Year: 2016

Michael Pollan’s approach to food anything but simple, moderate

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

If [Michael] Pollan’s approach were really as simple as his own words –“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” — I might be on board. But Pollan is far from a moderate. He’s an anti-GMO wingnut and a primitive food movement ideologue. In the teaser for Defense, we’re told that the “struggle over what to eat” is “one of the most urgent battles” facing the world. Really? Not hunger or malnutrition? How about demonizing biotech solutions that treat vitamin A deficiency, protect wild fish populations, reduce food waste and allow a kid with a peanut allergy to eat safely? No, apparently our most urgent battle is that we’re not making enough food from scratch. Cue lengthy scene of Pollan making bread from scratch in his home in Berkeley.

Defense is typical Pollan-fantasy fare. The film spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the many ways in which breastmilk is nature’s perfect food (barring any impediments to breastfeeding) and how a tribe in Tanzania is healthier than most westerners (so long as you don’t die in childhood). Best not to spoil a perfect fantasy with troubling facts like infant mortality. . .

For some reason, food crusaders like Pollan. . . continue to cling to the mythology of an idealized past. What’s moderate about valorizing organic produce, when we know that organic is less efficient, more expensive, not any more nutritious or pesticide-free? What’s simple about idealizing breastfeeding and food cooked entirely from scratch, particularly for mothers? Why cling to fantasies about the past without embracing the technologies that might make for a healthier future?

Read full, original post: I watched Michael Pollan’s new fantasy “In Defense of Food” so you don’t have to.

It’s practically impossible to define “GMOs”

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Debates rage over what to do about genetically modified organisms, but we rarely stop to ask a more basic question: Do GMOs really exist? It’s an important question, because no one in this debate can tell you precisely what a GMO is. I’ve come to the conclusion that “GMO” is a cultural construct. It’s a metaphor we use to talk about a set of ideas. It doesn’t map neatly onto any clear category in the physical world. . .

Like porn, GMOs defy strict definition because, like porn, GMOs are a cultural construct with borders that shift with the times. Perhaps the most accurate definition of GMO is social and contextual: Organisms breed in a way that people find threatening. . . This cultural definition doesn’t make for firm borders, but there is a fuzzy collection of attributes — a gestalt — that we can all comprehend. . .

Why does this matter? Because once people understand how mushy the definition of GMOs really is, they start to realize how hard it would be to make substantive change by regulating GMOs.

There are GMOs that reduce pesticide spraying, and GMOs that increase pesticide spraying. There are GMOs designed to serve monoculture, and GMOs made for small farmers with mixed plots. There are GMOs made to work hand-in-hand with herbicide, and non-GMOs made to work hand-in-hand with herbicide. There are GMOs controlled by big corporations, and GMOs given away for free by universities.

The question “to GMO or not to GMO” isn’t really useful. The real question we should be asking is this: How fast, and in what directions, should agricultural innovation advance?

Read full, original post: It’s practically impossible to define “GMOs”

Opposition to GMOs is about corporations, not technology

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

The positions of major NGOs on GMOs and climate change are quite consistent if one considers that the real issue is not opposition to GM technology, but rather to large petro/chemical companies. Large petro/oil companies commonly profit from fossil fuel usage; therefore policies which mean reduced fossil fuel usage are applauded. Large chemical/bio companies benefit from GMO crop technology; therefore, GMO crops are opposed.

Opposition to these corporations is the common element. . .

The explanation lies not in the technology, but in the technologists. . . If the first large-scale transgenic crops had been produced and marketed by public breeders, likely no major NGO would have paid any attention. Who would have heard of GMO-papaya, created by a University of Hawaii plant breeder to address a local disease problem, if not for reaction to large scale Bt and HT corn, soybeans, cotton and canola developed and introduced by Monsanto at about the same time?

It’s true that Monsanto contributed significantly to its own fate. I remember how Robert Shapiro, CEO of Monsanto at the time, bragged widely about the new world of agriculture and food to be dominated by his company. Monsanto was aggressive in buying up seed companies.

I recall asking a contact in Greenpeace Canada in the late 1990s whether they couldn’t distinguish between Monsanto (whose swagger also annoyed farmers) and biotechnology (the products of which many farmers loved). His response was that Greenpeace liked things to be simple – good versus evil, not shades of grey – and the combination of an American chemical company, corporate arrogance and new unknown technology was a perfect target.

Read full, original post: Agricultural Anti-GMO Activism is Probably Not About the Technology At All

Vilsack will attempt to hash out GMO labeling before VT law takes effect in July

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

The food industry, consumer groups and other stakeholders in the debate over how to label products containing genetically modified ingredients are expected to be summoned to the Agriculture Department [in early January] to try to resolve the contentious issue.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said there is growing urgency to reach a compromise with Vermont’s law that would require labels on foods that contain genetically modified organisms expected to take effect in July. If Vermont’s initiative withstands a legal challenge, proponents say it could give momentum to similar measures being considered in more than a dozen other states.

“I’m going to challenge them to get this thing fixed. I would like to avoid making food more expensive,” Vilsack said in an interview from his office overlooking the National Mall. He did not specify who would be invited to the meeting . . .

