We have some ambitious goals ahead of us, from art to videos, tax-exempt status and more, but there is one more thing that I think we should strive for in the coming year – making the news. We are indexed by Google News, so in that sense we are making news as we report and comment on what goes on in the world. But what I mean is making a big enough impact in the world that other news organizations start reporting on us. The more reaching out we can do, the more people may come here and exchange ideas, contribute articles, and learn about science. I know that we have a good following amongst scientists, and it would be great if we could bring more people into the discussion.

We’re also on our way to a bigger league.

At the beginning of December, I thought that we had gotten to the point where a Wikipedia article about our organization (which is more than just a blog) was appropriate, giving the bare-bones rundown on what we do. Other organizations such as the Non GMO Project and GM Watch have pages, of varying quality, why not us? I built it over a few days and it went up on December 6. A few editors helped out with improving it, and suggesting links to de-orphan the page, and everything seemed fine.

Then, right on the New Year, an editor flagged it for deletion. Over about a week, various editors chimed in on how big of a mention in different news sources was big enough of a mention for notability, and I provided what more information I could to help out. I tried to point out politely when a couple editors were not even bothering to read some of the sources, and made sure they were aware that I both created the page and am a founder of the site in question. In the end, our page was deleted, with not enough of a strong ‘keep’ vote from other editors.

I thought it was ironic that editors were arguing that I myself may be notable but Biofortified is not – even though my notability in this case stems from what I have done here on Biofortified. Kind of odd, don’t you think?

I’m not worried about the deletion, because all of my work (and other editors’ additions) has been saved, and the entire thing can go back up once we have but a few more references to meet the oft-arbitrary guidelines of notability. So here’s another incentive for us to make some news!

I would like to solicit some ideas of things that we can do this year. There is on-the-ground public outreach and events, online gatherings, and additional resources that can be put together on the site. What would you like to see?

I thought one fun thing we could do is organize a book reading of the original Frankenstein, which could involve virtual meetings over Google+ or a webinar-type site. Or should we dress up like fools and get people to sign a petition to ban genetic recombination? Serious and silly, there are many ways to get messages out there. Let us know in the comments!

Let’s make 2012 be the year we make some serious news.

There were many ways to contribute: Paypal donations, merchandise, telling your friends, and good ol’ fashioned checks in the mail. Bit by bit donations were rolling in, and I can also tell you that someone, somewhere, is the proud owner of a calendar featuring cheesecake shots of yours truly.

A week ago we got to less than $100 of our goal, but then at the end of the week we suddenly passed it and then some. With the fundraising drive now at a close, we come to the moment you have all been waiting for. How much did Biofortified raise toward our goal for 2012?

Drum roll please……

$2443.06! $2491.66! $2540.26!

That is super sweet – and I’m not saying that just because I’m an ear of corn! Thanks to the generosity of our readers, (and of other blogs as well), we have vastly exceeded our goal for this year. We have the funds to get all of these projects rolling, with a cushion to carry us into the next year. Thank you every person who contributed! You have the gratitude of a plush ear of corn – and there’s nothing in the world greater than that (or so I’m told)!

The future of this site and its growth has been secured. Now comes all the hard work of following through on all these goals. I can only type so fast with these little husks, so I’ll leave that up to the humans. Now I’ve got to look presentable for my trips to Washington D.C., so I think I’m going to need to get a tux. What do you mean there’s no room in the budget for Cobnobbing?

Frank likes bees too.

When I was an undergraduate, I spent about a year or so working as a beekeeper. It was a fun job, and I learned all sorts of fun facts about bees. By this time I had been interested in parasitoids for nearly a decade and a half, having raised parasitic wasps out of caterpillars since I was five. Naturally, I attempted to see if there were any parasitoids which attacked Apis mellifera but I always ended up empty handed and disappointed. This always confused me because there were parasitoids which attacked ants, termites and caterpillars living in ant nests. I never understood why parasitoids had never been documented attacking honeybees.

This changed earlier this week, when a description of a parasitoid fly which attacks bees was published in PLOS ONE: A New Threat to Honey Bees, the Parasitic Phorid Fly Apocephalus borealis by Core et al. Unfortunately, the authors tried way too hard to connect the fly to Colony Collapse Disorder, but I’ll discuss that later. First…

What are Phorid flies? What are parasitoids? Why do we care?

Figure 1 from Core et. al 2012. I labeled the identifying characteristic of the family Phoridae with a black arrow and the ovipositor which is convergent with a wasp stinger with a red arrow.

Parasitoids are insects which are parasitic as larvae, free living as adults and which kill their hosts after development is complete. Most parasitoids are either flies or wasps, with wasps being the best studied. They’re important to agriculture because they’re good at regulating the populations of their hosts by killing them in large numbers. My studies revolve around how these insects evade the immune system, which gives us a springboard to learn more about how insect immunity works on a biochemical level.

Parasitoids in the family Phoridae are particularly interesting. Most species, such as the very common Megaselia scalaris, are actually scavengers but some species have made the leap to parasitism. The paper lists a particularly great example of parasitoid phorids, the decapitating flies which are used as fire ant biocontrol. These flies can be identified by a bunch of scrunched up veins on their wings, labeled by a black arrow in the first picture.

Figure 1 B from Core et. al 2012. The fly is visible laying it's eggs into the abdomen of the bee to the left of the picture.

Parasitoids go through standard holometabolous development of egg, larvae, pupa and adult. The adults lay eggs either on or inside their hosts. The larvae develop within the hosts, pupate, and then hatch into adults. Each of these stages requires particular adaptations, and parasitoid wasps and flies use completely different strategies. Larvae, for example, must evade the immune system. Wasps tend to suppress the immune system through venom or polydnaviruses. Flies, on the other hand, tend to hide in tissues which aren’t easily accessible to the immune system. They also have a tendency to hijack the immune system in some rather impressive ways like using melanization machinery to build snorkels to keep the parasitoid larvae supplied with air.

Sometimes, however, parasitoid flies and wasps solve similar problems with similar solutions. This parasitoid oviposits inside the host like the wasp, but uses a hard spike on it’s fleshy ovipositor to help it insert it’s eggs into the bee. I labeled this with a red arrow in picture A.

In the picture above, you can see the fly laying it’s eggs into the abdomen of the bee. From here, the eggs hatch and hatch into larvae which feed on the bee’s tissues. After this the larvae emerge in a particularly gruesome and characteristic fashion, between the head and thorax. The larvae emerge from under the ‘chin’ of the bee after the bee leaves the colony at night.

Fly larvae emerging from honeybee host, highlighted with red arrows.

This is a particlularly interesting example of a host shift. Apocephalus borealis is a specialist on bees and wasps, so a shift to Apis mellifera makes sense because it has a similar immune system. Honeybees hail from Africa, whereas this parasitoid is uniquely American so this is a definite example of a native parasitoid infecting and adapting to a new host.

