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Are you cranky if you don’t eat? This explains that ‘hangry’ feeling

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Are you cranky if you don’t eat? This explains that ‘hangry’ feeling
Maybe it starts with a low-energy feeling, or maybe you’re getting a little cranky. You might have a headache or difficulty concentrating. Your brain is sending you a message: You’re hungry. Find food.

Studies in mice have pinpointed a cluster of cells called AgRP neurons near the underside of the brain that may create this unpleasant hungry, even “hangry,” feeling. They sit near the brain’s blood supply, giving them access to hormones arriving from the stomach and fat tissue that indicate energy levels. When energy is low, they act on a variety of other brain areas to promote feeding.

By eavesdropping on AgRP neurons in mice, scientists have begun to untangle how these cells switch on and encourage animals to seek food when they’re low on nutrients, and how they sense food landing in the gut to turn back off. Researchers have also found that the activity of AgRP neurons goes awry in mice with symptoms akin to those of anorexia, and that activating these neurons can help to restore normal eating patterns in those animals.

Understanding and manipulating AgRP neurons might lead to new treatments for both anorexia and overeating. “If we could control this hangry feeling, we might be better able to control our diets,” says Amber Alhadeff, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

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To eat or not to eat

AgRP neurons appear to be key players in appetite: Deactivating them in adult mice causes the animals to stop eating — they may even die of starvation. Conversely, if researchers activate the neurons, mice hop into their food dishes and gorge themselves.

Experiments at several labs in 2015 helped to illustrate what AgRP neurons do. Researchers found that when mice hadn’t had enough to eat, AgRP neurons fired more frequently. But just the sight or smell of food — especially something yummy like peanut butter or a Hershey’s Kiss — was enough to dampen this activity, within seconds. From this, the scientists concluded that AgRP neurons cause animals to seek out food. Once food has been found, they stop firing as robustly.

One research team, led by neuroscientist Scott Sternson at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, also showed that AgRP neuron activity appears to make mice feel bad. To demonstrate this, the scientists engineered mice so that the AgRP neurons would start firing when light was shone into the brain with an optical fiber (the fiber still allowed the mice to move around freely). They placed these engineered mice in a box with two distinct areas: one colored black with a plastic grid floor, the other white with a soft, tissue paper floor. If the researchers activated AgRP neurons whenever the mice went into one of the two areas, the mice started avoiding that region.

Sternson, now at the University of California San Diego, concluded that AgRP activation felt “mildly unpleasant.” That makes sense in nature, he says: Any time a mouse leaves its nest, it’s at risk from predators, but it must overcome this fear in order to forage and eat. “These AgRP neurons are kind of the push that, in a dangerous environment, you’re going to go out and seek food to stay alive.”

Sternson’s 2015 study had shown that while the sight or smell of food quiets AgRP neurons, it’s only temporary: Activity goes right back up if the mouse can’t follow through and eat the snack. Through additional experiments, Alhadeff and colleagues discovered that what turns the AgRP neurons off more reliably is calories landing in the gut.

The sleeping mouse in this video has been engineered so that when blue light shines into its brain, AgRP neurons are activated. The mouse is resting after a night in which it had plenty to eat. When researchers turn on the blue light, the mouse awakens and eats more, even though it’s sated. Credit: Daniel Kroeger/ Michael Krashes

First, Alhadeff’s team fed mice a calorie-free treat: a gel with artificial sweetener. When mice ate the gel, AgRP neuron activity dropped, as expected — but only temporarily. As the mice learned there were no nutrients to be gained from this snack, their AgRP neurons responded less and less to each bite. Thus, as animals learn whether a treat really nourishes them, the neurons adjust the hunger dial accordingly.

Next, the team used a catheter implanted through the abdomen to deliver calories, in the form of the nutritional drink Ensure, directly to the stomach. This bypassed any sensory cues that food was coming. And it resulted in a longer dip in AgRP activity. In other words, it’s the nutrients in food that shut off AgRP neurons for an extended time after a meal, Alhadeff concluded.

Alhadeff has since begun to decode the messages that the stomach sends to the AgRP neurons, and found that it depends on the nutrient. Fat in the gut triggers a signal via the vagus nerve, which reaches from the digestive tract to the brain. The simple sugar glucose signals the brain via nerves in the spinal cord.

Her team is now investigating why these multiple paths exist. She hopes that by better understanding how AgRP neurons drive food-seeking, scientists can eventually come up with ways to help people keep off unhealthy pounds. Though scientists and dieters have been seeking such treatments for more than a century, it’s been difficult to identify easy, safe and effective treatments. The latest class of weight-loss medications, such as Wegovy, act in part on AgRP neurons but have unpleasant side effects such as nausea and diarrhea.

Therapies targeting AgRP neurons alone would likely fail to fully solve the weight problem, because food-seeking is only one component of appetite control, says Sternson, who reviewed the main controllers of appetite in the Annual Review of Physiology in 2017. Other brain areas that sense satiety and make high-calorie food pleasurable also play important roles, he says. That’s why, for example, you eat that slice of pumpkin pie at the end of the Thanksgiving meal, even though you’re already full of turkey and mashed potatoes.

 

 

Outflanking anorexia

The flip side of overeating is anorexia, and there, too, researchers think that investigating AgRP neurons could lead to new treatment strategies. People with anorexia avoid food, to the point of dangerous weight loss. “Eating food is actually aversive,” says Ames Sutton Hickey, a neuroscientist at Temple University in Philadelphia. There is no medication specific for anorexia; treatment may include psychotherapy, general medications such as antidepressants and, in the most severe cases, force-feeding via a tube threaded through the nose. People with anorexia are also often restless or hyperactive and may exercise excessively.

Researchers can study the condition using a mouse model of the disease known as activity-based anorexia, or ABA. When scientists limit the food available to the mice and provide them with a wheel to run on, some mice enter an anorexia-like state, eating less than they’re offered, and running on the wheel even during daylight, when mice are normally inactive. “It’s a remarkable addictive thing that happens to these animals,” says Tamas Horvath, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine. “They basically get a kick out of not eating and exercising.”

It’s not a perfect model for anorexia. Mice, presumably, face none of the social pressures to stay thin that humans do; conversely, people with anorexia usually don’t have limits on their access to food. But it’s one of the best anorexia mimics out there, says Alhadeff: “I think it’s as good as we get.”

 

To find out how AgRP neurons might be involved in anorexia, Sutton Hickey carefully monitored the food intake of ABA mice. She compared them to mice that were given a restricted diet, but had a locked exercise wheel and didn’t develop ABA. The ABA mice, she found, ate fewer meals than the other mice. And when they did eat, their AgRP activity didn’t decrease like it should have after they filled their tummies. Something was wrong with the way the neurons responded to hunger and food cues.

Sutton Hickey also found that she could fix the problem when she engineered ABA mice so that AgRP neurons would spring into action when researchers injected a certain chemical. These mice, when treated with the chemical, ate more meals and gained weight. “That speaks very much to the importance of these neurons,” says Horvath, who wasn’t involved in the work. “It shows that these neurons are good guys, not the bad guys.”

Sutton Hickey says the next step is to figure out why the AgRP neurons respond abnormally in ABA mice. She hopes there might be some key molecule she could target with a drug to help people with anorexia.

All in all, the work on AgRP neurons is giving scientists a much better picture of why we eat when we do — as well as new leads, perhaps, to medications that might help people change disordered eating, be it consuming too much or too little, into healthy habits.

Amber Dance is a contributor to Knowable and writes the Coronavirus Files at University of Southern California. Check out Amber’s website here

A version of this article was originally posted at Knowable and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Sign up for their newsletter here. Find Knowable on X @KnowableMag

Viewpoint: UK’s The Guardian fearmongers over PFAS ‘forever chemicals’

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The Guardian’s August 17 headline, “Drinking Water of Millions of Americans Contaminated with Forever Chemicals”, was based on newly released data from EPA’s Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule. Contrary to the headlines blasted in the media, the actual data from this rule shows that Americans have nothing to fear from these chemicals.

