by Kevin Folta on 19 September 2010 Last night I woke up in a fog, face down on the couch, fully dressed with my work clothes on. It was 3:44 AM and the artifacts around me described the scene. A partially eaten salad, my glasses crooked on my head, a laptop with an exhausted battery and the television running an infomercial led me to the conclusion that I closed my eyes for a minute while eating dinner and drifted off to sleep.
Fumbling with the remote, I clicked through a few middle-of-the-night stations. There’s a vibrating weight to firm womens’ arms. Click. A guy with a tie on a news station says that climate change is a hoax. Click. A woman on the next channel lost fifty pounds in a month eating just cookies. Click. A former playboy playmate says that vaccines are dangerous. Another channel has a person claiming evidence that the terrorist attack on 9-11 was an inside job.
I turn off the television, put on my jammies and head off to bed, my dog Stinkie following behind. The claims of kooks go in one ear, rattle around for a moment and then leave out the other.
We are bombarded with junk science, all the time, every day. I don’t get mad, I consider the source and let it go. They have an agenda, they have to appeal to viewers, and if subscribing to anti-science or abject untruth is their method then so be it. Financial and political gains are there to be had if you can fool enough people.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 1 April 2010 The UK supermarket Waitrose announced that they are selling a brand new variety of strawberry, a pale white berry with red seeds dubbed the “Pineberry” so named because it tastes and smells like pineapple.
The berries appear in the Daily Mail article Pineberries and cream? The new summer fruit which looks like a white strawberry… but tastes like a pineapple. Due to the timing of the press coverage at the end of March, people
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 11 February 2010 I just received word* that a special webcast will be happening tomorrow, Friday the 12th, called Now Serving 9 Billion: Global Dialogue on Meeting Food Needs for the Next Generation. The webcast will occur from 10 am-12 pm U.S. Eastern Standard Time (-5 GMT), which will be 9-11 am in the U.S. Central time zone where I am. Here are the panelists that will be appearing in the webcast:
- Dr. Nina V. Fedoroff; Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to the Administrator of USAID Rajiv Shah. Author of “Mendel In The Kitchen” Bio here.
- Dr. Robert Paarlberg, Wellesley College. He is the Betty Freyhof Johnson Class of 1944 Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Author of: Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out Of Africa. Bio here.
- Dr. Calestous Juma, Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Professor of the Practice of International Development. Director, Science, Technology, Globalization Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Bio here.
- Mark Cantley, former Advisory in the Directorate for Biotechnology, Agriculture and Food, of the Directorate-General for Research of the European Commission, and formerly head of the OECD’s Biotechnology Unit. Bio here.
- Frank Sesno, moderator, Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University, Emmy-award winning journalist, and host and creator of Planet Forward, a ground-breaking web-to-television show seen on PBS. Bio here.
- Dr. Gale Buchanan, CAST report lead author; College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, The University of Georgia, Tifton Campus; former USDA Under-Secretary for Research, Education and Economics. Bio here.
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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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Why plant breeding is incompatible with Organic Agriculture
This is part I of a three-part series on Orgenic* Backlash. How is the organic sector handling the argument in favor of integrating of genetically engineered crops into organic agricultural systems?
When I read the news a few weeks ago I was at first puzzled, and then inspired. Jim Riddle, Organic Outreach Coordinator for the University of Minnesota, wrote an article for the Rodale Institute outlining 10 reasons why genetic engineering is incompatible with organic agriculture. This is one of the issues that we tackle quite often here at Biofortified. So here are his ten reasons: