshold, and temperatures above it tend to result in hemorrhage, which may reduce or cease blood flow, hampering drug delivery. It's the Goldilocks Effect: The in-between range is perfect.

• Third, Celsion's LTSL technology promotes an accelerated release of the drug when and where it will be most effective. That allows for direct targeting of organ-specific tumors.

Celsion's LTSL technology has shown that it's capable of delivering drugs to the tumor site at concentrations up to 30 times greater than those achievable with chemotherapeutics alone, and three to five times greater than those of more traditional liposome-encapsulated drug-delivery systems.

The company's first drug under development is ThermoDox, which uses its breakthrough LTSL technology to encapsulate doxorubicin, a widely used chemotherapeutic agent that is already approved to treat a wide range of cancers.

Currently, ThermoDox is undergoing a pivotal Phase III global clinical trial - denoted the "HEAT study" - for the treatment of primary liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma, or HCC), in combination with radiofrequency ablation (RFA).

RFA uses high-frequency radio waves to generate a high temperature that is applied with a probe placed directly in the tumor, which by itself kills tumor cells in the immediate vicinity of the probe. Cells on the outer margins of larger tumors may survive, however, because temperatures in the surrounding area are not high enough to destroy them. But the temperatures are high enough to activate Celsion's LTSL technology. Thus, the heat from the radio-frequency device thermally activates the liposomes in ThermoDox in and around the periphery of the tumor, releasing the encapsulated doxorubicin to kill remaining viable cancer cells throughout the region, all the way to the tumor margin.

ThermoDox is also undergoing a Phase I/II clinical trial for the treatment of recurrent chest wall (RCW) breast cancer (known as the "DIGNITY study"), and a Phase II clinical trial for the treatment of colorectal liver metastases (the "ABLATE study"). But most of the drug's (and hence the company's) value is tied up in the HEAT study.

The HEAT trial is a pivotal 700-patient global Phase III study being conducted at 79 clinical sites under a special protocol assessment (SPA) agreement with the FDA. The FDA has designated the HEAT study as a fast-track development program, which provides for expedited regulatory review; and it has granted orphan-drug status to ThermoDox for the treatment of HCC, providing seven years of market exclusivity following FDA approval. Furthermore, other major regulatory agencies, including the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and China's equivalent, have all agreed to use the results of the HEAT study as an acceptable basis to approve ThermoDox.

The primary endpoint for the HEAT study is progression-free survival - living longer with no cancer growth. There's a secondary confirmatory endpoint of overall survival, too. Both the oncological and investing community are eagerly awaiting the results, which are due any day now.

So then, why are we on the sidelines now, right when the big news is due to hit? That all goes back to why Celsion was such a good investment to begin with, and what it can tell us about finding other big wins in the technology stock market.

When we're looking for a strong pick in the biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices fields - once we have established the quality of the technology itself and ensured it will likely work as expected - there is a simple set of tests we apply to ensure that we've found a stock that can deliver significant, near-term upside. The most critical of these are:

• The technology must provide a distinct competitive advantage over the current standard of care and be superior to any competitors' effort that will come to market before or shortly after our subject's does. In other words, it must improve outcomes, by improving patients' length or quality of life (i.e., a cure for a disease, or a maintenance medication with fewer side effects), or lower costs while maintaining quality of care (i.e., a generic drug). A therapy that does both is all the better.

• The market must be measurable and addressable. There must be some way to say specifically how many patients would benefit from a therapy, and to ensure that those patients have providers caring for them that would make efficient distribution of the therapy possible. For instance, a successful treatment for Parkinson's disease might be applicable to hundreds of thousands of patients, with little competition from other treatments, whereas a treatment for Von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) might only reach hundreds. If the goal is to recover years of research investment and profit above and beyond that, then market size matters, as do current and future competitors that might limit your reach within a treatment area.

• Payers should be easily convinced to cover the new therapy at profitable rates. In the modern world of health care, failure of a treatment to garner coverage from government medical programs like Medicare and the UK Health Service, and private insurance companies (which generally cooperate closely to decide how to classify and whether to cover a treatment) is usually a game-ender. Payers have a responsibility not just to patients but to their shareholders or taxpayers to stay financially solvent. This means that if a therapy does not provide a compelling cost/benefit ratio, then it won't be covered. For instance, if you release a new painkiller that is only as effective as Tylenol and costs $1,000 per dose, you're obviously not going to see support.

