The genetically engineered food labeling initiative once had a 2-1 advantage but an advertising blitz has trimmed the lead to 48% to 40%. Proposition 37 once was ahead statewide by more than a 2-1 margin.View the original article here: Support for California Prop 37 slipping
GMO’s are a touchy topic, mostly because of the affiliations of the people who do the arguing. People who have a say in the issue are usually locavores/environmentalists/foodies who place a lot of importance on food purity or people who like to defend industry and markets.
An ideological bloodbath usually ensues whenever they get down and dirty. So where does the truth lie?
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think people who are highly skeptical of GMO’s are more or less in the wrong. The opposition to GMO’s suffers from a poor understanding of what the technology is and isn’t, an underestimation of their benefits and the problems facing the global food supply, an underestimation of the feasibility and implementation costs of entirely organic farming, and they employ a biased risk assessment of GMO’s that makes them unnecessarily alarmist and causes them to mix up their devils.
View the original article here: GMOs: “Frankenfood” or “Better Living Through Chemistry?”
In a UCL-led study, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, an international consortium of over 180 scientists report the identification of 21 new gene variants associated with cholesterol predictors of heart disease and metabolic disorders.
The findings expand the list of potential targets for drugs and other treatments for lipid-related cardiovascular disease, a leading global cause of death and disability.
View the original article here: International study finds 21 genes tied to cholesterol levels
A review of available scientific evidence about genetically modified (GM) crops clearly indicates their benefits for environmental sustainability and managing drought, according to an article by New Scientist.
“By reducing the need for tilling, for example, GM crops have enabled farmers to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, a small but important contribution to the fight against climate change. And GM promises more: creating drought-resistant crops that will thrive in the warmer climates of the future, for instance,” it points out in the October issue of the magazine.
View the original article here: Sustainable impact of GM crops
View the original article here: Scientists dash hopes for dinosaur cloning – Mother Nature Network
Four young boys with a rare, fatal brain condition have made it through a dangerous ordeal. Scientists have safely transplanted human neural stem cells into their brains. Twelve months after the surgeries, the boys have more myelin — a fatty insulating protein that coats nerve fibers and speeds up electric signals between neurons — and show improved brain function, a new study in Science Translational Medicine reports. The preliminary trial paves the way for future research into potential stem cell treatments for the disorder, which overlaps with more common diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis.
“This is very exciting,” says Douglas Fields, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the work. “From these early studies one sees the promise of cell transplant therapy in overcoming disease and relieving suffering.”
View the original article here: Stem Cells Show Early Promise for Rare Brain Disorder – Wired
By including chemotherapy as a conditioning regimen prior to treatment, researchers have developed a refined gene therapy approach that safely and effectively restores the immune system of children with a form of severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), according to a study published online today in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH).
SCID is a group of rare and debilitating genetic disorders that affect the normal development of the immune system in newborns. Infants with SCID are prone to serious, life-threatening infections within the first few months of life and require extensive treatment for survival beyond infancy.
View the original article here: Researchers Improve Gene Therapy Technique for Children with Immune Disorder – RedOrbit
A series of achievements have stoked excitement about the potential of regenerative medicine, which aims to tackle diseases by replacing or regenerating damaged cells, tissues and organs. A paper in Nature today reports another step towards this goal: the generation of working thyroid cells from stem cells.
Sabine Costagliola, a molecular embryologist at the Free University of Brussels, and her team study the development of the thyroid gland, which regulates how the body uses energy and affects sensitivity to other hormones. Their research shows that thyroid function can be re-established even after the gland has been destroyed — at least in mice. If the same technique could be applied to humans, it would help the roughly 1 in 3,000 babies born with deficient thyroid activity, or hypothyroidism, which can result in stunted physical and mental development.
View the original article here: Hormone-Producing Thyroid Grown from Embryonic Stem Cells – Scientific American
View the original article here: South African consumers win GM labelling victory – DigitalJournal.com
Video: Scientists cloned the first animal in 1996. Since then a number of businesses have grown, including a Texas company which is reproducing horses used in competitions.
View the original article here: Texas firm cloning horses used in competitions – Globe and Mail
Biotechnology is getting into some pretty interesting territory these days. The latest breakthrough comes from Kyoto University where research scientists have, for the first time, created a mouse by using eggs and sperm produced by stem cells alone. The achievement once again shows the remarkable possibilities presented by regenerative technologies like stem cells — but also the unsettling potential for human births in which parents might not be required.
Back in 2011, the same scientists, a team led by Mitinori Saitou, produced healthy mouse pups by using sperm derived from mouse stem cells. But if that wasn’t remarkable enough, they have now shown that it’s also possible to produce viable eggs with stem cells, too. And if just to prove a point, they used their stem cell-derived sperm to fertilize the stem cell-derived eggs to create baby mice.
View the original article here: Breakthrough: Researchers create an animal entirely from stem cells – io9
Confined Field Trial (CFT) of three genetically modified crops may start next year, according to Senior Research Scientist, Dr. Ibrahim Kwasi Atokple.