What about Colony Collapse Disorder?

Despite the good job the authors did documenting the development of this parasitoid inside the honeybee, they lose my enthusiasm when they get to the colony collapse stuff. I really think they did some good work on natural history in this paper, that is they did some good work on looking at how the flies develop in the bees in labs. However, there are some things which weren’t very well fleshed out in this paper which mostly pertain to CCD.

I really think they tried too hard to connect this fly to CCD and this part of their work wasn’t very well performed. In their defense, I think the main purpose of this paper was the natural history work on this parasitoid. The CCD work appears to be done as almost an afterthought, but given the high profile of the paper I thought this warranted it’s own dissection.

To investigate internal hive behavior and possible infections within a hive, we kept an observation hive in a laboratory near our primary study hive. Samples taken from the observation hive in June 2010 confirmed infection with A. borealis. Rates of infection varied between June 2010 and December 2010 (Mean = 25% Range = 12%–38%) peaking over the sample period in November at 38%. In September, the number of bees in the hive declined and we observed phorid pupae and empty pupal casings among dead bees at the bottom of the hive, indicating emergence of adult phorids within the hive and the potential for A. borealis to multiply within a hive and infect a queen.

Let’s overlook the fact this was observed in a single hive kept differently than how most bees are housed. There’s a bigger issue here.

At my university, I am the curator of the insect zoo. We used to have some pretty big problems with Megaselia scalaris in our roach colonies. M. scalaris is a very common phorid fly that develops on dead and dying insects. Weakened hives aren’t able to fight off scavengers, so it’s possible in my view that Megaselia could have been in the hive after the populations declined because the large number of fresh dead bees would be the perfect environment where this scavenger could develop. The authors didn’t explicitly explain how they differentiated Apocephalus puparia from Megaselia puparia, and I think this is a fatal flaw in their work. These are two very similar looking Phorids with ecological habits that couldn’t really be more different. Megaselia does not develop as a parasitoid, and would thus pose no threat to the bees.  I think this is a rather important oversight and I wouldn’t trust their conclusions without further explanation of how they differentiated between the two. Put bluntly, I don’t think this piece of data should have been in this paper without that information.

Secondly, they did a bunch of tests looking for bee pathogens in the Phorids. They looked for genetic material, correctly noting this didn’t necessarily indicate that the pathogens were growing inside the flies. Quite frankly, I think it would be very strange if a parasitoid which fed on tissues of a bee didn’t consume any of it’s pathogens even if those pathogens didn’t infect the fly. Many science writers have been confused by this result, and many articles give the impression that the authors thought the flies vectored the pathogens. I find that doubtful but I won’t completely rule it out. Either way, I need to point out that it doesn’t come anywhere near proving it because there is no data indicating the pathogens were growing inside the flies. They also pointed out a correlation between Phorid emergence and the point of the year when colonies collapse, but demonstrating causation needs more data. The authors explicitly stated all of this, but some writers didn’t realize this.

Third, the majority of the data dealing with how the bees act when infected with the flies appears to have been conducted on a very specific building of the campus of San Francisco State University. That’s well and good, but urban beekeepers are a very specific subset of beekeepers and this data might not be relevant to most beekeepers, and thus irrelevant to the hives most important to agriculture. I think they need to do a lot more work on behavior before we can make any solid conclusions on how parasitized bees act in the wild before emergence of the parasitoids.

I don’t blame them for trying to connect this parasitoid to CCD, because that’s the hot topic right now in bee biology. However, I don’t think this fly really has much to do with the collapse of honeybee colonies. Despite this, this is still a really important find because this fly could shed more light on CCD, but not in the direct way the researchers imply in this paper. This is an insect which invades the bee and evades it’s defenses. Figuring out how the fly evades the bee’s defenses could shed light on how the bee’s immune system works. Figuring out how the bee’s immune system works might help us figure out how whatever pathogen actually does cause CCD is also able to evade the defense mechanisms of the bees. Once we fully understand the bee’s defense mechanisms, we can then think about potential interventions based on this data.

And now… some gratuitous parasitoid videos. These are particularly impressive examples of physical grace and biochemical warfare from some of the most incredible critters in the world.

A special thanks to Bug Girl for pointing out the Biodiversity In Focus article.

Core, A., Runckel, C., Ivers, J., Quock, C., Siapno, T., DeNault, S., Brown, B., DeRisi, J., Smith, C., & Hafernik, J. (2012). A New Threat to Honey Bees, the Parasitic Phorid Fly Apocephalus borealis. PLoS ONE, 7 (1) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0029639

By Emily Willingham

Rice.

A study from a Chinese group led by Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanking University and published in Cell Research, has uncovered the fascinating result that when people eat rice, they can absorb microRNAs (miRNAs)–tiny sequences of RNA–from the rice into the blood. These rice-originating miRNAs turn up in blood and tissues of people who eat rice and…here’s the kicker…one type of rice miRNA interacts with human proteins that are responsible for removing LDL (“bad” cholesterol) from the blood (!). It’s the first report of plant miRNAs ending up in people by way of diet and the finding that at least one of them alters an important process in the body.

The implications could extend in many a direction, but not as far as writer Ari Levaux would like to take them in this remarkably confusing article published on the Atlantic Website. Before taking on the errors and the overstretch that are that piece, let’s look at something far more interesting: miRNAs themselves.

These little bits of RNA, consisting of 22 building blocks linked in a single strand (a human DNA molecule has billions) get around with surprising facility, and their purpose is to regulate genes. They don’t regulate by latching directly onto a DNA sequence but instead lurk in the cell and interfere with processes that come after the gene’s role is complete. If you consider the gene sequence as the directions for building a protein, one job of RNA is to serve as a copy of those directions. It takes on the risky business of toting that copy out of the safety of the nuclear vault in our cells and into the big, bad scary cytoplasm outside. In the cytoplasm, the fluid-ish environment of the cell, RNA has many, many roles, but all of them center on executing the directions encoded in the gene for building proteins, the molecules that help make up our tissues and perform the tasks required to keep us alive.

In some cases, though, RNA occurs in the form of miRNAs, and their job may well be to bollix up the protein-building works. These little molecules–which researchers have identified in the hundreds in humans–can, for example, latch onto an RNA that is a copy of the protein code and cause it to break down or keep the cell from using it. These tiny RNA sequences help fine-tune the process of protein building well beyond the starting point of directions copied from a gene sequence. Thanks to miRNAs and many other steps that can promote or interfere with protein building, the cell–and the organism–has several chances to modulate how much of a specific protein it makes, allowing agile, real-time responses to changing conditions.

