Notes from a Gene Safari

New Blog Launched

2009-07-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

I'm launching a new blog on the politics of agriculture as The Scientist Gardener.

The arc of a blog

2009-01-19T12:34:00.000-08:00

a final soliloquy

Like thousands of its contemporaries, this blog has slowly wound down, predictably and inevitably, and now officially freezes as long as the cache remains.

I began this blog as a grad student, encountering and turning over many new and exciting ideas faster than I could find other bodies to discuss them with. Writing helped me to organize and coalesce my thoughts on topics that I felt passionate about yet often failed to articulate.

I imagine it's no surprise that my motivation has slide from excitement to obligation as I worked through the main themes I was interested in. I'll probably start another blog sometime in the future, but Notes from a Gene Safari has outlived it's purpose.

If I do this again, I'll focus more on what I want to get out of it, what my niche will be and what online forums already exist. I imagine reading and commenting on other people's blogs is probaby one the best ways to draw people into yours.

There are a lot of blogs out there that do a good job of communicating day-to-day science to a general audience, but I've found I'm not very interested in this.

I've increasingly found academics blogging about their professional interests within the same communities in which they attend meetings, make collaborations and apply for funding. I think blogs could serve young academics well in developing and advertising their brand within these existing communities. As academics largely function as independent contractors, I imagine having a strong online presence would be an important part of your resume.

There also seems to be a lot of room for blogs that take curious readers into some esoteric corner of the world. I think my postings about modern agriculture would have been a lot more interesting within the context of the daily account of a more boots-on-the-ground agriculturalist (e.g. an extension agent) - especially with all the recent public interest in the aesthetics and philosophy of farming (in addition to knowing where food actually comes from!). I think this would be a fun blog to write.

In hindsight it's pretty obvious that the success of a blog comes from its interactions with a community. I like writing, and I wouldn't mind starting from scratch, but I need a good idea first. We'll see where I end up after my postdoc. If nothing else, I'd like to get involved with my future home's community (e.g. through wildlands conservation and sports or the arts)...
maybe I'll blog about that.

_______________________________________________________________

I bet someday I'll hear someone on NPR promoting their book, a collection of final blog posts. I'd read it. I bet it would be full of funny, self-indulgent hand wringing over why no one was interested in what he/she had to say.

So for one last time, I sort out my thoughts. bye!

Global warming and paleoclimatology

2009-01-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

One of the recurrent themes in this blog has been my dissatisfaction with the availability of accessible (yet convincing!) data on global warming.

I've come across some references that state that some of the recent ice age transitions occurred over a few to several decades (regionally, if not globally). It's pretty much become a cliche to me that geologists (alone among scientists) are skeptical of global warming. If these references are accurate, it certainly seems to put contemporary anthropogenic climate change well within the norm for prehistoric climate change.

Were these previous abrupt changes accompanied by significant extinction events?
If not, would they be today?

Maybe if there is so much unknown, we should shift our resources into a more generally adaptive strategy instead of just focusing on reducing greenhouse gasses...

What should we focus on? I think I vote for:

Business policy that encourages translation of cutting edge agriculture and energy generation
More research funding for applied ecology/conservation biology and meteorology
Wildlands conservation!
- more protected parks (with different levels of permissible activities)
- targeted conservation + restoration of biodiversity hotspots and charismatic organisms
- local networks of functional urban ecosystems

Intuiting Science

2009-01-17T12:09:00.000-08:00

I've come to appreciate recently how subjective and intuitive the process of science really is. It's often emphasized that science is this big, objective machine, but there really is a lot of art in it (along with quite a bit of luck!).

These ideas were simmering in my head as I was reading a library book, Data Analysis and Graphics Using R. One of the chapters on preliminary data analysis emphasized that humans are really excellent at picking out patterns in the seemingly random. I'm used to thinking about this idea when it comes to people imagining connections where they don't actually exist (e.g. superstitions based on selective memories or the very human ability to see "faces" in all manner of everyday objects - clouds, wood grain, floor tiles...). This chapter emphasized though that this ability/handicap is really central to science because it inspires people with hypotheses about how the world works - that can then be tested with objective sampling and statistical methods.

