Illumination 2.0

With a most heavy heart I have to report that the recent events have bled into this forum, and I have to suspend communication through this blog.  I'm very touched by all of your interest and support.  Thank you.

Professor Graeme Martin joins Talking Biotech Podcast to talk about the Future Farm 2050 Project. It is a series of innovative ideas to farm more sustainably, and a very interesting interview.

I've always been interested in science and communication, and as time went along always wondered how to meld the two in an interesting and entertaining way.  In fact, in my senior year in college I finished third in the nation in a forensics event-- something called After Dinner Speaking. Here you would convey a serious topic using humor as a vehicle.  I was pretty good at that.  During grad school I was paid to write for stand-up comedians and even wrote greeting cards.  I self-published funny books on pranks and pseudoscience, and wrote a lot of clever work for "fanzines", the pre-internet alternative media. My stuff flew off the racks at a local place called Quimby's Queer Book Store.  Yes, there once were stores that sold books.   As I moved through academic ranks from grad student to professor, my students' reviews always recognized how my use of humor was appropriate and helpful, and creative analogy and colorful tangents reinforced key scienti...

7/12/2019 EDIT --  This was a good idea and was executed well.  Unfortunately the other organizers took umbrag e to my repeated demands to complete the work and dismissed me from the project.  I did initiate drafts of the manuscript back in 2016. It is part of a much bigger falling out.  These folks also decided to use FOIA to obtain internal university documents about confidential professional witness work I was doing for a law firm on my vacation time. They broke my confidentiality, revealing information that was not supposed to be public. It jeopardized  my involvement in a private dispute between two parties, as well as the progression of the arbitration . They have certainly taken every opportunity to impugn my integrity and harm my career, in this and other ways.  Please understand that if I had any pull in this situation I would do everything I could to complete the work as promised. It pains me to not deliver, but I have been dismissed from th...

This week's Talking Biotech features interviews with Dr. Karl Haro von Mogel and our interest in finding 1250 participants to test the hypothesis that wild animals will not eat genetically engineered corn. You can contribute to the effort and/or participate here! The second part interviews Dr. Lee Panella about sugar beet breeding.  We don't think much about sugar beets, but they are important to sugar production and bring good value to farmers. 

In a textbook case of cherry picking, one sentence keeps emerging in the activist trial-by-internet concerning the Monsanto donation to my science communication program.  The backstory is that my university received a donation from the company toward my outreach program, which covered the costs for me to travel and teach scientists how to talk about science.  That was very nice of them, wonderful.  Having funds to rent a facility, travel to the location, buy coffee/doughnuts or subs for the workshop is a real help. Previously this was all funded personally buy taking monies offered to me as speaker fees and deferring them to the Talking Biotech program.  I remain extremely grateful for their support, even after those funds have been allocated elsewhere by the university.  I was so grateful, that I noted this in an email to the Monsanto Company.  That became a huge deal when 4600 pages of emails were seized by activists back in June.  Out of th...

This week's Talking Biotech!! This week we’re joined by Richard Levine, communications director for the Entomological Society of America.  We discuss bees, butterflies, insecticides and some of the current issues in crop protection from an entomological perspective.  We then turn to the idea of promoting artwork using a science podcast, and the important effort to get Dr. Barbara McClintock on the ten dollar bill, replacing some guy. We discuss the barriers to her participation in science, and describe why she would be such a fitting presence on our currency– not just because she was a woman, not just because she was a scientist, but because she broken down barriers.