Background

The initial data just released from EPA’s Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR-5), a credible data source with a 20-year history, includes data on 29 PFAS, the “forever chemicals.” UCMR-5 requires the collection of water samples in all public drinking water supplies serving more than 3,300 people and a representative sample of those serving fewer than 3,300 people (but does not include private wells) every five years, measuring a different set of unregulated contaminants each time. The initial data from the samples to be collected between 2023 and 2025 were just released, representing approximately 7% of the total results the EPA expects to receive over the next three years.

Although these results represent only a small percentage of the total that will be available in the next few years, they take on increased significance because they will be a primary element of EPA’s support for its proposed drinking water regulation for PFAS, submitted in March 2023. All of the data from the UCMR-5 showing that PFAS occurs in drinking water systems will be used by EPA to support and finalize their regulatory agenda.

Although the percentage of water systems containing PFAS is important, it is secondary to the threshold issue: the EPA’s health advisory, their benchmark for PFAS, is not supported by science and was driven by EPA’s desire to set as low a number as possible. This is what is driving most of the fear around PFOS.

The EPA is attempting to demonstrate a health risk by comparing the levels of PFAS found in UCMR-5 with their health advisories –  non-regulatory guidance on the concentrations of contaminants in drinking water at which adverse health effects are not expected to occur. If the contaminant levels found in UCMR-5 exceeded the health advisories, EPA concluded a potential health risk was present.

The EPA’s health advisory of 0.000004 parts per billion (ppb), for PFOA, and 0.00002 ppb, for PFOS are based on non-credible science and are much lower than those calculated by other agencies and countries. Because these health advisory levels are set so low, any amount of PFOA/PFOS found in drinking water is considered by EPA to be a health risk.

The results from UCMR-5

Key fundamentals:

  • Approximately 2,000 public water systems reported results in this initial data group, providing 4,700 total water samples (more than one sample was taken per water system).
  • Monitoring was conducted for 29 PFAS, including PFOA, PFOS, and lithium.
  • The minimum reporting level (MRL), the lowest concentration considered achievable by at least 75% of laboratories nationwide, was 0.004 ppb for PFOA and PFOS.
  • Since the MRL of 0.004 ppb for PFOA and PFOS exceeds the health advisories’ of 0.000004 ppb for PFOA and 0.00002 ppb for PFOS, all results reported were considered a health risk.    

PFOA Results

  • 267 results out of 4,667 total results (5.7%) exceeded the MRL of 0.004 ppb.
  • 156 public water systems out of 2,002 public water systems (7.8%) had at least one result above the MRL.
  • The average level was 0.0095 ppb, the maximum was 0.235 ppb, and the minimum was 0.004 ppb.
  • 68% (183) of the systems that exceeded the MRL used groundwater as a source; larger systems were represented more than small ones. [1]

PFOS Results

  • 279 results out of 4,665 total results (6.0%) exceeded the MRL of 0.004 ppb.
  • 170 public water systems out of 2,001 public water systems (8.5%) had at least one result above the MRL.
  • The average level was 0.01 ppb, the maximum was 0.095 ppb, and the minimum was 0.004 ppb.
  • Like PFOA, most (200) of the systems with MRL exceedances used groundwater as a source and were larger rather than smaller systems.

The average levels of PFOA and PFOS were almost identical; however, a higher maximum level was reported for PFOA compared to PFOS.

There are only two other PFAS in UMCR-5 for which EPA has set Health Advisories, HFPO-DA (Gen-X) and PFBS. HFPO-DA was only measured above its Health Advisory in one out of 2,002 public water systems, and PFBS was not found above its Health Advisory in any water system. [2]

There are 25 other PFAS that have no Health Advisories. Nine were detected above their respective MRLs, and none of the other sixteen were found above them.

The importance of an appropriate health advisory

As previously discussed, the significance of the levels totally depends on the health advisories. Since EPA’s health advisories are so low, all levels appear to present a potential health risk.

But the picture changes when we compare the results with credible data, as developed by the Alliance for Risk Assessment. [3] Twenty-four scientists from eight countries were selected, divided into three independent teams, and reviewed relevant information and independently developed ranges for estimated PFOA-safe doses.

They developed a safe dose range of 10 to 70 nanogram (ng) per kilogram (kg)-body weight per day for PFOA. Their safe dose for PFOS has not been finalized.

This group of scientists developed a safe dose range, instead of a single number, to emphasize that the safe dose is not a bright line separating safe from unsafe chemical levels. Instead, it is an imprecise measure of the dose, if consumed over a lifetime, that may begin to present health effects in vulnerable individuals.

The safe dose is calculated to represent the safe dose of the chemical from all sources: food, water, and air. This dose is converted to a safe amount in drinking water only. EPA’s traditional conversion method [4] results in a range of 0.07 – 0.5 ppb or an average safe level of 0.3 ppb for an adult. This level is above the average and maximum levels of PFOA, and PFOS detected in UCMR-5, indicating no health risk.

The EPA’s entire PFAS campaign is founded on the faulty foundation of its health advisories. As I’ve previously written, the health advisories for PFOA and PFOS are based on a study in the Faroe Islands and demonstrates why health advisories should be part of an open, public comment process. The extraordinarily low numbers will lead to years of litigation, unnecessary consumer fear, and billions of dollars spent on low-risk compounds. The billions that EPA plans to spend would be much better spent on true risks to public health from drinking water, such as aging infrastructure, small systems, and microbiological contaminants, such as Legionella, in plumbing.

Notes: 

[1] Groundwater = underground water in aquifers; surface water = water from lakes, streams, and rivers. EPA also characterized public water systems as using groundwater under the direct influence of surface water or mixed sources (groundwater and surface water).

[2] In these cases, EPA set Health Advisories based on science at reasonable levels: 0.01 ppb for HFPO-DA and 2 ppb for PFBS, translating into no risk from these compounds.

[3] A global cooperative involving government, industry, academic, and environmental stakeholders.

[4] A 70 kg adult consuming 2 liters of water per day, allocating 20% of the total safe dose to drinking water.

Susan Goldhaber, M.P.H., is an environmental toxicologist with over 40 years’ experience working at   Federal and State agencies and in the private sector, emphasizing issues concerning chemicals in drinking water, air, and hazardous waste.  Her current focus is on translating scientific data into usable information for the public. 

A version of this article was originally posted at American Council on Science and Health and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find American Council on Science and Health on X @ACSHorg

Considering the controversy over the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, is it worth getting the seasonal flu shot this year? How well do they really work?

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It’s that time of year again. No, I am not referring to the latest COVID-19 vaccines, which are now available. And even if you’re skeptical about shots to prevent getting the coronavirus (which based on massive scientific evidence are incredibly effective with a very low chance of side effects), that’s no reason to forego getting an annual influenza shot. 

On average, the United States experiences about 41 million flu-related illnesses annually. That’s more people than got COVID in any one year since the pandemic began. Over the past decade, influenza has killed as many as 650,000 globally in a single year, and from 12,000 to 52,000 people in the US. And unlike with COVID, the very young are among the most vulnerable.

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Estimated US Flu Burden, By Season. Credit: CDC

How does the CDC pick and formulate which strains of the flu to target?

The process of selecting viruses for the yearly flu vaccines is complex and inexact. One major reason is that scientists need to make calculated guesses of which flu strains will be most prominent in which country many months in advance of the commencement of the autumn flu season. The promising news is that for the 2023-2024 flu season, there is reason to be optimistic that the vaccines will provide good protection. 

Flu is the prototype of a respiratory disease that requires repeated — yearly — vaccinations to prevent infection; the effectiveness of the shot only lasts about six months. Although annual seasonal flu vaccines are invaluable tools for controlling the spread and severity of influenza, they do not provide immunity against every strain of the virus, which constantly mutates, sometimes radically. 

Flu vaccines that would confer long-term immunity and eliminate the need for yearly shots to protect against new variants would be an important public health advance, but attempts to develop them have been unsuccessful. So, we are left with a complex process, described below, for formulating the vaccines for each flu season.

Seasonal flu vaccines are designed to protect against the four main groups of flu Type A and B viruses that experts believe are most likely to spread and cause illness during the upcoming flu season. Current U.S. flu vaccines protect against two forms of both influenza A and B. The vaccines’ components are selected anew each year based on:

  • which flu viruses are causing illnesses prior to the upcoming flu season,
  • the extent to which those viruses are spreading before the upcoming flu season,
  • how well the previous season’s vaccines may protect against those flu viruses,
  • the ability of vaccine viruses to provide cross-protection against a range of related flu viruses of the same type.