Many of the greatest discoveries in science began with luck and hunches. With people noticing funny things and imagining incredible, unique possible explanations for these observations - followed by careful objective methods to filter reality from imagination. I've started to notice and appreciate this a lot more in my own work. I've always been very focused on the objective, deductive side of science - often associating scientific musings with naivete. I think I underestimated just how open your mind should be at the front end of a research project.

I think I can be better at what I do by more fully embracing the creative aspects of my work.

wiki RNA

2009-01-17T11:58:00.000-08:00

This article in Nature describes how the journal RNA Biology will now require authors of accepted (peer-reviewed) papers to submit summaries of their research to be added to Wikipedia. The first article to be translated into a Wikipedia page is titled "A Survey of Nematode SmY RNAs."

There's a nice discussion under the Nature article about the pros and cons of such a strategy and I agree with what appears to be the majority opinion - that any effort to make cutting edge science accessible to the people is a good thing.

Aware citizens already know that a site like Wikipedia can never be trusted to be 100% accurate (even when it comes to dry, supposedly apolitical topics like SmY RNAs!), but I've frequently found that Wikipedia pages serve as an excellent introduction to foreign topics that give you enough of a cursory understanding to allow you to process more scholarly sources.

"Clean" coal

2008-12-04T17:18:00.000-08:00

I just saw an interesting commercial asserting that the frequently used phrase "clean coal" is an oxymoron. It appears to be run by Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.

It's nice to hear the facts occasionally cut through the noise of misinformation.

Against Organic

2008-12-01T20:24:00.000-08:00

Periodically, I feel compelled to reiterate why I'm against organic agriculture.

This post will be one of those times, as I've run into this anti-intellectual strain of environmentalism a lot recently.

Bottom line:
1 - chemicals are everywhere in nature, not just in glass tubes in laboratories
2 - chemicals have incredibly diverse properties and need to be evaluated on a case by case basis
3 - the same chemical synthesized in a lab is identical to its counterpart synthesized by an organism

I'll give you two examples of how organic agriculture is not green.

The Gulf dead zone is caused by fertilizer runoff from the Midwest.
The fertilization paradigm of the past several decades (thanks to cheap synthetic nitrogen) has been to pour tons of nutrients onto fields. Crops were bred to thrive in an environment with profuse nutrient availability, yields went through the roof, poor people could afford good food and huge quantities of runoff flowed into the waterways.

Switching from synthetic nitrogen to manure tomorrow would fix none of this. The correct solution is to breed crops that thrive under lower nutrient conditions, to precisely apply the minimum amount of fertilizer required and to apply conservation ('no') tillage - all three of which are being accomplished by mainstream agribusinesses, not small organic farms.

Topsoil erosion and the nutrient runoff that accompanies it is pretty hard to limit when you plow up your fields every year, leaving bare soil that is easily washed away. Traditional Western agriculture (e.g. Medieval/organic practices) relies on tilling to control weeds and other pests. The current push towards no-till agriculture is possible only because modern chemicals allow farmers to control pests without plowing up the land.

Many of the pesticides used in the past were extremely dangerous and did plenty of damage to people and the environment. As it's a pretty bad strategy to allow your customers and their communities to be poisoned, chemical companies have made great contributions to creating more effective and safe pesticides.

One of the highlights is glyphosate. This chemical kills plants but is pretty much harmless to animals (e.g. farmworkers) and breaks down quickly after application. The best thing about glyphosate is that many of our crops today have been genetically engineered to be resistant to glyphosate. In the past, if farmers were going to apply weed killers at all, they usually had to do it before they planted - and as long as they were investing in this expense, they needed to spray a lot to be sure they'd get their money's worth in crop protection. All of this left the fields temporarily bare, and vulnerable to erosion and runoff.

GMO glyphosate resistance changed this. Now, farmers often don't need to spray herbicides until they actually see weeds pop up, they can spot treat only certain areas of their fields, and they can use a fraction of the herbicide they'd otherwise spray. All while the crops are in the ground, mitigating runoff!

The Scientist Guild

2008-11-07T17:45:00.000-08:00

I was fascinated by a recent essay from Science Careers.