• There must a clear path to market in the short term, or another catalyst to propel the stock upward. An investment in a great technology does not always make for a great investment. You have to consider the quality of the management team and structure of the company, including its ability to pay the bills and get to market without defaulting or diluting you out of your positions. And of course, time. The biggest and most frequent mistake investors make in technology is assuming that it is smooth and short sailing from concept to market. Reality is much harsher than that, and in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals in particular - with a tough regulatory gamut to run - the timeline to take a new technology to market can be anywhere from a decade to thirty, forty, or even fifty years.

Liposomes are a perfect example of that. Twenty years ago, I probably could have told you a story about a technology that was very similar to what was laid out above. It would be compelling and enticing to investors of all stripes - a breakthrough technology with the promise to revolutionize cancer care by making chemo less toxic and more effective at the same time. Yet had you invested in that promise alone, chances are you'd be completely wiped out by now, or maybe - just maybe - still waiting for a return.

That is why we invest in proof, not promises. So, how does Celsion stack up against our four main proof points?

Time to market: When we first recommended Celsion, it was in Phase III pivotal trials. This is the last major stage of human testing usually required before a company can submit an FDA New Drug Application and apply to market the product.

The process of bringing a drug to market, even once a specific compound has been identified and proven to work in vitro (in the lab), is perilous. Many things can go wrong along the way. If you look at investing in a company whose drugs are just entering Phase I clinical trials, for instance, it is still unclear if the therapy is effective in vivo (in the human body). This is a critical stumbling block for many companies, whose promising compounds immediately prove less effective or more dangerous than testing suggested. Even if Phase I goes well, it can take up to a decade and sometimes longer to get from there to market with a drug. And then, even Phase II trials often leave treatments five or more years from market - though there are exceptions in cases where a therapy is proven very effective or a disease has so few treatment options available. But shortcuts are rare, and investors have to consider the time and expense (which leads to fundraising and ultimately dilutes your return) of getting from A to Z.

In this regard, Celsion made a uniquely great investment. When we first recommended the company, it was in the midst of a pivotal Phase III trial and looked to be about a year or so away from its first commercialization. (Though, speaking to the length of these trials, this one had been started back in 2008.)

With many of the most high-profile companies in the industry - those working on vogue treatment areas and conditions, like hepatitis C treatments of late - when they get this close to market, the large banks bid up stocks to high levels, content to squeeze just a few percentage points out at the end. They have to be conservative, since they're investing large amounts of other people's money. However, biotechnology is such a fragmented space with far more companies than Wall Street can possibly cover in depth, that coming across a gem like Celsion late in the game with a potentially big win is not as uncommon as you'd think. The "efficient market" hypothesis fails to account for the fact that no one can know everything, including every stock. And Celsion had gone all but unnoticed for some time.

Payer acceptability: Celsion has the benefit of developing a 2.0-style product, an improvement over something that already exists. RFA is already in relatively widespread use and has proven effective enough that most every insurance and benefits provider will cover it. Even the early generations of LTSL, while not quite as safe or effective as desired, were enough of a benefit to gather pretty solid support from payers.

Celsion, through its clinical trial process, has proven its unique blend is safer, better tolerated by patients, and much more effective than its predecessors. Thus, payer support at a reasonable price is a pretty sure bet.

Market size: When we originally recommended Celsion, we stated that the company was sitting on a multibillion-dollar opportunity. And we stand by that statement. However, just because something is eventually worth that amount does not mean it's bankable today as a short-term investment. So we try to keep our analysis narrowly focused on what can be directly counted on and measured. In Celsion's case, that's the Phase III treatment, Thermodox, and the one area in which it is being studied: primary liver cancer (HCC). Even just in this narrow band, however, we see the market opportunity for Celsion as in excess of $1 billion.

HCC is one of the most deadly forms of cancer. It currently ranks as the fifth most-common solid tumor cancer, and it's quickly moving up. With the fastest rate of growth among all cancer types, HCC projects to be the most prevalent form of cancer by 2020. The incidence of primary liver cancer is nearly 30,000 cases per year in the US, and approximately 40,000 cases per year in Europe. But the situation worldwide is far worse, with HCC growing at approximately 750,000 cases per year, due to the high prevalence of hepatitis B and C in developing countries.

