Stronger Plants, Stronger Science, and Stronger Communication
Hi everyone, Frank N. Foode™ here. I may not have managed to tweet during the BIO convention last week, but I’ve sure been having a ball of a time on twitter lately. A month ago, I talked someone down from freaking out about sugar cane because she learned it was a cross between two species….
Scientific Blogging is an interesting blogging model. Anyone can start up a blog, but only bloggers that provide quality, accurate posts are selected to be columnists. This is quite different from the invitation-only model used by ScienceBlogs. I like the former because it gives everyone the opportunity to share their knowledge in a public forum….
Back in November 2008, Velimirov, Zentek, and fellow researchers conducted a long-term study where they fed genetically modified maize to rats. They concluded, in their non-peer-reviewed press release, that the maize caused reduced fertility. It had great potential because it’s true, there haven’t been very many long term studies. Unfortunately, they did not meet that potential. The…
Usually, when we think about biotechnology, it’s in the context of agriculture, and occasionally in the context of medicine, but biotechnology is useful for a lot more. It can be used to study complex cellular and developmental processes with results that can be stunningly beautiful, and sometimes silly. Margaret Clarke researches the soil amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum…
In Polydnaviruses: Nature’s GMOs, I wrote about how wasps use viruses to disable the immune defenses of their hosts. Braconid and ichneumonid wasps use a system that genetically modifies their hosts in order to shut their immune systems down. So how does this all work? A good system to use to describe how polydnavirus proteins…
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m an Australian. But us Ozzies get to meet a lot of Americans. American author of Seeds of Deception and public speaker Jeffrey Smith’s of Fairfield Iowa, first came to the attention of Australians when he was rolled out by the anti-GM activists to try and prevent Australian farmers being given…
One of the best parts of the Maize Genetics Meeting is the opportunity to have discussions with scientists working in a variety of fields from academia, industry, and NGOs. Conversation this afternoon veered towards intellectual property (IP) and biotechnology for a bit. It’s a contentious subject for a lot of reasons, but some new ideas…
The 2010 Maize Genetics Conference started with a call for maize geneticists to take on one of the greatest challenges of human history – feeding the world. Marianne Bänziger of CIMMYT presented the first plenary talk, titled Stress tolerant maize for the developing world – Challenges and prospects. Find the abstract of her talk at…
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(Hat tip to Elton Robinson at South East Farm Press) The Consumers Union wanted to know what consumers felt about genetically engineered crops cross-pollinating with organic crops. So in early February, they conducted a poll. They called a thousand random people over the phone and asked them just two questions: 1. Do you buy organic…
