So as per my aforementioned plan to post every day to encourage readers to register and vote, I will instead post one per week until the 28th, and then I will do one per day to get out the vote.

As of today I’m 1/11th of the way to the lead with 3 votes. Huzzah!

It seems that the motivation for this change is probably the limited number of entries. Frank tells me he might still have time to win a free flight to Machu Picchu if only he could find a human to attach their name to the entry!

Anyhow, please consider registering at the changemakers site and voting for my entry. The number of votes to beat is 33 votes, I know way more people read this site than that! As opposed to the hiccups that the publishing process experiences on changemakers, registration takes less than a minute and is pain-free. So get to it!

My entry is below the fold.

The text-only entry boxes eliminated my formatting, so here it is as I would like to have shown it:

Biofortified is an independent group blog for plant genetics and genetic engineering (GE). By posting news, discussing research, debunking myths, and inviting the input of guest experts and especially readers, our knowledgeable writers are helping to bring a new standard of communication to agricultural biotechnology. Check us out!

What makes your approach innovative?

Group science blogs have been tried and tested, but this is the first one for plant genetics. The site is currently written on a volunteer basis by two graduate students and two professors, and features posts written by guest experts. This gives the public an opportunity to learn about GE, ask questions, and give their own input.

There are many resources on the internet where people can find factual information about GE crops, but Biofortified is the first forum of its kind to encourage dialog on this important topic, and to bring scientists into an open online forum where they can talk about the issues that they find important. To our knowledge, no other organization is making such a dedicated effort to discussing genetic engineering on the web.

Finally, our blog mascot, Frank N. Foode is going to be a big hit. As he travels the country and the world in search of plant genetics adventures, he gives us a personal connection to the genetics of the foods we eat. No one seems to be able to resist getting their photos taken with him!

How will you sustain your solution?

Maintaining the site is inexpensive, something that a small fundraiser can take care of each year. But we have big plans for extensive information resources and new media approaches, which will take time to put together. This will become easier as Biofortified adds members in the future. The blog is not yet a year old, yet conversation is starting to build up and people are taking notice.

It is important also to keep people interested in a resource, and to create a community where people feel that they can be open, honest, and are entertained enough to keep coming back. In the near future, we plan to release the first in a series of videos to not only bring some science to the public’s computer screens, but also into their kitchens. Most people have all the basic tools to learn about their food right at home, and with Frank N. Foode as their cooking guide, they can see that science can be fun and delicious!

What will be the impact of your solution?

Three authors live in the United States, and one in Australia. As time goes on, we will be adding more writers across the world, to help add to the varied global perspectives we talk about on the blog. We talk about more than just the science – there’s also the politics, social impact, environmental issues, economic considerations, and more. So we have the potential to reach people around the English-speaking world on a wide range of issues connected to this technology.

Genetic engineering is not a “RISK or RESCUE“, it is a RESCUE with RISKS. All plant modifications have risks, including traditional breeding, and we need to encourage public dialog that recognizes this fact and puts this technology in the proper context without resorting to black-and-white false dichotomies. If we can help people realize just this fact, we will have already moved the debate forward in a positive manner.

This is just a taste of some of the reasons why we think this effort is worth your vote. Stick around the comments section in the final week of the Changemakers contest to hear more!

Thanks

I included a few images in the contest entry, and here they are for posterity:

The banner image, of course.

Frank N. Foode representing the plants.

Anastasia, Frank, and myself when we all met at Maize Genetics.

In my entry, I might have let slip some information about a secret project I am working on with Frank, so in the coming week look forward to hearing more about it. Indeed, each day until the contest closes, I will post one good reason to vote for this blog in the Changemakers contest. There was really not enough space in the contest to adequately explain why something like Biofortified is a great idea worthy of votes, so I will use their comment system to help voters decide. In the meantime, we have until 4 pm EST on September 16th, so get out there and vote!