Some lawmakers hoped to include a ban on state labeling laws in a $1.1 trillion spending package, but it was left out of the 2,009-page bill. . .

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been mulling genetically modified labeling legislation for years, but the bills have failed to gain much traction.

A few House and Senate Republicans have pledged to focus again next year on legislation preventing states from enacting labeling laws. But Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., told reporters there is not enough support in the Senate. . .

“I wouldn’t put real good odds on having something like that done before Vermont would go into effect,” he said.

Read full, original post: Vilsack calls opposing sides of GMO labeling debate to table

Hershey opts out of sugar from GE beets citing consumer demand for non-GMO products

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Increasing concern over genetically modified organisms in farming and food operations has resulted in The Hershey Company’s decision to no longer use the sugar produced from sugar beets in its chocolate.

“As a consumer-centric company, we listen to our consumers and work to respond to their interests and expectations. Non-genetically modified ingredients is something our consumers are telling us is important to them,” said Jeff Beckman, director of corporate communications for The Hershey Company.

According to Beckman, consumer interest in buying products made with non-genetically modified ingredients has caused Hershey to buy mostly non-genetically modified sugar. Only non-genetically modified sugar is used in the production of Hershey’s key brands, such as chocolate bars and milk chocolate “Kisses.”

Hershey’s decision, although impactful, shouldn’t immediately cause alarm at Minn-Dak, explained David Berg, president and CEO of the American Crystal Sugar sugar beet co-op, Moorhead, Minnesota. Both Minn-Dak and American Crystal Sugar’s operations extend into the production of cane sugar, which Hershey uses. . .

Berg reminds consumers that sugar produced from sugar beets is genetically and chemically similar to cane sugar, calling the anti-genetically modified organism movement “purely emotional.” . . .

Although he is aware of consumer concerns and doesn’t dismiss them, Berg said he thinks they are misplaced. . .

Kurt Wickstrom, president and CEO of Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative in Wahpeton, could not be reached for comment on the decision.

Read full, original post: Hershey’s refuses to use ND/MN sugarbeets due to GMOs

While attempt to save American chestnut through cross-breeding flagging, GMO seeds expect to be ready in 3-5 years

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

New Hampshire is home to hundreds of American chestnut seedlings growing as part of attempts to produce a blight-resistant chestnut tree through traditional cross-breeding, but in a few years it might also have some trees that were created through a different process: genetic modification.

“We hope to have 10,000 blight-resistant seedlings ready for distribution” in as little as three to five years, said Allen Nichols, president the American Chestnut Foundation’s chapter in New York state. Seedlings will first go to members of the state chapter, which includes some New Hampshire residents who joined partly to get in line, Allen said. . .

Called the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project, the project is trying to return the majestic chestnut to American forests.

Through the late 1800s, chestnuts made up as much as one-third of hardwood trees in Eastern forests, and were valued for their wood and for the prodigious amount of high-fat, high-protein nuts that they produced. But a fungus carried here on imported Japanese chestnut trees caused a blight that virtually wiped out the species by 1920, killing as many as four billion trees. . .

An alternative attempt to create blight-resistant trees, run by the American Chestnut Foundation, involves crossbreeding American and Chinese chestnut trees. Hundreds of such crossbred trees are being grown on sites across New Hampshire, although it will be at least a decade more before potentially resistant trees are available for planting by the general public. It takes at least six generations of crossbreeding and each generation takes about five years to mature.

Read full, original post: Chestnut trees planting a comeback?

Gene editing propels search for Duchenne muscular dystrophy cure

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

After decades of disappointingly slow progress, researchers have taken a substantial step toward a possible treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy with the help of a powerful new gene-editing technique.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a progressive muscle-wasting disease that affects boys, putting them in wheelchairs by age 10, followed by an early death from heart failure or breathing difficulties. The disease is caused by defects in a gene that encodes a protein called dystrophin, which is essential for proper muscle function.

Because the disease is devastating and incurable, and common for a hereditary illness, it has long been a target for gene therapy, though without success. An alternative treatment, drugs based on chemicals known as antisense oligonucleotides, is in clinical trials.

Three research groups, working independently of one another, reported in the journal Science on Thursday that they had used the Crispr-Cas9 technique to treat mice with a defective dystrophin gene. Each group loaded the DNA-cutting system onto a virus that infected the mice’s muscle cells, and excised from the gene a defective stretch of DNA known as an exon.

Without the defective exon, the muscle cells made a shortened dystrophin protein that was nonetheless functional, giving all of the mice more strength.

The teams were led by Charles A. Gersbach of Duke University, Eric N. Olson of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Amy J. Wagers of Harvard University.

Read full, original post: Gene Editing Offers Hope for Treating Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Study Finds

Scientist who developed CRISPR reflects on year of ethical debate

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Some 20 months ago, I started having trouble sleeping. It had been almost two years since my colleagues and I had published a paper describing how a bacterial system called CRISPR–Cas9 could be used to engineer genomes.