Basically, the author describes two types of unions. The first is the one that skilled professionals belong to (e.g. plumbers and physicians). Like medieval guilds, these unions restrict membership in order to limit competition - especially valuable for the professions that survive on temporary contract work. Membership is earned through low-paid apprenticeships and rigorous certifying exams. Prospective members who meet and exceed these high expectations are eventually repaid with very well paid, steady work.

The second type of union is the one that unskilled laborers belong to. They are organized to protect laborers (e.g. factory workers) from giant organizations who are able to suppress pay and benefits because laborers are so easily replaced.

Apparently, academia used to operate on the former model. Professors were judged on (and therefore highly invested in) the careers their students went on to lead. Graduate fellowships were only offered to the most promising students, who could then depend on their mentor to take a personal stake in their post-graduate career. The author elaborates that, due to multiple factors, academia has basically fallen to the latter model. Grad students and postdocs are cheap, replaceable laborers who are hired in mass, and released as necessary.

Ouch!

Intl Dialects of English

2008-10-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

I just wandered across a pretty cool website that archives speech samples from diverse English speakers - IDEA

I was hoping to hear a good example of the Northern vowel shift, but couldn't pick it out...

Living without a wiki

2008-10-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

I can't believe such a science and technology-oriented town as Ithaca doesn't have a local wiki. I've been spoiled living in Davis where anytime you want to find a restaurant, auto mechanic or park all you have to do is query the wiki and then you get a list of local venues with a long list of personal reviews.

I hope whichever town I move to next has their act together a little better.

My fresh start

2008-10-01T15:31:00.000-07:00

I've been complaining for months (or was it years?) about how tired I was of working on my Ph.D. thesis research. It's pretty hard to keep up your motivation when you feel like that but it's done now! I'm feeling very focused on tying up the last loose ends (submitting pubs, printing up copies of my thesis for my profs, etc.), which is a feeling that should last awhile as I'm currently all alone in this town with little to do in my free time anyway.

At any rate, I'm settling in on a new project that I'm pretty excited about. I'll be searching for fruit nutrition/flavor variation among heirloom, modern commercial and experimental transgenic tomato varieties (with metabolomics and targeted gene silencing). I'm currently feeling pretty optimistic that what I learn here will help me get a real job two years from now.

I don't expect to find systematic differences between transgenic and conventional varieties, but it would be pretty exciting if I did. It's so rare to get truly convincing, definitive answers in biology that sometimes getting proved wrong is the most exciting result - because it means your experimental results are so convincing that they changed your mind!

Now that I'm working on a topic I've long been interested in, it's time to put my money where my mouth is.

The private space industry "takes off"

2008-09-30T18:32:00.000-07:00

Sorry - couldn't resist.

A landmark was recently reached as a private company, SpaceX, successfully launched a scratch-built rocket (the Falcon 1) into low earth orbit and brought it back home safe (and at a quarter of the cost that current government systems could have done it!). If they succeed with their follow up (a rocket large enough to carry common commercial satellite payloads) then we really will be on the cusp of a whole new era!

I'm excited.

How not to be a mad scientist

2008-09-18T16:23:00.002-07:00

Inevitably, people with expertise (in science, business or anything else) love to make (sometimes forceful) recommendations on how the people should run their lives/country. The author of this editorial points out that this can backfire and recommends that such experts try to exercise some restraint.

Especially in these anti-intellectual times, it may be better to just lay out the facts and let individuals come to the correct conclusion on their own. It's a tough charge for scientists (and anyone else) who often find themselves trying to argue against the zeitgeist. I think it's good to keep this in mind especially when it comes to contentious topics such as genetic engineering and global climate change - maybe it's best to lean a little heavier on stats and a little lighter on recommendations. On the other hand, being too laid back will delay any necessary actions.

I think it will take some practice to get this balance right.

I'm afraid of Americans

2008-09-18T16:23:00.001-07:00

I've said it before that I think the greatest flaw of the US (and most European countries) is a pervasive and vague fear that sticks itself to all sorts of non-threatening phenomena. I don't know if it's a cultural thing or a logical outgrowth of a people who rarely confront real mortal danger, but it absolutely gets in the way of running an efficient and practical nation.

