For decades there has been a statistical controversy about meat. By statistical I mean it was never a real health issue. Instead, though we clearly evolved to eat it, epidemiologists statistically correlated meat to dying and said therefore we shouldn’t eat it. Though such studies noted down at the bottom that the relationship was not causal, they wanted the public to believe it because they highlighted the causal inference in press releases, and so media rushed to claim that meat causes heart attacks.
A few years ago, epidemiologists at France’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) joined in, using their own meta-analyses to declare that meat was just as hazardous to health as plutonium. And smoking. And mustard gas.
Their methodology was as ridiculous as the result but media outlets, who seem to think IARC is a Supreme Court over scientists, declared the science settled yet again. But as we have seen in the last month, even Lancet and NEJM peer review of epidemiology is suspect. Which means peer review of epidemiology in Environmental Health Perspectives is more like astrologers peer-reviewing each other and declaring astrology is science.
The public is unsure what to trust, because bizarre epidemiological claims have been treated like science fact if they match the political proclivities of journalists. Does hydroxychloroquine work for COVID-19 or does it cause heart attacks? Peer-reviewed epidemiologists claimed both. Journals rushed both to print. Media rushed to endorse both. The only reason they were debunked was because outsiders criticized the work but with so many food frequency questionnaire and chemophobia claims produced each month, there is no time to debunk them all.
Credit: USA Today
Here is what journalists and the public need to know to ground epidemiology, and mouse study, claims. They can exclude benefit or harm, but never prove it. They can find a statistical link that might merit follow-up, if it is scientifically plausible and not ‘Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln’ coincidence. Somewhere along the cultural way journalists stopped understanding what “exploratory” means and that meant the public has been bounced all over the place with fat-free diets, low-carb diets, Blood Type Diets, and now Blood Type COVID-19 effects.
A new observational paper debunks claims that meat increases risks of heart attacks, adding onto one from last year that so enraged the anti-meat academic group True Health Initiative, they tried to get the Philadelphia district attorney to sue Annals of Internal Medicine for publishing it. So an observational study is offsetting a statistical claim.
Which do you believe? Neither yet, that is the whole point. While the meat industry will cheer, and journalists will rush to churnalism up the press release, you as readers should be more critical. The design was fine but the sample size was in the tiny range. Not as small as the papers that set off the gluten-free and vaccines-cause-autism nonsense, but in a post-coronavirus world people should expect more, the same way they stopped buying green alternatives that pretended they were not chemicals and started buying products that work.
The study used 33 middle-aged obese people and a randomized, crossover, controlled-feeding trial is great but two months is not long enough. The metrics for insulin sensitivity were fine. They also used blood pressure, which seems silly since blood pressure is only a risk factor for a risk factor for heart disease, but that is what a whole lot epidemiology papers do so it makes sense in an ‘apples to apples’ way.
The result was that all of the changes in risk factors that claimed to be linked to greater risk of heart attacks were not much different for meat eaters and those without.
The reason to be skeptical is the same reason to be critical of most food claims; it is underpowered. Instead of attacking the methodology, critics will allege that because a beef organization provided funding that the results are tainted but that is Naomi Oreskes-type conspiracy theory, not rational criticism. The authors have also received funding from Big Almond, Big Avocado, and Big Cereal but it would be ridiculous to assume any of those want you to eat more steak. And where does the funding conspiracy end? Should Republicans not trust science funded during the Obama administration? Do Democrats not trust the FDA now? That sounds silly but it is no more silly than claiming that a beef group is telling researchers they’ll get grants only if they produce a positive result.
I have never had a donor tell me I will only get money if I agree to do something. I have had PR groups ask if I might be interested in writing about the science of a product they represent but they have never gotten anywhere because they can’t pass the science test. That is what matters.
Yet the anti-meat side is throwing money everywhere.
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There is an entire industry built up around demonizing meat, just like there is around demonizing science itself. The anti-meat academic group True Health Initiative not only funds detractors, they email bombed the Annals of Internal Medicine Editor-in-Chief to try and get her to block publication of a study showing meat was not harmful, and epidemiologists Walter Willett And Frank Hu claimed their detractors were colluding with the beef industry. Using sexist dog whistling they suggested all the female co-authors on the paper were under the Svengali spell of a male who had gotten funding from a food group to study…sugar.
Who rushed to agree with their misogynist rhetoric? A lot of prominent academic women who have made their careers alleging Big Food conspiracies. True Health Initiative even lobbied the Philadelphia district attorney to launch an investigation into the journal, all because inconvenient science threatened their income stream.
People inside the anti-meat industry are first to charge that everyone else is on the take. But if you look at their organizations and see their corporate sponsors, you can see the reason they believe academics are bought off is simple; they are getting a lot of corporate money to promote the products of their sponsors, and assume everyone else must be also.
NOTES:
(1) On this site, I have even documented how activists game the system by recruiting high-caliber scientists to be lead authors to get into prominent journals before the paper is even written. And then having a cabal of lower-tiered scientists and activists standing by to promote the manufactured result when it gets published.
Hank Campbell is the founder of Science 2.0 and co-author of the book Science Left Behind. Follow him on Twitter @HankCampbell
This article originally ran at Science 2.0 and has been republished here with permission.
Nathan Cofnas is an American philosopher and philosophy PhD Candidate at Oxford University. He is known for his works on the evolution of morality; his debate with Kevin B. MacDonald about Jewish ethnic interests; and his paper titled “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry.”
The following interview is part of a series of conversations of independent scholar Grégoire Canlorbe with natural and social scientists (In addition to his scientific interviews Canlorbe also interviewed a variety of renowned cultural and political figures—such as Greenpeace’s co-founder and former president Patrick Moore and Hollywood stars’ trainer Kamel Krifa).
Nathan Cofnas
Canlorbe has critically studied Kevin. B. MacDonald’s thesis on Jewish ethnic interests—namely that Jews are genetically and culturally predisposed to a combination of high collectivism and high out-group hostility, and in the two last centuries have been serving their perceived ethnic interests through promoting left-wing doctrines like anti-racism.
A retired psychology professor at California State University, MacDonald is claimed to be an anti-Semitic theorist; his controversial and often derided thesis has yet gained traction in some quarters. His critical interest led Canlorbe to have a conversation with Kevin B. MacDonald in March 2019; and then the following interview in May 2020 with one of MacDonald’s most renowned intellectual critics, Nathan Cofnas, who is generally supportive of the theory of genetically based group intellectual differences.
Kevin MacDonald
Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to hear that IQ tests are not measuring intelligence stricto sensu, but only the success in passing IQ tests. Hence so many people supposedly gifted with a high IQ turn out to be complete morons in the real life… lacking subtlety, depth, hindsight, creativeness, polyvalence, humility, alertness, and a critical and independent mindset. As a defender of the research on group differences in intelligence, do you contest such claim?
Nathan Cofnas: The claim that IQ tests only measure the ability to take IQ tests is a common critique, but not among those who are familiar with the relevant evidence. IQ is highly correlated with a range of real-life outcomes both inside and outside the classroom: educational attainment, job performance, health, even your chance of getting into a car crash. This is not surprising when you consider that, as Robert Gordan put it, “everyday life [is] an intelligence test.”
Nonacademic tasks like planning and following a healthy diet, preventing or treating diseases, reading a bus schedule, making a budget, avoiding accidents, or setting up household appliances involve problems that have the same basic form as IQ test questions. People with higher IQs tend to do these things better and more reliably than those with lower IQs.
That being said, the ability that IQ tests purport to measure—so-called “general intelligence”—is not well understood in any detail, and “intelligence” certainly has other dimensions. Success at any given activity requires a constellation of abilities and dispositions. It’s pretty much always an advantage to have more general intelligence, but the people with the highest IQs are not necessarily the most successful or the “smartest” in a colloquial sense. The traits you mention—subtlety, creativity, critical thinking, etc.—are to some extent independent of general intelligence, and can be just as essential.
As readers may or may not know, there are nontrivial differences in the distribution of IQ among racial groups, and these differences go a long way toward explaining racial disparities in socioeconomic status. There is a debate about the role played by genes vs. environment in producing race differences in IQ. We know that environmental factors can influence IQ: better nutrition/healthcare as well as familiarity with abstract, scientific thinking both increase IQ up to a point.
But race differences persist even when environments become as equal as we know how to make them. The 15-point IQ gap between Blacks and Whites in the US has been stable for decades, and has resisted extreme interventions including cross-racial adoption. I have argued that it’s time to start thinking about what the political and ethical implications would be if these differences are influenced by genes.
Grégoire Canlorbe: In contrast to the view that the evolution of moral and juridical norms is best explained by the psychological forces operating within individuals (and facing the trial of natural selection), you argue that the success of an established norm is most often imputable to the magnitude of the power backing the latter. How do you sum up your argument? Does your thesis apply to the transition of Ancient Judaism to Talmudism—a renovated practice of Judaism in which kings and priests would be left behind for the benefit of the masters of exegesis?
Nathan Cofnas: An influential approach in cultural evolutionary theory assumes that beliefs/ideas/practices spread as a result of individuals’ learning biases, natural selection, and random forces. People have learning biases to, for example, conform to the majority or adopt practices that seem useful. Then natural selection favors individuals and groups with adaptive beliefs and practices.
William Durham, Joseph Fracchia, and Richard Lewontin raised the objection that this ignores the role of power in cultural evolution. Maybe cultural evolution is not driven by the aggregate of the individual decisions of agents in a population but by the whim of the powerful. If so, the learning biases that feature in some cultural evolutionary models of the evolution of morality would be largely irrelevant in practice.
Drawing on work by Christopher Boehm, I argued that the evolution of morality probably was driven largely by the exercise of power in ways that undermine cultural evolutionary models that emphasize individual learning biases. Hunter–gatherers in the Pleistocene did not choose what moral rules to follow based on learning biases. Instead, rules were imposed by coalitions of the majority to advance their explicitly represented collective interests. Rule-violators were subject to fitness reducing punishments. This created selection pressures to internalize group norms and, I argue, to be innately receptive to certain rules that were widely enforced across groups.
This is not to deny that we have the learning biases identified by cultural evolutionary theorists. We really are disposed to, for example, conform to the majority and copy prestigious individuals. But these are not always decisive forces in cultural evolution. In regard to morality, the ultimate source of many of our moral values are powerful individuals and coalitions who managed to enforce values that serve their interests. Once a norm becomes culturally entrenched, people conform to it without being aware of its origin. The idea that power influences morality in this way might seem like common sense to many people, but it hasn’t been incorporated into mainstream cultural evolutionary theory because it doesn’t fit with the standard models.
Regarding the transition to Talmudic Judaism, there wasn’t really an option to continue with the old system. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70, and the Bar Kokhba revolt was put down by the Romans in 135. So there was no Temple for priests to operate, and no country for a king to rule. In the absence of strong central authorities, individual choice might have been more important than usual in driving cultural evolution.
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Grégoire Canlorbe: An eminent assertion in the field of evolutionary psychology has been that human individuals are born with an innate capacity for language, which is unique to our species and which emerged as a tool to solve the specific problem of communication among hunter-gatherers. Do you judge this view to be substantially corroborated?
Nathan Cofnas: I don’t know enough about this subject to have an opinion.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Challenging psychologist Kevin MacDonald’s thesis on Jewish ethnocentrism and the “culture of critique” you make the case that the Ashkenazi intellectual brilliance simply leads to Jewish overrepresentation in all intellectual movements (instead of the Jewish perception of their ethnic interests leading them to destabilize their host societies out of genetic and cultural reasons). It seems quite reasonable to hypothesize that those of Jews who are preaching cosmopolitanism—and who are self-identifying as Jews in the process—are indeed acting (at least in part) on behalf of a certain perception of their ethnic interests; but that the aforesaid perception, far from being stipulated in the Torah and genetically influenced, is really contingent: only one of the perceptions possible in the Jewish mindset. Also it seems quite reasonable to hypothesize that the Jewish perception of their ethnic interests—just like the Jewish actualization of their messianism—is actually molded by the Western intellectual climate; and not the other way around.
Nathan Cofnas: It would not be surprising if some cosmopolitan Jews have acted “in part” to advance “a certain perception of their ethnic interests.” But MacDonald makes a much stronger claim, which is that modern liberalism is a Jewish intellectual movement designed (consciously or unconsciously) to promote Jewish ethnic interests. He says explicitly that Jews’ pursuit of their ethnic interests was a “necessary condition for the triumph of the intellectual left in late twentieth-century Western societies.”
This can be broken down into claims about the motivation of Jewish liberals (i.e., ethnocentrism) and the influence they had (i.e., without Jewish activism the intellectual left as we know it would not have triumphed). I can find no compelling evidence that the leading Jewish intellectuals discussed in MacDonald’s book were particularly concerned with Jewish interests. Many of them in fact opposed Jewish interests as conceived by MacDonald (e.g., they promoted multiculturalism for Jews and multiracial immigration to Israel). And the West was on a liberal trajectory long before Jews became influential at all, and liberalism has triumphed in a number of societies where Jews had virtually no influence.
Grégoire Canlorbe: MacDonald also deals with the National Socialism movement in Germany, claiming Nazism to have been a group evolutionary strategy mimicking (what MacDonald believes to be) the very own principles of Judaism—outgroup hostility combined with within-group collectivism—as a response to alleged Jewish parasitism. What are your thoughts about it?
Nathan Cofnas: MacDonald never clearly defines what he means by “group evolutionary strategy.” Sometimes he implies that strategies are shaped by group selection, sometimes that they were (or are) consciously designed. In any case, if National Socialism was a “group evolutionary strategy” it wasn’t a very successful one. Twelve years of National Socialism led to several million German deaths, and the survivors were subject to the largest mass rape in history. The political movements that MacDonald sees as opposed to white interests were largely a backlash against National Socialism, so it indirectly led to multiculturalism and mass immigration to Germany.
Grégoire Canlorbe: When it comes to explaining the “cross-cultural convergence on liberalism,” an occasionally proposed narrative is that people came to acknowledge the objective, universal truth of liberalism—what is plausibly a laicization of the Biblical faith in the march of humanity towards the acceptance of Yahweh and His objective law. Another occasionally invoked factor lies in the extension of peace and the increasingly intricate interdependence of humans within the worldwide division of labor. As the proponent of a “debunking explanation for moral progress,” how do you assess those perspectives?
Nathan Cofnas: I do not believe that there are objective, mind-independent moral truths. We may have the intuition that morality is objectively real, but this is an illusion that can be explained by non-moral-truth-tracking forces such as natural selection. If we find that the cause of our belief that p doesn’t track the truth about p, then the belief loses its justification. Since (in my view) our moral beliefs are satisfactorily explained by naturalistic processes, there is no reason to postulate moral truth.
Some moral realists, however, have argued that cross-cultural convergence on liberalism does not have a naturalistic explanation, so (they say) the best explanation for this phenomenon is that societies are independently discovering the mind-independent moral truth. I have argued that there are good naturalistic explanations for why societies tend to gravitate toward liberalism as they become more prosperous and adept at keeping the peace. Peace makes people more sensitive and averse to violence, and prosperity (and everything that goes along with it) removes many of the incentives for illiberal practices like oppression and fighting.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Besides familiar considerations about the dysgenic trends that are allegedly miscegenation, the proliferation of spiteful mutants, and the higher fertility of low IQ people, the marginalization of war has been claimed to be one of the most psychologically detrimental features of our bourgeois industrial era. Robert Ardrey’s remark on this point deserves to be recalled. “We face in the elimination of war this most fundamental of psychological problems. For almost as long as civilization has been with us, war has represented our most satisfactory means of at once escaping anonymity and boredom while preserving or gaining a measure of security.” Fifty years later is The Territorial Imperative still relevant?
Nathan Cofnas: I think the reduction in war is an overwhelmingly positive development, but it may have some negative side effects. Our innate psychology is adapted to conditions where war and violence were much more common. The desire to bond with groups to fight an enemy used to be adaptive, but may now lead to pathologies.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you.
Grégoire Canlorbe has authored a variety of philosophical and metapolitical articles, and proposed a renovation of Platonic metaphysics as well as a new approach to the influence of Judaism on the “Aryan” mentality. Visit his website or email him: [email protected]
Europe’s quest to confront climate change and achieve carbon neutrality is being undermined by “Big Ag”? That’s not my claim. It’s the latest in a series of attacks on those who question whether the European Union’s Farm to Fork policy recommendations, cobbled together mostly with input from green activist groups, have any chance of achieving its sustainability goals.
The latest attack on conventional agriculture and its embrace of cutting-edge biotechnology comes in a scathing piece last week by openDemocracy headlined: “How the agricultural lobby is sabotagingEurope’s Green Deal”.
Its basic premise: “Big Farming” is forging nefarious alliances to block agriculture’s necessary role in ‘transforming Europe’ into a ‘climate neutral’ economic bloc by 2050. These are serious, sweeping charges…and clearly not true.
Most politicians on the Continent embrace the goal to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next three decades. Agriculture can play a key role.But thoughtful questions have been raised about how to achieve the broad sustainability goals outlined in the F2F policy, as it calls for dramatically increasing food production while scaling up organic farming and slashing synthetic pesticide use, all without any clear plan as to how to address agricultural pests and productivity challenges. The gap between aspiration and action appears huge.
Getting this right is critical as Europe’s global policy influence is huge. Too much is at stake to turn this serious challenge into a political football. Rather than critics of conventional agriculture offering mostly bromides and broadsides, we would all be better served by applying science rather than innuendo and hyperbole.
Addressing food insecurity
Reading the F2F document, I was struck by one insight. Although we occasionally see scenes on the news of malnourished children in distant countries, most people in Europe and the wealthier parts of the world believe that we are well on our way to solving what has for most of human history been life’s primary challenge: producing enough food for a growing global population.
We are told that we already grow enough food to feed everyone, but much of it is wasted—88 million tons of food annually in Europe alone. So, increasing production, food activists say, is itself wasteful. Rather than increasing food production, activists claim, we should create a“sustainable agricultural system.” That claim would be true if people could eat statistics. Green advocates offer no concrete plan as to how we can transport food scraps from western households, restaurants and grocery stores to under-developed countries.
Credit: Reuters
In the real world, capping food production at current levels, which would happen with the spread of organic farming, would work if crops were never lost to pests in the field or spoiled in storage before they got to market, if the massive global challenges of transportation and distribution just magically disappeared, and we assigned a food monitor to every home, farm and restaurant to collect the world’s scraps after we ate our assigned calorie allotment for the day.
Here’s a wake-up call. Food security is emerging as the number one issue of our time. F2F’s central premise is a need to steer farmingin Europe and the world away from conventional methods that rely on high technology tools such as pesticides, genetic engineering, key elements of precision farming.
Yet many people who embrace the same sustainability goals say these recommendations, taken as a whole, are a prescription for disaster. They will not only increase hunger, they will undermine the climate change environmental goals as well.
It’s time we got a reality check on food insecurity, and how we’ve managed to reduce world hunger over the last 90 years. It wasn’t until after World War II and the widespread adoption of agricultural technologies, including the genetic manipulation of plants to create advanced hybrid crops, modern chemical pesticides, and synthetic fertilizer, that everyone in Europe—not just the upper classes—had enough to eat. Cultural memories of hunger grow fainter after a few generations, but as late as the early 20th century, malnutrition was still widespread in Europe.
The UN estimates that 821 million people are suffering from hunger. The number was rising before COVID, but the pandemic is making it even worse. An additional 10,000 children every month are expected to die from malnutrition as farms are cut off from markets and food aid no longer reaches hungry populations.
Malnutrition in India. Credit: 2020 Global Nutrition Report
Reckoning on farming and food
The novel coronavirus may seem like a once-in-a-century disaster, but plenty of food and farm crises roil the world. Most frighteningly, the Middle East, much of India and East Africa are being ravaging by a Biblical scale, crop-destroying locust plague. It threatens some 22 million people in Africa alone with starvation. And only the widespread deployment of insecticides have been able to get it under control.
That’s just one of the many scourges threatening agriculture and biodiversity. Myriad other plant pests, viral, bacterial, and fungal crop diseases, droughts and other weather events threaten agricultural production. And don’t assume this is just happening in Africa and Asia. The Varroa parasite that sickens and kills honeybees is an invasive species that only arrived in Europe in the 1960s before spreading to the United States in the late 1980s. The massively destructive Fall Army Worm which jumped across the Atlantic to Africa a few years ago could reach Europe any moment. So could the locusts.
Add to this the fact that climate change could drastically alter growing conditions, increasing drought and other destructive weather patterns, and Black Swan events, like COVID, are inevitable. Consider these threats in light of the fact that we will need to increase food production between 70 and 100 percent by 2050. This is not a prediction; this is a fact.
We face two challenges: a fast-growing population and a gradual demand for more and higher caloric food in developing countries in Asia and Africa who now subsist on 1,000 calories a day, and won’t be satisfied with their meagre bowls of rice. In other words, they’ll be eating more like Americans and Europeans.
Certainly, we can and should cut food waste. But that’s not a game changer when it comes to making food and farming both more sustainable and more productive. We need to decide whether we are going to address the issue seriously, or if we’re just going to pretend that this perfectly predictable crisis, like the next pandemic, isn’t going to happen.
Which brings us back to Farm to Fork. The broad goal, according to F2F, is to “reduce the environmental and climate footprint of the EU food system in the face of climate change and bidoversity loss.”
It’s an impressive manifesto. As we’d say in America, that broad goal is an ‘apple pie’ aspiration; everyone embraces that. But how to achieve that is where F2F careens off course. But as you drill down into the details, examining it with the eyes of someone who has struggled with sustainability challenges for upwards of 30 years, it is deeply disappointing. The entire strategy, in the end, is predicated on the idea that we can address food security with agricultural strategies that have already come up short—despite their faddish popularity. Most eyebrow-raising: the primary tool to transform European farming is to embrace organic farming and food.
Most significantly, F2F does not provide for the embrace of advanced farming and food technologies, such as transgenic GMOs and CRISPR gene editing of seeds, which offer the only suite of tools proven to increase food production while decreasing the use of unnecessary chemicals.
It even advocates for a labeling system for foodstuffs such as the Nutri-Score system which France is promoting. This kind of “traffic light” labeling scheme purports to regulate Europeans’ plates and is based on a controversial algorithm which denigrates some kinds of foods as unhealthy—slapping a red label on them—while giving others the green light. A number of nutritional allege that Nutri-Score gives an advantage to some categories of foodstuffs over others—for example, French industrial foods over products such as olive oil, one of the building blocks of the healthy Mediterranean diet.
It’s filled with ‘solutions’ that sound great on paper but defy definition, things like promoting a “circular bio-based economy” and developing an “integrated nutrient management action plant.” It’s mostly aspiration and verbiage, demonizing agricultural technology when it should be science based. Environmental activists, say, farmers globally should expand the model pioneered in Europe, where organic farming is almost religion. But as in many cases, below the surface of environmental platitudes the reality is complicated.
Those statistics are shocking to many, as there is a widespread misconception that Europe is on the cutting edge of sustainable farming, when the opposite is the case. Let’s explore why that is so.
Synthetic chemical myths
As part of this new sustainability equation, there are calls to cut conventional pesticide use by 50 percent, regardless of their effectiveness or toxicity. Why? That’s never addressed scientifically. It can’t be over concerns about health or environmental impacts.Many people, including it appears the drafters of F2F, do not even realize that organic farming uses dozens of approved synthetic chemicals and hundreds of natural chemicals.
But aren’t synthetic pesticides, which are most commonly used by conventional farmers, more harmful than natural ones? Many people believe that, and environmental advocacy groups based their fund raising almost entirely around convincing people they should be ‘scared to death’ by chemicals. But the science answer is ‘no’. The most toxic chemicals in the world are natural, and more than 99% of the pesticides we eat are produced naturally.
Science has come a long way since synthetic agricultural chemicals were first introduced in mid-last century. Early, crude chemicals have been phased out. Functionally, the newer ones are targeted, designed to prevent specific plant diseases, kill weeds, and kill or repel harmful insects without harming beneficial ones, and overwhelmingly they do that.
The overall toxicity of synthetic pesticides has decreased steadily over the decades as technology has improved. Despite epidemiological studies finding that some pesticides have deleterious effects, in almost all cases that’s based on levels of exposure that we just don’t encounter in the real world.
Another key driver has been the introduction of crops engineered to express natural insecticides. Insecticide use on American farms has dropped more than 90% since the mid-1990s spurred by the introduction of GMO corn, soybeans and cotton that produce the insect-repelling natural bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).
The sustainable GMO technology is spreading to the developing world. Bangladesh eggplant farmers have cut insecticide use by more than 75% with the introduction of Bt brinjal and India has become a world leader in the production of cotton. The transition from old-line farming techniques to the use of bioengineered seeds has dramatically improved the health of tens of thousands of women and children who do much of the farming.
It’s all part of a global move away from toxic chemical usage spurred by biotechnology innovation that is expected to accelerate dramatically with advances in gene editing that could eliminate some harmful chemicals altogether.
Meanwhile, the organic movement remains wedded to the past. It is addicted to ‘technology’ that is a century old or even older, even when the health and environmental consequences can be catastrophic. Consider copper sulfate, used by organic farmers, particularly in the wine industry, and some conventional farmers to limit fungus on wine grapes. It’s highly toxic.
Although glyphosate accounts for one quarter of herbicides applied by weight to corn, it only accounts for one tenth of one percent of the chronic toxicity hazard associated with weed control in corn. Put another way: The other 74% of herbicides accounted for 99.9% of chronic toxicity hazard in weed control for corn. Or to put it yet another way, taking glyphosate out of the picture could raise the toxicity hazard in corn by 26%, 43% in soybeans, and 45% in cotton. Yet, green groups want to ban it, which directly contradicts the science goals of F2F and the Green Deal.
How to achieve sustainable farming
F2F gets sustainability backwards. Rather than set a goal—sustainable agriculture that results in increased food production while moderating inputs—and figure out what tools best work, F2F elevates facile proposals that only appear to support what it seeks to achieve. Organic agriculture is held up as both a European goal—F2F proposes to more than triple its implementation in ten years—and as a global model, but its bereft of actionable, toxicity-reducing specifics.
Which brings us to the most egregious problems with the Farm to Fork fantasyland. What would happen if a country—say the United Kingdom— fully embraced organic farming, the ultimate goal of Green Deal backers? As there is almost no arable land left in the world, the move to organic would result in a shift in production to the developing world, which would lead to the clear-cutting of forests to create more farmland. In essence, the EU would be exporting to the poorest regions of the world its environmental “externalities”, as economists calls them, all because of its organic fixation.
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That’s exactly the question asked and answered by researchers in a state-of-the-art study published last year in the prestigious journal Nature Communications comparing conventional and organic agriculture and its impact on carbon emissions. As the organic industry itself acknowledges, they found organic farming is as much as 40 percent less productive than conventional farming. Transitioning from conventional farming to organic would pump somewhere between 20 and 70 percent more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than conventional farming.
Just to meet the current demand for food (It’s actually expected to increase steadily in the years ahead) and make up this 40 percent shortfall, the independent research team found the UK would have to dramatically increase its import of food.
“This has an associated impact on the environment, adding potentially unnecessary food miles and greenhouse gas emissions to our food systems,” said Philip Jones, from the University of Reading, one of the authors of the groundbreaking study.
According to a BBC analysis, “due to significantly lower productivity in other countries, this would require five times the amount of land that is currently used for food in England and Wales, consuming 6 million more hectares of land.”
Organic production and greenhouse gases
The questions surrounding F2F multiply exponentially when you consider greenhouse gas emissions. Growing concerns about climate change—and estimates that one third of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture—have helped fuel the market for organic foods, which is perceived as reducing environmental impacts. Many scientists contest those claims.
One of the great early advances of organic farming was the use of compost to promote soil health. But there are sustainability trade-offs. During the process of composting, methane is emitted, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Methane is also released in catastrophic amounts by flatulent cows, the primary generator of organic waste for use as fertilizer on organic farms. Cattle livestock is already blamed for generating nearly 20% more greenhouse gases in terms of carbon equivalency as compared to driving automobiles. The use of organic fertilizer often results in the release of nitrous oxide, a highly potent greenhouse gas.
Organic farmers also rely on tillage far more than their conventional counterparts. Many conventional farmers have switched to no-till, ridge-till, and mulch oil (reduced plowing up of the soil) practices, facilitated by the use of GMO crops, because tillage contributes to soil erosion and the release of greenhouse gasses. No-till practices allow the soil structure to stay intact, protecting beneficial microorganisms, fungi and bacteria. It also conserves water, reduces erosion, and unnecessary labor to ride carbon-belching machinery so common in large scale organic farming. The use of no-tillage farming has grown sharply over the last two decades in the US, in step with the growth in GMO farming, accounting for more than 35 percent of cropland.
One study estimates that using glyphosate herbicide in conjunction with GMO glyphosate-resistant corn and soybean has prevented 41 billion lbs. of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere between 1996 to 2013. A 2016 study by Purdue University researchers found that agricultural greenhouse gas emissions would increase by nearly 14 percent if there were a ban on GMOs in the countries now using them. These figures help explain why the US is so far ahead of Europe in toxic pesticide reduction.
Beyond Farm to Fork: How do we put agricultural sustainability ahead of ideology?
If the supporters of the Farm to Fork strategy take seriously their desire to ‘export’ the organic agricultural model to ‘the rest of the world’, they have to soberly reassess the impact of their carbon-increasing strategy. Boutique ideas like urban farming and local production or reverting world agriculture to more “natural” low-yield, land intensive and disease-vulnerable farming methods—are the fantasies of an affluent society. Organic farming is like an impulse buy, and such thinly supported decision-making has no place in a document that purports to seriously address the enormous challenges facing the world.
Here is my disappointment with the notions promoted by F2F. They don’t address the real complexity of food and farming; they are bereft of nuance and a science-based understanding of environmental and economic tradeoffs. Synthetic chemicals are only part of the sustainability equation. Eco-responsibility means different things to different experts. Greenhouse gas emissions? Productivity per acre? Land usage? Labor intensive vs. mechanized agriculture? These and other factors should be part of a complex, value-based assessment of what constitutes agricultural sustainability.
We could actually begin solving many challenges if we stopped choosing methods based on superficial notions of sustainability and instead looked to outputs and goals. Do we want to feel virtuous or actually solve real-life problems? Modern technology offers solutions, first and foremost: gene-editing that can make plants more resistant to disease, drought, and pests; more nitrogen efficient (meaning they would need less or no chemical fertilizer); safer (peanuts without the harmful proteins that can kill; wheat without the gluten that is deadly to people with celiac disease); healthier (crops with heart-healthy omega 3s). The advantages are endless—if we don’t regulate this promising technology to death.
It may not be fashionable to say this, particularly in Europe, but we will continue to need targeted chemical pesticides. A lot of them. Complemented by a new suite of genetically engineered products based on synthetic biology with little to no toxic footprint. The toxicity of modern pesticides has dropped 98% since the 1960s, and is being reduced every year. Organic pesticides toxicity has dropped zero percent since 1960. Should we be judicious and careful going forward? Yes. But let’s listen to the science here, not to chemophobic scaremongering, when it comes to setting farm production policy.
We need a food system that is efficient, productive, environmentally sustainable, and can provide nutritious food with an increasingly tinier environmental footprint. That can only happen if it is based in reality, not wishful thinking.
Jon Entine is founder and executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project. Jon is also known for his research and writings on corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability, and was US editor for 15 years of the UK-based publication Ethical Corporation. Find Jon on Twitter @JonEntine
As scientists around the world work at an unprecedented pace to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, anti-vaccine proponents are planting seeds of doubt about its safety and effectiveness.
Surveys show that up to nine percent of British people, 18 percent of Austrians and 20 percent of Swiss are wary of or outright opposed to being immunized. The skepticism, unfortunately, is even higher in the US, where a recent survey indicated that just 50 percent of those asked said they would get vaccinated; 31 percent said they were not sure and the remainder said they would not get vaccinated.
The anti-vaccine forces are finding allies in both the developing and developed nations among those who are suspicious of genetic engineering, as any approved vaccine is likely to be a product of biotechnology. Their combined efforts stand to prolong the pandemic by drowning out responsible expert voices that are trying to inform a confused and fearful public.
Ronnie Cummings (right). Credit: Organic Consumers Organization
Led by the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), many organic food activists, who are predisposed against GE crops, have been particularly outspoken about the dangers of vaccines. Ronnie Cummins, the organization’s international director, has said vaccines “are dangerous and that’s why I didn’t vaccinate my kids.” He has peddled the falsehood that the novel coronavirus was leaked from a genetic engineering lab, a move that has allegedly been covered up by a cabal of the US and Chinese governments, Big Pharma and global scientists.
The OCA has specifically targeted immigrant groups in spreading its anti-biotechnology and anti-vaccine propaganda. It was among the activist groups that organized an anti-vaccine meeting in Minneapolis in 2017 that attracted many Somali-Americans. Their anti-vaccine message is blamed for leading to an outbreak of measles among the Somali-American community.
Somali-American Suaado Salah comforts her 3-year-old son, who got measles during an outbreak in Minneapolis. Salah had previously refused the MMR vaccine for them because of false rumors that it caused autism. Credit: Courtney Perry/Washington Post
Kris Ehresmann, infectious disease division director at the Minnesota Department of Health, called the outbreak a “public health nightmare” and indicated she was beyond frustrated with the disinformation campaign by anti-vaccine advocates, who have been working against efforts to contain the outbreak.