Researchers have discovered myriad ways that miRNA influences human development and disease, and these discoveries open the way to using that information to cure disease. But all of the miRNAs investigated thus far in people have come from people themselves, either present for normal functions or overabundant and linked to disease. The flashy take-home from this latest rice study is, We can pick up these tiny regulators from what we eat…and they can interfere with the functions of proteins we make.

This take-home could have huge implications for how diet influences our health and development if other non-human miRNAs turn up that fit the same profile: absorbable after we eat them and modifying how our bodies function. The effects could be good, bad, ugly, or neutral. This paper is simply an open door. Now, for years and years, investigators will walk through it to find a number of research paths to explore, from seeking more non-human miRNAs and identifying their effects to evaluating how modifying diet might influence disease or human development via miRNAs.

In spite of how much lies ahead and how relatively little lies in the present about this discovery–one rice miRNA, one human effect–the piece that appeared today in the Atlantic argues that the implications are immediate and dire and related to genetically modified organisms. I initially read the piece trying to identify how someone could make that leap but instead found myself distracted by how poorly the article presents the science itself.

First, the headline: The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods. I read the Cell Research paper. I can’t find mention of GMOs in it. I don’t find mention in the paper the the rice miRNA in question derives from a genetically modified rice strain. So, I don’t see that this headline appropriately represents the science here.

Then there’s the dek: “New research shows that when we eat we’re consuming more than just vitamins and proteins. Our bodies are absorbing information, or DNA.” That’s not what this research shows. It shows that the body takes up a specific rice miRNA when people consume it. Not DNA or “information.”

The lede leaves out a crucial modifier: the word “rice”: “Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice.” Actually, miRNAs are present in the blood and organs of…all humans, whether they eat rice or not. I think the writer here means “small pieces of rice ribonucleic acid.”

There is then a series of claims about what the research implies, including, mysteriously, that it will help us learn how some “herbal medicines function.” The original paper makes no mention of herbal medicines, although some research indicates that “natural agents” can alter expression of human miRNA. Also among the potential implications described in the piece is, “And it reveals a pathway by which genetically modified (GM) foods might influence human health.” That’s an enormous leap to make from “one rice miRNA in blood and tissues influences activity of one human protein.” A number of steps would be required for a GM food to exert a similar effect, none of which have been investigated yet. These steps include identifying that the modified sequence in the target food either also encodes a miRNA sequence or interacts with its expression or, later in the gene-to-protein process, somehow evades normal miRNA regulation thanks to this change.

Then suddenly, there’s Monsanto and a strange effort to explain the central dogma of molecular biology (DNA–>RNA–>protein) using a pizza/pizza restaurant analogy that involves the “DNA” knowing what kind of pizza “it wants,” although in truth, the cell is the entity in charge of which parts of the DNA it uses. The central dogma, a linear representation of how a cell copies DNA into RNA and then uses the RNA copy instructions to build proteins, is too simple for what we know today about how cells regulate protein expression. But the core dogma remains intact, including that DNA serves as the template for making RNA.

The article makes a number of other scientific errors, including in a bold pull quote claiming, “The Chinese RNA study threatens to blast a major hole in Monsanto’s claim. It means that DNA can code for microRNA (italics mine), which can, in fact, be hazardous.” No. That’s not what the Chinese study “means.” It’s not news that DNA encodes RNA of all kinds. It encodes the messenger form that carries the copy of the code. It encodes the ribosomal form that is a component of ribosomes, the cell factory workers that take the code copy and use it as an instruction book for building proteins. It encodes the RNAs that bring those factory workers the molecular blocks the cell uses for building proteins. And it encodes miRNAs. This latest paper does not carry the meaning that DNA encodes miRNAs–that’s a longstanding part of the Central Dogma, ironically, and not news. Nor does it threaten in any discernible way to “blast a hole” in much of anything. As I noted, the study opens a door.

In closing, Levaux writes,

The news that we’re ingesting information as well as physical material should force the biotech industry to confront the possibility that new DNA can have dangerous implications far beyond the products it codes for. Can we count on the biotech industry to accept the notion that more testing is necessary? Not if such action is perceived as a threat to the bottom line.

That's a lot of rice. U gonna eat that?

“Ingesting information”? The miRNAs are not “information” (they are noncoding molecules), and like all other things of this world that we’ve identified, they’re not somehow distinctive from “physical material.” There is naught in this study that implies that “new DNA” can have “dangerous implications” far beyond the products it “codes for.” The miRNAs in this paper are not “new.” They are from rice, the most-prevalent grain crop in Asia, and presumably something humans have been taking in for hundreds of years. It’s unclear from this study even what the implications of the findings are for consumers of regular rice, much less what they’d be for modified organisms. Furthermore, we are not the only entities that modify organisms. Nature does so, often by way of viruses. I wonder why the fact that miRNAs are also present in viruses and could “potentially regulate host genes” didn’t set off the anti-GMO alarms, too.

The article goes on for several grafs about Monsanto and substantial equivalence–indeed, the writer devotes a mere 180 words or so of 908 to the study itself–and observes that the lead author on the Cell Research paper (wisely) declined to comment on any implications about these findings for GM foods. If only the Atlantic and Ari Levaux had done the same, the real implications of this remarkable work could simply stand on their own.
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For an article that focuses more on the research findings from the study, including design and other dietary miRNAs identified, see this piece by Anne-Marie C. Hodge at Scientific American.

ETA: As for the study itself, the effects the authors found weren’t earthshattering, and it seems that there was an issue with images provided that required a rapid erratum after the paper was published.

Follow-up: The author of the piece, Ari Levaux, has responded here, and I have replied just below that.

Follow-up follow-up: Ari Levaux has tweeted that he is going to rewrite the piece, taking the scientific critiques into account. I’m looking forward to seeing the update.

Emily Willingham has a bachelor’s degree in English and a PhD in biological sciences, both from The University of Texas at Austin, with a completed postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She blogs at The Biology Files about how science and writing about science take shape around the audience known as You. She is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to College Biology and currently working on a book about lice. Yep, “lice.” She bets you’re about to scratch your head right now.

Clockwise from bottom left: Benny F. Broccoli, Stem Cell, E. coli, Bookworm, Chanten A. Carrot, and Frank, hanging around their metal holiday cactus!

Happy New Year one and all! Frank N. Foode here to give you an update on Biofortified’s fundraising drive for 2012. We’ve got big plans for the blog for this next year, and that means taking in some big money to make it possible. Last week, we announced that we wanted to raise $2012 for 2012, and almost one week later, I am pleased to announce that we are almost all the way there!

Donations have been coming in from all over the place. Word of mouth has spread amongst public scientists, who have been providing the bulk of donations. We’re sending along a little blog shwag to a really generous group that is part of a nonprofit breeding foundation, who not only gave personal donations, but also encouraged their colleagues to do the same! I think we may have picked up some readers in the process too.