My favorite example is the frequency with which I meet Americans who have a very conscious fear of terrorism. Only a few thousand Americans have ever been killed by terrorism on US soil
out of the (hundreds of millions?) that have died in total. I'd love to see that ratio. I'm sure it would be in scientific notation. I have no doubt I'll die in the same mundane way as almost everyone else - heart disease, car accident, etc...

So I found this article very interesting. They linked political leanings to sensitivity to fear. Overall they found an association between people who had conservative social views (in regard to gay rights, immigration, welfare etc.) and those who had more dramatic fear responses.

...

Culture and Biology

2008-09-10T22:21:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Smail's On Deep History and the Brain. The first few chapters were a boring history of historians writing history... but the last few were pretty fascinating.

It's a common idea that humans stopped evolving the day that civilization started. Cultural change is so profound and occurs on a time scale so much faster than natural selection that it's easy to expect that we are essentially living post-biology. It usually takes millions of years for species to adapt to their environment: modern humans appeared about 50k years ago and we started experimenting with agriculture and cities only in the past 10k. The implication is that we are maladapted to our current lifestyle (which is pretty depressing!). The idea is that we're built to live in small bands on the savannas of Africa, not giant cities in all climates.

My favorite part of this book was where Smail makes the argument that the above idea is untrue - evolution is still affecting humans wherever we experience strong selection pressures - even in the span of a few thousand years. Well-established examples of modern humans evolving include the mutation that allows many of us to digest milk throughout our lives, and the sickle-cell gene which conveys resistance to malaria. I just read an idea the other day that ethanol tolerance may have been selected for to allow citizens to drink disease-free water in the form of beer and wine.

Even more intriguing were the ways that he demonstrated that culture can change biology. He gave many examples of ways in which our biological development is flexible, plastic and responsive to the way we live our lives. Smail describes the theory that much of human biology (especially behavior) develops as flexible "modules" that are affected by the physical and cultural environment. One example is that most primates live in rigid, complex social hierarchies. Most anthropologists believe that most human hunter-gatherers live in egalitarian societies that prevent hierarchies from developing. This "module" may have been suppressed by the culture of human hunter-gatherers and re-activated by modern civilization. Similarly, a friend of mine once explained to me how many modern humans often have overbites because eating soft cooked food fails to fully trigger lower jaw growth.

I also liked how he pointed out the just so story nature of much of evolutionary human biology thought. Just because you can come up with a reason why a certain phenomenon could be adaptive doesn't mean it really evolved for that function. Evolution is random and unpredictable - there are many ways that a given trait could show up. One example is the hypothesis that Hindus have a religious taboo against eating cattle because their farmers relied on them to plow their fields - and couldn't afford to be tempted to kill them during a lean year. Sure it could be true, but there's no way to prove it...

Pop psychologists like to suggest that men are only attracted to young women, and women are only attracted to older (wealthier) men - because this is what would be evolutionarily adaptive to both. Smail points out that the studies that support this idea relied on personal ads - not exactly a representative sample. Furthermore he points out that modern human hunter-gatherers (and likely all our ancestors) don't live this way in the first place. Typically, women gather most of the calories that the family consumes and when men are successful hunting they usually distribute it evenly among their tribe. When men have extra meat, they tend to give it to girlfriends instead of wives. Likewise, women rely on help with childcare more from mothers, sisters, brothers and boyfriends than they do their husbands.

It's intriguing to think about ways in which biology and culture could be intertwined. He discusses all sorts of possible ways - mainly revolving around brain-body chemistry. It's also much more encouraging to think that we're not stuck in a losing battle between biology and culture.

spore

2008-09-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

Forum today discussed Spore, which appears to be some sort of SecondLife meets SimLife online game. It's basically a computer game that allows you to invent digital creatures and then release them into a virtual planet to evolve and multiply.

One of the guests made the point that true education is not so much like filling a bucket as it is like sparking a fire. His point was that the value of inspiring kids to be interested in science (or anything else) is often underestimated. He was excited about the role this game could play in inspiring kids to learn more about evolution and other science topics - even if its science wasn't 100% accurate.

