For more genetically engineered goodness!
For almost a year we have been anticipating this. It was one of the specific items that I brought up during the Changemakers contest as to why we needed the grant money. I’m talking, of course, about the ability to syndicate feeds from contributor’s blogs – but not only that – to have it automatic, hands-free, and self-formatting for this blog. Like many a layperson might be able to imagine a genetically engineered plant that they would not know how to transform, setting up this capability was beyond the coding abilities of the geneticists editing this blog. I for one, have learned about html and php through fiddling as a geneticist might make a mutation and study its downstream effects. Although the metaphor may seem backwards, it makes perfect sense to me to see lines of computer code as if they were analogous to genes and not the other way around. 
But like many genes in a genome database, there’s no easy annotation for special features for blog plugins that don’t yet exist. Rather than wait for natural variation to give something for bloggers to select for, we had to call on the help of an intelligent designer to produce it ex nihilo.
Charles Johnson created the highly versatile plugin, FeedWordPress, which allows you to subscribe to feeds on other blogs to import their posts into your own. It was perfect for a group blog like Biofortified with authors that already have their own blogs to manage, except it imported the whole post without any pleasing front-page breaks. I got in touch with Charles and he agreed to
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Supreme Court decides on Alfalfa case
In what (for me) seemed like no time at all, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has issued its ruling on the Roundup Ready Alfalfa case. In a landslide 7:1 ruling (with one recusing), the high court has lifted the nationwide ban on planting genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant alfalfa. What does this mean for GE alfalfa and sugar beet plantings that have been affected by the courts?
Although the social media chatter over the case was mostly characterizing it as crucial to win to “stop” GE alfalfa, it was really more about what the proper course of action is for the GE regulatory process, and whether a court can issue an injunction against planting GE crops while the environmental impact statement (EIS) is being drafted, without having to provide evidence of harm. For more background information, read my previous post about the case. In essence, the court was considering whether the lower court was right in “remanding” the GE alfalfa back to the USDA to determine whether it was ok to plant, while also issuing an injunction preventing them from saying it was ok to plant until the EIS is complete.
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