PZ Myers, possibly the most cuddly cuttlefish in the world, stepped in to promote our effort on Pharyngula, and soon enough some science blog supporters came in and moved the needle as well! Thank you PZ, and thank you everyone from the Pharyngulation horde!

Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. As of today, Biofortified has raised $1765.79 toward our $2012 goal! That’s almost 88% of the way there, with only $246.21 left to go. I know we can do it! Just look at the corn plant in the sidebar – the tassels are just starting to bloom!

I spent my holiday season with some friends, as I hope all of you did. I told them how excited I am about the coming year and all the things we want to do. And they told me I should put myself out there more. I have to say as far as plants go, I’m quite the adventurous type, and one thing I really hope to do this year is a lot more traveling. See more people, attend more conferences, and travel to more exotic lands to help bring genetics cheer to all the girls and boys of the world. I’ve got many helpers just aching to take me on a trip to a museum, the farmer’s market, or to a foreign country. A small donation from each of you can help get me there.

For example, this summer I went on a trip to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, or CIMMYT. While I was there, I had a grand old time, and you can see the whole experience here in our photo album. I just heard that I will also have the opportunity to join a grad student on a trip to Ecuador this summer, and I’m just aching to go – but we need to buy my ticket there! Luckily, I travel pretty light, and First Class for me runs about $20 round-trip. If you would like to see more awesome photo journals of my journeys like these, please consider making a donation!

There’s another way you can help, too. You can help support my travels around the world by buying your very own 2012 calendar that shows some of the awesome places I have been! From rice in Thailand, to Wheat in Mexico, and DNA helices in Chicago, each month you can join me in some place new and help me go on adventures to put in next year’s calendar. We’ve only sold one so far, but if there is enough interest in a Frank N. Foode calendar, then next year we will fill the days of the calendar with custom days like Gregor Mendel and Norman Borlaug’s birthday, and events like the World Food Prize, and Biofortified’s Birthday! You’ll never forget these important dates again! 25% of the price will go to support the blog. Everyone needs a calendar, why not make it one with me, Frank?

That’s it for now, I hope your new year was as warm and cozy as mine, and that the new year of blogging here at Biofortified will be better than the last!

Oh, one more thing, I thought I would give y’all a little teaser…

Now what am I going to do in this place?

This excellent New York Times article describes Eric Lander’s journey in science to his position today as not only one of the great genome researchers but a terrific teacher and human being.

This post was syndicated from Tomorrow's Table You may comment on the original entry.

Environmental Outlook: Labels for Genetically Modified Foods

In 1992 the FDA ruled against requiring labels for genetically engineered foods. Join us for a panel discussion on the rationale for that decision and why some are urging the FDA to reconsider its stance.

Thomas Redick: Global Environmental Ethics Counsel

Gardiner Harris: Science reporter for The New York Times and author of the mystery novel “Hazard.”

Gary Hirshberg: President, Stonyfield Farm, Inc.

The development of the roster of guests was rather interesting, and bears mentioning. It has gone through numerous rounds of change. Initially, Val Giddings, President of Prometheus Agricultural Biotech, was going to be on the show, and then they also decided to add Doug Gurian-Sherman from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Then they switched to inviting our own Pam Ronald from UC Davis, and for a brief time period her name was also on the website. I heard from Pam last night that they decided that they did not want to have a science section on the show, and canceled that part of it.

In this whole process, it seems, the producers were trying to “balance” the show, but each iteration of the process showed that a false balance was being achieved. The journalist Chris Mooney has described the trap that some journalists fall into when covering science-related issues is to give equal time to scientists that represent the consensus of the scientific community and those that represent outlier or minority positions. This show was about to go even farther by giving this minority viewpoint more time on the show than for responses from the practicing scientist guests, and as a result, there was difficulty negotiating the interview.

But the end result may be more appropriate. The newly-added guest, Thomas Redick from GEEC sounds interesting, and it appears that he argues against labeling, as evidenced by a book he co-authored, Thwarting Consumer Choice: The Case against Mandatory Labeling for Genetically Modified Foods. I am not familiar with him or his arguments in specific, so that will be new to me.

So have a listen, I will be, and represent science by calling in as early as you can to ask questions! Feel free to discuss the show below live or afterward.

(This just in: at the last minute, they have added and advertisement for a pro-labeling e-book by Hirshberg and other critics of GE, making it pretty clear the intent of the show.)

I like to think of myself as a skeptical blogger. I like to engage in critical thinking about scientific issues because this is an important aspect of my job as a graduate assistant. When I move into the workforce, I’ll still need some basic skills to parse evidence because this is my job as a scientist. Mythbusting is a great opportunity to do this, and I enjoy discussing things which may help people who read my posts whenever I can. Being an entomologist gives me some rather interesting opportunities to do this, which is leading me to discuss head lice of all things.

Pediculus humanus capitis by Gilles San Martin via Flickr.

In my last post, Do OTC Head Louse Treatments Work? Part 1: Mechanisms, I explained how the most commonly used FDA-approved treatments worked. In addition to those science-based products, there are many products that have no evidence of efficacy behind their claims, and that rely on fear to make a sale. What I’ve seen deeply concerns me not only as a scientist trying to make the world a better place, but as a parent trying to raise my daughter the best that I can. In this post, I’ve taken a few commonly sold products and listed some ways in which I think they play fast and loose with their claims.

A very brief review of how the nervous system works and how pesticides work in general can be found in the video below:

How do we know if treatments work?

Before getting down to the business of mythbusting, I think it’s appropriate to discuss how we know various products work. Treatments are assessed through clinical trails where infested volunteers subject themselves to putative treatments which are known as in vivo trials. In some cases, the lice are removed from the volunteers and exposed to the treatments in petri dishes which are known as in vitro treatments. In vitro treatments must be performed with the louse’s biology in mind because removing the louse from the host means that the louse is no longer in its natural environment. If the louse is not in it’s natural environment, the results gained from such a test may not be applicable to a real infestation. In vitro tests can disprove that a product works under ideal conditions, but proof of efficacy ultimately requires that the product be tested in real world conditions.

Clinical trials must have large numbers of people (and large numbers of lice) and untreated control groups. After all, insects are surprisingly fragile critters and even water or non-insecticidal shampoos may result in a small amount of mortality which is insignificant to treatment. Water or noninsecticidal shampoos can also temporarily clog the insect’s spiracles, resulting in immobile lice which could be interpreted as dead by a careless counter. Removal can physically injure the lice, which could cloud trial results if results are drawn from collected lice.