This excerpt from the CDC’s document, “Selecting Viruses for the Seasonal Influenza Vaccine,” describes the process for formulating the flu vaccines:

There are currently 144 national influenza centers in over 114 countries that conduct year-round surveillance for flu viruses as part of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS). This involves receiving and testing thousands of flu virus samples from patients. …

Twice a year, the WHO organizes a consultation with the directors of the seven WHO Collaborating Centers, Essential Regulatory Laboratories, and representatives of key national laboratories and academies. After reviewing the results of surveillance, laboratory, and clinical studies, and the availability of flu vaccine viruses, they make recommendations on the composition of flu vaccines.

These meetings take place in February for selection of the upcoming Northern Hemisphere’s seasonal flu vaccines and in September for the Southern Hemisphere’s flu vaccines. …Next, each country makes its own decision about which viruses should be included in flu vaccines licensed in their country.

In the United States, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) makes the final decision about vaccine viruses for domestic flu vaccines. 

Beginning in late winter, the various manufacturers of flu vaccines, using a variety of technologies, begin to produce them for the next flu season, seven or eight months away.

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How reliable are flu vaccines?

Because of the changeable nature of flu variants, the somewhat inexact science involved in identifying all possible variants, the time lag in developing the billions of vaccine doses to distribute in each hemisphere, the influenza shot, like any protective virus jab, is not totally effective. It’s estimated that last year, flu shots reduced incidences in the U.S. by 54%.

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Credit: CDC

How good will this year’s predictions about which viruses to include in the 2023-2024 vaccines for the North America be? Mid-season data from the Southern Hemisphere (where the fall-winter flu season precedes that in the Northern Hemisphere, and is just concluding) suggest the current season’s trivalent and quadrivalent inactivated flu vaccines protect quite well against the most serious outcomes, according to a September 15 report by CDC researchers:

The 2023 Southern Hemisphere seasonal influenza vaccine reduced the risk for influenza-associated hospitalizations by 52%. Circulating influenza viruses were genetically similar to those targeted by the 2023–24 Northern Hemisphere influenza vaccine formulation. This vaccine might offer similar protection if these viruses predominate during the coming Northern Hemisphere influenza season.

The language is measured, but the report offers presumptive good news about the currently available round of vaccines.

A significant and sobering finding in the CDC report was that less than a quarter of the hospitalized patients had been vaccinated. At least part of the explanation in recent years was the flood of misinformation around the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine. A University of California-Los Angeles study found a 4.5% drop off in states with below average pandemic vaccination rates. That drop-off was slightly offset by a modest surge in flu vaccine rates in states with strong uptake of the coronavirus vaccine. Flu vaccination rates ranges from 50% in Alabama to 81% in Rhode Island. On average, around the world, only about 25% of people get an annual influenza shot.

“This supports what I have seen in my clinical practice and suggests that information and policies specific to Covid-19 vaccines may be eroding more general faith in medicine and our government’s role in public health,” said the study’s lead author, Richard Leuchter, MD, a resident physician at UCLA Health.

To counter the dismal numbers, the CDC now recommends: “Health authorities worldwide should encourage influenza vaccination for persons at increased risk for severe disease, including young children, persons with preexisting health conditions, and older adults, as well as those at increased risk for exposure to or transmission of influenza virus, such as health care personnel.”

In the end, it is not vaccines that prevent infections; it is vaccinations. 

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Find him on X @henryimiller

What do ‘non-identical’ identical twins have to do with COVID-19? Mutations!

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Identical twins Stella and Desiree Vignes were born in 1938 in a Louisiana town so small that it wasn’t on any maps. Light-skinned Blacks, the girls left town together at the age of 16 to head to New Orleans to work and escape a bleak future. Stella was mistaken for White at a job interview and continued the deception to get the position, eventually marrying her boss and leaving her sister behind. Stella experienced adulthood as White, Desiree as Black.

The Vignes sisters were born in the imagination of Brit Bennett, an extraordinary young writer. Her bestseller “The Vanishing Half,” traces the experiences of the twins in a world where what happens to them depends upon how others perceive them – as Black or White. Of course, they go on to live starkly different lives, Stella in wealthy Brentwood, California, and Desiree back in her hometown waitressing in a diner. The drama intensifies when their grown daughters meet, one a pale blonde, the other “a dark girl” black as ebony.

Identical twins and higher multiples are, indeed, fascinating. The 2018 film Three Identical Strangers tells the tale of triplet brothers who met by chance at age 19 in 1980. It echoes the fictional film The Parent Trap, from 1961 with Hayley Mills and reborn in 1998 with Lindsay Lohan, each in dual roles.

Three Identical Strangers. Credit: Newsday

Twin studies

Twins have for decades provided a handy tool in genetics research. It’s straightforward. Characteristics more often shared between identical twins than between fraternal twins are presumed to have a greater inherited component. The flip side is that differences between identical twins are assumed to have arisen from environmental factors.

Twin studies are often used to scrutinize the underpinnings of behavioral traits, including conditions such as anxiety and depression. But the approach is also applied to less-well-defined characteristics, such as the ability to make wise investment decisions, altruism, trust, and even cell phone call and texting frequencies.

An entire literature is devoted to what twin studies reveal about the inheritance of political persuasion. The investigations are rigorous – I can’t follow the math – but explaining how, exactly, a gene-encoded protein causes a trait like loyalty seems elusive.

“The Heritability of Duty and Voter Turnout,” for example, considers “belief that voting is a duty” as a trait that a gene or genes influence. (Heritability is a measure of the proportion of a trait’s variance that is inherited, not the degree that the trait itself is inherited.) I’m more comfortable with traits that arise from abnormal or missing proteins like clotting factors and enzymes, rather than from harder-to-define feelings and beliefs.

The biology of twinning

Fraternal twins result from two sperm fertilizing two eggs. The twins share a uterus, but are no more closely related genetically than are any two full siblings. Fraternal twins are termed dizygotic, or DZ – two zygotes, aka fertilized ova.

For identical, or monozygotic (MZ), twins, a single sperm fertilizes a single egg, which then splits. But that can happen at different points very early in development, leading to different types of identical twins.

Monozygotic twins (left) originate from one fertilized egg that splits in two. Dizygotic twins (right) come from two separate eggs fertilized by two different sperm. Credit: Shutterstock

The split may occur as soon as the fertilized ovum divides, or over the first three days and resulting, eventually, in development of separate placentas. But if an initial collection of cells (the inner cell mass) chugs along until day 7 before separating into two clumps, then the resulting twins may share a placenta and possibly their amniotic sac too. Examining these structures reveals when the twinning took place.

The timing of twinning is important because as cells divide, DNA replicates (copies itself), and that’s when mutations can occur, like cutting and pasting an error in a document and then making many copies. A mutation that happens before the inner cell mass has sorted itself into two clumps will persist in both twins. But a mutation happening after the split results in discordance – that is, a mutation in one twin but not the other, even though they are called identical.

Tracking mutations that distinguish identical twins

A team from deCODE genetics in Iceland has cleverly identified a few mutations that distinguish supposedly genetically identical twins. They deduced events in development by comparing genome sequences of living individuals, not by harming embryos. The findings are published in a recent Nature Genetics.

(deCODE is the company founded in 1996 that established the first national biobank. It caused quite a fuss then, when genome projects were launching, about government control of genetic information. But deCODE went on to become and remain a leader in identifying genetic risk factors. Today deCODE is a subsidiary of Amgen.)

The researchers used the formation of identical twins as “a unique window into early embryonic development,” they write. Explained first author Hákon Jónsson, “Mutations can be formed when cells divide and the daughter cells may carry a mutation that marks the descendants of the mutated cell within an individual. Mutations that are present in only one of the twins allow us therefore to backtrack to the cell divisions that lead to the development of the twins.”