Alternative health proponents spread disinformation
Fear of genetic engineering used to produce some vaccines, such as those to fight Hepatitis B, Rotavirus, Ebola and the Human Papillomavirus virus, is a central trope of anti-biotech campaigners. Natural product peddler and major donor to OCA Dr. Joe Mercola links GMOs in food to vaccines to hype the scare factor. He runs what he calls the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC).
In a presentation on NVIC’s website called “Are you Concerned over GM Vaccines?” Mercola laid out his speculative case against biotech vaccines:
If you’ve ever had qualms about eating genetically modified (GM) foods, you’d likely be deeply concerned about receiving a GM vaccine as well .… We don’t know what portion of the GM DNA can be incorporated into our own genome, we don’t know what portion could be inheritable to our children, we also don’t know what happens when the immune system is exposed to DNA that has been recombined in lots of ways that the human body, through the course of time, has never had any exposure to….
Fringe “naturalists” have driven support for vaccines in the US down. A recent Gallup poll indicated that 84 percent of Americans believed it is extremely or very important that parents get their children vaccinated, a significant drop from 94 percent in 2001.
The alternative health movement is now specifically targeting a COVID-19 vaccine with claims that can only be described as bizarre. In a widely shared YouTube video, Dr. Andrew Kaufman, a natural healing consultant, alleged that a vaccine would provide a vessel to “inject genes” into humans by a procedure known as “electroporation.” During this process, an electric current creates little holes in our cells that allow DNA to enter, followed by the insertion of foreign proteins that supposedly generate immunity. As a result, according to Kaufman, the vaccine will make humans “genetically modified organisms.”
These spurious claims about the dangers of vaccines are often paired with political rhetoric designed to stifle policies that promote immunization. “Though a Covid-19 vaccine is likely still more than a year away, according to experts, concerns over mandatory vaccinations have spread throughout the anti-vaxxer community,” wrote Texas Monthly in a recent article. A woman named Jacqueline Belowsky told the publication she was not concerned about the coronavirus and would treat it like she does any other illness, “naturally and not in a panic.” She added that she “will never accept any vaccine no matter how scary the government makes the situation seem. I will refuse no matter what.”
“The anti-vaccine community at large believes vaccines are a tool of government control that make big pharmaceutical companies rich and have side effects that can cause lasting damage,” Texas Monthly noted.
That’s the line pushed by Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit founded by activist-attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a notorious anti-vaxxer. Kennedy said the rush to find a COVID-19 vaccination instead of focusing on treatments is driven by profit, because “fast-tracked vaccines were a sweetheart deal for both biopharma and government.”
While already exerting troubling influence on public opinion, antivax conspiracies could gain political traction in the 2020 elections. Jo Rae Perkins, who has been selected to be the Republican candidate for the Senate in Oregon, winning about 50 percent of the vote in the primary, indicated she would not get any vaccine developed in response to the coronavirus. “I don’t know what they are pumping me full of,” she complained, “I don’t want that crap.”
Among the most popular sources of COVID-19 conspiracy thinking was the May 2020 documentary Plandemic. Before Facebook and YouTube banned the incendiary film, it attracted roughly eight million viewers. It alleges that a “shadowy cabal of elites was using the virus and a potential vaccine to profit and gain power,” relying heavily on discredited scientist Judy Milovits, who claims her research on “contaminated” vaccines has been “buried.” A just-released sequel, Plandemic: InDoctorNation, was preemptively banned by Twitter and Facebook in hopes of preventing a repeat of Plandemic’s viral success.
This onslaught of disinformation is nothing new, vaccine advocates have said. “I’m seeing a very similar pattern that I see when outbreaks of measles happen, noted Karen Ernst, executive director of the parent-led Voices for Vaccines, in an interview with Undark:
These are people who make this part of their self-identity: I’m a mother, I have a natural lifestyle, I refuse vaccines. It’s important to deny things in order for that identity to be protected.
“It’s not surprising a significant percentage of Americans are not going to take the vaccine because of the terrible messaging we’ve had, the absence of a communication plan around the vaccine and this very aggressive anti-vaccine movement,” added Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, which is developing a vaccine for COVID-19.
International opposition
But opposition to a COVID vaccine is not a uniquely American phenomenon. In Africa, for instance, there have been demonstrations against a vaccine as misinformation about its possible side effects and effectiveness infiltrates the continent. Protesters at a vaccine trial in South Africa carried placards that read, “No safe vaccine.” Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI vaccine alliance, told the African Union vaccine conference that anti-vaccine sentiment in Africa is “the worst I’ve ever seen.” In reference to COVID-19, he said, “the rumor mill has been dramatic.”
“Trust in vaccines is generally higher in the developing world where the impact of infectious diseases is more obvious,” said Heidi Larson, Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project. “But here too there could be resistance, particularly if people suspect they are being used as guinea pigs.”
Anti-vaxxers have made headway in Eastern Europe, too. A recent survey conducted in Romania indicated that one third of those surveyed said they would refuse to take a COVID-19 vaccine “under any circumstance.” The poll was taken as the nation’s Parliament debated a bill to make vaccines mandatory. According to Balkan Insight, “The results of the survey come against the backdrop of the growing visibility of the anti-vaccine movement in the country …. Anti-vaccine groups [have] picketed in Bucharest and other cities to denounce what they see as a health hazard and a state abuse of personal freedoms.”
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The refusal by a significant minority of the population to be vaccinated could dramatically impact the course of the pandemic. The fewer people who receive a vaccine, the higher the risk that SARS-COV-2 will continue spreading. In the case of measles, for comparison, herd immunity is achieved when 93-95 percent of the population is vaccinated. For the coronavirus, herd immunity has been estimated at between 60 percent and 80 percent.
As COVID-19 vaccines move into the final stages of testing for safety and efficacy, there will no doubt be a ferocious counterattack by anti-vaccine forces and those strongly opposed to genetic engineering. These efforts, unfortunately, are likely to fan confusion and hesitancy among some segments of the public already distrustful of the government’s response to this crisis. As is the case with other vaccines, some people will pay dearly for listening to the false prophets who claim to know “the truth” about vaccines.
Steven E. Cerier is a freelance international economist and a frequent contributor to the Genetic Literacy Project
When Ralph Fisher, a Texas cattle rancher, set eyes on one of the world’s first cloned calves in August 1999, he didn’t care what the scientists said: He knew it was his old Brahman bull, Chance, born again. About a year earlier, veterinarians at Texas A&M extracted DNA from one of Chance’s moles and used the sample to create a genetic double. Chance didn’t live to meet his second self, but when the calf was born, Fisher christened him Second Chance, convinced he was the same animal.
Scientists cautioned Fisher that clones are more like twins than carbon copies: The two may act or even look different from one another. But as far as Fisher was concerned, Second Chance was Chance. Not only did they look identical from a certain distance, they behaved the same way as well. They ate with the same odd mannerisms; laid in the same spot in the yard. But in 2003, Second Chance attacked Fisher and tried to gore him with his horns. About 18 months later, the bull tossed Fisher into the air like an inconvenience and rammed him into the fence. Despite 80 stitches and a torn scrotum, Fisher resisted the idea that Second Chance was unlike his tame namesake, telling the radio program “This American Life” that “I forgive him, you know?”
In the two decades since Second Chance marked a genetic engineering milestone, cattle have secured a place on the front lines of biotechnology research. Today, scientists around the world are using cutting-edge technologies, from subcutaneous biosensors to specialized food supplements, in an effort to improve safety and efficiency within the $385 billion global cattle meat industry. Beyond boosting profits, their efforts are driven by an imminent climate crisis, in which cattle play a significant role, and growing concern for livestock welfare among consumers.
Gene editing stands out as the most revolutionary of these technologies. Although gene-edited cattle have yet to be granted approval for human consumption, researchers say tools like Crispr-Cas9 could let them improve on conventional breeding practices and create cows that are healthier, meatier, and less detrimental to the environment. Cows are also being given genes from the human immune system to create antibodies in the fight against Covid-19. (The genes of non-bovine livestock such as pigs and goats, meanwhile, have been hacked to grow transplantable human organs and produce cancer drugs in their milk.)
The hornless offspring of a gene- modified bull (L), alongside a horned control cow, are seen at the University of California-Davis
But some experts worry biotech cattle may never make it out of the barn. For one thing, there’s the optics issue: Gene editing tends to grab headlines for its role in controversial research and biotech blunders. Crispr-Cas9 is often celebrated for its potential to alter the blueprint of life, but that enormous promise can become a liability in the hands of rogue and unscrupulous researchers, tempting regulatory agencies to toughen restrictions on the technology’s use. And it’s unclear how eager the public will be to buy beef from gene-edited animals. So the question isn’t just if the technology will work in developing supercharged cattle, but whether consumers and regulators will support it.
Cattle are catalysts for climate change. Livestock account for an estimated 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, of which cattle are responsible for about two thirds, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). One simple way to address the issue is to eat less meat. But meat consumption is expected to increase along with global population and average income. A 2012 report by the FAO projected that meat production will increase by 76 percent by 2050, as beef consumption increases by 1.2 percent annually. And the United States is projected to set a record for beef production in 2021, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Alison Van Eenennaam
For Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal geneticist at the University of California, Davis, part of the answer is creating more efficient cattle that rely on fewer resources. According to Van Eenennaam, the number of dairy cows in the United States decreased from around 25 million in the 1940s to around 9 million in 2007, while milk production has increased by nearly 60 percent. Van Eenennaam credits this boost in productivity to conventional selective breeding.
“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or even a mathematician to figure out that the environmental footprint or the greenhouse gases associated with a glass of milk today is about one-third of that associated with a glass of milk in the 1940s,” she says. “Anything you can do to accelerate the rate of conventional breeding is going to reduce the environmental footprint of a glass of milk or a pound of meat.”
Modern gene-editing tools may fuel that acceleration. By making precise cuts to DNA, geneticists insert or remove naturally occurring genes associated with specific traits. Some experts insist that gene editing has the potential to spark a new food revolution.
Jon Oatley, a reproductive biologist at Washington State University, wants to use Crispr-Cas9 to fine tune the genetic code of rugged, disease-resistant, and heat-tolerant bulls that have been bred to thrive on the open range. By disabling a gene called NANOS2, he says he aims to “eliminate the capacity for a bull to make his own sperm,” turning the recipient into a surrogate for sperm-producing stem cells from more productive prized stock. These surrogate sires, equipped with sperm from prize bulls, would then be released into range herds that are often genetically isolated and difficult to access, and the premium genes would then be transmitted to their offspring.
Furthermore, surrogate sires would enable ranchers to introduce desired traits without having to wrangle their herd into one place for artificial insemination, says Oatley. He envisions the gene-edited bulls serving herds in tropical regions like Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter and home to around 200 million of the approximately 1.5 billion head of cattle on Earth.
Brazil’s herds are dominated by Nelore, a hardy breed that lacks the carcass and meat quality of breeds like Angus but can withstand high heat and humidity. Put an Angus bull on a tropical pasture and “he’s probably going to last maybe a month before he succumbs to the environment,” says Oatley, while a Nelore bull carrying Angus sperm would have no problem with the climate.
The goal, according to Oatley, is to introduce genes from beefier bulls into these less efficient herds, increasing their productivity and decreasing their overall impact on the environment. “We have shrinking resources,” he says, and need new, innovative strategies for making those limited resources last.
Nelore cows, the most common breed in Brazil. Credit: Christopher Borges/Flickr
Oatley has demonstrated his technique in mice but faces challenges with livestock. For starters, disabling NANOS2 does not definitively prevent the surrogate bull from producing some of its own sperm. And while Oatley has shown he can transplant sperm-producing cells into surrogate livestock, researchers have not yet published evidence showing that the surrogatesproduceenough quality sperm to support natural fertilization. “How many cells will you need to make this bull actually fertile?” asks Ina Dobrinski, a reproductive biologist at the University of Calgary who helped pioneer germ cell transplantation in large animals.
But Oatley’s greatest challenge may be one shared with others in the bioengineered cattle industry: overcoming regulatory restrictions and societal suspicion. Surrogate sires would be classified as gene-edited animals by the Food and Drug Administration, meaning they’d face a rigorous approval process before their offspring could be sold for human consumption. But Oatley maintains that if his method is successful, the sperm itself would not be gene-edited, nor would the resulting offspring. The only gene-edited specimens would be the surrogate sires, which act like vessels in which the elite sperm travel.
Even so, says Dobrinski, “That’s a very detailed difference and I’m not sure how that will work with regulatory and consumer acceptance.”
In fact, American attitudes towards gene editing have been generally positive when the modification is in the interest of animal welfare. Many dairy farmers prefer hornless cows — horns can inflict damage when wielded by 1,500-pound animals — so they often burn them off in a painful process using corrosive chemicals and scalding irons. In a study published last year in the journal PLOS One, researchers found that “most Americans are willing to consume food products from cows genetically modified to be hornless.”
Still, experts say several high-profile gene-editing failures in livestock and humans in recent years may lead consumers to consider new biotechnologies to be dangerous and unwieldy.
In 2014, a Minnesota startup called Recombinetics, a company with which Van Eenennaam’s lab has collaborated, created a pair of cross-bred Holstein bulls using the gene-editing tool TALENs, a precursor to Crispr-Cas9, making cuts to the bovine DNA and altering the genes to prevent the bulls from growing horns. Holstein cattle, which almost always carry horned genes, are highly productive dairy cows, so using conventional breeding to introduce hornless genes from less productive breeds can compromise the Holstein’s productivity. Gene editing offered a chance to introduce only the genes Recombinetics wanted. Their hope was to use this experiment to prove that milk from the bulls’ female progeny was nutritionally equivalent to milk from non-edited stock. Such results could inform future efforts to make Holsteins hornless but no less productive.
The experiment seemed to work. In 2015, Buri and Spotigy were born. Over the next few years, the breakthrough received widespread media coverage, and when Buri’s hornless descendant graced the cover of Wired magazine in April 2019, it did so as the ostensible face of the livestock industry’s future.
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But early last year, a bioinformatician at the FDA ran a test on Buri’s genome and discovered an unexpected sliver of genetic code that didn’t belong. Traces of bacterial DNA called a plasmid, which Recombinetics used to edit the bull’s genome, had stayed behind in the editing process, carrying genes linked to antibiotic resistance in bacteria. After the agency published its findings, the media reaction was swift and fierce: “FDA finds a surprise in gene-edited cattle: antibiotic-resistant, non-bovine DNA,” read one headline. “Part cow, part… bacterium?” read another.
Recombinetics has since insisted that the leftover plasmid DNA was likely harmless and stressed that this sort of genetic slipup is not uncommon.
“Is there any risk with the plasmid? I would say there’s none,’’ says Tad Sonstegard, president and CEO of Acceligen, a Recombinetics subsidiary. “We eat plasmids all the time, and we’re filled with microorganisms in our body that have plasmids.” In hindsight, Sonstegard says his team’s only mistake was not properly screening for the plasmid to begin with.
While the presence of antibiotic-resistant plasmid genes in beef probably does not pose a direct threat to consumers, according to Jennifer Kuzma, a professor of science and technology policy and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, it does raise the possible risk of introducing antibiotic-resistant genes into the microflora of people’s digestive systems. Although unlikely, organisms in the gut could integrate those genes into their own DNA and, as a result, proliferate antibiotic resistance, making it more difficult to fight off bacterial diseases.
“The lesson that I think is learned there is that science is never 100 percent certain, and that when you’re doing a risk assessment, having some humility in your technology product is important, because you never know what you’re going to discover further down the road,” she says. In the case of Recombinetics. “I don’t think there was any ill intent on the part of the researchers, but sometimes being very optimistic about your technology and enthusiastic about it causes you to have blinders on when it comes to risk assessment.”
The FDA eventually clarified its results, insisting that the study was meant only to publicize the presence of the plasmid, not to suggest the bacterial DNA was necessarily dangerous. Nonetheless, the damage was done. As a result of the blunder, a plan was quashed for Recombinetics to raise an experimental herd in Brazil.
Backlash to the FDA study exposed a fundamental disagreement between the agency and livestock biotechnologists. Scientists like Van Eenennaam, who in 2017 received a $500,000 grant from the Department of Agriculture to study Buri’s progeny, disagree with the FDA’s strict regulatory approach to gene-edited animals. Typical GMOs are transgenic, meaning they have genes from multiple different species, but modern gene-editing techniques allow scientists to stay roughly within the confines of conventional breeding, adding and removing traits that naturally occur within the species.
That said, gene editing is not yet free from errors and sometimes intended changes result in unintended alterations, notes Heather Lombardi, division director of animal bioengineering and cellular therapies at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine. For that reason, the FDA remains cautious.