If caught early, the standard first-line treatment for primary liver cancer is surgical resection of the tumor. Early-stage liver cancer generally has few symptoms, however, so when the disease is finally detected, the tumor is usually too large for surgery. Thus, at least 80% of patients are ineligible for surgery or transplantation by the time they are diagnosed. And there are few nonsurgical therapeutic treatment options available, as radiation and chemotherapy are largely ineffective.

RFA has emerged as the standard of care for non-resectable liver tumors, but it has limitations. The treatment becomes less effective for larger tumors, as local recurrence rates after RFA directly correlate to the size of the tumor. (As noted earlier, RFA often fails at the margins.) ThermoDox promises the ability to reduce the recurrence rate in HCC patients when used in combination with RFA. If it proves itself in Phase III, there's no doubt the drug will be broadly adopted throughout the world once it is approved.

A quick look at the numbers: According to the most recent data from the National Cancer Institute, the incidence rates of HCC per 100,000 people in the three major markets are 4 in the US, 5 in Europe, and approximately 27 in China. Based on these incidence rates, the total addressable market in these three regions (which we will conservatively assume to be the total addressable worldwide population for the time being) is approximately 400,000 (12,000 in the US, 40,000 in Europe, and 351,000 in China).

Assuming that 50% of HCC patients are eligible for nonsurgical invasive therapy such as RFA, approximately 200,000 patients worldwide would be eligible for ThermoDox. Further assuming an annual cost of treatment for ThermoDox of $20,000 in the US, $15,000 in Europe, and $5,000 in China, in line with similar treatments of the same variety, we estimate that the market potential of ThermoDox could be up to $1.3 billion. Not to mention the countless thousands of lives saved. (And that's before the rest of the developing world comes online.)

Of course, this is an estimate of ThermoDox's potential assuming 100% market penetration - something that simply never happens. While we expect ThermoDox in combination with RFA to become the standard of care for primary liver cancer, a more reasonable expectation for maximum market penetration after a six-year ramp-up to peak sales (from an expected approval in 2013) is probably 40%.

Improving outcomes or lowering costs: This is exactly what the Phase III trial was intended to prove: efficacy beyond a shadow of a doubt. Given preliminary data and earlier trial results, it was already a pretty sure thing, so in our model, we assumed about a 70% chance of success (to be on the conservative side, as always - it's better to be right by a mile than to miss by an inch).

Once we incorporate that probability of success into our model, we come to a probability-weighted peak sales figure in 2019 of approximately $365,000,000 annually.

The average-price-to-sales ratio among the big players in biotech these days is about 5. If we apply a sales multiple of 3 (i.e., just 60% of the average) to Celsion's probability-weighted peak sales for ThermoDox in 2019, we come up with a value for the company of nearly $1.1 billion, which would equate to about $33 per share if it did not issue any new stock between now and then - that's more than 17 times where the stock was trading when we recommended a buy.

And remember, these numbers are only for ThermoDox under the HCC indication.

With final data from the current Phase III pivotal trial due expected to come in within the next few weeks, Celsion's stock has ballooned in value from the $2 range to $7.50 or so in the past few weeks. Now, that's a far cry from the $33 price we mentioned above, but remember, that's a target for 2019. And it doesn't allow for a whole range of things that could go wrong.

Chief among those concerns is that the Phase III data come in more poorly than expected. Even just a small variance in efficacy or a simple question about safety can knock a few hundred million dollars off those sales figures. Or it can push trials back a year or two, delaying returns and sending short-term-minded investors, like those who have recently bid up CLSN shares, retreating to the hills for the time being.

Further downfield there is sure to be competition as well, and of course we may get those miraculous chemo-free treatments mentioned up front.

In short, we don't have a crystal ball and can't tell you what the world will look like in 2019. If you believe yours is clear, ask yourself if you thought touchscreen phones and tablets would outsell traditional computers by 3 to 1 globally in 2012. If not, you might want to give the crystal a polish.

To be clear, the value of Celsion in the near term hinges on a binary event - the results of the ongoing HEAT trial. We are of the opinion that CLSN represents one of the best opportunities we've come across since we started this letter, and that the probability of a successful trial is high. Nevertheless, there is substantial down side if the trial is unsuccessful. And it could take years to recover, if ever, on news of a delay from any concerns raised.

We'd already advised subscribers to take a free ride early on in our coverage of the stock, taking all of the original investment risk away. However, even with that protection, the short-term potential is still more heavily weighted to the down side. Thus, we booked our profits and stepped to the sidelines on this one.

