Illumination 2.0

The Brookes and Barfoot report is a dense, annual study of biotech crops impacts. Dr. Brookes summarizes the 2017 report on this week's podcast.  Click here to listen , or download from iTunes .

This week’s podcast is a discussion with Dr. Christine Lattin, a postdoctoral researcher in the Radiology and Biomedical Imaging Center at Yale University. Dr. Lattin examines stress responses in house sparrows using live imaging so that birds can be studied over and over through time. However, Dr. Lattin has become a target of activists that have engaged malicious, personal attacks against her and her research.  The harassment has intensified into very personal acts of defamation and intimidation for this early career scientist.  We discuss the extreme measures she takes to ethically conduct her research and how her own personal reconciliation of how animals are important to research.  We then discuss what it is like to be the subject of an activist defamation campaign and personal attacks, and how to not just survive it- how to turn it into something positive. The discussion is powerful and emotional, and hopefully will stir further awareness of how scientists...

Twitter can be a great tool for rapid review and dissemination of thoughts, criticism, and media.  However, about six months ago Twitter revised the program so that the @usernames did not count against the 140 character limit.  At that point a culture of strategic, well worded posts between a few users changed.  Twitter went from useful to intolerable.  Now there are threads with 40 users involved, sparring endlessly about issues like GMO, vaccines and climate. These are now good science allies arguing endlessly with people known to be disruptive agitators with no interest in actual science.  Please stop entertaining them.  I've blocked the trolls, so now I sit and watch well-intentioned people that have the science right pop up on the thread one after another, arguing with trolls.  I see one side of the argument, but that's all I see.  Hundreds of posts, one after the other.  Now I'm missing valuable messages that I want ...