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Luigi over at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog brought up a really great point in a recent post, the Bourne Ultimatum, about the National Geographic article The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty, a point that just begs to be repeated.Man Walking in Field With Puzzle Piece, 2007 by Josh Cornett As is typical of Nat Geo, the journalism is excellent (although a bit jumpy in this global story), and doesn’t shy away from telling How do you improve crop yields without actually improving crop yields? Control rodents that are eating grain in the fields. This is exactly what Dr. Loretta Mayer and her graduate student Heidi Miers intend to do with a chemical called VCD (4-vinylcyclohexene diepoxide), commonly used in tires, polyesters and plastics. VCD basically degrades ovaries, similar to how the ovaries degrade during menopause – hence “mouseopause”. Simply place VCD bait stations in fields, rodents Although half of my day was spent traveling to the BIO convention There was still plenty for me to see starting at lunchtime. During Tuesday’s lunch, they gave awards to high school students for biotech-related research, and the Governor of Georgia, Sonny Perdue gave a speech positioning Georgia as a future center for biotech research. It was his state of Georgia, however where those infamous stickers disparaging evolution could be found – Cobb County to be precise. In 2004, his statement for a “balanced” approach to teaching evolution – where it is not taught as “fact.” Apparently he wants the benefits of a thriving biotechnology industry in his state without supporting the bedrock of modern biology in his state’s high school science classrooms. It seems that Florida is not the only state where the living is contradictory! The star of the lunchtime diversion from our food, however, was Elton John.
Continue reading… Hello everybody. This morning I caught a red eye flight to Atlanta, Georgia. Although this trip has been almost three months in the making, I’ve been so busy getting ready that I have not had the time to give everyone the heads-up with a blog post. (Busy making time in my research, that is. Packing took one evening.) Today through Friday, I will be at the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s 2009 International Convention, representing Biofortified and blogging about it. Let me give you a few more details.
Continue reading… Earlier this year, I heard about a plant science video contest called Chlorofilms. Supported by a grant from the American Society of Plant Biologists, (ASPB) they wanted to encourage people to produce informative and entertaining plant science videos and organize the best of them on one website. Their deadline was in early March, and I was busy getting some of my videos ready to be entered when they extended the deadline to April 15th. This was good, because up until they announced the extension, there were very few videos entered in the contest. As a result, over 60 videos were entered for their first contest! This morning, I received a press release from Chlorofilms – They have chosen their winners and I’m counted among them!
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