Another important aspect of clinical trials is blinding and randomization which make sure the person who is counting the lice isn’t aware of the treatment the person received. The human mind is a surprisingly bad tool for science because we tend to see patterns where none exist, and we may unintentionally superimpose patterns that don’t exist. Since everything in nature has some amount of variability (Anastasia is about six inches shorter than I am, Bug Girl is about a foot shorter than I am, and my boss is about a foot taller than I am for a quick example) we use statistics to tell us what the probability is that our results are due to random chance, eventually ending up with something known as a P-value. Followup observations are also required to show that the patient remained louse free, that is that there weren’t any hidden adults or unhatched eggs because the unhatched eggs can restart infestations.

Last week, I discussed some common OTC head louse treatments. While effective, there are some problems with resistance for some OTC treatments which results in failure of some treatments. This is a product of evolution where some lice are able to survive treatment because they have some random mutations which just so happen to be beneficial in a pesticide filled environment. The mechanisms of this resistance are actually similar to agricultural pests which have been treated with the same product.

One thing astute readers may have noticed is that I didn’t shy away from the use of the word ‘pesticide’ when discussing these treatments. One of my very first posts on Biofortified revolved around the definition of the word ‘pest’ which is completely anthropocentric. A pest is any critter which annoys us in the slightest, and a pesticide is a compound which kills a pest. Insecticides are used to kill insect pests and head louse treatments are referred to as ‘pediculicides’ because they kill lice. All pediculicides are insecticides (because they kill lice, which are insects), and many of the less toxic insecticides used in agriculture have been repurposed as pediculicides. Often times with head louse treatments, you hear companies claim with great pride that their products are pesticide free, are great at killing lice and that no resistance has evolved to their treatment.

Well… how do these claims stack up?

Uncomfortable Truths

Current packaging of products discussed in this article. Product images taken from the websites of their respective companies, used in accordance with the Fair Use Clause in US Copyright Law.

The use of agricultural insecticides to treat head lice is somewhat of an uncomfortable truth, and many companies have taken advantage of this to market head louse treatments. Despite what any label you read may say, any product which claims to kill lice is an insecticide by definition. It doesn’t matter if these are plant extracts, because pyrethrum falls straight into this category and it is classified as an insecticide. In fact, I would even go so far as to argue that a product is engaging in false advertising if it claims to kill headlice while being pesticide free. This, of course, doesn’t mean that all products must directly interfere with the inner workings of lice to be potential treatments.

Some compounds like mineral oil are used as insecticides in agriculture to kill aphids by suffocating them. The product marketed as ‘Lice MD‘ in the picture above claims to kill lice through a similar mechanism. The fact that these chemicals do not interfere with the neurological systems of insects does not mean that the product isn’t an insecticide. If the product claims to kill lice, as Lice MD does, it is claiming to be an insecticide.

A couple of examples of products that play fast and loose with advertising, in my opinion. Remember: natural products can be just as bad as synthetic products. Also, any product that claims to kill something is certainly not pesticide free. Both images taken from the websites of their respective companies, and used in accordance with the Fair Use Clause in US copyright law.

Uneasiness about insecticides has also given rise to many products which are derived from natural sources; these are popular because of a general assumption that natural products are safer than synthetic insecticides. The advantage of this from a company’s point of view is that these products don’t have to go through safety or efficacy testing, depending on how they’re marketed. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 allows many products to go straight to market without testing under the guise of ‘supplements’ which allows them to make sometimes outlandish health-related claims. Homeopathic products are similarly exempt from safety and efficacy testing, which gives companies a great loophole to sell products which make medicinal claims.

This is a successful tactic because it plays on the unease parents have about treating their children with insecticides to kill lice. Unfortunately for these uneasy parents, the assumption that natural products are less harmful than synthetic products doesn’t always hold true. The LD50s for many synthetic pyrethroids are higher than their natural counterparts. Ricin and amantin are both incredibly powerful poisons derived from plants and fungi respectively. Eucalyptus oil, if used improperly as a head louse treatment, can have dire consequences including seizures and death. Many natural components can have chronic effects, too. Cyclopamine, derived from Vetratum californicum, causes some rather disturbing birth defects by inhibiting developmental pathways. Rotenone, a pesticide once used widely in organic agriculture, has been linked to Parkinson’s disease in workers exposed to sublethal doses of the toxin over the course of a very long time. Aflatoxins are powerful carcinogens produced by fungi which threaten food supplies all over the world. Even something as seemingly innocuous as a cockroach sex pheromone can be carcinogenic.

To be safe, it doesn’t matter if a chemical is derived from natural sources. Instead, safety depends on how the chemical interacts with the molecular machinery that keeps us alive. The safest way to make a new product is to construct it with chemicals where we know what everything does, as opposed to treating with soups of unknown composition. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible because purifying and testing a compound for effects is extremely expensive and can take years of effort.

One of the components in the Quit Nits formula is a plant called Delphinium, a plant genus which is famed for its toxic alkaloids that poison cattle and make this plant genus a pest of cattle pastures. I’ll discuss this claim further in another paragraph, but the plant is in the formula at a concentration that is most likely too low to harm either lice or people. Other claims on this product are technically honest, but misleading. Some components of this product have been used in agriculture as insecticides. Lice consume a blood diet, and would probably have to eat these pesticides to see any effect. Components of the shampoo are toxic, but the concentrations these components are used in are harmless to people and are probably harmless to lice as well. As far as I can tell, most of these components haven’t been tested against lice in literature available to researchers. The statements made in the Quit Nits product comparison chart are misleading on multiple levels.

Misleading Statistics

Study methodology and results from the Lice Sheild website. This usage of the information from the company's website is in accordance with the Fair Use Clause of US copyright law.

Many products give misleading statistics that aim to trick parents into believing the product works. For example, let’s take a look at a product called Lice Sheild. They give a description of an experiment on their website that seems like a good test on the surface but is missing any information that actually allows you to draw any conclusions. For instance, they give P-values in their experimental setup, but do not give any information needed to verify their results. The P-values given imply statistical significance, but without any information on repetitions, sample sizes, means, or deviations the information is basically useless. There’s no way to check their math to see if the statistics were correctly performed. There are also no details on how many lice they used for the experiment. If they used two repetitions of five lice (the minimum required for 80% repellency with four lice moving between hair strands and away from the treatment), this would be a negligible result. If they used ten repetitions of 500 lice, the results would be a bit stronger. There simply isn’t enough information here to determine if the statistics were correctly performed.

Also lacking is a description of the experimental arena which is important because there are many ways in which you can test repellency that would potentially interfere with louse movement. If they placed the louse in a container in a patch of hair, one wouldn’t expect lice to move away from the hair at an appreciable rate. Many products are tested by placing the lice on a piece of filter paper and looking at the percentage of lice which move away from the product. While a test like this may appear to show some repellent activity, it’s not actually a very good measure of how good your product repels lice in real world conditions. Using in vitro tests means you’re trapping the lice in a place with the repellent and giving them essentially unlimited time to make their choice. This is a big problem because they’re using a timeframe that’s irrelevant to head louse transmission. Lice are mainly transmitted through hair to hair contact, and it’s rare for two people to be in hair to hair contact for this amount of time.

