Stronger Plants, Stronger Science, and Stronger Communication
In a recent post, I discussed how Amflora potatoes are harmless, and could help industry produce starch using less energy and water. Unfortunately, approval for the potatoes was denied on March 12 by the European Commission, even though all applicable regulatory agencies have declared it to be safe. According to GMO Compass: The Amflora potato…
Twitter has a feature that allows you to watch certain keywords. I like to keep my finger on the pulse of the GMO debate, so I follow “GMO”. This one made me laugh out loud: heard best excuse ever for turning down a sysadmin job offer: moving to germany because whole foods is using GMO…
Biopharma is such a strange word. To me it sounds sort of sci-fi, evoking images from the 1950s of a future where everything will be high-tech but beautiful and simple at the same time. Of course, not everyone has such positive thoughts about this potentially dangerous yet potentially lifesaving application of technology. “Scientists Worry Over…
A mid-January press release tells of rice from China rejected by Europe because it was “contaminated” with rice modified to express a version of the Bacillus thuringiensis toxin: Bt63. The offending rice had been made into such products as noodles and distributed across Europe before the Bt63 was noticed. To me, there is one important…
Opponents of biofuels say that using corn as ethanol is causing grain prices to rise. That’s true, but there is another side to this issue that is completely ignored. Meat consumption has been rising in developed and developing countries, increasing demand for corn and soy animal feed. Now that ethanol and biodiesel claim more and…
Reason‘s science correspondent Ronald Bailey has written an amusing retort to the Friends of the Earth report “Who benefits from biotech crops?” As expected, the FoE twist the facts and call scientists liars, in their attempts to sweep the ISAAA report under the rug. They may be friends of the earth, but they certainly aren’t…
Read More “Counterpoint and counterpoint to the ISAAA report on biotech crops” »
The AP story “Developing Countries Grew More Biotech Crops in ’07” appeared in various outlets, including the NY Times. The study was conducted by International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), a non-profit that is working to get biotech to the people who need it most. All farmers, especially the poor, can use…
Throughout history, a lucky few people have been in the right place, at the right time, with enough intelligence to connect the dots in the world around them. Darwin was one of these people. In Darwin’s time, some naturalists were already thinking about how the diversity of life came to be, but hadn’t quite solidified…
In a sentence: Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital are inducing fluorescent cancer in transparent zebrafish in order to study the spread of the cancer cells. Now for a little background info to help that sentence make sense! Zebrafish are one of the so-called “model organisms” because they fit a list of criteria that make them…
As if in answer to my recent post “Doomsday seed vault to open soon“, USDA’s ARS just sent their first shipment of seeds to Norway. From the press release (via ISU’s Agronomy News): Seeds from more than 11,000 plant varieties are being shipped by the USDA Agricultural Research Service to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault…