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Field of Dreams in Dyersville, IA by John Bollwitt. We often talk about the science of corn (aka maize) but there’s so much more to it. I’ll be leaving corn country soon to start a new job, and I know I’ll miss being in the center of so much maize. Consider the natural beauty of a cornfield swaying in a summer breeze, with killdeer and red-winged blackbirds calling amongst the buzzing of grasshoppers. It’s just a cornfield, but the combination of symmetry and asymmetry from afar and up close, of being in the presence of a plant that has been touched by humans for thousands of years, somehow makes it a very interesting place to be – even when I have many hours of pollinating or harvesting behind and ahead of me. I like sci-fi. I’m not your typical Star-Wars nerd, instead I like B-movies. You know… the low-budget creature feature movies that entail some giant creature killing everything in sight? They’re fun, campy, not at all meant to be taken seriously, yet can be useful in teaching about biology due to their reliance upon urban legends. Still, some things about them do get on my nerves. Let’s take an episode of the television show Fringe: Immortality (13th episode of the 3rd season). Fringe is your typical X-Files wannabe show with writing that’s sub-par even for prime-time TV. The show centers around investigators who investigate apparent criminal abuses of science. And there’s a doomsday device in a parallel universe, somehow woven into the plotline, which feels like a very uncreative and poorly done rip-off of the parallel universe in the Doctor Who episode Rise of the Cybermen. Anyway, the Immortality episode is about entomology, in which a mad scientist genetically modified a sheep parasite which somehow has a protein which cures a deadly flu. The episode made no sense to me for reasons I’m going to get into in a few moments, but there’s something more important I’d like to get to first because I think it’s an important part of how scientists are viewed in popular culture.
Continue reading… I had the pleasure of speaking today with Matthew Nisbet, author of a controversial report about communication of climate change. Matt’s full report Climate Shift is well worth a read, but is a bit daunting at almost 100 pages. Andrew Revkin has an excellent play by play discussing Matt’s report as well as the commentary that has surrounded it: Beyond the Climate Blame Game. There were a lot of interesting ideas discussed at today’s meet and greet but I’ve pulled out a two ideas that are relevant to the discussion of biotechnology. 1) When talking about climate change, if we ever want to accomplish real communication, we need to find the scientists that are in the pragmatic* middle. These scientists in the pragmatic middle are more likely to be able to make themselves understood and are more likely to have things in common with the public in the pragmatic middle. Does this apply to biotechnology? In some ways, I have to say no.
Continue reading… From Nutritional Blogma Corporate involvement in public health is a sensitive topic, but one I am largely against. It is pretty clear that corporations usually get the benefit of bettering their brand image (which is often largely unhealthy processed products) at a low cost of sponsorship of health campaigns. See plenty of great/unfortunate examples on blogs such as Food Politics, Weighty Matters, and Appetite For Profit, or my own criticisms of the ADA/Hershey partnership as a specific case. Such relationships, as well as how government aid alters our attentions on health matters have been also discussed in length in the literature (see this table for examples). But what about the private nonprofit organizations pouring money into public health promotion? How much do personnel in these foundations that often overlap with public corporations influence public health decisions, and might these relationships sometimes prevent objective divisions of funding? This is difficult to answer and less studied, but a new paper in PLoS Medicine by David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu, and Martin McKee* titled “Global Health Philanthropy and Institutional Relationships: How Should Conflits of Interest Be Addressed?” has examined some of these relationships and highlighted some worrisome connections between food (and pharmaceutical) corporations and the major nonprofit foundations from information gathered from the public domain. They suggest such potential conflicts of interest be scrutinized similar to direct corporate involvements in public health, even though their missions are stated to be philanthropic instead of profit oriented. This post was syndicated from Nutritional Blogma You may comment here or on the original entry. |
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