Now, using recombinant DNA techniques, modern scientists are like their Native American forebearers, continuing to engineer plants. Why? The very plants that taste so good to us also taste good to insects, fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Our plants -- all planted in a row -- are easy targets for these hungry pathogens. Plants are at a distinct disadvantage because plants cannot run away.
I'm saying this quite seriously because they're being pestered to death. Furthermore, plants have been much maligned in the science fiction films. Science fiction movies have made it difficult to teach the science of plants because from, "The Thing" to "A Little Shop of Horrors" to "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes," plants have been anthropomorphized. They're always chasing people and killing them and so on.
This notion of the violent plant -- now this is really a muTANT! It differs in at least several hundred thousand genes from any known plant. Most importantly, it can move. Most plants can't move and are under constant attack from their environment. As a consequence, plants have evolved their own "immune system" -- a way of protecting themselves from their own environment. They make toxins which enable them to resist disease. It is the genes for those toxins which modern plant biologists wish to use as part of their armamentarium to prevent disease in crops that are constantly under attack.
So, what you can see here is a corn leaf that's being attacked by a fungus, Helminthosporium maydis which cause Southern Corn Blight in the United States. This fungus can completely destroy a crop of corn. The leaves at the top (a, b) are from a corn plant sensitive to fungal infection. However, you can find plants that are resistant to this infection (c) due to toxins it develops to eliminate the fungus. Even though infected, these plants do quite well.
  
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Winding Your Way Through DNA Resource Book Index