“There’s a lot out there that I think is still unknown in terms of unintended consequences associated with using genome-editing technology,” says Lombardi. “We’re just trying to get an understanding of what the potential impact is, if any, on safety.”
Bhanu Telugu, an animal scientist at the University of Maryland and president and chief science officer at the agriculture technology startup RenOVAte Biosciences, worries that biotech companies will migrate their experiments to countries with looser regulatory environments. Perhaps more pressingly, he says strict regulation requiring long and expensive approval processes may incentivize these companies to work only on traits that are most profitable, rather than those that may have the greatest benefit for livestock and society, such as animal well-being and the environment.
“What company would be willing to spend $20 million on potentially alleviating heat stress at this point?” he asks.
On a windy winter afternoon, Raluca Mateescu leaned against a fence post at the University of Florida’s Beef Teaching Unit while a Brahman heifer sniffed inquisitively at the air and reached out its tongue in search of unseen food. Since 2017, Mateescu, an animal geneticist at the university, has been part of a team studying heat and humidity tolerance in breeds like Brahman and Brangus (a mix between Brahman and Angus cattle). Her aim is to identify the genetic markers that contribute to a breed’s climate resilience, markers that might lead to more precise breeding and gene-editing practices.
“In the South,’’ Mateescu says, heat and humidity are a major problem. “That poses a stress to the animals because they’re selected for intense production — to produce milk or grow fast and produce a lot of muscle and fat.”
Like Nelore cattle in South America, Brahman are well-suited for tropical and subtropical climates, but their high tolerance for heat and humidity comes at the cost of lower meat quality than other breeds. Mateescu and her team have examined skin biopsies and found that relatively large sweat glands allow Brahman to better regulate their internal body temperature. With funding from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the researchers now plan to identify specific genetic markers that correlate with tolerance to tropical conditions.
“If we’re selecting for animals that produce more without having a way to cool off, we’re going to run into trouble,” she says.
A Brahman cow at the University of Florida’s Beef Teaching Unit. Credit: Dyllan Furness
There are other avenues in biotechnology beyond gene editing that may help reduce the cattle industry’s footprint. Although still early in their development, lab-cultured meats may someday undermine today’s beef producers by offering consumers an affordable alternative to the conventionally grown product, without the animal welfare and environmental concerns that arise from eating beef harvested from a carcass.
Other biotech techniques hope to improve the beef industry without displacing it. In Switzerland, scientists at a startup called Mootral are experimenting with a garlic-based food supplement designed to alter the bovine digestive makeup to reduce the amount of methane they emit. Studies have shown the product to reduce methane emissions by about 20 percent in meat cattle, according to The New York Times.
In order to adhere to the Paris climate agreement, Mootral’s owner, Thomas Hafner, believes demand will grow as governments require methane reductions from their livestock producers. “We are working from the assumption that down the line every cow will be regulated to be on a methane reducer,” he told The New York Times.
Meanwhile, a farm science research institute in New Zealand, AgResearch, hopes to target methane production at its source by eliminating methanogens, the microbes thought to be responsible for producing the greenhouse gas in ruminants. The AgResearch team is attempting to develop a vaccine to alter the cattle gut’s microbial composition, according to the BBC.
Genomic testing may also allow cattle producers to see what genes calves carry before they’re born, according to Mateescu, enabling producers to make smarter breeding decisions and select for the most desirable traits, whether it be heat tolerance, disease resistance, or carcass weight.
Despite all these efforts, questions remain as to whether biotech can ever dramatically reduce the industry’s emissions or afford humane treatment to captive animals in resource-intensive operations. To many of the industry’s critics, including environmental and animal rights activists, the very nature of the practice of rearing livestock for human consumption erodes the noble goal of sustainable food production. Rather than revamp the industry, these critics suggest alternatives such as meat-free diets to fulfill our need for protein. Indeed, data suggests many young consumers are already incorporating plant-based meats into their meals.
Ultimately, though, climate change may be the most pressing issue facing the cattle industry, according to Telugu of the University of Maryland, which received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve productivity and adaptability in African cattle. “We cannot breed our way out of this,” he says.
Dyllan Furness is a Florida-based science and technology journalist. His work has appeared in Quartz, OneZero, and PBS, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @dyllonline
This article was originally published at Undark and has been republished here with permission. Follow Undark on Twitter @undarkmag
U.S. regulators rejected [Biomarin’s] potentially game-changing hemophilia A gene therapy over concerns it might not really be a one-and-done lifetime treatment.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s rejection late [August 18] means the San Rafael, California-based company will have to complete an ongoing late-stage patient study, likely delaying possible approval till late in 2022.
The infused therapy, called Roctavian, could have freed hemophilia A patients from frequent, extremely expensive infusions of a blood-clotting therapy to prevent dangerous internal bleeding. It had been highly anticipated by doctors, patients and investors.
In a statement, BioMarin said the company and the FDA previously agreed on how much patient testing data the agency required to review the therapy, but in its rejection letter the FDA for the first time recommended Biomarin finish the late-stage study and provide two years of follow-up data on the therapy’s safety and efficacy in preventing internal bleeding for all study participants.
…
Questions about whether it would work for a lifetime or just a few years came amid rumors that Biomarin might set a price tag as high as $3 million per patient. That would top the price for the most expensive therapy ever approved by the FDA… Biomarin has estimated the lifetime cost of current treatments to prevent bleeding at about $25 million, arguing its gene therapy would save far more than its cost.
The clotting disorder hemophilia A may become the third gene therapy that the US Food and Drug Administration approves, joining treatments for a form of retinal blindness in 2017, and spinal muscular atrophy in 2019.
Biomarin Pharmaceutical Inc. has submitted a biologics license application to FDA and documentation of clinical trial results to the European Medicines Agency, with reviews slated to begin early this year at both organizations.
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An article in the January 2 New England Journal of Medicine from a UK research team presents the findings of a phase 3 analysis of continuing success of a phase 1/2 trial (instead of a new phase 3 trial). The hemophilia gene therapy – called valoctocogene roxaparvovec for now – can mean a one-time infusion that replaces the more than 100-150 infusions of clotting factor a patient takes each year, and can also alleviate the painful joint bleeding that is the hallmark of the disease.
The different clotting disorders result from mutations in different genes in the pathway that knits a clot from protein fibrils. Hemophilia A is a deficiency of clotting factor VIII, and is also called classic hemophilia. It accounts for 80 percent of people with the disease. The clotting disorder that threaded through the royal families of Europe was hemophilia B, which is a deficiency of factor IX.
Both hemophilias are transmitted by genes on the X chromosome, and therefore affect only males. One in 10,000 males has hemophilia A, and it arises as a new mutation (rather than being inherited), in about a third of cases.
In 1980, the year that PERC was founded, I spent three months in the Himalayas working on a wildlife conservation project. The purpose was to do wildlife surveys on behalf of the Indian government in the stunningly beautiful valleys of the Kulu region in northern India, among forests of deodar cedar and evergreen oak.
One species of particular interest was a bird called the western tragopan, a large, spotted gray forest pheasant with red plumage around the neck and bright blue skin on the male’s throat. The bird was found only in a few places and thought to be teetering on the brink of extinction.
Though we saw other pheasant species, we never saw a tragopan that year, but some of the people we met knew of the bird, and one even handed me the remains of a tragopan that had been shot for food. I feared it might be the last one. I wanted to come back in the spring when the birds’ mating calls might give them away in the deep bamboo thickets they preferred, but work prevented me.
If you had asked me in 1980 to predict what would happen to that bird and its forest ecosystem, I would have been very pessimistic. I could see the effect on the forests of growing human populations, with their guns and flocks of sheep. More generally, I was marinated in gloom by almost everything I read about the environment.
The human population explosion was unstoppable; billions were going to die of famine; malaria and other diseases were going to increase; oil, gas, and metals would soon run out, forcing us to return to burning wood; most forests would then be felled; deserts were expanding; half of all species were heading for extinction; the great whales would soon be gone from the oil-stained oceans; sprawling cities and modern farms were going to swallow up the last wild places; and pollution of the air, rivers, sea, and earth was beginning to threaten a planetary ecological breakdown. I don’t remember reading anything remotely optimistic about the future of the planet.
Today, the valleys we worked in are part of the Great Himalayan National Park, a protected area that gained prestigious World Heritage status in 2014. The logo of the park is an image of the western tragopan, a bird you can now go on a trekking holiday specifically to watch. It has not gone extinct, and although it is still rare and hard to spot, the latest population estimate is considerably higher than anybody expected back then. The area remains mostly a wilderness accessible largely on foot, and the forests and alpine meadows have partly recovered from too much grazing, hunting, and logging. Ecotourism is flourishing.
This is just one small example of things going right in the environment. Let me give some bigger ones. Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980. Famine has pretty much gone extinct in recent decades. In the 1960s, about two million people died of famine; in the decade that just ended, tens of thousands died—and those were in countries run by callous tyrants. Paul Ehrlich, the ecologist and best-selling author who declared in 1968 that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over” and forecast that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death”—and was given a genius award for it—proved to be very badly wrong.
Remarkably, this feeding of seven billion people has happened without taking much new land under the plow and the cow. Instead, in many places farmland has reverted to wilderness. In 2009, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculated that thanks to more farmers getting access to better fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, the area of land needed to produce a given quantity of food—averaged for all crops—was 65 percent less than in 1961. As a result, an area the size of India will be freed up by mid-century. That is an enormous boost for wildlife. National parks and other protected areas have expanded steadily as well.
Nor have these agricultural improvements on the whole brought new problems of pollution in their wake. Quite the reverse. The replacement of pesticides like DDT with much less harmful ones that do not persist in the environment and accumulate up the food chain, in addition to advances in biotechnology, has allowed wildlife to begin to recover.
In the part of northern England where I live, otters have returned to the rivers, and hawks, kites, ospreys, and falcons to the skies, largely thanks to the elimination of organochlorine pesticides. Where genetically modified crops are grown—not in the European Union—there has been a 37 percent reduction in the use of insecticides, as shown by a recent study done at Gottingen University.
One of the extraordinary features of the past 40 years has been the reappearance of wildlife that was once seemingly headed for extinction. Bald eagles have bounced back so spectacularly that they have been taken off the endangered list. Deer and beavers have spread into the suburbs of cities, followed by coyotes, bears, and even wolves. The wolf has now recolonized much of Germany, France, and even parts of the heavily populated Netherlands. Estuaries have been cleaned up so that fish and birds have recolonized rivers like the Thames.
Global Greening
Here’s a question I put to school children when I get the chance: Why is the wolf population increasing, the lion decreasing, and the tiger now holding its own? The answer is simple: Wolves live in rich countries, lions in poor countries, and tigers in middle-income countries. It turns out that we conservationists were wrong to fear economic development in the 1980s. Prosperity is the best thing that can happen to a country’s wildlife. As people get richer, they can afford to buy electricity rather than cut wood, buy chicken rather than hunt bushmeat, or get a job in a town rather than try to scratch a living from a patch of land.
They can also stop worrying that their children will starve and start to care about the environment. In country after country, first in Asia, then in Latin America, and now increasingly in Africa, that process of development leading to environmental gains has swiftly delivered a turning point in the fortunes of wild ecosystems.
One way of measuring such progress is to look at forests. Forests are still being cut down in poor countries, but they are expanding in rich ones. It turns out that when a country reaches a certain level of income, around $5,000 per person per year, it starts reforesting. This is because people become wealthy enough to stop relying on wood fires for cooking and to use electricity or gas instead. Bangladesh, for example, was desperately poor in 1980 but is now rich enough to be significantly increasing its forest cover today.
Overall, therefore, the number of trees in the world is steadily increasing. A study published by NASA and the University of Maryland in 2018 examined satellite data and found that global increases in tree cover have more than offset losses in tree cover over the past 35 years. This is not just because of growing plantations of timber crops; most of it is natural regeneration. Nor is this happening only in the cold woods of the North; tropical countries are reforesting as well. If you had told me in 1980 that this would happen, I would not have believed you.
In 2013, I caught wind of an interesting study being done by NASA in conjunction with Boston and Beijing Universities. A team of researchers had found a way of measuring the quantity of green vegetation on the surface of the planet using satellite data. It was increasing: There were more green leaves each year. I published an article on this phenomenon of “global greening” and was immediately vilified for my impertinence in departing from the pessimistic script. But in fact it had been clear for some years that the carbon dioxide levels measured on top of a mountain in Hawaii, though increasing year over year, were also rising and falling with the seasons more than they once did, implying there was more growth of green leaves in the northern hemisphere summers.
Credit: Taste For Life
In 2016, the same team published a paper confirming that global greening was occurring and speculating about the cause. Although the press release that accompanied the paper preemptively admonished me—by name!—for taking any comfort from this fact, it quoted the lead author, Zaichin Zhu of Beijing University, saying that the greening over the past 30 years was equivalent to adding a new continent covered in green vegetation twice the size of the United States. Global greening is occurring in all ecosystems, including rainforests, tundras, and croplands, and it is particularly strong in the arid areas of the planet.
By analyzing the patterns of this greening, Zhu and his colleagues were able to tease out why it was happening. Some of it was due to the use of fertilizer, some to increased rainfall caused by the slight warming of the seas, and some to reforestation. But the greatest cause, responsible for 70 percent of the greening, was the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is the raw food that plants use, with water, to make carbohydrates and thence proteins and fats.
This CO2-fertilization effect was well known in principle, thanks to thousands of experiments in laboratories, greenhouses, and the open air over many years. Indeed, commercial greenhouses purchase carbon dioxide to pump over tomato plants to encourage them to grow faster. But this was the first time it had been measured on a global scale. Another study published this year confirmed “the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration as the dominant driver” of a 31 percent increase in global terrestrial gross primary production since 1900.
Global greening means that there is more food every year for caterpillars, antelopes, woodpeckers, and countless other species. It also means we need less land to feed ourselves than we would otherwise have needed by now. Of all the things that I did not expect in 1980, this is surely one of the most remarkable.
More From Less
In the ocean, too, though a lot is still going wrong, my younger self in 1980 would be amazed by what has happened. The amount of oil spilled in the seas has fallen by 80 percent since 1980. This is because shipowners got together and agreed to use double-hulled tankers, and GPS navigation soon made shipwrecks less likely. At the same time, the populations of whales have increased in spectacular fashion. Humpback whales, for example, numbered less than 5,000 in the 1960s. Today there are at least 80,000.
The subantarctic island of South Georgia, which I was fortunate to visit in 2016, now has millions of king penguins, millions of fur seals, and almost a million elephant seals crowding its beaches. These species were vanishingly rare in the middle of the 20th century, after whalers and sealers had devastated the island’s wildlife. In the Arctic, the numbers of walrus and polar bear have similarly rebounded to high levels.
This is partly because of regulatory protection, but also partly due a change in economic incentives. Just like an African subsistence farmer who gets a job in a town and starts to buy chicken in the shop instead of relying on bushmeat, so we in the West have decided that killing wild seals and whales for their meat or their blubber now makes less economic sense than rearing chickens, growing canola, or drilling for oil.
Indeed, in areas where wildlife populations are declining, it is now often caused by competition from recovering species. Fin whales are gathering in such huge aggregations off Elephant Island near the Antarctic Peninsula that they are eating the krill relied on by chinstrap penguins, causing a fall in the numbers of the latter. Humpback whales are eating the prey of puffins off the coast of Iceland, contributing to breeding failures. Killer whales have driven away great white sharks in South Africa. Hedgehogs have disappeared from much of the British countryside because of predation by badgers, whose populations have blossomed.
If only we could stop relying on wild caught fish, they too could recover to fill the seas again. Fortunately, we are making progress here as well. Today, about half of our seafood now comes from farmed fish and shrimp. But to feed these farmed animals, we still need to catch wild fish, and if we can alter that, perhaps with biotech crops, then maybe we can go back to a time when vast shoals of huge tuna and swordfish roamed the oceans.
A fisherman harvests tilapia at a fish farm in Samut Prakan province, Thailand. (Image credit: Sukree Sukplang/Reuters)
Some worry that reporting good news about the environment makes people complacent. I disagree. It makes people realize that declines are not inevitable, that improvements are possible, and that it is worth trying. Take the case of New Zealand’s determination to rid itself of all mammalian predators by 2050. (Apart from bats and seals, no mammals are native to New Zealand, and introduced alien mammals such as stoats and foxes have devastated native wildlife.) This ludicrously ambitious plan is only being contemplated because of the remarkable achievements of New Zealand conservationists on offshore islands, such as Stewart Island and South Georgia, where poisoned rat bait spread by helicopters has rid large, mountainous islands of rodents altogether.