To find the mutations, the team compared full genome sequences from fat cells, white blood cells, and cheek lining cells among 387 pairs of identical twins and their parents, offspring, and spouses to identify twins that aren’t exact clones. Comparison to spouses enabled elimination of mutations inherited from that parent, and comparison to a twin’s offspring made it possible to infer the gene variants that passed from the twin’s sperm or egg.

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The degree to which the identical twin pairs differ varied quite a lot, with some twins by more than 100 mutations, yet others, none at all. In about 15% of the pairs, one twin had many mutations that the other didn’t. The average is 5.2 mutations.

The mutations that distinguish identical twins occurred during the first days of development – that explains why the mutations tend to be in large percentages of the sampled cells from an individual. “These two groups of monozygotic twins give insight into development of the embryo only a few divisions after conception, when the embryo consists of several cells,” said Kari Stefansson, CEO and founder of deCODE genetics.

The finding may be important in understanding the origin of conditions such as autism and developmental disorders that are assumed to be due to an environmental factor if only one identical twin is affected. The conditions may instead be due to genetic differences between the twins, perhaps suggesting novel treatment approaches.

The bigger picture: COVID

The new view of identical twins illustrates the fundamental changeability of the informational molecules that are genetic material, DNA and RNA.

DNA changes, mutates, because it is an informational molecule. Triplets of the building blocks A, C, T, and G are transcribed into a molecule of RNA, which is then translated into sequences of 20 types of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Traits come from the proteins. That’s molecular biology in a nutshell.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has RNA. And the sequence of that RNA’s building blocks changes, as does the genetic material within our own cells. That is, mutation is part of nature, lying at the intersection of chemistry and biology.

If a mutation leads to a new characteristic, or modifies an existing one, in a way that benefits the organism or virus, the change will persist. This is natural selection, aka “survival of the fittest.” The word “fittest” in the context of evolution means reproductive success, not physical fitness. And that’s why certain new variants of SARS-CoV-2 are potentially worrisome.

The new “variants” are actually a set of genetic changes. Because they enable SARS-CoV-2 to spread more readily, which in turn increases the reproduction number (R naught) of how many people an infected person in turn infects, the mutants will take over the population of viruses – I think, no matter what we do.

Because new variants are present before we’re aware of them, and because some countries have prioritized sequencing viral genomes while others, like the U.S., have not, the proverbial cat is out of the bag. Efforts to block the spread of new viral variants by restricting human travel are almost without doubt too little too late.

Resistance may indeed be futile. For mutations will continue to happen. That’s what nucleic acids – RNA and DNA – do.

Adam Lauring, MD, PhD, from the University of Michigan Division of Infectious Diseases and an expert in the evolutionary biology of RNA viruses, put the new mutations into practical perspective in a JAMA audio clinical review on January 2 and published a related Viewpoint in JAMA, “Genetic Variants of SARS-CoV-2—What Do They Mean?” with Emma B. Hodcroft, PhD. Said he:

“Lots of mutations have happened around the world that haven’t affected transmissibility. We don’t have evidence that they are more virulent and cause more severe disease or death. Mutation happens. Some are important and help the virus do what viruses do – spread. The trick is figuring out which of these mutations are important and which ones aren’t. What is allowing it to spread and how do we get on top of that? I’m optimistic mutations won’t affect vaccinations, but there will be a lot of work over the next weeks and months and in the future, because we’ll have more mutations to contend with.”

Ricki Lewis has a PhD in genetics and is a science writer and author of several human genetics books. She is an adjunct professor for the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College. Follow her at her website or Twitter @rickilewis

A version of this article previously appeared on the GLP January 19, 2021.

Viewpoint: As the BBC spews organic farming propaganda, the world’s poor suffer

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How many people around the world are currently living in poverty? The World Bank reports that a little over 9%, or approximately 720 million people, are subsisting on less than US$2.15 a day. 

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In the US, where poverty is measured differently, a staggering 10% of the population, or almost 40 million people, are living below the poverty line.

How about the UK? Approximately 20%, or 14 million citizens, are in poverty. That’s a lot of food-insecure people in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. But while many in the farming and scientific communities understand the relationships among agricultural practices, the cost of food, and food security, the staff of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) seem clueless about them. 

The government broadcaster came under fire from the think-tank Science for a Sustainable Agriculture (SSA) for posting misleading, pro-organic statements on their online “Bitesize revision guides,” which are aimed specifically at students. 

screenshot at  amSSA challenged the BBC over statements such as “organic milk and beef are produced without using antibiotics,” “organic farmers … do not apply pesticides to their crops”; and “many farmers are turning to organic farming as consumers opt to buy chemical-free food.”screenshot at  am

The BBC must be short on fact-checkers. In fact, organic farmers do use pesticides, as well as other chemicals. According to USDA, dozens of “synthetic substances” are allowed under U.S. organic rules and are commonly used in the growing and processing of organic crops. Many of these organic pesticides are more toxic and cause greater environmental harm than their counterparts used in conventional (not organic) agriculture, especially fungicides, like copper sulfate, which can kill beneficial insects and animals. Moreover, an iconic paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Bruce Ames and his colleagues demonstrated that 99.99% of pesticidal substances in the human diet are substances present naturally in plants to protect them from insects. 

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The BBC website goes on to claim that when compared to organic agriculture, conventional farming reduces biodiversity. Another misstatement by “The Beeb.” Organic farming, with its prohibition of advanced technologies, produces reduced crop yields, averaging about 20-40% less than conventional crops. This means that more land (and water) is required to compensate for these low yields, and increased land use for organic farming will in turn reduce what wild places still remain. 

There are several factual whoppers in a short, summary BBC graphic, “Organic Farming and Genetically Modified Food.” It states that genetic modification “involves farmers using seeds which have been altered by scientific techniques. In the past plants were improved by breeding them with better plants. This allowed farmers to grow strong plants which yielded large amounts of crops to sell.”  

In fact, for about a century, many new varieties of plants have been created by mutagenesis — treating seeds with chemicals or radiation to create mutations — and by wide crosses (also called “distant hybridization”), which employs artificial means to overcome natural breeding barriers. Crops created these ways, including sweet Ruby Red Grapefruit and Italian durum wheat (mutagenesis); and strawberries, bananas and mangoes (distant hybridization). In sum, all crops have been ’genetically modified’ in one way or another over millennia, with the newest techniques—recombinant DNA technology, RNA interference and gene-editing — the most precise and predictable, and, therefore, safer than traditional breeding.

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But established science doesn’t seem to be the BBC’s thing. They are convinced the supposed advantages of organic methods, as they charted thusly on their website.screenshot at  pmThese are especially egregious claims because they’ve gotten it exactly backward. As discussed above, organic agriculture does use chemicals, many of which are toxic, and the use of no-till farming in conventional agriculture results in less soil erosion and runoff of chemicals into waterways and aquifers and less release of carbon dioxide into the air than organic farming. 

In sum, organic’s crude, primitive practices impose greater environmental stresses than conventional agriculture. 

The BBC’s reporting is inexcusable sloppiness, even mendacious. While the pro-organic propaganda that promotes an inferior approach to agriculture is embraced by advocacy groups and the organic industry, one would expect a higher standard of fact-gathering from one of the world’s most heralded news organizations.

A study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, published recently in the European Journal of Agricultural Economics, echoed the Wales and England report, and added additional concerns. They found that for many reasons, public policies that support the expansion of organic agriculture as a feasible way to produce food while maintaining environmental sustainability disadvantage poorer households. 

  • The production and marketing of organic foods “are associated with higher unit costs and/or reduced yields relative to the conventional alternative, and they are produced and consumed mainly in wealthier countries.”  In other words, it is primarily consumers in wealthier countries with more disposable income who can afford more expensive food. 
  • For four major grains and oilseeds (wheat, rice, corn and soy, which represent a substantial proportion of the world’s calories), an increase in organic cropland from 3 to 15 percent would boost the food prices for consumers in poor countries by up to 6.3 percent.
  • As the organic share of the land area in rich countries increased, the prices of major commodity crops in poor countries increased to an extent that “they represent a substantial aggregate loss to consumers.” 

In sum, organic agriculture makes the food supply more expensive and more tenuous, and when practiced in poor societies, puts vulnerable populations at risk. 

BBC does not have to swallow organic propaganda whole

The claim by organic advocates, echoed by the BBC, that organic agriculture benefits the poor is not only erroneous, but cruel. Promulgated widely, it could promote a transition to more organic farming, and thereby expand the acreage needed for farming. That would, in turn, impair the ability to maintain wild spaces, preserve biodiversity, and recycle carbon. 

Food prices would also escalate because of organic farming’s lower yields and its inability to grow higher-yielding genetically engineered crops (which are also sometimes more nutritious and sustainable). 

This is not a ‘could happen’ but a ‘will happen’. Consider the eye-opening findings in a now iconic 2019 study of the carbon release impact if England and Wales went 100% organic. Crunching readily available public data, they predicted a 40% drop in food production compared to conventional farming, setting a tumbling sequence of events.

“[T]he land area needed to make up for shortfalls in domestic production is nearly five times the current overseas land area used for food for England and Wales.” Imports would soar, particularly from Latin America, where the clear-cutting of forests to meet production demands would lead to even more greenhouse gas emissions.

Because of organic’s  comparative inefficiency in production, especially compared to the cultivation of genetically engineered crops, many of which do not require carbon-releasing tilling, climate disruptions would soar. Study after study has shown that climate instability falls disproportionately on the shoulders of the poor.

All these factors will adversely affect consumer welfare among the poorest in the world, even in wealthy enclaves in the UK, Europe and North America.. 

Organic agriculture and food production, to say nothing of utter nonsense like organic sheets and pillows, are a colossal, and expensive, hoax. 

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It is bad enough to see this misinformation inflicted on the affluent, but it is grotesque that consumers in poorer countries will bear the largest burden of these narcissistic policies. Influential sources of information like the BBC should rethink their collaboration on this deception. 

Kathleen L. Hefferon is an instructor in microbiology at Cornell University. Find her on X @KHefferon

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Find him on X @henryimiller

GLP podcast/video: ‘Industrial’ seed oils unhealthy? A mom’s guide to anti-GMO myths; Opposites actually don’t attract

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Are so-called “industrial” seed oils slowly killing us? Probably not. One mom and farmer says other parents shouldn’t be scared of anti-GMO rhetoric they see online. Do opposites really attract? A new study appears to have debunked that old adage.

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Join guest host and geneticist Kevin Folta and GLP contributor Cameron English on episode 236 of Science Facts and Fallacies as they break down these latest news stories:

Cooking oils derived from corn, canola and other crops have been staples in Western diets for decades. Although public health authorities have promoted vegetable oils as better choices than saturated fats, growing rates of obesity and diabetes have coincided with the increased consumption of these products, leading many people to the conclusion that seed oils are inherently harmful. Is there any solid evidence to support that conclusion?

Health gurus who sell fad diets and GMO-free products routinely target parents, who are keen to protect their children from potentially harmful chemicals in their food. Minnesota-based mom and farmer Wanda Patsche says her fellow parents need not fear GMOs and other modern tools that are used to produce our abundant food supply. She has some advice that may help moms and dads separate good science from health scares as they browse the shelves at their local grocery stores.

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When it comes to romantic relationships, men and women prefer partners who are like them, according to a recent study surveying 120 years worth of research. The study found that, for more than 80 percent of personality and physical traits, people tended to pair up with partners who exhibited the same qualities they posses. In other words, opposites do not attract.

Kevin M. Folta is a professor, keynote speaker and podcast host. Follow Professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Visit his website and follow ACSH on Twitter @ACSHorg

Multiple evolutions? Does all life on Earth descend from the primordial soup or have different insects, plants and animals evolved separately but concurrently?

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Multiple evolutions? Is this the first time life on Earth appeared?
From its humble origin(s), life has infected the entire planet with endless beautiful forms. The genesis of life is the oldest biological event, so old that no clear evidence was left behind other than the existence of life itself. This leaves many questions open, and one of the most tantalising is how many times life magically emerged from non-living elements.

Has all of life on Earth evolved only once, or are different living beings cut from different cloths? The question of how difficult it is for life to emerge is interesting – not least because it can shed some light on the likelihood of finding life on other planets.

The origin of life is a central question in modern biology, and probably the hardest to study. This event took place four billion years ago, and it happened at a molecular level – meaning little fossil evidence remains.

Many lively beginnings have been suggested, from unsavoury primordial soups to outer space. But the current scientific consensus is that life emerged from non-living molecules in a natural process called abiogenesis, most likely in the darkness of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. But if life emerged once, why not more times?

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What is abiogenesis?

Scientists have proposed various consecutive steps for abiogenesis. We know that Earth was rich in several chemicals, such as amino acids, a type of molecules called nucleotides or sugars, which are the building blocks of life. Laboratory experiments, such as the iconic Miller-Urey experiment, have shown how these compounds can be naturally formed under conditions similar to early Earth. Some of these compounds could also have come to Earth riding meteorites.

smoking thermal vent
Smoking hydrothermal vent. (NOAA / Wikipedia)

Next, these simple molecules combined to form more complex ones, such as fats, proteins or nucleic acids. Importantly, nucleic acids — such as double-stranded DNA or its single-stranded cousin RNA — can store the information needed to build other molecules. DNA is more stable than RNA, but in contrast, RNA can be part of chemical reactions in which a compound makes copies of itself – self-replication.

The “RNA world” hypothesis suggests that early life may have used RNA as material for both genes and replication before the emergence of DNA and proteins.

Once an information system can make copies of itself, natural selection kicks in. Some of the new copies of these molecules (which some would call “genes”) will have errors, or mutations, and some of these new mutations will improve the replication ability of the molecules. Therefore, over time, there will be more copies of these mutants than other molecules, some of which will accumulate further new mutations making them even faster and more abundant, and so on.

Eventually, these molecules probably evolved a lipid (fatty) boundary separating the internal environment of the organism from the exterior, forming protocells. Protocells could concentrate and organise better the molecules needed in biochemical reactions, providing a contained and efficient metabolism.

Life on repeat?

Abiogenesis could have happened more than once. Earth could have birthed self-replicating molecules several times, and maybe early life for thousands or millions of years just consisted of a bunch of different self-replicating RNA molecules, with independent origins, competing for the same building blocks. Alas, due to the ancient and microscopic nature of this process, we may never know.

Many lab experiments have successfully reproduced different stages of abiogenesis, proving they could happen more than once, but we have no certainty of these occurring in the past.

A related question could be whether new life is emerging by abiogenesis as you are reading this. This is very unlikely though. Early Earth was sterile of life and the physical and chemical conditions were very different. Nowadays, if somewhere on the planet there were ideal conditions for new self-replicating molecules to appear, they would be promptly chomped by existing life.

What we do know is that all extant life beings descend from a single shared last universal common ancestor of life (also known as LUCA). If there were other ancestors, they left no descendants behind. Key pieces of evidence support the existence of LUCA. All life on Earth uses the same genetic code, namely the correspondence between nucleotides in DNA known as A, T, C, and G – and the amino acid they encode in proteins. For example, the sequence of the three nucleotides ATG always corresponds to the amino acid methionine.

Theoretically, however, there could have been more genetic code variants between species. But all life on Earth uses the same code with a few minor changes in some lineages. Biochemical pathways, such as the ones used to metabolise food, also support the existence of LUCA; many independent pathways could have evolved in different ancestors, yet some (such as the ones used to metabolise sugars) are shared across all living organisms. Similarly, hundreds of identical genes are present in disparate live beings which can only be explained by being inherited from LUCA.

My favourite support for LUCA comes from the Tree of Life. Independent analyses, some using anatomy, metabolism or genetic sequences, have revealed a hierarchical pattern of relatedness that can be represented as a tree. This shows we are more related to chimps than to any other living organisms on Earth. Chimps and we are more related to gorillas, and together to orangutans, and so on.

You can pick any random organism, from the lettuce in your salad to the bacteria in your bioactive yogurt and, if you travel back in time far enough, you will share an actual common ancestor. This is not a metaphor, but a scientific fact.

This is one of the most mind boggling concepts in science, Darwin’s unity of life. If you are reading this text, you are here thanks to an uninterrupted chain of reproductive events going back billions of years. As exciting as it is to think about life repeatedly emerging on our planet, or elsewhere, it is even more exciting to know that we are related to all the life beings in the planet.

