The first of my videos from my trip to the MOSES conference is up on Biofortifed’s new Vimeo account. This is the keynote speech that Margaret Mellon gave. ‘Mardi’ is the director of the Food & Agriculture Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and as you will see in the video, is a critic of genetic engineering in agriculture. She gave an argument comparing genetic engineering with organic agriculture, suggesting that the safety of the former depends upon proving a negative, and that the latter involves proving a positive. She also addressed the suggestion that organic agriculture could incorporate genetic engineering. What do you think of her arguments? Watch the video and let us know!
Margaret Mellon at MOSES 2010 from Biofortified on Vimeo.
Almost immediately after her speech I recorded an audio interview with Margaret which I will post very soon. I already had some questions, but the speech spurred several more. What would you have asked her after this speech?
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One of the students of the lab defended his thesis work during this time frame. He was a terrific speaker who made us understand the medical and economic burdens of these parasites on the impoverished communities he studied. Somehow he managed to make the story of sample collection amusing…. And the details of the discovery of his own infection (after a very hot curry meal) made that defense one of the most memorable during my career in science (Figure 1, right. Speaker and his infectious agent). But I still remember the scientific point: these infections have real impacts on the humans and the agricultural animals that live in close proximity to them in the developing world. And that there appear to have been separate and distinct infections in humans and in pigs in the 
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