(By the way, I know that online contests invite their own sort of shenanigans, please lets keep it clean and only register/vote once per person.)

The debate over the future of our food supply is heating up. Everyone is weighing in on the moral, environmental, and nutritional effects that Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) will have on our society, but how do we really know what’s on our plate?

This summary is well-written and gets everyone in the right mindset to offer up an idea no matter their point of view. The Welcome Letter goes into more detail:

WHAT’S ON YOUR PLATE? Advances in food science and technology have changed dramatically in the last decades. Often food consumers’ voices are not heard in the debate. Yet, no one is more important in the business of food than consumers. How do we know what’s really on our plate? And how do we demonstrate that we have the power to make and demand better choices? We invite our Changemakers community to speak up, challenge each other, and develop ideas and solutions that will have an impact on the world. This competition is about finding the best solutions that educate consumers about what they’re eating, and the effect their food choices will have on the environment and society.

PERHAPS YOUR local gardening association is collecting and preserving seeds to ensure the integrity of our food supply. Or perhaps you’ve spearheaded an awareness campaign advocating GMOs as the answer to climate change and malnutrition. The future of our food supply is at stake, and your ideas could change the way we connect with what we eat.

Again, they did a very careful job in wording everything to appeal to everyone who has something to say on this topic. And the proverbial carrot on a stick to encourage entries is a conversation with Michael Pollan, amongst other things.

The winners will be selected by the Changemakers online community – meaning you!

The three tiers of prizes are:

· The top 20 entries with the most votes will win a social media training session with Ashoka.

· The top 3 entries with the most votes will receive an enhanced social media training session and will be featured in a one-page ad in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

· The grand prize winner will win a conversation with the best-selling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan (www.michaelpollan.com).

· The Latin American entry with the most votes will receive a round-trip ticket to anywhere in South America, courtesy of Gol Airlines.

All winners will be announced on September 23, 2009.

Tomorrow is actually the last day to make an entry, so apologies on the short notice if this appeals to you. Actually, there is not much competition so far, with only a few entries in the contest. These entries all take an anti-GE stance, some are quite bad. For example, one redefines food to be that which is not genetically modified (There is no food that fits this definition). The brilliant marketing plan for this one is called “Murder by Food.” Come on readers, you know you can offer up some better ideas than that! Even overnight.

I will be making an entry into this contest in the next day, as soon as I can winnow my notes down to something more readable. But for the moment, I wanted to comment about the contest, and perhaps one of the reasons why the entries are all anti-GE, some extremely so. Perhaps it has something to do with this banner image:

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to eat those tomatoes! Sure they are red, shiny, and glistening with dew, but there’s some evil scientist putting black liquid in with a syringe! I do not want to eat India Ink in my salsa just as much as the next food blogger. And of course, the image bears no resemblence to genetic engineering. Unfortunately, the news media has latched onto the food-with-syringe-of-evil image as a visual description of genetic engineering, and it is really unfortunate that Ashoka Changemakers decided to use this image as the banner for their site. Visitors to the site who are anti-GE would consider the contest to be a safe haven for speaking of genetic engineering in terms of Murder, and pro-GE visitors would think, oh great, another anti-GE site.

Since the contest winner is decided by whomever has the most votes from registered community members, this has the added effect of discouraging pro-GE entries because of the doubtful prospects of getting a fair hearing from registered users.

I sent them a message and they are sincere about the neutrality of the contest, and it is unfortunate that this mistake may have affected the tenor of their effort. I was hoping to see if they would be willing to

change the image to something more accurate or descriptive before I advertised the contest on Biofortified, pointing them to the rotating images on the top right of the blog as examples. Something like this transformed rice plant growing in a petri dish would be much better than the Deadly Drano Nightshade pictured above.

