Illumination 2.0

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 the tens of thousands of sentences t

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.

Recent events have brought criticism that I believe can be addressed with more information. The whole story is posted here on Huffington Post Blogs. This story contains a link to PDFs that shows all of my outreach and extension activities, how much I was reimbursed, how much I was paid and what honoraria were received (and where they went). This will be posted here at least bi-monthly, so bookmark this page. The complete list of Kevin Folta outreach and extension activities: July 2013-September 19, 2015