Jordi Paps is an evolutionary biologist fascinated by the causes that underlie the origins and diversity of the Animal Kingdom. He is  interested in the evolution of animals, systematics, body plans and their genomes.  Paps is a senior lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol. Follow Jordi on X @JordiPaps

A version of this article was originally posted at The Conversation and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find The Conversation on X @ConversationUK

‘Unlocking creative potential’: Why the first 10 minutes of sleep are so important

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‘Unlocking creative potential’: Why the first 10 minutes of sleep are so important
There is a stage of sleep where we still have a toe in the waking world — remaining able to take in outside information. Yet at the same time, the mind is unleashed and our thoughts flow more freely. Sadly, non-rapid eye movement sleep stage 1 (N1 for short) lasts a brief ten minutes as we drift off to unconsciousness, and all of the imaginative thoughts and vivid dreams that we encounter during its fleeting moments are often forgotten by morning. That’s a pity, considering that a study published in 2021 found that subjects who spent at least 15 seconds in N1 and then awakened during it or shortly thereafter enjoyed a burst of creative problem-solving power that made them more adept at figuring out tedious math problems.

Presciently aware of N1’s creativity-boosting properties more than a century ago, legendary American inventor Thomas Edison would reportedly doze off with a heavy object in hand so that when he truly started falling asleep he would drop the object and awaken from the clamor. He would then quickly recall and record any insights attained during his brief repose.

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In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports on May 15, researchers from the MIT Media Lab and the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston detailed a more refined method of harnessing N1’s creative bump.

N1 and creativity

Lead authors Adam Haar Horowitz and Kathleen Esfahany invited 50 healthy participants into the lab. They had all subjects wear a futuristic glove-like device, called Dormio, that takes physiological measurements to determine when wearers transition to sleep stage N1 and then into the next stage, N2. The glove can also deliver audio messages to users and record their voices.

dormio
The Dormio dream incubation device. (Credit: Horowitz & Esfahany, Scientific Reports, 2023)

In the lab, some of the participants were instructed to fall asleep and others to stay awake. For the sleepers, Dormio would wake them up after being in N1 for no more than five minutes, then instruct them to briefly detail their dream experience and go back to sleep. The process would then repeat. For non-sleepers, Dormio would simply ask them to record their thoughts every eight to 12 minutes.

The researchers also included another key component in the protocol: Dormio would “incubate” some of the sleepers’ dreams by asking them to think of a tree as they drifted off to sleep. Prior research hinted that implanting ideas in people’s dreams could boost their creativity, at least pertaining to that specific idea.

The incubation worked. All of the subjects instructed by Dormio to think of trees did so in their dreams. One participant reported seeing “trees, many different kinds, pines, oaks,” in a dream, while another described “trees splitting into infinite pieces.”

After the protocol, which lasted 45 minutes total, each subject took three distinct tests of creativity: one in which they were instructed to write a creative story including the word “tree,” another in which they were given three minutes to “list all the creative, alternative uses you can think of for a tree,” and a third where they were shown a list of 31 nouns and instructed to write the first verb that came to mind for each. Subjects’ creativity was assessed by an independent team of raters blinded to the study’s purpose.

Reviewing the results, the researchers found that the subjects who took N1 naps greatly outperformed the non-sleeping subjects in the tests of creativity. The subjects who had their dreams incubated by Dormio led the way, however, scoring 43% higher in creativity than the subjects who just napped and 78% higher than the subjects who stayed awake.

In a blog post about the research, Horowitz cautioned that the creative boost from dream incubation is likely context-dependent: If subjects are made to dream about trees, they will likely be more creative about tree-related topics, but probably not much else.

According to the researchers, the results clearly show that dreams aren’t useless, but rather can be legitimate sources of inspiration and ingenuity, especially if harnessed in a controlled manner.

“In the past, dream experience has too often been explained as the unimportant, and indeed, random result of important nonconscious cognitive processing ongoing in sleep,” they wrote.

The findings certainly suggest that “sleeping on” a problem, especially if that sleep is in the form of a brief N1 nap, can be helpful in figuring out a solution. Thomas Edison was definitely on to something…

Ross Pomeroy studied Zoology & Biological Aspects of Conversation at University of Wisconsin-Madison and used to be a zookeeper. Ross is now an editor at Real Clear Science. Follow Ross on X @SteRoPo

A version of this article was originally posted at Big Think and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Big Think on X @bigthink

Charles Benbrook: Agricultural economist and consultant for the organic industry and anti-biotechnology advocacy groups

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Charles “Chuck” Benbrook (born 1949) is an organic industry consultant and paid “expert witness”[1] on pesticide and GMO-related lawsuits,[2]. According to the New York Times, he receives considerable funding from the organic industry. He is trained as an agricultural economist. He has a PhD in agricultural economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an undergraduate degree from Harvard University.

Benbrook has a long history of being dismissed from jobs because of his perceived biases. Over the years, he lost positions at the National Resource Council, Washington State University, and most recently the Heartland Research Alliance After his separation in mid-2023 as founding director of HRA,  he resumed his work as a full-time tort legal consultant focusing on agricultural chemicals. His ties to the ‘predators’ industry stretch back to 2011, according to Wikipedia. By then, he had already served as an expert witness in more than a dozen lawsuits involving GMOs and pesticides.

Since 2014 Benbrook has been a paid litigation consultant for numerous mass tort pesticide cases including those targeting glyphosate, He has worked as a consultant and expert witness for Baum Hedlund (renamed Wisner Baum), the Church of Scientology law firm that was the lead plaintiff lawyers for the first three cases targeting Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide. His critical evaluations of glyphosate are regularly posted on Environmental Health News, a media site notorious among scientists as a repository for politicized attacks on chemicals, sometimes written by scientists, such as Benbrook, funded by organic companies and predatory lawyers — without the author or the EHN disclosing those links.

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Benbrook has developed proprietary analytical systems he uses to quantify food quality and safety, and the impacts of agricultural technology and policy. He has re-analyzed government reports for public groups and for organic organizations known for anti-biotechnology lobbying to suggest that there are high risks associated with GMOs, pesticide use and residue levels, and often charges for those services. He is often quoted by mainstream news sources (like The New York Times, with at least 30 references) promoting organic agriculture and aggressively opposing GMOs, pesticides and other conventional agricultural tools. He claims that GMO crop use has “backfired” and results in unsustainable massive pesticide use, that organic crops have equivalent or better yields than conventional and GMO counterparts, and that organic food is safer and more nutritious.

Benbrook is the former research director of the organic industry-funded group The Organic Center. He also was affiliated with Washington State University as an adjunct “research professor”, but left WSU in 2015 following disclosures that 100 percent of his activities were funded by the organic industry. Benbrook also is board secretary for the Environmental Working Group‘s political action committee. He has served as a ‘visiting scholar’ at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University since 2017, and spent two years affiliated with Newcastle University in the UK, ending in 2017. Neither is a research position.

Organic Industry Ties

Benbrook emerged as a spokesperson for  organic farming during his tenure as a research director of The Organic Center from 2016-2012. The Center, which is funded by the organic industry, is part of the Organic Trade Association, and has been very critical of crop biotechnology. From 2012-2015, he affiliated with the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources (CSANR) at Washington State University (WSU). He held an adjunct faculty position in the Crop and Soil Sciences Department, funded entirely by the organic industry. It ended on May 15, 2015, when his contract was not extended amidst charges that he was misrepresenting and downplaying his organic industry links (see below).

After he was severed from WSU, Benbrook continued to represent himself as a “research professor at Washington State.” Reporter Carey Gillam (then with Reuters and more recently an editor with the anti-GMO organic funded advocacy group US Right to Know), referred to him as a “research professor” when writing about a commentary highly critical of GMOs co-written by Benbrook in the New England Journal of Medicine. A controversy developed after the NEJM article appeared, because Benbrook publicly maintained, including in COI statements to the NEJM, that he had no conflicts of interests despite extensive documentation that his research at WSU was 100 percent funded by the organic industry (not disclosed to NEJM, see below, Misrepresentations, for an analysis of Benbrook’s claims about his employment situation and in Conflict of Interest representations to NEJM) and that he was (and remains) a paid consultant for organic industry lobby groups and anti-GMO organizations.