Finally, the title Risk or Rescue, also sets up a problematic dichotomy. Genetic engineering is either a RISK or a RESCUE. The correct response is that genetic engineering is a RESCUE with RISKS. As in all plant modification, whether through breeding, polyploidy, wide crosses (with poisonous wild relatives), genetic engineering carries risks of unintended consequences, sometimes less risk than other, ‘more traditional’ methods. Talking about risks related to genetic engineering has to be put in the larger context of all food risks, and if we are to make any progress in this debate we have to shed what is inaccurate, and recognize how the ways people conventionally approach contentious issues often carries an inherent biasing structure that partially dictates the outcome. The black-and-white Either-Or approach to this question is part of the problem.

I can say no more at this time, otherwise I would be writing my entry on the blog! Check back soon for updates.

Welcome to the 29th edition of Mendel’s Garden, the monthly one-stop-shop for the best the blogosphere has on Genetics. I have hosted the Garden a couple times before on my personal blog, but this month we find ourselves on Biofortified. This is a group blog on plant genetics and genetic engineering, to try to sprinkle a little fertilizer on the discussion of the majority of the eukaryotic biomass on this planet – plants! And we’ve got some plant genetics-based blog posts to talk about, but the theme for this edition is FRANKENPEOPLE!

Yes, human genetics has been up in the news lately, and there is no shortage of blog posts discussing it.

We begin with Josh Witten at the Rugbyologist, who discusses the uncanny genetics of the X-Men. Wrestling with mutation rates and variable mutant powers, Josh settles on the weirdness of the claim that the mutant gene is inherited from the father – wait, if it is on the Y-Chromosome, how come there are female mutants? Perhaps the X-gene is not a mutant gene per se, but an epimutant that is the result of a change in paternal gene imprinting?

Changes in gene expression are becoming more and more important these days, as our tools to study them are improving. Eliza Strickland at the 80beats Discover Blog talks about the long-lasting effects of child abuse on the genome. We must learn from the rats and lick our offspring more… no wait, maybe treat them well in our own human fashion to prevent epigenetic changes that could make them depressed down the road!

Speaking of tools improving, the cost of whole-genome sequencing is coming down. FuturePundit Randall Parker wonders whether we will see $100 personal genome sequencing by 2014? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather pay the extra 50 bucks to get both halves of my genome sequenced when I do. Screw this haploid genome stuff – I’m a heterozygote!

Genome sequencing will be very fascinating at least for what it will tell us about our geneology. Erin at The Spittoon describes how mitochondrial DNA was used to confirm the identity of two ‘missing’ Romanovs. Also up at The Spittoon is a discussion of how some tiny changes in a gene, FOXO3A have been associated with longevity. Now those are some SNiPs that I hope I have in my genome!

This edition of the Garden comes on the heels of Barack Obama’s momentous lifting of the embryonic stem cell research ban in the US. So to get ourselves ready for the influx of stem cell research coming our way, Chris Patil primes us with some research on the function of telomerases – we’ll reprogram our cells yet!

The Pope Wears Prada

Next, there’s a rising trend in discussion of so-called “Designer Babies,” which isn’t quite the GATTACA-storyline bioethics issue, but touches pretty close to it. Can prospective parents pre-screen embryos for genetic diseases prior to implantation? On one hand, you have the issue of choosing the genetics of your offpsring on a [possibly mistaken] whim, and on the other hand you have the possibility of prevent kids with inborn genetic diseases from being born. Well, Pope Benedict, seen here sporting his “Pagan” ruby slippers, chimed in against the very concept of screening embryos, calling it “Genetic Discrimination.”

As the American Freethought blog astutely points out, apparently genetic discrimination is wrong – except for priests. Genetic discrimination against the human XX karyotype is alive and well in the catholic church.

Finally in our human genetic section, Abbie Smith aka ERV says that a gene called ERV9 beat Jesus to the punch by resurrecting a dead gene long before humans split from our ape cousins. Read ERVs=Jesus: Bringing dead genes back to life.

