Illumination 2.0

The year is 2067. I'm living near a dried-up lake bed in the Northern Wisconsin Desert, popping the cork on a bottle of GMO champagne, and pouring a cool glass in the heat of another January day. It is the eve of my 100th birthday and I'm looking back at the cool stuff that science has done.  The most exciting changes were the way that technology was used to change medicine and food. Medicine integrated comprehensive genomic and gene expression data in treatment, and in farming, all tools were now integrated into producing food for a growing world population.  We had come a long way, especially from the days when starvation and deficiency once claimed many lives, way back in the decade known as the "Denial Teens". It was the time when the Communicable Disease Plagues began, when political leaders ignored warnings of carbon emission, and a time when the most modern and precise genetic improvement techniques were demonized as poison by a small group of well-fed, vocal...

Today I sent a letter to Springer, the publisher that allowed publication of an opinion piece where prominent anti-biotech authors fail to disclose their clear financial conflicts of interest. Let's see what happens.

The world's esteemed scientific organizations have made bold statements regarding the scientific consensus on transgenic crops.  The National Academies of Science, the American Medical Association, and dozens of others worldwide have all indicated that these products have an outstanding safety record and pose no more risk than conventional breeding. But what do they know? A paper was published last week in Environmental Sciences Europe , a Springer journal that has published some real gems, including the un-refereed republication of the 2012 lumpy rat torture study. It boldly proclaims in the title " No scientific consensus on GMO safety " . The authors represent a series of academics, activists, and NGO associates, all that hold public views against transgenic, synthetic or nano biology.  To me, consensus is something that just happens.  We don't usually measure it with tools, because we don't have to.  It is a general agreement on the state of a scientif...

Two years ago I wrote a blog about an eight-year-old California girl that started an online petition to remove transgenic-crop-based ingredients from Girl Scout cookies. Again, I admired her drive and interest, but was appropriately critical of her surfacy scientific understanding. She claimed that " GMOs studies (sic) (in animals) have linked them to infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system." It could be an honest third-grade interpretation of the scholarly literature.  Probably not.  More likely she was simply a pawn of flimsy parents that paid good money for an anti-GMO book at Whole Foods, only to have their food fears reinforced by a popular TV doctor, leading to the de-education of their daughter.   That's something I'm firmly against, as I want young women to be excited about science, not taught to fear it because parents are twits.  I wrote a blo...

The other day a group of food science students penned a letter to Vani Hari , criticizing her pseudo-scientific approach to food and health issues.  It was a thoughtful, reasoned and appropriate letter. They were speaking from a basis of evidence and science. And instead of simply leaving it out in the internet, Hari actually responded .  In typical Food Babe fashion, she approaches criticisms from actual emerging scholars with a the usual barrage of nonsense and holier-than-thou attitude.  She actually tells these students that they are wrong on all counts. University students are pretty sharp, especially grad students like these folks appear to be.  Their points are consistent with the scientific literature and the scientific consensus.  Well done.  Hari's reply is the usual indictment of stuff she doesn't understand, and adherence to her beloved suite of fallacies. I've parsed her arguments line-by-line, and as usual, she clearly just does not understa...

I'm so grateful to any author that takes the time to write about citrus greening disease and its potential solutions.  When I saw the posting in Fast Company by Satta Sarmah, I was happy that someone might be providing a additional resources on the disease and its solutions. When you read the article Does orange juice have to genetically modify or die? it does a good job describing some of the proposed solutions, some of which will involve the addition of transgenes. They mention Dr. Eric Mirkov's (Texas A&M) installation of a spinach gene and Dr. Jude Grosser's (Univ Florida) efforts with other transgenes.  While many solutions have been attempted, a subset of them show strong potential to help solve the problem. To this point it is a factual summary of what science has done. Then Sarmah makes the classic journalist mistake-- striving for balance.  If scientists propose solutions, there must be some other opinion of equal importance, right? The article then go...

While other companies roll over and reformulate ancient recipes when Food Babe Vani Hari comes to town, Johnson's is fighting back.  Clearly influenced by Hari's inane claims that "if you can't pronounce it, it is bad for you", Johnson and Johnson have produced a video for the Carah's Life series.  Here Carah (a mom with a You Tube channel documenting her experiences) addresses the concerns of chemicals in baby products, reminding us that everything is made up of chemicals.  My new hero.  Carah Amelie speaks of chemicals, and those long science-sounding words that freak out Food Babes. Carah is exactly what we need.  She's slick but unpolished, articulate but clunky, beautiful and plain. She's any of us.  We believe her.  She conjures credibility and trust.  She knows what she's talking about. Johnson's, I'm going to go buy some baby shampoo and give it to someone with a dirty baby, just because you hired Carah and made this vi...