by Karl Haro von Mogel on 28 October 2009 Today, Biofortified gained another 120 votes in the Ashoka Changemakers contest, coming in at 812 at the time of this writing. It would be great if in the last day of voting, if we could top 1,000. To help to that end, I will present the fourth reason why I think we deserve a little of your time: Michael Pollan.
When I first heard about the contest, the grand prize was a ‘social media training’ session and a conversation with Michael Pollan. As I noted on my personal blog, I have been waiting to do an interview with him for almost three years. Back in 2006, I participated in a panel discussion (available here on UCTV) with him and others on Food, Farming, and Genetics, as part of the Community Book Project at UC Davis, which focused on The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pam Ronald was also the moderator of the discussion. Our group conversation left more questions than answer in my head, so I asked him if I could interview him sometime on my radio show and he agreed. A combination of timidity, lack of radio show after moving to Madison for grad school, and the sheer amount of demand on Pollan’s time, it hasn’t yet happened.
In the interim, more questions have piled up. Not just about genetics, but even about the philosophy of science, the future of agriculture, and whether he thinks that health food stores like Whole Foods have the highest concentration of contradictory food philosophies or if he didn’t notice the food supplement aisles. I could write several pages of questions, always thinking that I will have to jettison most of them to make for a radio/podcast interview someday that will will have continuity and make sense. Over time, questions related to The Omnivore’s Dilemma slid away to be replaced by questions related to In Defense of Food. A few questions about plant genetics held steady in the heirarchy of importance.
I initially entered the contest so that I could win the conversation with him and see if he wouldn’t mind adding a microphone to it as a podcast interview. I assumed that it would be a conversation over the phone as well. The other part of the prize, the social media training, didn’t have much appeal considering I’ve been doing social media for years! You could pretty much say I entered us in the changemakers contest to talk to Pollan. But then after I entered, the contest deadline was extended and a $1,500 grant was added to the grand prize. This was going to change the dynamics of the contest dramatically, and it did.
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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.
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by Anastasia Bodnar on 17 March 2009
Volker Brendel, professor of bioinformatics at Iowa State, spoke at the Maize Genetics Conference about the need for a better system of community annotation of the maize genome. The genome of the popular maize inbred line B73 is sequenced, but we don’t actually know what a lot of the code stands for. It’s going to take a lot of collaborative effort to discover and annotate (explain) the
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 16 March 2009 Friday was the first full day of the 51st Maize Genetics Conference, and it was filled with all kinds of genetic fun. When I saw the program, I knew I would be up for the first talks of the morning at 8 am, because they were about transposons. The rest of the day was filled with poster presentations, talks about online genetic resources, and a discussion of gene annotation. Anastasia was there with me, and she’ll have all sorts of good stuff to talk about as we give the 51st MGC the exposure it deserves!
Transposons are really neat. Also known as Mobile Genetic Elements, Transposable Elements, or just “jumping genes,” they are sequences of DNA that are capable of popping out of a chromosome and inserting themselves into another. The most well known kind of transposon contains a gene that encodes for an enzyme called Transposase, which physically chops the transposon out of the DNA strand it is in, and puts it in another. The result is a gene that does not remain in a fixed location, and ‘jumps’ around the genome from Chromosome to chromosome, turning other genes on and off if it inserts in them or near them. Transposons were first described in Maize, by the famous Cornell biologist Barbara McClintock, and are thought of as some of the source of genetic variations that fuel evolution. Sometimes they can incorporate bits of other genes and move them around, causing all sorts of genetic modifications.
The morning talks were full of transpositional goodness.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 11 March 2009 
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!
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