In 2015, The New York Times released a trove of Benbrook’s emails secured in a FOIA request documenting his organic industry funding and his close ties to anti-GMO activists and journalists. A separate FOIA led to the release of more of Benbrook’s emails, available here, which reaffirmed his close ties to the organic industry that has bankrolled him since his affiliation with the Organic Center. It includes emails in which asks organizations for financial support in exchange for producing ‘research on request’ tailored to their editorial needs. The emails also reveal that Benbrook and other anti-GMO campaigners worked hand-in-hand with GMO labeling lobbyists, and two prominent journalists critical of GMOs, Michael Pollan and Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott. The email trail suggest both journalists coordinated their article strategies and internet outreach with Benbrook and anti-GMO environmental advocacy groups, including some alternative health providers.

Heartland Research Alliance

In 2018, Benbrook was named the founding director of the organic-funded Heartland Research Alliance, which works closely with tort lawyers targeting agricultural chemicals such as glyphosate. He immediately launched the Heartland Study; its purpose, in his words, is to study “how food and farming impacts the health of people and the planet”. HHRA partnered with various universities and hospital systems to conduct correlation (but not causation) studies “linking” herbicides, particularly glyphosate, to cancers and other health risks [3]:

The Heartland Study claims it is a hospital-based research project designed to find out whether rising herbicide use is putting Midwestern moms and babies — and perhaps even future generations — at risk.

The study targets the herbicides glyphosate, dicamba, and 2,4-D, but also atrazine, neonicotinoids and other active crop chemical ingredients. The project lists a roster of chemical class action litigation-paid consultants, known for the anti-pesticide, endocrine-disruption chemical risk promoting research as partners, including: Philip Landrigan of Boston College, Melissa Perry of George Washington University, Paul Winchester of Indiana University, Fiorella Belpoggi of the Ramazzini Institute, Michelle Perro of GMO Science Alpha, Michael Hansen of Consumers Union, Michael Antoniou of Kings College London, Robin Mesnage (a litigation consultant), John Fagan of Maharishi Movement and HRI Testing Labs, and Bruce Lanphear of Simon Fraser University.

These studies became the foundation for class action lawsuits by the Church of Scientology’s law firm, then named Baum Hedlund, and other predatory law firms. In addition to funding HHRA, Benbrook and his family reported receiving more than $500,000 in fees from mass tort lawyers while coordinating these studies.

HHRA’s donors and board members include plaintiffs’ litigators and their paid expert witnesses. According to a 2019 post on its website that was removed but recovered with Wayback Machine, HHRA received donations from both RFK, Jr. and Michael Baum of Baum Hedlund. Most of its larger donations are disguised as “anonymous.”

imageIn addition to funding HHRA, Benbrook and his family reported receiving more than $500,000 in fees from mass tort lawyers while coordinating these studies.

Benbrook resigned from Heartland in July 2023. According to his resignation letter posted on the organization’s site, he left because, “my service as the HHRA ED has proven to be incompatible with my work as a testifying expert in hotly contested pesticide litigation.” Benbrook’s resignation letter was soon stripped from Heartland’s web page but is preserved here.

Much of the money raised by Heartland and similar groups goes directly or indirectly to environmental advocacy groups known for taking activist positions on chemicals and risk. Environmental Working Group’s political lobbying “Action Fund” is supported by the American Association for Justice, formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, to promote mesothelioma health risk claims linked to class actions being filed by the donors’ trial lawyer members.

Controversial Research

Benbrook’s most controversial study, published in 2012 in a predatory pay-for-play journal, concluded that genetically modified foods had “backfired,” because weeds had begun developing resistance to glyphosate, resulting in massive increases in herbicide use[4]. He claimed that organic crops have equivalent or better yields than conventional and GMO counterparts and that organic foods are safer and more nutritious. The article led to many thousands of web posts and articles claiming that the use of glyphosate with GMO crops uniquely led to ‘super weeds’ as they adapted over time to the herbicide.

The research was widely criticized in the mainstream science community. Benbrook used subjective estimates of herbicide usage by relying on data he interpreted from the US National Agricultural Statistics Service, which didn’t differentiate between GM and non-GM crops and did not take into account the fact that glyphosate is less toxic than the herbicides it has replaced. Thus the net toxicity of herbicide use had actually decreased even as total herbicide use trended mildly upward. Graham Brookes of PG Economics published a peer reviewed report that same year that cracked the same data but reached a far different conclusion: GM crops actually reduced worldwide pesticide use by 9.1 per cent. However, the Benbrook study is still widely circulated on anti-GMO websites as fact.

The source of the article also came under fire. It appeared in the organic-industry funded Environmental Sciences Europe, an online journal which often publishes papers not accepted by mainstream peer reviewed journals. It’s a favorite landing spot for papers by organic-funded anti-GMO scientists such as Gilles-Éric Séralini whose notorious studies making unsubstantiated claims about the alleged dangers of GMOs and glyphosate were unpublishable except in fringe publications.

Benbrook has a long history of attacking scientific findings that conflict with his views as either tainted by industry funding or as researchers making “rookie mistakes.” That’s how he  characterized the 2012 Stanford University meta-analysis of organic foods that concluded they are no safer or nutritious than conventional counterparts. It’s become a landmark study.

In December 2013, Benbrook was the lead author of a study claiming that organic milk contained significantly higher levels of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. The study was funded in part by the organic milk producer Organic Valley, and was sharply criticized for faulty assumptions and analysis. In July 2014, Benbrook was co-author of a meta-analysis of 343 studies examining the nutritional differences between organic and non-organic food. It concluded that organic food had higher levels of antioxidants and lower levels of cadmium than did conventional food.

Benbrook and co-author epidemiologist and pediatrician Philip Landrigan wrote a commentary in 2015, “GMOS, Herbicides and Public Health,” in the New England Journal of Medicine, calling for a global reconsideration of the safety of plant biotechnology due to their concerns over the impact of herbicides on public health. Landrigan, director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai Medical Center, has long maintained that “toxic chemicals” are silently damaging children around the world. The authors based their current argument upon the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)’s controversial classification of glyphosate as a ‘probable’ carcinogen and of 2,4-D as a ‘possible’ carcinogen, along with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision to approve Enlist Duo, a herbicide comprising glyphosate and 2,4-D designed to be used with herbicide resistant, genetically engineered crops

Independent scientists were sharply critical of the NEJM commentary:

  • Dr. Dave Stone, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology, Oregon State University

While it is important to pursue advances in how we assess and manage risk, it is equally important to avoid representations that use inflammatory language, are devoid of context and cause undue alarm. Unfortunately, the latter is the case with the recent commentary by Landrigan and Benbrook who cite Agent Orange, Monarch butterflies, and endocrine disruption to support labeling of genetically modified foods and distort the risk posed by plant biotechnology.

One of Landrigan’s and Benbrook’s central arguments is that the GMO landscape has changed as a result of the noted increase in herbicide applications to genetically modified (GM) crops. While this increase raises some key issues, such as weed resistance, the commentary suggests implications to consumers and public health that are unwarranted.  Whether or not a pesticide is used in conventional or GM crops, the level of acceptable residue on a commodity, known as a tolerance, is set to protect us from harm. Year after year, residues in our food supply have been measured at trace levels that are far below what is required to result in clinically relevant effects.

  • Dr. Jeff Wolt, Professor of Agronomy & Toxicology, Biosafety Institute for Genetically Modified Agricultural Products, Iowa State University

In their piece, Landrigan and Benbrook present a laundry list of familiar misperceptions of modern crop production. Through the lens of their perspective, the public gains a distorted view of the safety of biotechnology crops and pesticides; and of the immense contributions of agriculture to public health in the United States by assuring a safe and abundant food supply.

The authors’ statements regarding findings of the NAS 2000 and 2004 reports are misleading both in terms of what these reports state and the progress that is being made.