Makes a lot of sense to me - maybe more educators should be given the freedom to teach in more exciting and creative ways and less by rote.

"The debilitating power of want"

2008-08-31T23:04:00.000-07:00

I was hanging out with some friends this weekend when one began telling an anecdote about his travels in Central/South America where he routinely met people who, without any thread of material wealth or possession, managed to be much happier than most (US) Americans he knows.

The other interjected the title quote with the suggestion that much of the chronic illness you find in the US (which he may or may not have been implying he hasn't seen in his travels through the developing world), is largely due to stress and continuous dissatisfaction. The first then elaborated with the (absolutely correct) observation that many Americans are hugely motivated by fear and are consequentially perpetually over-wound.

I think there may be something to this. I remember reading a study (I wish I could remember a citation!) where it was suggested that some measure of personal satisfaction correlated with wealth - but only within countries, not between them - i.e. people judge how well they are doing based on how well their neighbors are doing, not against some universal, objective standard.

I also once read an editorial that suggested that Americans were happier in the 1950s then they are now because basic consumer goods that we now consider necessities (e.g. refrigerators and cars) were new, exciting and increasingly becoming available - i.e. people didn't have much, but they were excited and happy as they saw themselves and their neighbors steadily accumulating more and more neat stuff and living better - as opposed to today, where we take all our mountains of stuff for granted and only chaff to see people with fancier, more expensive versions of our own refrigerators and cars.

It sounds kinda funny, but it also resonates with me. My daily 2+ mile bike commute through quiet, residential neighborhoods really isn't a big deal on all but the hottest and rainiest days, yet I constantly find myself resenting all those that pass me in motorized vehicles. If everyone else were on bikes, I'd still arrive at work wet on many days, but I don't think I'd arrive as irritated.

Maybe this is one of those ways in which physiology is really intertwined with culture...

[reference to upcoming article...]

An encouraging environmental note

2008-08-26T22:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a hopeful new study in PNAS. Actually, just check out this one figure. It charts the presence of heavy metals in the Arctic (where it accumulates in the local wildlife).

The authors found a low baseline level of metals that spiked with the Industrial Revolution, fell a little during the Great Depression, came back strong afterwards, and crashed after the passage of tough environmental regulation in the '70s and appears to have almost hit the baseline levels again by 2000! They suggest that much of the measured pollution can be traced to coal power plants.

I find it very encouraging that at least some of our pollution can disappear so quickly once we take action. Maybe, in my lifetime, I'll actually be able to eat tuna without getting my FDA's daily allowance of mercury!

McCain vs. bears

2008-08-16T18:39:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's been perplexed by McCain's repeated assertion that a 3 million dollar federal grant to study 'bear DNA' is government waste should read the following article in Scientific American.

The bear study referred to is not wasteful pork, but a necessary population study of the remaining grizzly bears in the United States. If you believe, like I do, that maintaining some living fragment of the great American frontier is vital to US cultural heritage, this bear study is completely reasonable. The National Park system would be much less compelling without charismatic macrofauna such as bears, bison and bald eagles (no alliteration intended). If the US allows its final scraps of wilderness to be plowed, thinned out and paved over (like Europe has) we'll have lost something priceless.

If anything, I think we should spend enough to clone recently-extinct large mammals and reintroduce them!

New Urbanism and the Integrated Farm

2008-08-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

A few interesting links this week.

Science Friday interviewed David Blume regarding vast efficiency gains and environmental impact reductions that supposedly could be made by integrating agricultural inputs and wastes. It's an important concept that's well utilized in the chemical products industry: one man's effluent is another man's feedstock. I'm skeptical of his numbers, but fully intend to read his book for some more data. It's all very aesthetically and practically appealing if it checks out - especially propagating near-native wetlands as an agricultural commodity!

The Economist had a brief article on the state of American Suburbia. Although proponents of New Urbanism are predicting it's demise, the facts suggest the public are still eager for free standing homes on quarter acre lots. Hopefully we can find a way an environmentally and socially sustainable and practical mix of housing in the future that will suit everyone's tastes.