In short, showing 80% repellency is very different than saying that you have a 80% reduction in your chances of getting head lice. The company which makes Lice Shield uses questionable statistics to claim their product repels 80% of lice under conditions that don’t reflect the conditions where lice are transmitted, then turns around and claims in their FAQ this means that there is an 80% reduction in head louse transmission without any evidence for this claim. These two claims are quite different, because repellency doesn’t necessarily translate to a reduction of infestation.

Homeopathic Medicines are Marketed Differently than FDA Approved Drugs

Homeopathy is a system of beliefs which claim that serially diluting a ‘medicinal’ substance makes it stronger. These dilutions are pretty specific, for example the letter X denotes a 1:10 dilution. If a product is diluted 6X, it’s diluted to 10^-6 which is about one millionth of the original concentration. The idea that diluting a potential louse treatment makes it stronger is ridiculous because if the chemicals in any treatment interfere with insect biochemisty, they must be within a certain range to have an effect. Too much, the person gets poisoned (but the lice still die). Too little, and the lice survive and resistance can build up after the more susceptible individuals are culled from the population.

Homeopathy defies essentially every principle in science from biology to physics. Homeopaths claim that water has memory but, to paraphrase Tim Minchin, this ‘memory’ of water seems infinite when paired with some substances but water seems to have a case for amnesia when it comes to more harmful substances. Homeopathy has no a plausible mode of action.

The next paragraph of my post may get me into hot water with some of my skeptic friends. Many skeptical bloggers have taken on homeopathy. Let me restate: homeopathy has no plausible mode of action. I want to put this in writing to avoid the inevitable criticism from other skeptical bloggers. I also want to avoid the quote-mining from naturopaths who may want to say that I support homeopathy. I am not claiming the efficacy of homeopathy because there is no evidence that it works, and there is no plausible mechanism by which this practice could possibly work.

I am considering some homeopathic products as potentially effective. Why? Homeopathic formulas are exempt from safety and efficacy testing by the FDA which gives many products a free pass when it comes to clinical trials. Many products aren’t actually homeopathic because they contain ingredients in concentrations that could potentially have an effect. These products are often classified as homeopathic so they can make medicinal claims. A cold remedy product marketed under the name Zicam is a good example of this. Zicam was a solution of zinc which was marketed to treat the common cold after it was shown that zinc ions could interfere with viral replication in in vitro tests. The product was eventually recalled by the FDA because it was found to destroy the sense of smell. Another example of a product sold as a homeopathic remedy with potentially active components is sold under the name of Quit Nits.

Unlikely Modes of Introduction

Quit Nits bills itself as a homeopathic remedy and contains a bunch of plant extracts from several different species. As a result of intense selection by insect herbivory, all plants have some sort of anti-herbivore defense. Many plants have toxic components as a result of being under selective pressure to develop such components over the course of millions of years. Plants represent a wonderful treasure trove of different types of novel pesticide chemistries. After all, this is how we got pyrethrum. Despite the fact plant extracts are potentially plausible pesticides in and of themselves, we shouldn’t assume that any plant can kill any insect.

The first thing that raises a red flag for me in the Quit Nits formula is the mode of introduction of this pesticide. Some pesticides (see this RNAi post, for example) must be eaten to be toxic, and these are referred to as stomach poisons. Others can be absorbed, and are referred to as contact poisons. While this product does have toxic components, the fact these plants have natural toxins doesn’t automatically mean that they’ll be absorbed by the lice. Because the lice feed by inserting their mouthparts into the host, it seems very unlikely to me that they’d actually be able to pick up any pesticide by eating it unless the pesticide was in the blood of the host in appreciable amounts. Thus, any active ingredient would have to be absorbed through the exoskeleton.

A second thing that I am concerned about is the formulation. Spraying plant extracts on crops and lathering the same stuff into hair and then washing it off are very different modes of introduction. Pesticidal activity may not be preserved by the shampoo, even if the substance is downright toxic to bugs when dissolved in water. This stuff needs to be tested on lice in the formulation offered for sale before it can be said to have insecticidal activity. The mode of introduction and dosage play vital roles in the insecticidal activity. It’s possible the active ingredients wouldn’t retain their insecticidal activity in shampoo or that they wouldn’t be in contact with the lice long enough to be toxic. No pesticide kills every insect with equal efficacy in every situation. This is why the ultimate test of any pesticide is to test it on the pest in the situation you’re going to use it in, in the formulation in which it will be used.

Third, the mode of action of the two active ingredients means that they are unlikely to affect lice. Extract of the plant Delphinium and extract of a plant called Sabadilla (Schoenocaulon sp.) are listed as active ingredients at one part per million. There appears to be little work evaluating Delphinium for insecticidal activity, but Sabadilla and Delphinium both contain veratridine which acts as a stomach poison in insects. Because lice feed by inserting their mouthparts into the skin of the host and sucking blood from capillaries under the skin, I have a tough time believing they’d actually pick the insecticide up in appreciable amounts unless the toxins were absorbed directly into the bloodstream. Since the active ingredient is toxic to humans, there would probably be some major issues with the product if it made it’s way into the bloodstream. The mode of action here renders me skeptical that the lice would pick up a toxic dose of the pesticide in the first place.

Pesticides Used in Doses Unlikely to be Effective

The biggest problem with Quit Nits is the concentrations of the active ingredients. It’s the dose that makes the poison and if you look at the label of the product in question, there are two ingredients that are listed as parts per million and one component that’s in there at a 1:100 dilution.

Purified components of Sabadilla have been used as pesticides for high value orchards like oranges and mangoes. The lowest concentration for semi-purified Sabadilla alkaloids is about .1 g/l, or about one part in 10,000 if we’re going by weight. The extract of the plant seeds, of which the alkaloids are only a small part, is about a hundred times lower than this in the quit nits shampoo. The seeds of Schoenocaulon contain 2-4% insecticidal alkaloids by weight, which means the alkaloids from Sabadilla are present at one part in 25,000,000 in the shampoo.

Delphinium contains veratridine in appreciable amounts as well and has a large amount of other toxic alkaloids in addition to veratridine. It’s difficult to know what concentrations the insecticidal alkaloids are present in Delphinium because there are simply many potentially insecticidal alkaloids in these plants. However, we can make some educated guesses because researchers have purified alkaloids from Delphinium. The individual components are present in milligram amounts with all the alkaloids being present at about 6 grams per kilogram of plant tissue. If we assume the insecticidal alkaloids are present at a concentration of five grams per kilogram of plant material to make our math easy, this means that the insecticidal components comprise about one part in two hundred per unit weight. The concentration of plant in the shampoo is about two parts per million, which means the alkaloids are present at one two hundredth (1/200) this concentration. Given generous assumptions of grams per kilogram amounts, the active ingredients would be present part per hundred million concentrations if we assumed all of the alkaloids in the plants had insecticidal activity.