Celsion continues to be a model, even at today's prices, for a great biotech investment with significant upside potential. But we're content to wait for the market to hand us another, similar opportunity.

The pages of Casey Extraordinary Technology are filled with investments just like Celsion - up-and-coming technology companies the market has yet to discover. With 2012 coming to a close, the service's track record for the year is a remarkable 9 winners out of 9 closed positions, with an average gain of 61%. Get in on it now: subscribe today and save 25% off the regular price - as always, backed by our unconditional money-back guarantee.

Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

Last month, a group of Australian scientists published a warning to the citizens of the country and of the world who collectively gobble up some $34 billion annually of its agricultural exports. The warning concerned the safety of a new type of wheat.

As Australia's number-one export, a $6-billion annual industry, and the most-consumed grain locally, wheat is of the utmost importance to the country. A serious safety risk from wheat - a mad wheat disease of sorts - would have disastrous effects for the country and for its customers.

Which is why the alarm bells are being rung over a new variety of wheat being ushered toward production by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) of Australia. In a sense, the crop is little different than the wide variety of modern genetically modified foods. A sequence of the plant's genes has been turned off to change the wheat's natural behavior a bit, to make it more commercially viable (hardier, higher yielding, slower decaying, etc.).

What's really different this time - and what has Professor Jack Heinemann of the University of Canterbury, NZ, and Associate Professor Judy Carman, a biochemist at Flinders University in Australia, holding press conferences to garner attention to the subject - is the technique employed to effectuate the genetic change. It doesn't modify the genes of the wheat plants in question; instead, a specialized gene blocker interferes with the natural action of the genes.

The process at issue, dubbed RNA interference or RNAi for short, has been a hotbed of research activity ever since the Nobel Prize-winning 1997 research paper that described the process. It is one of a number of so-called "antisense" technologies that help suppress natural genetic expression and provide a mechanism for suppressing undesirable genetic behaviors.

RNAi's appeal is simple: it can potentially provide a temporary, reversible off switch for genes. Unlike most other genetic modification techniques, it doesn't require making permanent changes to the underlying genome of the target. Instead, specialized siRNAs - chemical DNA blockers based on the same mechanism our own bodies use to temporarily turn genes on and off as needed - are delivered into the target organism and act to block the messages cells use to express a particular gene. When those messages meet with their chemical opposites, they turn inert. And when all of the siRNA is used up, the effect wears off.

The new wheat is in early-stage field trials (i.e., it's been planted to grow somewhere, but has not yet been tested for human consumption), part of a multi-year process on its way to potential approval and not unlike the rigorous process many drugs go through. The researchers responsible are using RNAi to turn down the production of glycogen. They are targeting the production of the wheat branching enzyme which, if suppressed, would result in a much lower starch level for the wheat.

The result would be a grain with a lower glycemic index - i.e., healthier wheat.

This is a noble goal. However, Professors Heinemann and Carman warn, there's a risk that the gene silencing done to these plants might make its way into humans and wreak havoc on our bodies. In their press conference and subsequent papers, they describe the possibility that the siRNA molecules - which are pretty hardy little chemicals and not easily gotten rid of - could wind up interacting with our RNA.

If their theories prove true, the results might be as bad as mimicking glycogen storage disease IV, a super-rare genetic disorder which almost always leads to early childhood death.

Now that is potentially headline-grabbing stuff. Unfortunately, much of it is mere speculation at this point, albeit rooted in scientific expertise on the subject.

What they've produced is a series of opinion papers - not scientific research nor empirical data to prove that what they suspect might happen, actually does. They point to the possibilities that could happen if a number of criteria are met:

• If the siRNAs remain in the wheat in transferrable form, in large quantities, when the grain makes it to your plate. And…
• If the siRNA molecules interfere with the somewhat different but largely similar human branching enzyme as well.

Then the result might be symptoms similar to such a condition, on some scale or another, anywhere from completely unnoticeable to highly impactful.

They further postulate that if the same effect is seen in animals, it could result in devastating ecological impact. Dead bugs and dead wild animals.

Luckily for us, as potential consumers of these foods, all of these are easily testable theories. And this is precisely the type of data the lengthy approval process is meant to look at.

Opinion papers like this - while not to be confused with conclusions resulting from solid research - are a critically important part of the scientific process, challenging researchers to provide hard data on areas that other experts suspect could be overlooked. Professors Carman and Heinemann provide a very important public good in challenging the strength of the due-diligence process for RNAi's use in agriculture, an incomplete subject we continue to discover more about every day.