Despite such efforts, the perils presented by alien species are an example of a trend that is not yet going in the right direction, and it is a reminder not to be Panglossian. Invasive species are the biggest cause of extinction of mammals and birds on islands. The brown tree snake, for example, has caused the extinction of 12 bird species on Guam. One innovation that could help in this fight is gene drive, a technology in which a genetic sequence that makes all offspring male spreads through a population for a set number of generations, driving a local population extinct. This could soon be used, for example, to wipe out the alien mosquitoes that have spread the avian malaria that has caused the decline of native honeyeaters in Hawaii, many species of which have gone extinct.
I therefore venture to predict that in 40 years we will have rid the world’s islands of many of the invasive species that have done such harm, using biotechnology. Indeed, we will have gone further and revived several extinct species. Under the banner of Revive and Restore, Ryan Phelan and Stewart Brand have begun exploring how this could be done. First you need to read the full genome of an extinct species from a museum specimen. In some cases this has already been done. The passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914, and the great auk, which went extinct in 1844, have been sequenced in this way.
Second you need to make precise edits to the genome of a closely related species. The new base-editing and prime-editing techniques that are being developed promise to make this possible fairly soon. Third, you need to introduce this genome into embryos to grow a population of individuals, and then you need to reintroduce them to the wild. I expect this will happen in my children’s lifetime.
The Next 40
What else might we achieve by the year 2060, when I shall be 102? Even though there will then be more than nine billion people, it is almost certain there will be larger forests, more wildlife, cleaner rivers, and richer seas, because that is what is currently happening. Most people who deny this, and insist things are getting worse, are simply wrong. The latest example is the “insect apocalypse,” a scare that has been widely reported by the media but is based on inadequate data and ridiculous exaggerations from one or two small-scale studies of dubious value.
There is, however, one thing that worries me, and it is this: Some environmentalists, as steeped in pessimism today as I was 40 years ago, are determined to push policies that actually harm the environment. They want us to farm organically, even though that uses more land and does more harm to the soil than farming with chemicals and biotechnology. They want us to get all of the energy we need from the sun or the wind, even if it means covering the landscape in industrial structures to try to extract energy from extremely low-density sources.
They want us to turn crops into fuel, via ethanol from corn or diesel from palm oil, even though this means pinching land from wildlife. They want us to reject biotechnology and nuclear power, two practices that reduce humans’ environmental footprint. They want us to recycle plastic, rather than incinerate it, which has resulted in an industry of exporting plastic to Asia where much of it ends up dumped in the ocean. In short, their policies are in many cases actually worse for the environment.
I will end with one further prediction. While climate change is real and man-made, it will not cause catastrophe by 2060. The current rate of warming over the past three decades is about half what scientists predicted in 1990: 0.17ºC per decade compared with 0.30ºC. And, as predicted, the warming is happening more at night, in cold areas, and in winter than in the daytime, in warm areas, and in summer. The effect on the frequency and intensity of storms, droughts, floods, blizzards, and other weather events is still so small that it is hard to detect. These continue to happen, of course.
There has probably been a slight decline in droughts, but a slight increase in heat waves. There is less snow cover in the northern hemisphere in spring, more in fall, and no change in winter. Glaciers are retreating, as they have been since the mid-1800s. Most important, deaths from weather events continue to fall steeply as more countries get access to the technology, infrastructure, and information needed to prevent large-scale loss of life in a hurricane, drought, or flood.
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Moreover, if warming continues like this, by 2060 we will still not have reached the sort of temperatures that were standard in the early part of the current interglacial period, when the Arctic Ocean regularly lost all of its ice during the summer. So we are not heading into unprecedented territory. And I suspect that we will ultimately solve the problem by substituting nuclear fusion for fossil fuels long before its consequences turn catastrophic.
I was wrong to be pessimistic about the environment in 1980, and it would be wrong to give young people a counsel of despair today. Much has improved since then, and as PERC’s work has demonstrated for four decades and counting, much improvement from here is not only possible, but likely.
Gene drives may be invaluable tools to control the spread of parasites, invasive species, and disease carriers. But the technology has faced strong opposition from activist groups and some mainstream scientists based on environmental and food safety. Are these concerns valid?
On June 30, some 80 environmental organizations, led by Greenpeace EU, Friends of the Earth Europe and Save Our Seeds, signed an open letter to the European Commission asking for support for a global moratorium on gene drive technology. The advocacy groups claimed that the release of gene drives “poses serious and novel threats to biodiversity and the environment at an unprecedented scale and depth”.
Citing a report by the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility (ENSSER), the coalition wrote:
…in light of the unpredictabilities, the lack of knowledge and the potentially severe negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, any releases (including experimental) of Gene Drive Organisms into the environment be placed on hold to allow proper investigation until there is sufficient knowledge and understanding.
The environmental claims were unsupported by any documents other than the “report” by ENSSER, a controversial group of anti-biotechnology activist scientists co-founded by Gilles-Éric Séralini, best known for his retracted and discredited 2012 paper linking GMOs to cancer in rats.
The European parliament has already supported such a moratorium, an act that echoes EU’s precautionary approach to genetic engineering, transgenic organisms and gene editing. The EU stated reasons include:
Human-induced extinction of species
Irreversible changes to food chains and ecosystems
Loss of biodiversity
Mutations could happen mid-drive, which has the potential to allow unwanted traits to unexpectedly “ride along”
Cross-breeding or gene flow potentially allow a drive to “escape” and move beyond its target population
Unknown ecological side effects Ecological impacts: Even when new traits’ direct impact on a target is understood, the drive may have side effects on the surroundings
What are gene drives?
Recent advances in genetics and synthetic biology, particularly the development of CRISPR gene editing tools, have given scientists a powerful way to address problems created by pests, from mosquitoes to rodents, that vector disease to humans. In classical genetics, genes that offer adaptation benefits to individuals tend to increase their occurrence in the population while genes that reduce fitness tend to disappear.
Gene drives are genetic sequences designed to spread strongly and become present in every individual of a targeted species after a few generations. The genes may offer benefits, be neutral for adaptation purposes, or hinder their carriers’ survival and reproduction potential.Generation after generation, it would relentlessly copy and paste the gene it carried, until the gene and the desired trait was present in every descendant. Because the spread of a trait happens over generations, a gene drive works best in species that reproduce quickly, like insects and rodents
Gene drives are the first genetic constructs that can theoretically affect a population in its entirety, and quickly. It could even lead to the extinction of entire species, as gene drive critics allege. Species extinction has been part of life and evolution for all of Earth’s history. Although the data are fuzzy and contested, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that 150-200 plant, insect bird, and mammal species go extinct every day.
Credit: Entomological Society of America
The likelihood that a gene drive will destroy a species in part or in whole, such as the infected Aedes aegypti mosquito species that carries the Zika, dengue and chingunya viruses and offers no known environmental benefits, is nonetheless daunting to some. On the one hand, gene drives could be used to eradicate disease such as malaria and yellow fever by controlling the mosquitoes that transmit them. On the other hand, critics fear that the technology will open a Pandora’s Box; removing a species that theoretically could resultin what is popularly and controversially known as the “butterfly effect”.
As imagined by MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz 60 years ago, a tiny environmental change—say an extinction of a pest—could dramatically and unpredictably result in unpredictable or even catastrophic consequences (Lorenz imagined a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon).
In the last few years, various groups have called for a global moratorium on gene drives. Such attempts were resisted at the 2016 and 2018 United Nations Conventions on Biological Diversity, mainly due to the strong opposition of many scientists and sub-Saharan African nations hardest hit by disease-vectored pests. Nevertheless, gene drive opponents have gained traction and gene drive research and applications face significant regulatory obstacles across the world (see Genetic Literacy’s Global Gene Editing Regulation tracker for a country-by-country analysis).
What does the scientific evidence say about gene drives and their environmental consequences?
Myth 1: The eradication of a population will destroy the ecosystem
There are over 3,000 mosquito species, likely a fraction of the number of species that have existed over some 100 million years. A handful of these (Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex species) are disease vectors and transmit infections such as malaria, yellow fever, the West Nile virus, Zika, and dengue fever. Mosquito-borne disease account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases and cause more than 700,000 deaths every year. These mosquitoes are mostly invasive in their ecological distributions.
“Ultimately, there seem to be few things that mosquitoes do that other organisms can’t do just as well—except perhaps for one,” reported Nature magazine in a 2010 article “A World Without Mosquitoes.
“They are lethally efficient at sucking blood from one individual and mainlining it into another, providing an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes.” The Nature article concluded that wiping out mosquitoes wouldn’t be a bad thing. In fact, they could restore rather than harm the ecosystem. The same can be inferred for most parasitic insects, which are specialized to a particular host and normally don’t have an extended ecological interactions network.
Aedes aegypti, a mosquito that can transmit dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile fever, chikungunya, eastern equine encephalitis, and Zika virus. Credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Wikimedia commons
Invasive species also cause significant environmental hazards. Cane toads, having no natural predators, are slowly taking over the Australian continent from the northeast. Invasive fish from the red sea are wrecking havoc in the Mediterranean marine ecosystems. Rodents have spread in every conceivable corner of the earth, displacing vulnerable local fauna.
Gene drives might be one of the only ways to contain their spread, protecting biodiversity. They can be a powerful conservation tool that targets only the organism of interest, unlike contemporary pest management techniques such as the use of insecticides that attack all insects indiscriminately, or introduction of natural predators from other ecosystems (that by default disturb the food chains and interactions network).
Myth 2: Gene drives can jump from species to species and spread uncontrollably
It is possible for a DNA sequence to jump from one species to the other through a process called horizontal gene transfer. This theoretically could happen between insects, which appears to lend support to the argument that there is at least a small chance for a gene drive to move from species to species with unforeseen consequences.
The truth is that gene drives can be designed to target a very specific area of the genome, unique for a species. The modern gene drives use the precise CRISPR base editing technologies to spread to the population. In the off chance that the DNA encoding the gene drive will enter the reproductive cells of an individual from the other species, the editing system will have no template to act upon and the gene will be lost. One may argue that CRISPR has a chance for off-target activity, but a gene drive needs maximum efficiency to act as a gene drive. If the CRISPR doesn’t work at 100%, the DNA sequence will be subject to the typical laws of inheritance and will disappear from the genetic pool
Valid concern 1: Gene drives could be used by the military
The ability to introduce genetic information to a wild population, which will spread to every individual, is unfortunately a dual use technology. The technology can theoretically be exploited to make biological weapons, though there’s no indication that such a weapon is or has been developed. As gene drives can work well across many generations and require a large amount of offspring, they are unable to directly harm humans, crops, and farm animals. But a gene drive could be used to enhance the fitness of a crop-eating insect or a disease-carrying rodent.
The solution to this potential hazard is more research (and definitely not a research moratorium). Anyone with the means (which are considerable, so no lone bioterrorists or rogue scientists) and intent to cause harm can already research into such applications and will ignore aUN-imposed technology ban. The research community needs to develop the means to detect and monitor any malicious gene drive release and counter any offensive use.
Valid concern 2: Who decides and who is responsible?
The question on who and how should approve gene drive projects isn’t easy to answer. A gene drive isn’t contained by country borders, and the outdated GMO regulation framework existing in most countries is scientifically outdated and practically inadequate to handle such applications.
Moreover, the technology cannot be monopolized by a few countries or private companies. Each project is different. The approval should be a result of consensus among numerous stakeholders. There should also be a defined way to monitor how the gene drive spreads and how to handle liability claims if there are negative effects.
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With populism growing and fewer people willing to trust the judgment of regulators and scientists, the rhetoric around complex innovations has become increasingly polarized, with both sides stuck fighting a high-stakes battle for public opinion. The issue is complex, and any decisions cannot be left to scientists, state organizations, and companies alone. But it also cannot be left solely in the hands of environmental organizations with little or no understanding of the science and with an ideological agenda that doesn’t necessarily serve the public.
Environmental groups have often resorted to hyperbole as the debate over gene drives has unfolded. At the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, in 2018, a coalition of activists compared gene drives to the atomic bomb and accused researchers of using malaria as a Trojan horse to cover up the development of agricultural gene drives for corporate profit.A handful of small NGOs in the US, collectively known as SynBioWatch, have taken to describing gene-drive researchers as a cabal. The Canadian anti-biotechnology organization ETC Group claims aggressively spreads misinformation on social media, including claims that gene-drive honeybees could supposedly be controlled with a beam of light.
Meanwhile, Florida Keys is experiencing the largest dengue fever outbreak in a decade, with close to 40 cases already documented. The outbreak has led the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District to enter a partnership with UK-based, US-owned Oxitec that could lead to the Keys becoming the first U.S. trial site for genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
With a technology that can prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, it is unethical to peremptorily ban it because it doesn’t fit a few people’s worldview of what is ‘natural’. One may argue that governments and regulators should have no say whether one species should go extinct or not. But one can also question why activist groups in North America or Europe should be able to insert themselves in life and death decisions, preventing initiatives across the globe that could save millions of lives and protect our population’s health and crops, and promote biological diversity.
Kostas Vavitsas, PhD, is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Athens, Greece. He is also a steering committee member of EUSynBioS. Follow him on Twitter@konvavitsas
Geneticist Dr. Kat Arney brings you exclusive excerpts from her new book, Rebel Cell: Cancer, evolution and the science of life, exploring where cancer came from, where it’s going, and how we might beat it.
Many of us think of cancer as a contemporary killer, a disease of our own making caused by our modern lifestyles. But that perception just isn’t true. Although it might be rare in many species, cancer is the enemy lurking within every complex organism. Why? Because cancer is a bug in the system of life. We get cancer because we can’t not get it.
Cancer has always been with us. It killed our hominid ancestors, the mammals they evolved from and the dinosaurs that trampled the ground before that. Tumors grow in pets, livestock and wild animals. Even tiny jelly-like Hydra—creatures that are little more than a tube full of water—can get cancer.
Cancer starts when cells rebel against the social norms of the body, throwing off their molecular shackles and growing out of control in a shambolic mockery of normal life. This is why we can’t avoid cancer: because the very genes that drive it are essential for life itself.
The revolution has raged, on and off, for millions of years. But it was only in the twentieth century that doctors and scientists made any significant progress in understanding and treating cancer, and it is only in the past few decades that we’ve finally begun to make meaningful improvements in survival.
Now the game is changing. Scientists have infiltrated cancer’s cellular rebellion and are finally learning its secrets. Seeing cancer in a new way—as rebel cells adapting and evolving within the landscape of the body—is pointing towards new ways of preventing and controlling cancer in the long term or even driving it to extinction altogether.
Hundreds of COVID-19 vaccine candidates are currently being developed. The way emerging vaccines will be distributed to those who need them is not yet clear. The United States has nowtwice indicated that it would like to secure priority access to doses of COVID-19 vaccine. Other countries, including India and Russia, have taken similar stances. This prioritization of domestic markets has become known as vaccine nationalism.
As a researcher at Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Law Studies, I have been following the COVID-19 vaccine race. Vaccine nationalism is harmful for equitable access to vaccines – and, paradoxically, I’ve concluded it is detrimental even for the U.S. itself.
Vaccine nationalism during COVID-19
Vaccine nationalism occurs when a country manages to secure doses of vaccine for its own citizens or residents before they are made available in other countries. This is done through pre-purchase agreements between a government and a vaccine manufacturer.
On June 15, the German government announced it would be investing 300 million euros (nearly US$340 million) in CureVac for a 23% stake in the company.
In April, the CEO of Sanofi, a French company whose COVID-19 vaccine work has received partial funding from the U.S Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, announced that the U.S. had the “right to the largest pre-order” of vaccine.
At the same time, India, alongside the U.S. and Russia, chose not to join the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, which was launched by the World Health Organization to promote collaboration among countries in the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.
Vaccine nationalism is not new
Vaccine nationalism is not new. During the early stages of the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, some of the wealthiest countries entered into pre-purchase agreements with several pharmaceutical companies working on H1N1 vaccines. At that time, it was estimated that, in the best-case scenario, the maximum number of vaccine doses that could be produced globally was 2 billion. The U.S. alone negotiated and obtained the right to buy 600,000 doses. All the countries that negotiated pre-purchase orders were developed economies.
Only when the 2009 pandemic began to unwind and demand for a vaccine dropped did developed countries offer to donate vaccine doses to poorer economies.
The problems posed by nationalism
The most immediate effect of vaccine nationalism is that it further disadvantages countries with fewer resources and bargaining power. It deprives populations in the Global South from timely access to vital public health goods. Taken to its extreme, it allocates vaccines to moderately at-risk populations in wealthy countries over populations at higher risk in developing economies.
With modern vaccines, there are very few instances in which a single country can claim to be the sole developer of a vaccine. And even if that were possible, global public health is borderless. As COVID-19 is illustrating, pathogens can travel the globe. Public health responses to outbreaks, which include the deployment of vaccines, have to acknowledge that reality.