These plants combined are in about one part in 500,000 in the shampoo. This means that the concentrations of the insecticidal alkaloids is about one part in 4-6*10^-8 parts depending on the alkaloid concentrations of the plants used. Because the lowest concentration of this pesticide used in agriculture is one part in ten thousand, this comes out to a ballpark figure of somewhere around 1,000 times lower than the lowest dose used in agriculture. The dose the lice will be exposed to in the shampoo won’t be great, as there will only be a couple grams of the shampoo used on the entire scalp. To give you an idea of what the pesticidal concentrations are in other louse products, pyrethrum is generally in antilouse shampoos at one part per hundred (one percent). Malathion is generally present at one part in two hundred parts, or one-half percent. This means that the crude alkaloids from the plant extracts would be present at one one millionth the concentration of the active ingredients that have known insecticidal activity. The improbable mode of action combined with the low amounts of active ingredients in the plant means that I would assume these ingredients are essentially inert without proof that they kill lice at these concentrations.

These ingredients aren’t the main stuff in the Quit Nits treatment, though. The plant extracts listed above are in parts per million, but Quassia amara extract is present at a 1:100 dilution…about 10,000 times higher than Sabadilla and Delphinium. Furthermore, it’s in the ballpark of the Pyrethrum extract. So what about Quassia?

Ingredients with No Proof of Efficacy

Quassia amara is an interesting plant because it contains one of the most bitter substances in the world. These substances are called quassinoids, and have been examined for insecticidal and antifeedant activities against a wide range of pests. In many cases extracts and purified components from Quassia have been shown to have insecticidal and antifeedant activity, but it wasn’t always clear to me whether the antifeedant activity was so strong that it led to mortality. In other words, it was difficult to tell if the substance made the food taste so bad to the bug that they’d rather starve than eat. Either way, we’re interested in it’s activity against lice in particular.

There have only been two papers which have examined Quassia extracts against lice. One appears in a Dutch journal in 1978 and another in a Spanish journal in 1991. Since these papers are in rather obscure low impact journals, I was not able to access them directly through my library and instead had to rely on their descriptions in review articles. The review articles weren’t exactly favorable towards Quassia as a louse treatment. The Dutch paper claimed high efficacy, but the experiment was apparently ran as an un-controlled, un-randomized, un-blinded experiment and counts as nothing as far as proof goes. The Spanish paper claimed high efficacy, but the review states that the Spanish paper concluded that Quassia would only have repellent effects but didn’t mention whether the extract had a clinically relevant success rate. There have been no well performed tests of Quassia as a head louse treatment, and the few tests that have been performed have yielded conflicting results. There’s simply no proof that the “active” ingredients in Quit Nits work.

Quit Nits also sells a repellent spray that has undergone independent testing. One paper compared it’s repellent activity using a filter paper repellency test, incubating the lice with filter paper treated with repellent on one side and water on the other. The objective was to measure what percentage of the lice moved away from the treatment. At the earliest time point measured (two hours), Quit Nits performed about as well as water. At later time points, there was some non-significant repellent activity. Another paper looked at the repellency of Quit Nits under real world (or close to real world) conditions and looked at whether lice would transfer to hair under approximated hair-hair contact conditions, if the lice would move on the hair treated with Quit Nits repellent spray, or if the lice would feed on the forearm of one of the authors who performed the study. For the hair tests, KY jelly was used to simulate greasy hair and Quit Nits fared no better than this. For the skin tests, bare skin not receiving any treatment was used and the lice exposed to Quit Nits treated skin fed just as well as those on bare skin. Quit Nits repellent spray simply doesn’t repel lice, as far as the current experiments show.

Some Products Have no Plausible Mode of Action

The first example of a product with no mode of action is a product called X-pel. In fairness, I’ve only seen this at a few small grocery stores in Iowa, but the fact something like this is sold at all really worries me. The product is a shampoo which consists of ground up honeybees, phenol, and an uncommon species of Rhododendron at femptogram concentrations (15X), or one part in one quadrillion. On their website, they give a couple of vague descriptions of various tests. The tests contain very little methodology and give no statistical information about their results. They claim a few ‘major universities’ were involved in the testing of the product, but neglect to give any sort of contact information or any publications generated as I described in the Quit Nits treatment. They have a video on their website, below, where they show an in-vitro test that consists of them drowning a louse in the shampoo. Because lice can be inactive for a long time following immersion in water, there is no evidence given that the lice in this video were actually killed. They also show an uncontrolled, un-randomized, un-blinded test of a single subject without any apparent followup as proof that their product works. Phenol here is the most likely ingredient for insecticidal activity, as the concentration of the Rhododendron is far too low to do anything at all. Quite frankly, I’m not sure how honeybees are supposed to kill head lice unless we assume the venom glands were somehow involved, but I find this unlikely. The ingredients used in this product are only used in vanishingly small concentrations, and there’s really no way to justify using ground up honeybees to treat head lice.

Another product marketed under the name Licefreee! is little more than a concentrated sodium chloride solution. While it’s plausible the product could suffocate the lice, the data for suffocants in head lice treatment isn’t exactly convincing. Because lice are coated in a waxy layer that prevents dehydration, I find the claim that a 10% salt solution will kill lice suspect. As far as I can tell, there’s no evidence of this product works either because I’ve only seen this mentioned in passing under ‘folk treatment’ sections of review articles. I’ve seen no primary literature articles dealing with concentrated salt solutions as lice-killers.

Conclusion

Many of these companies use a variety of tactics to sell their products that have nothing to do with efficacy. Many use highly questionable advertising methods, like capitalizing on patient fears of synthetic medicines and pretending to identify with their customers to sell them products of uncertain effectiveness. Some of these products even go as far as to claim to be pesticide free while still claiming to kill lice. Many of these products claim to have been invented by parents, but as a parent myself I cannot imagine marketing a questionable head louse treatment and this is a big part of why I’ve written this post.

The science-based products currently on the market that I mentioned in Part 1 have been thoroughly studied and activity proven with the obvious exception for strains of lice that are resistant to some treatments. Even though there is a risk to any product you’re bound to use, the risks of these products have been investigated and have been taken into consideration when formulating treatment regimens. I can certainly understand anxiety about exposing kids to pesticides, but when looking at alternative treatments one needs to ask whether they’re safe and effective. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If a product you spend money on makes any sort of claim, you should consider the claim extraordinary and ask for evidence behind the claim.