Electricity without carbon

2008-08-13T18:48:00.000-07:00

Want an overview of all our alternative energy options? Check out Nature's new pub!

Economics of a pyramid scheme

2008-08-12T20:53:00.001-07:00

Here's another essay on the sad state of US science employment.

"But the world that nurtured today’s senior professors, with PhDs earned in four years and appointments as faculty members and lab heads in their 20s, has vanished. What the great majority of today’s young scientists find instead is a penurious decade or more working in university labs, first as graduate students and then as postdoctoral researchers earning a “trainee” wage comparable to what a new liberal arts BA graduate makes."

Too bad I didn't know what I know now before I started all this...

Tipping point

2008-08-08T20:49:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting conversation with some co-workers today at our GSA's coffee bagel donut day.

It's pretty striking to think of the change that the WWII generation lived through. Many of my relatives of that generation were born off of dirt roads traveled largely by horse carts - in what is now suburban/mainline Philadelphia. They've obviously lived through tremendous technological and social changes, but I think the millennials just might live through even more dramatic changes.

At some point we'll advance to true genetic engineering - not the primitive tinkering we've engaged in to date. Some day engineers will be able to draw up totally new creatures on paper and build them just as you would new bridges, ipods or airplanes. By this time, biomedical engineers will have developed all manners of electronic prosthetic implants and people will have accepted them as natural. Citizens will be able to experiment with these technologies in their basements and garages as previous generations did with the PC, and their creations will be unleashed deliberately and accidentally on the world, for better or worse.

The thing about these changes is they're likely to come about very quickly - especially as private corporations and the market pick up on the enabling work of the public sector. This change has already begun to happen with the private space travel industry. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a tipping point within 50 years.

It's easy to picture equally positive and negative results of all this but hopefully, as in the past, most technological advancements will work out for the best. Even the now-nostalgic coal-powered train was once feared as an imposing and unnatural evil (and the potential cause of the Irish potato famine!). Scary new technologies generally turn out to be much less scary than originally predicted...

In the words of one of my labmates, "hopefully it'll be fun."

Highlights from APS

2008-08-01T22:22:00.000-07:00

Just got back from this year's APS meeting. Here are a few highlights.

Old growth chestnut forests, with trees up to 5 feet in diameter, covered much of eastern North America when the Europeans arrived. These trees were wiped out in the centuries since by two diseases tracked in through trade - cinnamomi blight and chestnut blight. Scientists have been working since to generate resistant cultivars through breeding and genetic engineering. The good news is that they're getting pretty close to releasing germplasm to replant these forests! They've additionally identified the environmental conditions that help chestnuts survive these blights - warmth, moisture and lots of sun. Hopefully we can start rebuilding the great eastern forest in a few more years.

Charles Arntzen discussed the opportunity to use greenhouse-contained humanized GMO tobacco to quickly and cheaply produce new medicines. Modern protein medicines are produced in fermenters by engineered microbe and animal cell cultures (not by synthetic chemistry). Companies hoping to introduce a new protein medicine (e.g. a vaccine or cancer drug) have to contend with a 12-15 year pipeline for each new chemical - for discovery, preclinical trials, 3 phases of clinical trials, drug licensing and sale. Each factory is generally dedicated to a single medicine and alone requires 5 years and about 1 billion dollars to build.

Developing plants as medicine factories not only will allow many more drugs to make it to market (and in less time) then more expensive and cumbersome fermenter systems, but also will allow the advance of true personalized medicine. A new study (July 2008 PNAS 105 p10131) documents how plants can be used to make cancer medicine for individual patients. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma occurs when a certain immune cell grows out of control. Although it can be treated by creating antibodies specific to that person's immune cell clone, this process takes almost a year - and chemotherapy has to be initiated within a few months of diagnosis. This new technique would allow a pharma company to engineer antibodies specific to a given patient into plants, grow them, isolate the antibodies and prepare them for the patient in several weeks, avoiding painful, risky chemotherapy!

Barcoding Life is leading an effort to develop a universal technique to identify unknown species.