How nationalism can backfire in the US
The U.S. in notorious for its high drug prices. Does the U.S. government deserve to obtain exclusive rights for a vaccine that may be priced too high? Such a price may mean that fewer U.S. citizens and residents – especially those who are uninsured or underinsured – would have access to the vaccine. This phenomenon is a form of what economists call deadweight loss, as populations in need of a welfare-enhancing product are priced out. In public health, deadweight loss costs lives.
At 2.1 million dollars, gene therapy Zolgensma is the most expensive drug in the US. Credit: Novartis
Secretary Azar has said the U.S. government wants the private sector to invest in vaccine development and manufacturing; if the U.S. sets prices, companies may not make that investment because the vaccines won’t be profitable. This view has been widely criticized. A commentator has called it “bad public health policy,” further pointing out that American taxpayers already fund a substantial amount of vaccine research and development in the U.S. Moreover, as legal scholars have pointed out, there are many regulatory perks and other incentives available exclusively to pharmaceutical companies.
If COVID-19 vaccines are not made available affordably to those who need them, the consequences will likely be disproportionately severe for poorer or otherwise vulnerable and marginalized populations. COVID-19 has already taken a higher toll on black and Latino populations. Without broad access to a vaccine, these populations will likely continue to suffer more than others, leading to unnecessary disease burden, continued economic problems and potential loss of life.
What needs to be done
Nationalism is at odds with global public health principles. Yet, there are no provisions in international laws that prevent pre-purchase agreements like the ones described above. There is nothing inherently wrong with pre-purchase agreements of pharmaceutical products. Vaccines typically do not generate as much in sales as other medical products. If used correctly, pre-purchase agreements can even be an incentive for companies to manufacture vaccines that otherwise would not commercialized. Institutions like Gavi, an international nonprofit based in Geneva, use similar mechanisms to guarantee vaccines for developing countries.
But I see vaccine nationalism as a misuse of these agreements.
Contracts should not trump equitable access to global public health goods. I believe that developed countries should pledge to refrain from reserving vaccines for their populations during public health crises. The WHO’s Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator is a starting point for countries to test collaborative approaches during the current pandemic.
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But more needs to be done. International institutions – including the WHO – should coordinate negotiations ahead of the next pandemic to produce a framework for equitable access to vaccines during public health crises. Equity entails both affordability of vaccines and access opportunities for populations across the world, irrespective of geography and geopolitics.
Insofar as the U.S. can be considered a leader in the global health arena, I believe it should stop engaging in overly nationalistic behaviors. Failure to do so harms patient populations across the globe. Ultimately, it may harm its own citizens and residents, and perpetuate structural inequalities in our health care system.
Ana Santos Rutschman is an assistant professor of law at Saint Louis University School of Law, where she teaches courses in health law, intellectual property, and regulation in the life sciences. In 2017, she was named a Bio IP Scholar by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics, and in 2018 she was named a Health Law Scholar by the same institution. Ana can be found on Twitter @a_rutschman
A version of this article was originally published at the Conversation and has been republished here with permission. The Conversation can be found on Twitter @ConversationUS
In recent years, the notion of an insect apocalypse has become a hot topic in the conservation science community and has captured the public’s attention. Scientists who warn that this catastrophe is unfolding assert that arthropods – a large category of invertebrates that includes insects – are rapidly declining, perhaps signaling a general collapse of ecosystems across the world.
Starting around the year 2000, and more frequently since 2017, researchers have documented large population declines among moths, beetles, bees, butterflies and many other insect types. If verified, this trend would be of serious concern, especially considering that insects are important animals in almost all terrestrial environments.
But in a newly published study that I co-authored with 11 colleagues, we reviewed over 5,000 sets of data on arthropods across North America, covering thousands of species and dozens of habitats over decades of time. We found, in essence, no change in population sizes.
These results don’t mean that insects are fine. Indeed, I believe there is good evidence that some species of insects are in decline and in danger of extinction. But our findings indicate that overall, the idea of large-scale insect declines remains an open question.
The debate
For most scientists, the idea of disappearing insects is a foreboding prospect that would have harmful repercussions for all aspects of life on Earth, including human well-being.
But some scholars were skeptical of the reported insect apocalypse. A number of studies that showed broad declines were limited geographically, focusing mainly on Europe. Typically these studies analyzed only a few species or groups of species.
Some particularly long-running assessments showed that declines in the past 30 years occurred after periods when the relevant insect populations increased. Many insect populations are known to naturally fluctuate, sometimes dramatically.
Many scientists concluded that while the prospect of mass insect losses was concerning, the jury was still out on what was actually happening.
Spotlighting North America
Ecologist Bill Snyder and I thought that the studies suggesting widespread insect die-offs produced an intriguing pattern with important ramifications, but that the evidence wasn’t strong enough yet to draw conclusions. We wanted to examine what was happening in North America, which has an immensely diverse landscape and, surprisingly to us, had not been broadly analyzed for insect declines.
For our study, we decided to use data from sites in the Long Term Ecological Research network, which is supported by the National Science Foundation. The network includes 28 sites across the U.S. that have been studied in depth since the 1980s, and covers deserts, mountains, prairies and forests. With almost 40 years of data collected, we hoped trends at these sites would be a good complement to European insect studies.
Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) larva preparing to pupate, or transform physically into a butterfly. Credit: Matthew Moran
We put together a 12-person team that included six undergraduate students, post-doctoral scholars Michael Scott Crossley and Amanda Meier, and colleagues from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When we finished compiling our data sets, at least some of us expected to see broad insect declines.
Instead, the results left us perplexed. Some species we considered declined, while others increased. But by far the most common result for a species at a particular site was no significant change. The vast majority of our species had stable numbers.
At first we thought we were missing something. We tried comparing different taxonomic groups, such as beetles and butterflies, and different types of feeding, such as herbivores and carnivores. We tried comparing urban, agricultural and relatively undisturbed areas. We tried comparing different habitats and different periods of time.
But the answer remained the same: no change. We had to conclude that at the sites we examined, there were no signs of an insect apocalypse and, in reality, no broad declines at all.
Students from Matthew Moran’s laboratory at Hendrix College sampling insects in a natural prairie in Arkansas using a suction machine. Studies like these help scientist gather long-term data on insect populations. Credit: Matthew Moran
Explaining continental differences
We are confident in our analysis and our conclusion, but a more important question is why our results are so different from those of other recent studies. I see two potential explanations: location and publication bias.
As I have noted, most insect decline papers have come from European data. Indeed, Europe has better and more extensive long-term data than other parts of the world. It is also one of the most densely populated parts of the world – three times higher than North America.
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Moreover, almost all of Europe’s land has been modified for human use. Agriculture is widespread and intense, and cities and suburban areas cover large swaths of the landscape. So perhaps it is unsurprising that Europe has also lost a larger proportion of its wild creatures compared to North America.
Publication bias is not about dishonesty or false results. It refers to the idea that more dramatic results are more publishable. Reviewers and journals are more likely to be interested in species that are disappearing than in species that show no change over time.
Just got rejected from a top journal because our findings aren’t surprising enough. “Are there any counterintuitive or unexpected findings that the authors could highlight more? If not, the paper feels like it’s a documentation of things we would already expect.” #publicationbiaspic.twitter.com/4BuPlWBTaW
The result is that over time, declining species can become overrepresented in the literature. Then, when scholars go looking for papers on animal populations, declines are predominantly what they find.
We selected Long-Term Ecological Research sites for our analysis in part because they had “raw” data available that had not been peer reviewed for publication and were not collected in anticipation of finding declines. Rather, scientists amassed these data to monitor ecosystems and observe trends over time. In other words, it was unbiased data. And because the data sets were so varied, they covered a broad range of species and habitats.
The future of insects
Our study will not be the final answer. As the human population continues to grow and appropriates an ever larger share of the world’s land, water, space and biomass, other species can only retreat and survive with fewer resources. I have no doubt that every time a forest is cut, a prairie is plowed or a field is paved, the world loses some of its animal and plant life.
Quantifying this process will require more monitoring, more conservation biologists working in the field and more awareness of how human actions affect Earth’s biodiversity. But it may be possible that insects, who have survived for millions of years through a great many biological catastrophes, are finding a way to survive our presence too.
Matthew D. Moran is a Professor of Biology at Hendrix College. He has published work on grassland ecology, predator-prey interactions, plant-animal interactions, and insect ecology.
This article was originally published at the Conversation and has been republished here with permission. Follow the Conversation on Twitter @ConversationUS
Even before Jurassic Park became a staple of pop culture in the early 1990s, geneticists have been on the hunt to find preserved dinosaur DNA. With a quick search online, you’ll find a handful of studies published in peer-reviewed journals claiming to have recovered DNA from dinosaur fossils or other preserved prehistoric specimens. The latest such paper was published in the journalNational Science Review back in January.
Though far from conclusive, the research reignited a debate over how long prehistoric DNA can survive, and added to a growing body of evidence showing that it may be possible to bring extinct species back to life.
Making a dinosaur in 3 easy steps?
According to the Jurassic Park novels and movies, the recipe for making a dinosaur is simple enough. All it takes is a Jurassic mosquito that fed on a dinosaur before it got trapped in a substance like amber. The bloody lunch can then carefully be removed from the mosquito, the DNA extracted, sequenced, and any essential blanks filled in with equivalent genes from modern day relatives. With the dino genome completed, and after a few more steps to condense the DNA, it can be implanted into an unfertilized donor egg cell to grow into a ferocious monster or gentle giant.
While the simplicity of the process is essential for the plot of Jurassic Park, finding well-preserved prehistoric DNA is a complicated and hotly debated topic. In the 1990s, several papers reported DNA extraction from a 120-135 million-year-old weevil and out of leaf tissue from a 40 million- year- old extinct tree trapped in amber. Unfortunately, the validity of the findings was called into question when other researchers failed to replicate the results in similar experiments.
Later in 2013, this topic was revisited using more powerful modern instruments and more recent subjects trapped in copal – an intermediate stage in resin hardening into amber. But they too were unable to find convincing evidence of preserved DNA. Instead early findings were likely contaminants or artifacts of the extraction or amplification process.
The problem with DNA
At the time Jurassic Park was released, ideas of prehistoric DNA preservation seemed limited to materials like amber. Back then, fossils weren’t really considered potential reservoirs of DNA since the process of fossilization involves soft tissue decaying, leaving only harder components like bones and teeth. Even those harder materials eventually lose their original composition as old minerals dissolve and are replaced by new ones.
Soft tissue preservation wasn’t widely accepted until Mary Schweitzer and Jack Horner, the the inspiration for Dr. Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park films, identified what looked to be the remnants of blood cells in a T-rex bone. Since then, additional soft tissues like osteocytes, blood vessels, and collagen have been recovered from fossils.
But even if some soft tissue can survive, would DNA also be able to last? In 2012, this question was tested by researchers who took 158 bones between 600 and 8,000 years old to identify the rate of DNA decay. While specific environmental conditions affect the rate of decay, the researchers concluded from their samples that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. In other words, half of the bonds holding DNA together will be broken after 521 years, three quarters after 1042 years, and so on. For dinosaur bones, this means that there should be nothing left besides potential remnants of individual nucleic acids.
Challenging the rules
And yet despite the purported half-life of DNA, Dr. Alida Bailleul and her colleagues published a study in January 2020 indicating the team had found some preserved DNA. The group was studying calcified cartilage in 75 to 67 million-year-old fossils of Hypacrosaurus stebingeri when they identified structures within the cells which were indicative of nuclei based on shape and location. When the cells were isolated and stained with either propidium iodide (PI) or 4′,6′-diamidino-2-phenylindole dihydrochloride (DAPI), both of which bind to double stranded DNA, they found faint yet specific staining indicating the presence of DNA.
Based on the specific localization of the signal and the lack of cell clusters indicating microbial infiltration, the team concluded that contamination was unlikely to be the source of DNA. They hypothesized that cartilage may be better suited to preserve DNA due to its non-porous nature and hypoxic internal environment.
Whether or not the DNA is actually from Hypacrosaurus stebingeri will be very challenging to confirm. To identify if the reported DNA is genuine, it would have to be sequenced. But if the DNA is too highly fragmented, the pieces may be too short: DAPI and PI staining only indicate the fragments are a minimum length of six base pairs. These findings show that the debate surrounding DNA preservation is not over and more work is needed before we fully understand the characteristics of the molecules that make life possible.
Resurrecting lost species
We may never find sufficiently preserved DNA to bring back dinosaurs as written about in Jurassic Park, though that doesn’t mean extinction is the end. The last Pyrenean Ibex died in 2000, but the species was brought back from extinction temporarily in 2009 when a clone of the species was born. Unfortunately, the clone died minutes after birth due to a lung infection. Still, the experiment showed that it may be possible to reintroduce lost biodiversity through de-extinction efforts.
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As of 2018, there were a total of seven documented de-extinction initiatives. Unlike trying to clone dinosaurs, the candidates for de-extinction all have either preserved cell samples, complete DNA sequences, or closely related living relatives that can be bred back or gene edited to an ancestral target species. Jurassic Park might remain entertaining fiction, but a Pleistocene Park or Zoo of Yesteryear could be a reality in the coming years.
Tautvydas Shuipys is a PhD candidate in the Genetics and Genomics Graduate Program at the University of Florida. Follow him on Twitter @tshuipys
A few weeks ago, I took an uncomfortable trip down the rabbit hole of Covid-19 conspiracy theory videos. As a newly minted M.D. who will soon be taking care of patients at a safety-net hospital on the frontlines of an ongoing pandemic, I was especially pained by what I saw. There was the infamous “Plandemic” video, which asserts that a cabal of elite individuals and organizations is using Covid-19 to cement power. There were also false claims that the new coronavirus was created with the backing of Bill Gates, for the purposes of diminishing our freedoms.
Dr. Judy Mikovits from the Plandemic video.
Watching the videos pushed me to think about why so many viewers gravitate toward them — and how best to counter their misinformation. On both of those fronts, my experiences working with patients have taught me valuable lessons.
I’ve learned that conspiracy theorists are often neither malevolent nor unintelligent. Rather, many are afraid of their own powerlessness, and these theories offer them a semblance of control. Believing that Covid-19 was perpetuated by organizations with evil intentions allows conspiracy theorists to affix their anxiety onto a big, bad villain, rather than acknowledge our collective powerlessness against the whims of nature. It helps allay existential fears regarding the indifferent, arbitrary universe we live in. I recognize these emotions because I have seen them time and time again in my patients who are hesitant to heed medical advice, either due to misinformation or due to a reluctance to change their habits.
A second allure of conspiracy theories may be that they allow the believer to lay claim to a secret truth that is not limited by one’s level of wealth or education. Previous studies have demonstrated that lower education levels correspond with increased reliance on conspiratorial explanations, with one concluding that “education may undermine the reasoning processes and assumptions that are reflected in conspiracy belief.” The average Covid-19 conspiracy theorist has probably never received the training needed to interpret complex academic papers. I couldn’t send them one of the dozens of research articles I’ve read over the past months and expect them to grasp its nuances. Yet, if I were to challenge them on their beliefs, it wouldn’t be surprising if they accused me of being the one who hadn’t done my due diligence in researching Covid-19. Conspiracy theories abound because they are easy to understand and fit neatly within their own twisted internal logic. The truth is often hopelessly complicated, but the best lies are simple and easy to believe.
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Fortunately, physicians have a powerful tool to persuade patients on a wide range of issues, from smoking to vaccines: motivational interviewing, a form of conversation therapy used to assess and guide patients in the process of making positive changes. As a part of motivational interviewing, I ask my patients about their biggest barriers to changing their minds or habits; this way, I know which worries or misinformation to try to address. I never resort to guilt-tripping, fearmongering, or ridicule, because those who feel their beliefs are being threatened become even more entrenched in their views.
At the end of every discussion, I reassess my patients’ willingness to change. Most of my patients aren’t willing to give up their deep-rooted beliefs or habits after a single office visit, so I remain open to an ongoing conversation. Over the course of many visits, my patients get to know me and understand that I want the best for them. By fostering a sense of mutual respect, I can often nudge them toward healthy behaviors, like taking their medications or taking actionable steps to quit smoking.
So, now, when I encounter a Covid-19 conspiracy theorist, I approach the conversation like this: I empathize with them, acknowledging that Covid-19 is horrifying and that we all want our loved ones to be safe. I tell them that I don’t trust the conclusions of some of the conspiracy videos on the internet, and I offer to refer them to more trustworthysources of information. Even if they don’t change their mind, they know that I take their concerns seriously. The conversation about Covid-19 will be an ongoing one, but in time, I hope that evidence-based views will win the conspiracy theorists over.
Viral misinformation has proliferated during the pandemic, and many of our friends and families have been afflicted. Fortunately, there is a potential cure: healthy doses of active listening, empathy, patience, and respect.