Burgess, I. (2009). Current treatments for pediculosis capitis Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases, 22 (2), 131-136 DOI: 10.1097/QCO.0b013e328322a019

Leone, P. (2007). Scabies and Pediculosis Pubis: An Update of Treatment Regimens and General Review Clinical Infectious Diseases, 44 (Supplement 3) DOI: 10.1086/511428

Canyon, D., & Speare, R. (2007). Do head lice spread in swimming pools? International Journal of Dermatology, 46 (11), 1211-1213 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-4632.2007.03011.x

Heukelbach, J., Canyon, D., Olivera, F., Muller, R., & Speare, R. (2008). Efficacy of over-the-counter botanical pediculicides against the head louse based on a stringent standard for mortality assessment. Medical and Veterinary Entomology, 22 (3), 264-272 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2915.2008.00738.x

Lebwohl, M., Clark, L., & Levitt, J. (2007). Therapy for Head Lice Based on Life Cycle, Resistance, and Safety Considerations PEDIATRICS, 119 (5), 965-974 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2006-3087

Leone, P. (2007). Scabies and Pediculosis Pubis: An Update of Treatment Regimens and General Review Clinical Infectious Diseases, 44 (Supplement 3) DOI: 10.1086/511428

Greive KA, & Barnes TM (2011). In vitro comparison of four treatments which discourage infestation by head lice. Parasitology research PMID: 22030833

Canyon, D., & Speare, R. (2007). A comparison of botanical and synthetic substances commonly used to prevent head lice (Pediculus humanus var. capitis) infestation International Journal of Dermatology, 46 (4), 422-426 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-4632.2007.03132.x

Rossini, C., Castillo, L., & González, A. (2007). Plant extracts and their components as potential control agents against human head lice Phytochemistry Reviews, 7 (1), 51-63 DOI: 10.1007/s11101-006-9026-0

In Memoriam,
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the love that is to be.

This post was syndicated from Tomorrow's Table You may comment on the original entry.

Money Matters

In 2009, due to an outpouring of support from the science blogging community and from our readers for what we’re trying to do, we won a contest that provided our blog with a $1,500 grant that helped us revamp the site, pay for hosting and purchase prizes to build a community of readers, and get some more diverse content on the blog. Now, after two years our grant is running out and we are going to need more funds to continue to keep our blog community going strong, and expand it with some more projects.

First, our expenses have mainly been spent on Promotion (prizes, posters, shipping), hosting costs (server, domains, photo album), conference reporting (gas, train, cheap motel), and site development (graphic design, plugins). Here is a visual breakdown of what proportion we have spent on each area. For those who are new to Biofortified – those who write here do so as volunteers, so our funds do not go to pay for what is written on the blog.

You no doubt may have noticed a section for Transcription in the above pie chart. That’s because we have hired a student who is writing some excellent transcripts of audio and video interviews we’ve done that I will post on the blog in the next couple days. This will make it easier for people to read, reference, and check back on these interviews. We would like to continue to make these transcripts available, and in fact, some will be absolutely necessary. I have a really good 2-hour phone interview I conducted earlier this year that will need to be transcribed before I can do something with it.

Another major expense that we would like to be able to make is to commission artwork. Communicating science depends as much on art as it does science, and we’ve got some great artists on call who can make us some killer graphics for improving the look of the site, for videos, and informational pages. An artist can also help us realize an attractive and thought-provoking T-shirt design for the blog.

And let’s not forget our long-term project of cataloging and summarizing all existing research on the relative risks of genetic engineering, a project we call GENERA. This will take a significant amount of money, which we do not expect to be able to gather this time around. But there is something we can do which will make funding that project possible: tax exemption.

As a science education and discussion organization, we would qualify for tax-exemption, and we would do it if we had the money for the filing fees. Not only would it make it possible for future donors to deduct their donations, it would also open up more opportunities to continue and expand our projects because we would be eligible to apply for grants from many charities and nonprofit trusts that require tax-exemption. Being exempt also carries more reporting and transparency responsibilities, but we plan to go further with yearly financial reports published on the blog.

From now until mid-January, we will talk a bit about how reaching our funding goal of $2012 for 2012 will be able to help us do the things I mentioned above and more, and how important this is.

How you can help

There are several ways that you can help us reach our goal. The first is you could give a donation through our PayPal account by clicking this button here or in the sidebar:

Any amount is great and welcome. If you would like to get some idea what your donation can help us do, here are some suggested amounts:

• $5 will buy a big spool of thread for embroidering tote bags.
• $10 will get a prize sent to a community contest winner.
• $20 will send Frank N. Foode on a plant-based adventure chronicled in our photo album.
• $35 will pay for one month of hosting costs for the blog and photo album.
• $50 will pay for a transcript of a normal interview.
• $100 will allow us to travel to and report on a conference.
• $150 will pay for some graphic art to be commissioned for the blog or for video projects.
• $200 will pay for the transcription of an in-depth interview.
• $400 will pay the application fee for tax-exempt status.

Paypal takes a small cut of each donation (2.5%), so if you want to minimize this impact on your donation and send it by check, please contact us for an address to send it to.

If you choose to make a direct donation, let us know if you would like to be acknowledged by name – we would love to tell the world how you have helped us, but if you wish to remain anonymous we respect that – and we will thank you by email. (Also, just a friendly reminder – our policy is not to accept direct funding from for-profit corporations.)

Never miss a planting date with Frank!

If you want to contribute, but would like to get something for your donation, there is another way you can help out. As Anastasia reported, we have a Zazzle store with many fabulous pieces of merchandise such as blog mugs, clothing, ornaments, a mousepad, and even a Frank N. Foode 2012 Calendar as well! 25% of sale prices will go directly to Biofortified.

Are you not in a position where you could donate money, but would still like to help us reach our goal? Please consider promoting our fundraising drive to your friends, family, contacts, exercise partners, in your smoke-filled rooms, your social networks, and your underground food pantry co-ops. We have all kinds of nifty promotion buttons below the post for social media, email, and heck, PDFs and printing which you can use to help spread the word. How ever you help out, you can brag about it in the comments of this post and get accolades from everyone! Tell everyone on your own blog and dare your readers to do better. Be creative!

Because we will. Frank will keep you posted on our progress in the sidebar with a color-changing corn plant, so you can see how far along we are. As a matter of fact, we’re already off to a great start. We have gotten some sales in our Zazzle Store, as well as a sudden surge of support through individual donations. As of today, I’m pleased to report that we have already raised $871.19! We are two fifths of the way there! Thanks to everyone who has helped us out so far.

Let’s make 2012 be a banner year for Biofortified, and help us raise $2012 to make it happen. Only $1140.81 left to go!
Thank you for considering supporting what we do here at Biofortified. I hope you are having a great Holiday Season and that we all have a fantastic and fruitful New Year.