Scientists at various Institutes of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research are expecting permits from the National Biosafety Committee to enable them proceed with the evaluations. Seeds for genetically modified rice, cowpea and sweet potatoes are to be tested for essential traits that will enhance crop production in the country.
View the original article here: Ghana to begin GMO testing – GhanaWeb
View the original article here: Scientists discover that shape matters in DNA nanoparticle therapy – Phys.Org
Acceptance of genetically modified food in Spain reached such an extent that growers in Catalonia planted a higher proportion of their corn crop with biotech seed than peers in the US.
Spanish growers raised sowings of genetically modified corn by 19.5% this year to a record 116,000 hectares, analysis of Spanish farm ministry data shows.
The sowings, with Monsanto’s MON 810 variety, the only biotech seed commercially grown in the European Union, accounted for some 30% of the Spanish corn crop.
View the original article here: Spanish farmers embracing GM crops
A top scientific panel of the government has favoured introduction of more genetically modified crops in the country under strict regulatory supervision because of the technology’s “transformational potential” in benefiting Indian agriculture.
View the original article here: Top Indian science panel backs GM crops
The belief that DNA samples mark out individuals like an infallible biological barcode is powerful. But the process of tying these genetic “footprints” to an individual can be compromised at key stages of an investigation.
View the original article here: DNA evidence may not be an open and shut case
Claims by a Japanese scientist to have run a clinical trial in which reprogrammed cardiac muscle cells grown from induced pluripotent stem cells were transplanted into six US patients with severe heart failure were apparently inflated or made up.
The ongoing hullabaloo over the controversial Seralini study and questions about the safety of foods made from genetic modified crops has obscured another line of attack on biotechnology by the Hydra of GM critics: claims that GM crops are environmentally unfriendly.
Noted organic scientist Charles Benbrook of the University of Washington recently released a summary of his published study assessing the use of pesticides since the introduction of GM crops in the 1990s. A fierce and respected critic of GM technology, Benbrook claims his data shows that pesticide use has gone up in the US over that time.
News coverage of the Benbrook study was motley and often highly politicized. There was the expected selective presentations from anti-GM journalists such as Tom Laskawy at Grist, Tom Philpott at Mother Jones and at organic publisher Rodale. But more disappointing was the botched context provided by more mainstream sources. Reuters, for example, echoed Benbrook’s views uncritically, blaring in a headline that “GMO crop technology backfires.”
Within days of the first wave of media coverage, the more responsible press weighed in and contextualized analysis emerged. Keith Kloor, the respected Slate contributing writer, offered his analysis of how many reporters misplayed the story out of the gate.
Former UC Davis scientist Steve Savage, who had nice things to say about Benbrook, put the organic advocates claims in a different perspective, and reached a far different conclusion. He viewed the extremely modest multi-year increase in the use of some pesticides—less toxic versions than ones used previously—as a sign of significant environmental progress.
The blog Big Picture Agriculture broke down Benbrook’s numbers and found that pesticide use is actually falling on a yield per acre basis—in accord with what biotech proponents have claimed would happen—but warned that trouble may lie ahead.
Environmental consensus emerging on relative safety of GM crops
Benbrook’s broadside aside, what’s most interesting as the debate unfolds are signs that a scientific consensus is gradually but surely emerging that GM crops do not pose unmanageable environmental threats. Supporters and critics of biotech crops agree that crops bred for a natural resistance to pests harm biodiversity less than conventional crops because glyphosate, the pesticide used in conjunction with GM crops, is less persistent in the environment and less toxic to animals.
As New Scientist noted this week conservationists, once diehard opponents, have sharply reduced their vitriolic opposition. It noted, for example, that in 2004, the International Union for Conservation of Nature called for a halt to the release of GM organisms, but by 2007 it had published a report saying there was “no conclusive evidence of direct negative impacts on biodiversity of GMOs that have been commercially released”.
By 2010, Michael Marshall also noted, the once skeptical US National Research Council Reporter had concluded: “[G]enerally, GM crops have had fewer adverse effects on the environment than non-GM crops produced conventionally”. The same year, a European Union report summarized 10 years of research, saying GM crops “are not per se more risky”.
The evolution in views, Marshall wrote, is largely because “claiming that GM crops are environmentally harmful is difficult to back up.” But what about Benbrook’s claims? The magazine quoted scientists who believe there are more than nits to pick with his methodology and conclusions.
Benbrook made subjective estimates of herbicide use because the data, provided by the US National Agricultural Statistics Service, doesn’t differentiate between GM and non-GM crops, said Graham Brookes of PG Economics, a consultancy firm in Dorchester, UK. Brookes crunched the almost identical data and published a peer reviewed report earlier this year that reached a far different conclusion: GM crops may actually have reduced worldwide pesticide use by 9.1 per cent.