However, we'll have to wait until the data come back on this particular experiment - among thousands of similar ones being conducted at government labs, universities, and in the research facilities of commercial agribusinesses like Monsanto and Cargill - to know if this wheat variety would in fact result in a dietary apocalypse.

That's a notion many anti-genetically modified organism (GMO) pundits seem to have latched onto following the press conference the professors held. But if the history of modern agriculture can teach us anything, it's that far more aggressive forms of GMO foods appear to have had a huge net positive effect on the global economy and our lives. Not only have they not killed us, in many ways GMO foods have been responsible for the massive increases in public health and quality of life around the world.

The debate over genetically modified (GM) food is a heated one. Few contest that we are working in somewhat murky waters when it comes to genetically modified anything, human or plant alike. At issue, really, is the question of whether we are prepared to use the technologies we've discovered.

In other words, are we the equivalent of a herd of monkeys armed with bazookas, unable to comprehend the sheer destructive power we possess yet perfectly capable of pulling the trigger?

Or do we simply face the same type of daunting intellectual challenge as those who discovered fire, electricity, or even penicillin, at a time when the tools to fully understand how they worked had not yet been conceived of?

In all of those cases, we were able to probe, study, and learn the mysteries of these incredible discoveries over time. Sure, there were certainly costly mistakes along the way. But we were also able to make great use of them to advance civilization long before we fully understood how they worked at a scientific level.

Much is the same in the study and practical use of GM foods.

While the fundamentals of DNA have been well understood for decades, we are still in the process of uncovering many of the inner workings of what is arguably the single most advanced form of programming humans have ever encountered. It is still very much a rapidly evolving science to this day.

For example, in the 1990s, an idea known simply as "gene therapy" - really a generalized term for a host of new-at-the-time experimental techniques that share the simple characteristic of permanently modifying the genetic make-up of an organism - was all the rage in medical study. Two decades on, it's hardly ever spoken of. That's because the great majority of attempted disease therapies from genetic modification failed, with many resulting in terrible side effects and even death for the patients who underwent the treatments. Its use in the early days, of course, was limited almost exclusively to some of the world's most debilitating, genetically rooted diseases. Still - whether in their zeal to use a fledgling tool to cure a dreadful malady or in selfish, hurried desire to be recognized among the pioneers of what they thought would be the very future of medicine - doctors chose to move forward at a dangerous pace with gene therapy.

In one famous case, and somewhat typical of the times, University of Pennsylvania physicians enrolled a sick 18-year-old boy with a liver mutation into a trial for a gene therapy that was known to have resulted in the deaths of some of the monkeys it had just been tested on. The treatment resulted in the young man's death a few days later, and the lengthy investigation that followed resulted in serious accusations of what can only be called "cowboy medicine."

Not one of science's prouder moments, to be sure. But could GM foods be following the same dangerous path?

After all, the first GM foods made their way to market during the same time period. The 1980s saw large-scale genetic-science research and experimentation from agricultural companies, producing everything from antibiotic-resistant tobacco to pesticide-hardy corn. After much debate and study, in 1994 the FDA gave approval to the first GM food to be sold in the United States: the ironically named Flavr Savr tomato, with its delayed ripening genes which made it an ideal candidate for sitting for days or weeks on grocery store shelves.

Ever since, there has been a seeming rush of modified foods into the marketplace.

Modern GM foods include soybeans, corn, cotton, canola, sugar beets, and a number of squash and greens varieties, as well as products made from them. One of the most prevalent modifications is to make plants glyphosate-resistant, or in common terms, "Roundup Ready." This yields varieties that are able to stand up to much heavier doses of the herbicide Roundup, which is used to keep weeds and other pest plants from damaging large monoculture fields, thereby reducing costs and lowering risks.

In total it is estimated that modern GM crops have grown to become a $12 billion annual business since their commercialization in 1994, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA). Over 15 million farms around the world are reported to have grown GM crops, and their popularity increases every year.

They've brought huge improvements in shelf life, pathogen and other stress resistance, and even added nutritional benefits. For instance, yellow rice - which was the first approved crop with an entirely new genetic pathway added artificially - provides beta-carotene to a large population of people around the world who otherwise struggle to find enough in their diets.

However, the race for horticulturalists to the genetic table in the past few decades - what could be described accurately as the transgenic generation of research - has by no means been our first experiment with the genetic manipulation of food. In fact, if anything, it is a more deliberate, well studied, and careful advance than those that came before it.