Yoo Jung Kim is a graduate of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Dartmouth College and a co-author of “What Every Science Student Should Know,” a guidebook for students interested in science, technology and engineering published by the University of Chicago Press. Yoo can be found on Twitter @YooJKim
A version of this article was originally published on Undark’s website and has been republished here with permission. Undark can be found on Twitter @UndarkMag
More than half a million people have died from COVID-19 globally. It is a major tragedy, but perhaps not on the scale some initially feared. And there are finally signs that the pandemic is shuddering in places, as if its engine is running out of fuel. This has encouraged many governments to relinquish lockdowns and allow everyday life to restart, albeit gingerly.
The spread of SARS-CoV-2 has been difficult to predict and understand. On the Diamond Princess cruise ship, for example, where the virus is likely to have spread relatively freely through the air-conditioning system linking cabins, only 20% of passengers and crew were infected. Data from military ships and cities such as Stockholm, New York and London also suggest that infections have been around 20% – much lower than earlier mathematical models suggested.
This has led to speculation about whether a population can achieve some sort of immunity to the virus with as little as 20% infected – a proportion well below the widely accepted herd immunity threshold (60-70%).
The Swedish public health authority announced in late April that the capital city, Stockholm, was “showing signs of herd immunity” – estimating that about half its population had been infected. The authority had to backtrack two weeks later, however, when the results of their own antibody study revealed just 7.3% had been infected. But the number of deaths and infections in Stockholm is falling rather than increasing – despite the fact that Sweden hasn’t enforced a lockdown.
Hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic may end sooner than initially feared have been fuelled by speculation about “immunological dark matter”, a type of pre-existing immunity that can’t be detected with SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests.
Antibodies are produced by the body’s B-cells in response to a specific virus. Dark matter, however, involves a feature of the innate immune system termed “T-cell mediated immunity”. T-cells are produced by the thymus and when they encounter the molecules that combat viruses, known as antigens, they become programmed to fight the same or similar viruses in the future.
Studies show that people infected with SARS-CoV-2 indeed have T-cells that are programmed to fight this virus. Surprisingly, people never infected also harbour protective T-cells, probably because they have been exposed to other coronaviruses. This may lead to some level of protection against the virus – potentially explaining why some outbreaks seem to burn out well below the anticipated herd immunity threshold.
Young people and those with mild infections are more likely to have a T-cell response than old people – we know that the reservoir of programmable T-cells declines with age.
In many countries and regions that have had very few COVID-19 cases, hotspots are now cropping up. Take Germany, which quickly and efficiently battled the virus and has had one of the lowest death rates among the large northern European countries.
Here, the R number – reflecting the average transmission rate – has risen again, below 1 until June 18, but rocketing to 2.88 just days later, only to drop again a few days later. It may be tempting to argue that this could be because the hotspots never got close to the 20% infection that was seen in other regions.
But there are counter examples, albeit particularly in older and immunocompromised populations. In the Italian COVID-19 epicenter in Bergamo, a town where one in four residents are pensioners, 60% of the population had antibodies by early June.
60% of people in Bergamo have antibodies. Credit: Angellodeco/Shutterstock
So how do we explain this? Could people in places with higher rates of positive antibodies have a different genetic make-up?
Early in the pandemic, there was much speculation about whether specific genetic receptors affected susceptibility to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Geneticists thought that DNA variation in the ACE2 and TMPRSS2 genes might affect susceptibility to, and severity of, infection. But studies so far have shown no compelling evidence supporting this hypothesis.
Early reports from China also suggested that blood types may play a role, with blood type A raising risk. This was recently confirmed in studies of Spanish and Italian patients, which also discovered a new genetic risk marker termed “3p21.31”.
While genetics may be important, the environment also matters. It is well known that airborne transmission of droplets is enhanced in colder climates. Super-spreading events in several meat production facilities where the indoor climate is cold suggest this has enhanced contagion. People also tend to spend more time indoors and in close proximity during inclement weather.
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Warm weather, however, brings people together, albeit outdoors. Indeed, June has been uncharacteristically hot and sunny in many northern European countries, causing parks and beaches to be overrun and social distancing rules flouted. This will likely drive contagion and cause new COVID-19 outbreaks in the weeks to come.
Yet another factor is how interpersonal interactions affect contagion. Some previous models have assumed that people interact in the same way regardless of age, well-being, social status and so forth. But this isn’t likely to be the case – young people, for example, are likely to have more acquaintances than the elderly. Accounting for this reduces the herd immunity threshold to around 40%.
Will COVID-19 disappear?
The lockdowns enforced far and wide, combined with the responsible actions of many citizens, have undoubtedly mitigated the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and saved lives. Indeed, in cases such as Sweden – where lockdown was eschewed and social distancing rules were relatively relaxed – the virus has claimed an order of magnitude more lives than in its pro-lockdown neighbours, Norway and Finland.
Stockholm on June 24, 2020. Credit: Stina Stjernkvist/TT/EPA
But it is unlikely that lockdowns alone can explain the fact that infections have fallen in many regions after 20% of a population has been infected – something that, after all, happened in Stockholm and on cruise ships.
That said, the fact that more than 20% of people have been infected in other places means that the T-cell hypothesis is unlikely to be the sole explanation either. Indeed, if a 20% threshold does exist, it applies to only some communities, depending on interactions between many genetic, immunological, behavioural and environmental factors, as well as the prevalence of pre-existing diseases.
Understanding these complex interactions is going to be necessary if one is to meaningfully estimate when SARS-CoV-2 will burn itself out. Ascribing any apparent public health successes or failures to a single factor is appealing – but it is unlikely to provide sufficient insight into how COVID-19, or whatever comes next, can be defeated.
Paul W. Franks is a Professor in Genetic Epidemiology and Deputy Director at Lund University Diabetes Center in Sweden, where I also head the Genetic & Molecular Epidemiology Unit. His research focuses on precision diabetes medicine, with special emphasis on lifestyle interventions. Paul can be found on Twitter @paulwfranks
Joacim Rocklöv is a Professor of Epidemiology at Umeå University. He is engaged in research in the nexus of global health, environmental epidemiology and infectious disease ecology. His lab is focusing on understanding disease etiology, developing predictive models for the purpose of early warning and response systems, and estimating future health impacts in relation to climate and environmental change guiding climate action. Joacim can be found on Twitter @JoacimRocklov
A version of this article was originally published at the Conversation and has been republished here with permission. The Conversation can be found on Twitter @ConversationUs
Anti-biotech groups in the Philippines are trying to link the COVID-19 pandemic to Golden Rice as part of a week-long effort to derail commercialization of the nutritionally enhanced staple food. Critics, led by Stop Golden Rice Network (SGRN), say the approval is part of an onslaught to advance “corporate control in food and agriculture.”
According to Cris Panerio, national coordinator of farmer-scientist group MASIPAG:
The pandemic exposed what we feared a long time ago – that our food system has become so flawed and weak, it will inevitably fail to sustain our needs. … There are enough reasons to safely conclude that multinational corporations are exploiting the dire situation of our food system during COVID-19 as a pretext for further greedy gains.
The new campaign is an attempt to derail the roll-out of Golden Rice, which is expected later this year. Food safety regulators in the Philippines finally approved the crop for human consumption on December 18 of last year after two decades of deliberations, protests and missteps by scientists. According to the International Rice Research Institute:
After rigorous biosafety assessment, Golden Rice ‘has been found to be as safe as conventional rice’ by the Philippine Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Plant Industry. The biosafety permit, addressed to the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) and International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), details the approval of GR2E Golden Rice for direct use as food and feed, or for processing (FFP).
After the approval, Greenpeace claimed that Golden Rice violated the ‘precautionary principle,’ which stresses the hypothetical risks and minimizes the demonstrated benefits of consuming the crop. Moreover, there is no evidence to support the allegation that Golden Rice—approved well before the international spread of COVID-19—is being advanced as a way to exploit the current crisis.
Rice that saves lives
Golden Rice contains high levels of beta carotene, a precursor to vitamin A, and was developed to combat severe nutrient deficiencies that can lead to blindness, anemia and weakened immune function that boosts the severity of infectious diseases—jeopardizing the health of millions of impoverished people. As the GLP reported last November:
[R]oughly 250 million people, mostly preschool children in southeast Asia, are vitamin A deficient. Between 2
50,000 and 500,000 of them go blind every year—and half die within 12 months of losing their sight. Genetically engineered Golden Rice …. could alleviate much of this suffering without otherwise harming human health or the environment, according to a mountain of studies.
SGRN and its allies nonetheless oppose the introduction of Golden Rice, labeling it a “Trojan horse” that will allow biotech giants like Bayer to expand their footprint in the developing world. The three scientists who developed and steered Golden Rice into production—Adrian Dubock, Ingo Potrykus, and Peter Beyer—argued in a recent GLP article that such opposition is a last, desperate attempt to salvage the anti-GMO movement, which has receded as one country after another has embraced transgenics to reduce agricultural chemical use, increase yield and, in the case of Golden Rice and a few other crops, enhance nutrition:
Golden Rice is created to deliver a consumer benefit, it is not for profit—for multinational agribusiness or anyone else; the technology originated in the public sector and is being delivered through the public sector. It is entirely altruistic in its motivations; which activists find impossible to accept. So, the activists believe suspicion against Golden Rice has to be amplified, Golden Rice has to be stopped: “If we lose the Golden Rice battle, we lose the GMO war.”
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Although Bayer and Syngenta helped develop the enhanced rice variety, they don’t stand to profit once the crop is approved, as science writer Matt Ridley pointed out in January, Potrykus and Beyer insisted that the technology be donated free to benefit children suffering from vitamin A deficiency.
A crowd breaking through a fence to destroy an experimental field of genetically modified golden rice in the Philippines. Credit: Philippine Department of Agriculture Regional Field Unit 5
Claims of corporate subterfuge are further undermined by the fact that the Philippines has grown insect-resistant GMO Bt corn for 17 years—which means biotech companies are clearly not using Golden Rice to sneak GMOs into the country. Moreover, high-profile legislators not only supported the release of Golden Rice, they have endorsed simplified regulations that will enable the use of new breeding techniques including CRISPR gene editing. For these reasons the USDA has called the Philippines a “regional biotechnology leader.”
This latest campaign against Golden Rice is yet one more installment in the long-running soap opera that pits corporate villains against helpless farmers, and now also illogically throws the Covid-19 crisis into the mix.
But neither this lurid stagecraft nor the apocalyptic rhetoric of the protesters has anything to do with Golden Rice, which is governed by the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, not a corporation, and which will be given away free to small landowner farmers who may plant it or not as a matter of their own individual choice. Nobody is holding a gun to their heads and nobody’s rights are being infringed by the planting or use of Golden Rice.
Editor’s note: Adrian Dubock, a member of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, offered these comments in an email in reaction to the latest maneuver by activist groups to derail commercialization of nutritionally enhanced rice in the Philippines.
*****
The people organizing the campaign against Golden Rice are knowingly misleading the Philippine people. They are also damaging the interests of Philippine mothers and Philippine children. Golden Rice has nothing to do with agribusiness companies, as claimed – it is a public sector project for public health! Indeed, as science reporter Matt Ridley noted in a report in Genetic Literacy Project: “Given the scale of human suffering Golden Rice could address, there may be no better example of a purely philanthropic project in the whole of human history. Yet some misguided environmental activists still oppose Golden Rice to this day.”
Thirty percent of young children in the Philippines lack sufficient vitamin A. The deficiency reduces natural immunity against common childhood diseases, including pneumonia, malaria and diarrhea, so that they kill. A source of vitamin A reduces child mortality by 23-34%, and 50-76% in the case of measles. Vitamin A deficiency is also the leading cause of blindness in children. White rice is carbohydrate, excellent as an energy source, but contains nothing else. Consumption of a small amount of Golden Rice is a proven source of vitamin A. Golden Rice will cost no more than white rice, and it is safe.
Since the 1940s, a healthy population has been a top objective of Philippine governments. The Philippine Rice Research Institute is planning to introduce Golden Rice to improve the public health of Pinoys. Philippine farmers have benefited for decades from the work of the Philippines highly skilled regulators, and Philippine families will soon too when Golden Rice is available for them to grown and consume.
Opposing the use of Golden Rice is hugely inappropriate, especially during a pandemic. Covid-19 will very seriously impact young children and mothers, already marginalized before the virus began to spread. Especially for those families who eat a lot of rice and little else, their vulnerability to all the Covid-19 circumstances, including indirect ones, is extreme. Vitamin A deficiency already kills more than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, Ebola and, incidentally, Covid-19.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is devoted to aiding national efforts to improve the health, nutrition, education, and general welfare of children. On April 3, UNICEF called for swift global action to prevent this health crisis becoming a child-rights crisis, noting:
….overburdened health systems threaten more than those who fall ill with COVID-19.
In the poorest parts of the world, children in need of basic yet essential services – including those to protect against diseases like pneumonia, malaria and diarrhea – are at risk of not receiving them. As health systems stretch, infants and children will lose their lives to preventable causes.
UNICEF calls on governments and partners [MASIPAG supporters please take note] to sustain life-saving maternal, newborn and child health services. This means continuing to meet the urgent needs posed by COVID-19, while carrying forward critical health interventions, like funding for vaccinations, that ensure children survive and thrive. Our response to COVID-19 must be one that strengthens health systems in the long run.
Getting Golden Rice registered and in use quickly could start to address vitamin A deficiency, which is even more important now in the time of Covid-19.
Golden Rice exists, and with very little regulatory decision, can be made available NOW to help those with limited dietary diversity, and where rice is the staple crop, fight infection for free, with very little cultural change.
Adrian Dubock, 6 August 2020
Cameron J. English is the GLP’s managing editor. BIO. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish
CRISPR could enable farmers to produce more beef from fewer cattle, boosting farm sustainability. Lawsuits designed to get pesticides and GMO crops off the market are paradoxically fueling the development of new biotech crops and pesticides. A troubling study says the world is headed for a population crash. What can be done to reverse this trend before it’s too late?
Join geneticist Kevin Folta and GLP editor Cameron English on this episode of Science Facts and Fallacies as they break down these latest news stories:
Editing a single gene in beef cattle with the new breeding technique CRISPR enables cows to convert feed into weight 15 percent more efficiently, say animal scientists from the University of California, Davis. The simple genetic change could help farmers produce more beef from fewer cattle in the coming years, leading to cheaper food and a smaller environmental footprint for animal agriculture. Several key questions remain to be answered before these gene-edited cows enter the food supply. Chief among them: will the FDA prevent farmers from breeding them?
An onslaught of lawsuits brought by high-profile anti-GMO groups has forced the EPA to ban several pesticides widely used in concert with biotech crops. The legal effort is part of a long-term strategy to ban genetically engineered seeds. But there’s a crucial problem: Biotech companies are developing more sustainable pest-control tools in response to the lawsuits. In the short term, then, product bans could spell trouble for farmers. But over the long haul, activist groups may be pushing themselves into irrelevancy by encouraging the development of new products that are eco-friendly and nearly impossible ban.
With more women than ever in the workforce, fewer people are getting married and having children. Those married couples who are still having kids are having far fewer than their parents and grandparents did. 70 years ago, women were having approximately 4.7 children, say researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. But the global fertility rate dropped to 2.4 in 2017, and is projected to fall below 1.7 by 2100, the BBC reported.
The study authors project that the global population will peak at 9.7 billion near 2064, then fall to 8.8 billion by the end of the century, conclusively debunking fears that the world will run out of food and other natural resources. The real danger lies in the fact that a population crash could eventually—perhaps in the next two or three centuries—lead to a world with no people. “If you can’t [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears,” warns University of Washington researcher Christopher Murray.
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Kevin M. Folta is a professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida. Follow Professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta
Cameron J. English is the GLP’s managing editor. BIO. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish
The other day, a tantalizing question appeared in my Twitter feed: “If you were writing a book about 2020, what would your first sentence be?” asked Mitch Weiss, a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist with the Associated Press. I laughed out loud at the response from Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, who has been on the front lines of the Covid-19 epidemiology dramas online and in the media.
The world is awash with bullshit, and we’re drowning in it.
This is the actual first line of Bergstrom’s 2020 book co-authored with Jevin West, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. There probably couldn’t be a more apt assessment of 2020 (I think I feel another book review coming on). It appears to be a field guide to help the public spot the misuse of data and prevent it in the future. This comes after Bergstrom and colleagues developed a popular course on this topic, which tackles the crucial problem of educating people and arming them with the critical thinking skills that seem to be in such short supply right now.
Of course, education is the foundation for better public policy and personal decisions, and we know that teachers around the world are crucial players in the science communication arena. But we can’t wait for the future education pipeline to deal with the existing misinformation tsunami that washes over us.