The disparity can also be explained by the unique toxic profile of glyphosate. While traditional herbicides don’t work on all weeds, resulting in farmers spraying their fields multiple times, the far more effective glyphosate, which attacks most weeds, can be sprayed fewer times for the same effect.
Every technology comes with trade offs. Farmers have seen an emergence of weed varieties—22 at current count—that are resistant to glyphosate. That’s a problem in conventional agriculture as well of course. So-called superweeds may signal danger ahead—or as New Scientist suggests, perhaps it’s only a temporary reflection of the current market reality that farmers have a limited menu of GM crops to choose from. With more variety of crops using different pesticides, resistant-specific weeds would be less likely to emerge. The issue then morphs into a debate over patent protections and not the science behind GM technology.
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The GLP carried a provocative article this week outlining the latest twist in the emerging debate over genoeconomics—the nexus of genetics and economics. The prestigious American Economic Review is set to publish a peer reviewed paper co-authored by two economists, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, that argues that a country’s economic well being could be linked to the population’s genetic make-up. Earlier versions of the article have been available on the web for a few years, and it’s stirred quite a controversy.
According to a summary of the paper in Nature: “The paper argues that there are strong links between estimates of genetic diversity for 145 countries and per-capita incomes, even after accounting for myriad factors such as economic-based migration. High genetic diversity in a country’s population is linked with greater innovation, the paper says, because diverse populations have a greater range of cognitive abilities and styles. By contrast, low genetic diversity tends to produce societies with greater interpersonal trust, because there are fewer differences between populations. Countries with intermediate levels of diversity, such as the United States, balance these factors and have the most productive economies as a result, the economists conclude.”
The term “genoeconomics” was coined only a few years ago. Spurred by groundbreaking public policy and social and economic research at the University of Chicago over the past two decades, economists have been expanding their wings, exploring the role of economic factors culture. The subject became mainstream after the bestselling success in 2005 of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by UC economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner. Within a few years, economists began turning their sites on the intersection of genetics and economics.
In May, the Boston Globe ran a fascinating piece, In Search of the Money Gene, featuring some of the young pioneers, Phillip Koellinger, now a professor at Erasmus college, then a MIT student but now a professor at New York University. Within a few years, a plethora of the best and the brightest in economics had jumped into the field—and the fray.
Their basic premise—which is incontestable in its most superficial form—is that genetics underlies many of the things, like risk-taking, patience and generosity that society has traditionally assumed are shaped totally by social and environmental factors. The challenge is to what degree scientists can tease out these genetic factors and what patterns might be found in various genetic groups, such as by sex or countries or ethnic and religious populations. Clearly, it’s potentially explosive stuff.
Leon Neyfakh in the Globe traces the movement—that’s what it has already become—to 1976, when the late University of Pennsylvania economist Paul Taubman published the results of a study in which he followed the financial lives of identical twins. The congruence in their “economic lives”—even in cases in which identical twins had been separated and raised in different cultural situations—was striking. Taubman estimated that between 18 percent and 41 percent of variation in income across individuals was heritable. Spurred by the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2000 and the budding of the field of neuroeconomics (the study of how economic decision-making functioned inside a person’s brain), the groundwork was laid for the emergence of genoeconomics.
It’s fascinating and controversial research. “I’m really worried that if [tracing behaviors to genes] should become possible, it may lead to a lot of things that we don’t want,” Neyfakh quotes Koellinger as saying. “I very firmly believe that information about your genetic makeup is probably the most private thing you could possibly have, and there should be extremely tight protections to make sure that no one gets their hands on this data unless you as an individual explicitly want this.”
No wonder that Ashraf and Galor’s paper is already prompting out-cries from the “we shouldn’t be discussing such things” crowd. The digital ink is not even dry and yet the authors are facing charges of genetic determinism and racism. Geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Harvard University paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman and more than a dozen other Harard professors have written an open letter highly critical of the paper and decrying its potential for mischief: “[T]he suggestion that an ideal level of genetic variation could foster economic growth and could even be engineered has the potential to be misused with frightening consequences to justify indefensible practices such as ethnic cleansing or genocide,” the letter said.
The reaction comes across as overheated. The paper had in fact been peer reviewed by economists and biologists and is not presented as definitive. Ashraf and Oder make a point of noting that they are merely using genetics as a proxy for other factors that can drive an economy, such as history and culture, so charges of determinism appear misplaced, serving mostly to raise the threat of soft censorship.
A taboo invariably emerges when the nexus of genetics and social patterns are discussed—issues engaged comprehensively by GLP executive director Jon Entine in two of his books, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It and Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People.
This is not an endorsement of this latest article in the ‘gene wars’ debate. It is a reminder that genetics is opening wide new doors of inquiry. It would be dangerous to close them because inquiries into human differences have been misused in a pre-genetic era. As we never know where new advances in science will originate we’re far better served by vigorous debate. Let’s hope more researchers pursue this subject and with even more intellectual rigor—and their work is welcomed as a appropriate subject for debate and discussion.
