by Joe Ballenger on 30 January 2010 My name is Joe and I’m going to be an occasional guest blogger here at Biofortified. The area I write about is going to be a bit different than most of the other writers on this website. Instead of writing about genetically modified plants, I’m going to spend a large portion of my time writing about genetically modified insects and insect pathogens.
It may seem odd to some that a blog that mostly focuses on controversies in modern agriculture would ask someone who studies insects to write on their site, but it’s not as counter intuitive as you think. Insects are a huge part of agriculture because they are our biggest competitors for food. One of the most common types of genetically modified corn, the various BT cultivars, were developed to fight the European Corn Borer, Ostrinia nubilalis, which is a tiny Crambid moth which burrows into the stalks of the plants and eventually kills them.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 28 January 2010 Anastasia was on the ball the other night with publishing her review of our evening with Michael Pollan. Mine comes a little late but not too little. We had all weekend to prepare our thoughts for what we wanted to talk about (And what we wanted to eat), and I daresay we did well on both accounts.
We coordinated our flights from Wisconsin and Iowa to meet up at about Noon on Saturday the 23rd, giving us ample time to hang out and zoom around the Bay Area before the big dinner. We stayed at my folks’ place in Petaluma, so it was very convenient that Michael happens to live near to where I grew up! They were happy to host, and to use us as an excuse to go eat Thai food!
First of all, it was great to spend the weekend hanging out with Anastasia (and Frank). Over the last couple of years, while joining forces to write about plant genetics, we have not only become good friends but also research collaborators. It makes me wonder if science blogging should join the list of suggested activities for professional development at graduate school? I’m serious.
Whether we were sitting in a restaurant by Aquatic Park, checking out the Japanese tea gardens and botanical gardens at Golden Gate Park, or driving all around we discussed a million and a half issues related to what we talk about on the blog. And we realized things that we didn’t think of before, all of which should hopefully make it into some blog posts soon. For example, why is there no mention of the afore-mentioned Greenpeace-funded study on Greenpeace’s website? Very odd.
And thanks to prodding from my sister and from Frank, we zoomed down to Cupertino to meet up with PZ Myers who was a big driving force behind the contest victory that got us here. It was a busy weekend yet relaxing as well. My one regret is that we missed being able to meet up with James on Monday to have a blogging powwow. It was really weird as the time seemed to go faster and faster as it got closer to the 6 pm dinnertime. The next three hours, though, seemed to last a long time – which was perfect.
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by Frank N. Foode on 18 January 2010
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great field trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow test plots. And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for acreage left you battered by the storms of uninformed pundits and ripped out by the hands of Greenpeace brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that biotic and abiotic stresses are redemptive. Go back to Colorado, go back to Oregon, go back to Southeast Asia, go back to Africa, go back to Europe, go back to the broken greenhouses of Germany, and the burned buildings in Michigan and California, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.
Let us not wallow in the laboratory with despair, I say to you today, my Frank ‘N’ Friends.
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the Human dream.
I have a dream that one day the eaters will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all crops are bred equal.”
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 14 January 2010 If you have been paying attention to the blogosphere lately, you’ve heard about a study that came out in the International Journal of Biological Sciences called A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health, by Vendomois et al. It is a reanalysis of feeding trail data from Monsanto corn-fed rats. While its conclusions essentially call for “more research” because they claim to have found “signs of toxicity” they admit that they do not have proof of such toxicity.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 13 January 2010  Mark Henderson at the Times Online has just published an article about Genetic Engineering and Organic Agriculture. Organic farmers must embrace GM crops if we are to feed the world, says scientist. The scientist is non other than Agricultural Ecologist Sir Gordon Conway, and he argues that Organic Ag should be open to GE crops, which we here like to call Orgenic agriculture.
Farmers, he said, should use the best aspects of organic methods and GM technology to maximise yields while limiting damage to ecosystems. He accepted that organic lobbyists would regard the idea as heresy, but said that genetic engineering could create better organic crops than those grown today with further environmental benefits.
“What frustrates me is there is a real potential for combining GM technology and organic approaches,” said Professor Conway, who stepped down last year as chief scientific adviser to the Department for International Development. “To say that is probably heretical, but there would be real benefits if we got over this notion that GM is somehow not organic.”
He continues, explaining how the pure philosophical basis and underlying assumptions may work against the overall goal.
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