To make the segue from humans to plants for us we no one else to thank than the FrankenSenator from Arizona, John McCain. Sidestepping email entirely, he’s taken to twittering what he sees as pork-barrel projects that he finds puzzling. That’s a low bar to start with, which is why many are pointing out the strange preponderance of scientific research in his list of “pork.” Well Grace Ibay at Genetics and Health has assembled a short list of his tweets on genetics and science, and reveals that he really doesn’t know what all of it is for.

Here’s the best one:

“$1,427,250 for genetic improvements of switchgrass – I thought switchgrass genes were pretty good already, guess I was wrong.”

Haha, yeah. You are. In case any of you are curious what kinds of genetic improvements are being worked in in switchgrass, I just happen to have a video I produced about switchgrass breeding. Why don’t you cool your mind for a moment on the effort to combine Upland and Lowland prarie grasses?

Does that make you feel like becoming a plant breeder? I hope so, that’s why I’m making them. To view a higher resolution version of this video, or to see the other ones I have produced in this series, visit the UW’s Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics website. I just showcased the newest video on How to Breed Cucurbits here on Biofortified.

I have a couple posts from the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. Luigi announces the start of a new plant breeding journal. Submit away, it’s also Open Access! And he also put up a post about a fascinating piece of news (which will get attention soon here on Biofortified): The Hawaii legislature is considering banning genetically engineered Hawaiian Taro because it “changes the basic structure” of the Taro plant. Well if that’s actually in the proposed legislation, then what will that do considering that plant breeding changes the structure of Hawaiian Taro? Read Making Breeding Illegal and join [us] in the discussion.

And Jeremy blogged about Darwin’s Birthday, on the subject of Beans and Selection. Check it out, and click through to Darwin Online, too!

Greg Laden also wrote about Chuck for his birthday, and wondered Why didn’t Darwin Discover Mendel’s laws? He also seems to have voted for Al Franken, by the look of his posts on politics. Another FrankenPerson!

Here on Biofortified, we have a few plant-related posts you might be interested in. First, I did some legwork and found out that some anti-GE activists have been promoting some false claims about Obama’s plans in the White House.

Pam Ronald writes about GE crops on the big island of Hawaii following her trip to the same place in Big Island Transgenics. On her own blog, she also posted a time-lapse video of her work with flood-tolerant rice in The Power of Genetics.

Pam’s husband and co-author Raoul Adamchak wrote a guest post about the necessity of allowing university scientists to do research on GE crops. Scroll to the bottom – Monsanto even reads this blog!

And my friend Melinda Markham enlightens us with a guest post on the first successful attempt to engineer a vaccine against tetanus into plants. I think it’s ironic that tobacco can now be used to make people healthier! Read Breeding Tetanus Vaccines into Plants.

Let’s end with something funny, and something pretty. Andrew at the Southern Fried Scientist talks about the need to give genes meaningful names. What’s wrong with Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog? Okay maybe you’ve got a point about “I’m not Dead Yet.” Check out the End of the Cheap Date for a little laugh at crazy Drosophila names and a little realism about genic nomenclature.

Finally, the Myrmecos Blog posts a picture of bees in the shape of DNA that was unfortunately rejected by a journal publisher, but take heart! We don’t care that the picture was the wrong dimensions – you got the DNA coiling the right way so you deserve a little buzz.

Bumblebee DNA

That’s all for this edition of Mendel’s Garden, thanks everyone for taking the time to read. Do check back here soon, because both Anastasia and I will be attending the Maize Genetics Conference starting tomorrow and we’ll have some deliciously corny stuff for everyone!

And it appears that no one has claimed the next Mendel’s Garden – now’s your chance!

If you’ve got something about plants, you get extra points!

The next edition of Mendel’s Garden will in fact be hosted right here at Biofortified, so send your submissions to karl [AT] inoculatedmind (DOT) com. Bonus points if you make it about plants!