Lowell Catlett gave a very fun and interesting seminar on the future of technology and society. His main idea built on Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the values held by different generations growing up with different levels of comfort. The basic idea was that our world is approaching a tipping point as the WWII generation dies off (those raised in tough times and expecting to make do with what they have) and the millennials take control (those raised in comfort and self-esteem and expecting to bend the world to accomodate all their aesthetic and ethical preferences).

Roger Beachy addressed the state of biotech research in the public sector. He described how the regulatory environment in the United States and Europe have become suffocatingly overzealous (e.g. you have to go through 3 federal agencies, the USDA, FDA and EPA!). Releasing a new biotech variety requires decades of work and millions and millions of dollars (well beyond the resources of your local professor). It's a real shame since professors and other public sector scientists used to play a critical role creating specialized crop varieties adapted to local growers and minor crops (i.e. anything besides maize, soybeans, wheat and cotton). These regulations don't hurt giant corporations in the private sector since they have massive, experienced staff to deal with regulatory law. He said that India and China have developed a much better system. They use a more appropriate level of regulation and have government programs that help professors pay for and correctly conduct regulatory safety tests. This encourages the production of locally adapted specialty crops in the public domain. He recommended that a similar system should be set up in the states and emphasized that it would be critical to maintain transparency to all involved parties.

Dr. Beachy also told us that the current farm bill had created (but not yet allocated cash for) a new agency on par with the NIH: the National Institute for Food and Agriculture. This would create unprecedented support for important ag and food research. He encouraged us all to support it.

Organic food is starving Africa

2008-07-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa, by Robert Paarlberg. This book, well at least the first few chapters, should be required reading for all agricultural scientists. I highly recommend it.

Paarlberg argues that organic farming is an ineffective, unsustainable technology that is being forced on Africa by nostalgic rich nations, primarily in Europe. He asserts that agricultural science has radically transformed the developed world, and was the foundation of the industrial revolution and all the wealth of North America, Europe and Asia. Food has become so cheap and plentiful in these countries that most of the citizens have completely lost interest in funding any additional agricultural science. While the developed world enthusiastically supports genetic engineering in medicine, they oppose it in agriculture because their aesthetic appreciation of an idealized rural past holds more appeal then further improvements in food availability or quality. Unfortunately, Africa has yet to adopt the basic technologies (e.g. improved seeds and fertilizer) that allow starving peasants the productivity to transition to self-determining citizens with enough income to invest in their farms and families and to weather bad seasons.

It's also interesting how Paarlberg describes fears of modern agricultural technology. People don't oppose these technologies because they have high risks, they oppose them because they don't value the payoff associated with the tiny amount of risk that exists - largely because many of these modern technologies benefit farmers and food processors, but not consumers - although this may change as GMO crops are developed that offer consumers tangible benefits (e.g. strawberries that don't get covered with gray mold in the supermarket and refrigerator).

To put the "risks" of pesticides in perspective, Paarlberg describes a study of exposure in US food supplies. An FDA study compared the highest average daily intake of 38 different pesticides for different population subgroups to FAO/WHO acceptable daily intake limits (ADI). All but 4 of the pesticides were less than 1% of this safety limit, the other 4 were less than 5%. and ADI is defined as a level ten thousand times lower than a level that still does not cause toxicity in animals! As far as GMOs go, we've been eating them every day for decades with still no effect. Compare this to medical risks, where consumers are willing to accept huge side effects and possible consequences because the benefit is longer and better lives not improved farmer profits.

He also points out that our modern synthetic fertilizer agricultural system is, by definition, sustainable as it has continued to improve our yields for over a century. The dust bowl was caused by unsustainable (and by the way, organic) agriculture. Modern chemicals and genetics changed that.

On a more positive note, he points out that the "race to the bottom" never happened. Instead of environmental and human rights standards being driven down by companies moving to countries with low standards, all companies are being forced to meet the expectations of the rich consumers in the developed world. Another victory for globalization!

If agricultural scientists want to advance their purpose, they will need to spend more time communicating the consumer benefits of modern agriculture - to fight global poverty in places like Africa, to produce foods with valuable consumer traits (e.g. with added nutrients and shelf life), and to protect the environment (by maximizing yields while minimizing land use, oil and water use and pollution).