The current pandemic has exposed the fact that many of our neighbors are long out of school, and unlikely to become skilled critical thinkers in time to address our present problems. Everyone’s Facebook and Twitter feeds are bombarded by waves of anti-GMO or anti-vaccine nonsense, and sometimes a combination of both. So what can be done about this in real time? Research in science communication has good news and bad news on this. The good news is that there are some strategies that might work. The bad news is that pro-science organizations might not be utilizing them to their full potential.
As a biologist who spends countless hours in the science communication trenches, I want to examine what several recent studies on this topic show, and provide some guidance to anyone who wants to help push back against the onslaught of Covid-fueled nonsense the world is experiencing.
First, the bad news
Despite years of science communication research, it appears that major pro-science groups aren’t succeeding on Facebook. In May, a team of researchers published an analysis of the network interactions among pro-vaccination, neutral, and anti-vaccination groups. In a paper titled The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views, they explored the connections among discussants during a measles outbreak. Based on their results, it seems that people with anti-vaccine views are able to integrate themselves into more of the undecided and neutral communities, even though pro-vaccine pages tend to have more members. Ryan Butner, a data scientist with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, summarized the work this way:
Because I’m not on Facebook, and the researchers are not allowed to reveal exactly who the pro-vaccine pages represent, it’s difficult to understand what their unsuccessful strategies look like. It’s possible that the science communication teams are not permitted to go beyond their narrow remit and venture into groups like the “school parent association” that anti-vaxxers in the study joined, according to the researchers.
It’s likely that some of these pro-science organizations are constrained by factors that are not issues to the conspiracy theorists—such as reliance on facts and evidence. These are not as compelling as some of the fictions produced by anti-science influencers. As neurologist and popular science writer Steven Novella once wrote about institutional systems in The Misinformation Wars, “They are like the British fighting in neat rows with their visible red uniforms, while the rebels fire at them concealed behind trees and stone walls.”
Credit: Scott Monty
It may also be that pro-science groups are mischaracterizing the opposition. While some individuals are merely misinformed, a powerful and well-funded marketing frigate sits in the harbor launching cannonballs of nonsense into the popular consciousness to monetize donations, memberships, books, and videos. Butner and several colleagues made this point in a recent study: Monetizing disinformation in the attention economy: The case of genetically modified organisms (GMOs):
This means those influencers don’t operate like opponents in debate club, they operate like businesses vying for market share. They have more willingness to experiment and take the risky plays with higher potential payoffs than institutional voices typically will.
Unfortunately, as on other fronts, it seems we shouldn’t expect institutional science voices to save us. And this prompts an important question: what can a pro-science individual do to stem the tide of disinformation, at least in their own sphere?
The good news: “observational correction” as science communication
Just before everything went belly-up due to SARS-CoV-2, I attended possibly the last in-person conference for a while, MisinfoCon at the National Academy of Sciences. It brought together many of the experts who are exploring ways to stem the spread of disinformation and misinformation in academia, the mainstream press and social media arenas.
Of particular interest to us is the research examining what works on the interpersonal scale. Briefly summarized, the evidence suggests that people will sometimes reject misinformation when they see others corrected for trying to spread that same misinformation. Social scientists Leticia Bode and Emily Vraga call this phenomenon “observational correction.”
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Bode gave one especially hopeful talk, presenting her work with Vraga and other colleagues titled, Wrong Again: Correction of Health Misinformation in Social Media. The researchers tested corrections on multiple platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube for misinformation on topics such as GMOs, raw milk, vaccines, origins of a virus, and more. Some of the studies involved college students and may not reflect the broader population, some were done with more diverse survey respondents. But now several threads of evidence suggest that correction can work on “lurkers,” or people who witness the correction, even if the original poster is unmoved.
In another study, See Something, Say Something: Correction of Global Health Misinformation on Social Media, Bode and Vraga examined the impact of observational correction in relation to the Zika virus crisis. The researchers created simulated posts of misinformation about the origin of the virus and various kinds of replies with corrected content. They again found that observers who saw corrected information from quality sources demonstrated a reduced belief in misinformation compared to the control group.
There has been a great deal of concern about the so-called “backfire effect” in science communication—that is, someone will cling more tightly to misbeliefs when challenged with facts they perceive as a threat to their worldview. Although this effect seems to be less common than originally suggested, observational correction end-runs the problem. People, it seems, feel less threatened when they see someone else corrected, even if they both share the same viewpoint. That might lower barriers to the absorption of new information.
Other benefits of observational correction include immediacy and scalability. Seeing correct and credible information inhibits the misinformation from taking root. Further, more people can see the corrected information beyond just the original poster. Social corrections can work on multiple issues, and you can use your personal style to bring that information to your local connections in ways that institutional science communicators cannot.
The new information could be provided either by a Facebook algorithm or an individual responding to the topic. This also creates a useful role for institutional communications folks—who can provide quality resources that algorithms or individuals can use for these corrections, even if they can’t dive into the anti-science discussions themselves.
Not all social media sites can facilitate algorithmic corrections as Facebook can, and this strategy may face other hurdles and constraints. The same tools may not work at all on Twitter or Reddit, for example. But the fact that algorithms can work when implemented properly may offer some hope for addressing misinformation on a massive scale, and therefore might be worth exploring on other platforms.
Can’t we be (un)civil?
Bode and her colleagues have also found that individuals can combat misinformation even if their preferred style may be deemed “uncivil” by some. With their most recent study, Do the right thing: tone may not affect correction of misinformation on social media, the team found that empathetic, neutral, or uncivil replies about erroneous claims all worked. As Bode summarized on Twitter, “Our biggest takeaway—as long as you provide credible information to rebut misinformation, other people viewing that correction will be convinced, whether you’re extra sympathetic, rude, or somewhere in between. So correct in whatever way feels most comfortable to you.”
In short, spending time on social media corrections is worthwhile. Friends and allies can team up for additional impact. This gives me hope that joining organized efforts of allies, like the new Stronger.Org campaign to challenge vaccine disinfo, could yield dividends at this crucial time. Also: you do you, your way. You can reach into community spaces that larger pro-science groups can’t. This won’t stop the tone police from coming after you, but now you’ll have evidence that tone police can put a cork in it.
The life ring we need to keep science literacy afloat right now may be in our hands. Or at least at our fingertips.
Mary Mangan holds a PhD in cell, molecular, and developmental biology from the University of Rochester. She co-founded OpenHelix, a company that provides awareness and training on open source genomics software tools. Follow her on Twitter @mem_somerville
Go walk the aisles of your local grocery store and see how many products are being marketed for what they are not. Fat Free, Sugar Free, Gluten Free, Non-GMO, Cage Free, Antibiotic-free, Hormone-free, and on and on. This massive assortment of food labels demonstrates one thing: wealthy, Western consumers have been duped into buying pricier food with no additional nutritional benefits.
For millennia, people have often struggled to have sufficient food and sadly, based on a 2018 report from the World Health Organization, there are still around 821 million people in our world that are hungry. These fellow humans just need food for what it is—a source of nutrition.
Even the privileged need our food to be what it is, to provide us energy, vitamins, minerals, fiber and all sorts of health-promoting compounds. I recently went to pick up a few things at a Ralphs supermarket and I could not find a cart without a placard on it that said, “Simple truth, proud of what’s not in our food.” Of course, they mean pesticide residues, GMOs, anything that might help farmers to feed consumers. I will never shop at that store again, as with my previous decision never to shop at Whole Foods.
So, how did this whole food labeling gimmick start? Why are we constantly advertising food for what it is not? Epidemiologists in the 1960s looking at data about lifestyles and heart disease concluded that the typical American diet was high in saturated fats and cholesterol, which was why heart attack rates were so high in our country. In the 1970s, the U.S. Dietary Goals advised Americans to cut back on fat and eat more carbs to lower the risk of heart disease.It later turned out that if they had included more of the available dietary data by nationality, they might not have reached that conclusion.
Image: IDM Program
Americans got used to paying attention to implied health claims on the front label, and those began to proliferate. The soybean processing industry started promoting the label, “contains no tropical oils” because their international competitors who supplied coconut and palm oil fell into the “saturated fat” category.
This sort of barely regulated kind of marketing expanded to other “health demons” which eventually included sugar, antibiotics, hormones, gluten and GMOs. Let’s explore the absurdity of marketing foods based on what they do not contain.
The American poet Walt Whitman once said: “I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them…. It always keeps the way beyond open…always gives…a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.”
I found that scientific spirit vividly present in the recollections that I garnered in recent years during interviews I did of more than two dozen scientists from a dozen different countries who were part of a group that had worked together from the 1960s to the 1990s in labs run jointly by two young Flemings, the late Jeff Schell, a geneticist, and his scientific partner, biochemist Marc Van Montagu in Ghent, Brussels, and eventually also Cologne.
The microbiologists, biochemists, molecular geneticists, and lab technicians who worked under Schell and Van Montagu were also young when they started. Most were of the first generation of their families to go to university, but they had seemingly quickly acquired the scientific spirit that Van Montagu and Schell had imbibed from their secondary school teachers, in this first generation after World War II when there were more good teachers in Belgium than could find university places.
In the interests of full disclosure, I note that I am a non-scientist nonfiction writer, who only became interested in researching and writing a book about these scientists’ story when I was sitting at dinner under the dome of Iowa’s state capitol while my good friend Marc Van Montagu was being presented in October 2013 with the World Food Prize for his and Schell’s labs’ having uncovered the initial facts that led to the creation of man-made genetically modified plants. (Two other scientists won the prize that day for GMO work, including a man from Monsanto.)
The Belgian scientist sitting next to me said, “You know, somebody should write up our discovery: how it happened, who did it, who helped, the mistakes, the bits of good luck. It is a thrilling story, but we scientists haven’t a clue how to write it so that ordinary non-scientists could understand it….”
And then he looked at me directly and said, “Why don’t YOU write it?” Unspoken was the glaring fact that six months earlier a new mass movement had spawned hundreds of “March Against Monsanto” rallies worldwide involving some two million people to draw attention to the dangers posed by genetically modified food and the “food giants” who produced it.
I accepted the challenge and what I wrote, after four years of research, was a non-academic book, without any jargon, for non-scientists like me. I called it Using Nature’s Shuttle: The making of the first genetically modified plants; it was published by Wageningen Academic Publishers NL, in November 2018.
Despite being written by me alone without any formal support or sponsorship, it was launched a month later in Belgium’s Palace of the Academies, in Brussels, hosted by the Flemish Institute of Biotechnology. The reason for the book’s prestigious launch is that it describes what Nobel laureate microbiologist Sir Richard Roberts calls “probably the greatest advance in agricultural biotechnology since the invention of agriculture.”
Their labs had started out trying to answer a fifty-year old question Jeff Schell had raised as worth pursuing: How do some members of a strain of soil bacterium known as Agrobacterium tumefaciens (tumor making soil bacterium) somehow induce heritable tumors in a variety of plants — and do it even when they are not present in the plants? No other bacterium seemed to be able to do it.
Schell and Van Montagu and the other scientists were pursuing this question, not to rid the world of plant tumors, but in order to better understand how things work in the world of microbes, the ultra-small units of DNA that were then for the first time fully visible, thanks to electron microscopes, with the scientists aided by the knowledge of the structure of DNA that Crick and Watson had discovered in the 1950s.
Image: ThinkStock
Schell had asked a new industrial engineer in the Ghent lab to look for what Schell suspected would be a particular kind of virus, a lysogenic phage, living inside the bacterium, that somehow could induce tumors in plants. He said that it might be supercoiled and that would affect where it would show up in the test tube after a tricky set of maneuvers, including many hours of the bacterium being spun in a centrifuge at very high speeds.
The engineer took his job seriously and worked well into the night most days for more than a year. Finally, late one night in March 1972, he found what seemed to be a small supercoiled band low down in the test tube, as Schell had predicted. He gave the tiny bit of DNA to the lab’s microscopy specialist and waited for Schell’s phage. But what he had found was not a phage but a plasmid — a kind of circular or supercoiled molecule that had only been discovered 20 years earlier — and this was a much bigger plasmid than ever recorded before.
A lot had been riding on it being a phage. Schell’s best doctoral student was working on phages in the expectation that this would be the one that would help unravel the secret of the plant tumors caused by something in the bacterium. A rival lab in another country seemed near to finding that a phage caused those tumors. There were also some phages able to combine so that they could resemble a plasmid. To confuse things more, the engineer soon found bigger plasmids that didn’t have any connection with plant tumors.
But while keeping all options open, a multistep process over the next several years, involving days and nights of meticulous work by various members of the lab, determined that this plasmid was always and only present in the strain of soil bacterium that induced plant tumors. The job of proving that took infinite care, not only by the postdocs and the doctoral students and technicians but even by the dishwashers, to assure that no contamination occurred to ruin the experiments. It involved all-out long-term teamwork by a bunch of young people who were not paid for their extra hours at work.
The discovery of the crucial role of the plasmid inside the soil bacterium turned out to be the key to figuring out not only how the soil bacterium induced plant tumors, but how scientists could use parts of the plasmid to, instead of inducing tumors, insert DNA in plants to make more desirable plants. Thus was conceived the genetically modified plant, a product of basic research.
Drawing on my scientist informants, and going back to them repeatedly, I did my best to record over many pages exactly what these scientists had done, why, and how. And that is how I came upon those precious moments when the scientific spirit showed itself. I learned that fundamental research, the quest for knowledge, can lead to unexpectedly useful developments; and that people harnessed together by a shared set of goals can accomplish much more than people working alone and afraid that someone will steal their data.
But when these scientists’ planned gift to the world, and especially to the poorest on the planet, became patent-protected products, commercialized by Monsanto and other big agrichemical companies with powerful marketing networks, things changed.
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Monsanto’s GM soybeans were on their way in 1996 to European markets and had just received EU permission to be sold there, when they ran into a buzz saw of opposition from public interest groups, such as Greenpeace, and EU member governments — starting with France, whose traditional agriculture depends on the original Common Market treaty’s guarantee of subsidies, to which were later added new beneficiaries from the East bloc when they became EU members, bringing their similar farming traditions.
By then, organic farming, begun after World War II, had become an emerging player in Europe and wanted no competition from cheaper farm products from the US. If that were not enough to make GMOs unwelcome in many places, a mere five days after the EU agreed to the entry of Monsanto’s GM soybeans, an unrelated food scandal emerged when the British Prime Minister had to announce that, despite UK governmental assurances to the contrary, British beef from animals with Mad Cow disease had been implicated in a new, human version of Mad Cow that had killed a number of Britons and went on to kill more of them.
Public outrage at this British incident of food poisoning in conventionally raised cattle spread to many other countries and came quickly to include a distrust of all government assurances on food safety, including the new GM foods. Lobbies and spokespeople for these various anti-GMO interests separately and together spread fear and distrust about GM foods and related products world-wide, a phenomenon that continues up to today.
Since 1996, 5.8 billion acres of GM crops have been planted, and more than 2,000 publications have addressed and confirmed their food and environmental safety. Also, hundreds of regulatory and food safety assessments, notably by the WHO, the National Institutes of Science, Medicine, and Engineering, all the most prestigious European scientific bodies, and by GM exporting and importing countries have, on the basis of their research, regulatory assessment, and/or history of use, found no evidence of harm from GMOs.
Meanwhile, in 2000, various anti-GMO well-funded efforts led to the adding of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the UN Convention on Biodiversity. The protocol cites a “precautionary principle” to permit any signatory country to ban GM products about which the signatory has doubts of their safety, without requiring the signatory to produce any evidence of their causing present or future harm. In 2018, the European Court of Justice added to the list of GMOs already banned entry into Europe by forbidding the entry into EU countries of any gene-edited food or products. A knock-on effect of these EU bans has been to discourage less developed countries, such as India, that the GM inventors had had in mind as most needing GM foods, with their less wasteful use of soil and other advantages, from growing GM crops; such countries, to gain foreign currency, also need to be able to export their foods to the EU.
The book therefore ends on a somber note, providing a warning to scientists that they need to take responsibility for promoting and defending the relevance of their science, even after it has left their lab. The scientists have literally all the facts on their side, but facts are not enough to combat the huge propaganda machine on the opposite side. What happened to GM crops and the people who made them seems likely now to start happening to gene-edited crops and the people who are making them.
Judith M. Heimann, a retired American diplomat, is the author of three books of history and biography, two of which became television documentaries. As a diplomat, she spent many years in Belgium and came to know well the leading scientists involved in making the first GM plants. She speaks French, Dutch/Flemish and Indonesian/Malay. Follow her on her website.
This article was originally published on May 7, 2019.
[Editor’s note: For a historical discussion on Black-White differences in culture and genes, read 
[Editor’s note: For a historical discussion on genes and Jewish identity, including an interview with Kevin MacDonald, read 