Some proponents of GMO foods are quick to point out that humans have been modifying foods at the genetic level since the dawn of agriculture itself. We crossbreed plants with each other to produce hybrids (can I interest you in a boysenberry?). And of course, we select our crops for breeding from those with the most desirable traits, effectively encouraging genetic mutations that would have otherwise resulted in natural failure, if not helped along by human hands. Corn as we know it, for example, would never have survived in nature without our help in breeding it.

Using that as a justification for genetic meddling, however, is like saying we know that NASCAR drivers don't need seatbelts because kids have been building soapbox racers without them for years. Nature, had the mix not been near ideal to begin with, would have prevented such crossbreeding. Despite Hollywood's desires, one can't simply crossbreed a human and a fly, or even a bee and a mosquito, for that matter - their genetics are too different to naturally mix. And even if it did somehow occur, if it did not make for a hardier result, then natural selection would have quickly kicked in.

No, I am talking about real, scientific genetic mucking - the kind we imagined would result in the destruction of the world from giant killer tomatoes or man-eating cockroaches in our B-grade science-fiction films. Radiation mutants.

Enterprising agrarians have been blasting plants with radiation of all sorts ever since we starting messing around with atomic science at the dawn of the 20th century. In the 1920s, just when Einstein and Fermi were getting in their grooves, Dr. Lewis Stadler at the University of Missouri was busy blasting barley seeds with X-rays - research that would usher in a frenzy of mutation breeding to follow.

With the advent of nuclear technology from the war effort, X-rays expanded into atomic radiation, with the use of gamma rays leading the pack. The United States even actively encouraged the practice for decades, through a program dubbed "Atoms for Peace" that proliferated nuclear technology throughout various parts of the private sector in a hope that it would improve the lives of many. And it did.

Today, thousands of agricultural varieties we take for granted - including, according to a 2007 New York Times feature on the practice, "rice, wheat, barley, pears, peas, cotton, peppermint, sunflowers, peanuts, grapefruit, sesame, bananas, cassava and sorghum" - are a direct result of mutation breeding. They would not be classified as GM foods, in the sense that we did not use modern transgenic techniques to make them, but they are genetically altered nonetheless, to the same or greater degree than most modern GMO strains.

Unlike modern GM foods - which are often closely protected by patents and armies of lawyers to ensure the inventing companies reap maximum profits from their use - the overwhelming majority of the original generations of radiation-mutated plant varieties came out of academic and government sponsored research, and thus were provided free and clear for farmers to use without restriction.

With the chemical revolution of the mid-20th century, radiation-based mutations were followed by the use of chemical agents like the methyl sulfate family of mutagens. And after that, the crudest forms of organic genetic manipulation came into use, such as the uses of transposons, highly repetitive strands of DNA discovered in 1948 that can be used like biological duct tape to cover whole sections the genome.

These modified crops stood up better to pests, lessened famines, reduced reliance on pesticides, and most of all enabled farmers to increase their effective yields. Coupled with the development of commercial machinery like tractors and harvesters, the rise of mutagenic breeding resulted in an agricultural revolution of a magnitude few truly appreciate. In the late 1800s, the overwhelming majority of global populations lived in rural areas, and most people spent their lives in agrarian pursuits. From subsistence farmers to small commercial operations, the majority of the population of every country, the US included, was employed in agriculture.

Today, less than 2% of the American population (legal and illegal combined) works in farming of any kind. Yet we have more than enough food to feed all of our people, and a surplus to export to more densely populated nations like China and India.

The result is that a sizable percentage of the world's plant crops today - the ones on top of which much of the modern-era GMO experiments are done - are already genetic mutants. Hence the slippery slope that serves as the foundation of the resistance from regulators over the labeling of GM food products. Where do you draw the line on what to label? And frankly, how do you even know for sure, following the Wild-West days of blasting everything that could grow with some form or another of radiation, what plants are truly virgin DNA?

The world's public is largely unaware that many of the foods they eat today - far more than those targeted by anti-GMO protestors and labeling advocates - are genetically modified. Yet we don't seem to be dying off in large numbers, like the anti-RNAi researchers project will happen. In fact, global lifespans have increased dramatically across the board in the last century.

The science of GM food has advanced considerably since the dark ages of the 1920s. Previous versions of mutation breeding were akin to trying to fix a pair of eyeglasses with a sledgehammer - messy and imprecise, with rare positive results. And the outputs of those experiments were often foisted upon a public without any knowledge or understanding of what they were consuming.