I had been astounded at how quickly labs around the world had adopted the technology for applications across biology, from modifying plants to altering butterfly-wing patterns to fine-tuning rat models of human disease. At the same time, I’d avoided thinking too much about the philosophical and ethical ramifications of widely accessible tools for altering genomes.

Questions about whether genome editing should ever be used for non-medical enhancement, for example, seemed mired in subjectivity — a long way from the evidence-based work I am comfortable with. I told myself that bioethicists were better positioned to take the lead on such issues. Like everyone else, I wanted to get on with the science made possible by the technology.

Yet as the uses of CRISPR–Cas9 to manipulate cells and organisms continued to mount, it seemed inevitable that researchers somewhere would test the technique in human eggs, sperm or embryos, with a view to creating heritable alterations in people. By the spring of 2014, I was regularly lying awake at night wondering whether I could justifiably stay out of an ethical storm that was brewing around a technology I had helped to create.

Read full, original post: Genome–editing revolution: My whirlwind year with CRISPR

Bad at planning? You might be out of touch with your future self

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Lately, scientists have come up with an intriguing hypothesis for why some people fail at long-term planning — they view their future selves as strangers. In fact, the more you view your future self as a distinct entity from your current self, the more likely you are to put off tasks (like saving for retirement) that will benefit you in the long term.

The good news? These researchers have also found tricks that help make us feel closer to our future selves — and could make us better at planning ahead.

Most people don’t feel a perfect continuity with the self they imagine in the future. They put things off — retirement savings, exercise — because they somehow think that this “other” me later on will take care of everything.

What’s more, researchers have been discovering that there’s a link between how we think of our future selves and how we make important choices about our lives. Hal Hershfield, a marketing professor at UCLA, has found that how close people feel to their future selves is related to how much money they’ve already saved up and how much they’re willing to save for the future.

Read full, original post: Why your brain is so bad at planning for the future

Ancient Irish closely related to Middle Easterners, genome analysis shows

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Evidence of massive migration to Ireland thousands of years ago has emerged from the sequencing of the first genomes from ancient Irish humans, carried out by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen’s University Belfast.

Sequencing the genome of an early woman farmer, who lived near Belfast 5,200 years ago, showed her majority ancestry originated in the Middle East, where agriculture was invented.

Sequencing the genomes of three men whose bodies dated from the Bronze Age about 4,000 years ago showed one-third of their ancestry came from the Pontic steppe on the shores of the Black Sea.

The woman farmer had black hair, brown eyes and resembled southern Europeans, according to the researchers.

In contrast, the three men, who were from Rathlin Island, had the most common Irish Y chromosome type, blue eyes alleles and the most important variant for the genetic disease haemochromatosis, or excessive iron retention.

The latter mutation is so frequent in people of Irish descent that it is sometimes referred to as a Celtic disease.

“There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe, from above the Black Sea into Bronze Age Europe, and we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island,” said professor of population genetics in Trinity College Dublin, Dan Bradley, who led the study.

Read full, original post: Ancient Irish had Middle Eastern DNA, study reveals

Can walk in the park improve mental health of city dwellers?

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

In 1865 the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted looked out over the Yosemite Valley and saw a place worth saving. He urged the California legislature to protect it from rampant development. Olmsted had already designed Central Park in New York City; he was convinced that beautiful green spaces should exist for all people to enjoy. “It is a scientific fact,” he wrote, “that the occasional contemplation of natural scenes of an impressive character … is favorable to the health and vigor of men and especially to the health and vigor of their intellect.”

In England researchers from the University of Exeter Medical School recently analyzed mental health data from 10,000 city dwellers and used high-resolution mapping to track where the subjects had lived over 18 years. They found that people living near more green space reported less mental distress, even after adjusting for income, education, and employment (all of which are also correlated with health).

It’s difficult to tell from studies like this why people feel better. Is it the fresh air? Do certain colors or fractal shapes trigger neurochemicals in our visual cortex? Or is it just that people in greener neighborhoods use the parks to exercise more?

Read full, original post: This Is Your Brain on Nature

Potential HIV cure shows promise in trials

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

A small Norwegian biotechnology firm has said it had the first evidence of real promise in a new approach widely considered to be a potential cure for HIV, prompting both cautious optimism and skepticism from experts.

Eradicating HIV has long proven elusive because the virus lies dormant in so-called latent reservoirs deep in the body. That means that although current treatments have transformed the AIDS-causing virus from a deadly disease to a chronic condition by keeping the virus at bay in the bloodstream, they can’t completely clear it out of the body.

One approach thought to be a possible route to a cure, known as “kick and kill” or “shock and kill,” seeks to expose these latent HIV-infected cells so they can be cleared away by the immune system.

Bionor Pharma ASA, one of a number of companies pursuing this strategy, said its method had reduced the size of the latent HIV reservoir by an average of 40 percent across 17 patients.

The Oslo-based company treated patients with its own experimental immune-boosting treatment, called Vacc-4x, followed by three rounds of a drug already proven to awaken dormant cells infected with HIV. That drug, called romidepsin, is marketed by Celgene Corp. for certain forms of blood cancer.

Read full, original post: Norwegian Biotech Company Flags Evidence for Efficacy of “Kick and Kill” Efficacy Treatment

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