Modern-day GM foods are produced with a much more precise toolset, which means less unintended collateral damage. Of course it also opens up a veritable Pandora's box of new possibilities (glow-in-the-dark corn, anyone?) and with it a whole host of potential new risks. Like any sufficiently powerful technology, such as the radiation and harsh chemicals used in prior generations of mutation breeding, without careful control over its use, the results can be devastating. This fact is only outweighed by the massive improvements over the prior, messier generation of techniques.

And thus, regulatory regimes from the FDA to CSIRO to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) are taking increasing steps to ensure that GM foods are thoroughly tested long before they come to market. In many ways, the tests are far more rigorous than those that prescription drugs undergo, as the target population is not sick and in need of urgent care, and for which side effects can be tolerated. This is why a great many of the proposed GM foods of the last 20 years, including the controversial "suicide seeds" meant to protect the intellectual property of the large GM seed producers like Monsanto (which bought out Calgene, the inventor of that Flavr Savr tomato, and is now the 800-lb. gorilla of the GM food business), were never allowed to market.

Still, with the 15 years from 1996 to 2011 seeing a 96-fold increase in the amount of land dedicated to growing GM crops and the incalculable success of the generations of pre-transgenic mutants before them, scientists and corporations are still in a mad sprint to find the next billion-dollar GM blockbuster.

In doing so they are seeking tools that make the discovery of such breakthroughs faster and more reliable. With RNAi, they may just have found one such tool. If it holds true to its laboratory promises, its benefits will be obvious from all sides.

Unlike previous generations of GMO, RNAi-treated crops do not need to be permanently modified. This means that mutations which outlive their usefulness, like resistance to a plague which is eradicated, do not need to live on forever. This allows companies to be more responsive, and potentially provides a big relief to consumers concerned about the implications of eating foods with permanent genetic modifications.

The simple science of creating RNAi molecules is also attractive to people who develop these new agricultural products, as once a messenger RNA is identified, there is a precise formula to tell you exactly how to shut it off, potentially saving millions or even billions of dollars that would be spent in the research lab trying to figure out exactly how to affect a particular genetic process.

And with the temporary nature of the technique, both the farmers and the Monsantos of the world can breathe easily over the huge intellectual-property questions of how to deal with genetically altered seeds. Not to mention the questions of natural spread of strains between farms who might not want GMO crops in their midst. Instead of needing to engineer in complex genetic functions to ensure progeny don't pass down enhancements for free and that black markets in GMO seeds don't flourish, the economic equation becomes as simple as fertilizer: use it or don't.

While RNAi is not a panacea for GMO scientists - it serves as an off switch, but cannot add new traits nor even turn on dormant ones - the dawn of antisense techniques is likely to mean an even further acceleration of the science of genetic meddling in agriculture. Its tools are more precise even than many of the most recent permanent genetic-modification methods. And the temporary nature of the technique - the ability to apply it selectively as needed versus breeding it directly into plants which may not benefit from the change decades on - is sure to please farmers, and maybe even consumers as well.

That is, unless the scientists in Australia are proven correct, and the siRNAs used in experiments today make their way into humans and affect the same genetic functions in us as they do in the plants. The science behind their assertions still needs a great deal of testing. Much of their assertion defies the basic understanding of how siRNA molecules are delivered - an incredibly difficult and delicate process that has been the subject of hundreds of millions of dollars of research thus far, and still remains, thanks to our incredible immune systems, a daunting challenge in front of one of the most promising forms of medicine (and now of farming too).

Still, their perspective is important food for thought... and likely fuel for much more debate to come. After all, even if you must label your products as containing GMO-derived ingredients, does that apply if you just treated an otherwise normal plant with a temporary, consumable, genetic on or off switch? In theory, the plant which ends up on your plate is once again genetically no different than the one which would have been on your plate had no siRNAs been used during its formative stages.

One thing is sure: the GMO food train left the station nearly a century ago and is now a very big business that will continue to grow and to innovate, using RNAi and other techniques to come.

Technology is the largest sector of the US economy right now - but that doesn't make selecting the best investments any easier. Not only must a new development get regulatory approval, it has to cross "the chasm"... the dangerous zone between early adopters picking it up and the mainstream accepting it. Learn how to choose the tech most likely to achieve this, and you'll be on your way to windfall gains.

Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.