The IARC findings of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen and 2,4-D as a possible carcinogen signal the need for vigilance concerning their use, but say nothing regarding risk to human health. EPA and other regulatory authorities conduct a more holistic appraisal of pesticides which considers a wider array of toxicity information as well as exposure characterization to arrive at an understanding of risk of the chemicals under actual use conditions. It is these regulatory risk assessments that support the safe use of glyphosate and 2,4-D in agriculture. EPA shows appropriate vigilance in assuring safety of our food supply through periodic reappraisal of pesticides and is currently undertaking just such an assessment for glyphosate.

  • Dr. Andrew Kniss, Associate Professor, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Wyoming

Dr. Landrigan and Dr. Benbrook cite glyphosate-resistant weeds as a primary reason why “fields must now be treated with multiple herbicides.” … [G]lyphosate-resistant weeds may certainly have increased the number of herbicides used per acre compared to 5 years ago, but the change has been relatively modest when compared to herbicide use before the adoption of GMO crops.

Dr. Landrigan and Dr. Benbrook also make several misleading statements, including that the Enlist Duo registration decision by EPA “failed to consider ecologic impact, such as effects on the monarch butterfly and other pollinators.” The EPA provides all relevant regulatory decision information on its website, including the environmental risk assessment documents. Just one of the risk assessment documents for Enlist Duo contains over 100 pages of ‘ecologic impact’ data and interpretation, including environmental fate, degradation, aquatic and terrestrial organism toxicity and exposure estimates. The EPA also explicitly addresses how Enlist Duo will affect pollinators on an FAQ page dedicated to the Enlist Duo registration.

Another misleading statement made by Dr. Landrigan and Dr. Benbrook is that the “risk assessment gave little consideration to potential health effects in infants and children, thus contravening federal pesticide law.” This claim was also addressed explicitly by EPA in the FAQ document. EPA concluded that after incorporating a 10X safety factor for children, and based on a “complete and very robust” data set, that the “risks were still acceptable for all age groups for all components of the assessment: dietary food and drinking water exposure, volatility, spray drift, residential, and aggregate assessment.

Misrepresentations on Conflict of Interest?

Both Benbrook and Landrigan may have misrepresented themselves as to whether they any potential conflicts of interest in the writing of the NJM article referenced above. NEJM states that submitting authors are required to report any “relationships or activities that readers could perceive to have influenced, or that give the appearance of potentially influencing, what you wrote in the submitted work.” Benbrook made numerous misrepresentations in his disclosure statement:

Did you or your institution at any time receive payment or services from a third party (government, commercial, private foundation, etc.) for any aspect of the submitted work (including but not limited to grants, data monitoring board, study design, manuscript preparation, statistical analysis, etc.)?

Answer NO                

100 percent of Benbrook’s funding at his institution was from organic industry commercial interests, which benefit from disparaging the safety of GMOs and pesticides.

Place a check in the appropriate boxes in the table to indicate whether you have financial relationships (regardless of amount of compensation) with entities as described in the instructions. Use one line for each entity; add as many lines as you need by clicking the “Add +” box. You should report relationships that were present during the 36 months prior to publication. 

Answer NO

Benbrook is a consultant to commercial interests, including Whole Foods Market and litigators with current cases pending against GMO and pesticide companies, which claim and profit from claims that GMOs and pesticides are unsafe

Are there other relationships or activities that readers could perceive to have influenced, or that give the appearance of potentially influencing, what you wrote in the submitted work? 

Answer NO

Both Benbrook and Landrigan are board members, advisors and/or paid consultants to numerous organic activist groups and organizations. Benbrook was and is a paid consultant to the organic industry, including Whole Foods, and 100% of the funds that supported his since-severed project at Washington Sate University were supplied by the organic industry—according to the disclosure on the WSU website (since removed by WSU but displayed above and available here).

Career

Benbrook is an agricultural economist and organic farming advocate who says he has developed analytical systems to quantify food safety and quality, as well as the impacts of agricultural technology and policy.

  • BA, Economics, Harvard University (1971)
  • MA, Agricultural Economics, University of Wisconsin (1979)
  • PhD, Agricultural Economics, University of Wisconsin (1980)

The first 18 years of his career was spent working in Washington, D.C., first for the Executive Office of the President (1979-1980), then as Executive Director for a U.S. House of Representatives agricultural subcommittee (1981-1983). He was the Executive Director of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Agriculture from 1984-1990, and started his own consulting firm in 1991.

In 1997, Benbrook served as Chief Scientist for The Organic Center from 2004 until June 2012. He then joined CSANR as a “research professor” (see reference for description)[4] in August, 2012. He served as the leader of the program called Measure to Manage (M2M): Farm and Food Diagnostics for Sustainability and Health (M2M). The stated goal of M2M was to develop, refine, validate, and apply analytical systems quantifying the impacts of farming systems, technology, and policy on food nutritional quality, food safety, agricultural productivity, economic performance along food value chains, and on natural resources and the environment.

Screen Shot 2015-08-29 at 4.57.38 PM

The M2M program was funded entirely by the organic industry with no funding support from any independent or university sources. According to the CSANR website, but since removed [but available here]

Initial start-up funding for the M2M program have been provided by United Natural Foods, Whole Foods, Organic Valley/CROPP, and Stonyfield. In addition, the Clif Bar Family Foundation has provided a generous three-year, $250,000 grant to support the dissemination of analytical systems and results via the M2M website.

Work on calculating the embedded attributes of food products has been advanced by a $25,000 gift grant from Annie’s, a company working to quantify the benefits stemming from its purchase of a wide range of organic ingredients.

Benbrook’s affiliations and publications all have a decidedly anti-biotechnology, pro-organic slant. In a 2009 interview with the Economist, Benbrook asked a series of questions he claims should be used to determine whether or not biotechnology enhanced crops can be seen as a component of sustainable agriculture. He stated “It is hard to get to “Yes”, biotech and sustainable agriculture go together, with one neutral and three “No” answers to the above questions.”

Education

Benbrook has a PhD in agricultural economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1980( and an undergraduate degree from Harvard University (1971). BA, Economics, Harvard (1971).

From 2012-2015 he held an adjunct faculty position in the Crop and Soil Sciences Department, Washington State University at the Center for Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resources (CSANR). While at WSU, h ran the M2M program within CSANR group. His responsibilities were two fold: To boost faculty cadre actively working on organic agriculture at WSU and to establish a peer reviewed research framework for evaluating sustainability metrics, a rapidly growing driver in the organic marketplace. Funding for Benbrook’s M2M program did not come from the University but was provided by a set of organic industry donors with the intent that Benbrook would establish a base from which he could compete for competitive funding–that his work would stand up to scientific review. In the three years, all funding for his salary and program came from direct industry support provided by United Natural Foods, Whole Foods, Organic Valley/CROPP, and Stonyfield. In addition, the Clif Bar Family Foundation and Annie’s Organic.[5]

Benbrook’s staff included Donald R. Davis, PhD (part time), a retired former academic with the University of Texas and research consultant at an alternative medical clinic in Kansas; he was also a frequent speaker at alternative health and organic conferences.[6] And, Nicholas Potter, MS, who works on “data visualization” for web settings on pesticide risks.[7]. Karie Knoke, BS, a former computer consultant for a hearing aid company and health and personal care worker promoting “off the grid”[8] yurt dwellings and natural living from Sand Point, Idaho (Benbrook’s former hometown), provides data entry and interpretation support.[9] Knote is a former fisherwoman from Alaska who has done pesticide research for Consumers Union and advocated for “energy healing, astrology and the primitive arts.”[10]

Benbrook’s center at WSU appeared to be “virtual” as neither he nor any of his listed staff near the campus. The official mailing address for M2M is Benbrook’s personal residence in Enterprise, Oregon more than 375 miles from the CSANR offices and University of Washington campus. Computer expert Knote lives “off the grid” near San Point Idaho (220 miles from M2M and 365 miles from WSU campus), data visualization staffer Nicholas Potter resides in Spokane (290 miles from campus and 165 miles from the listed M2M offices). And Davis resides near Austin, Texas (1,800-2,100 miles from the respective locations).[11]

Benbrook left in spring 2015 under cloudy circumstances. As of May of that year, his name was scrubbed from the “people” section of the CSANR website and no longer appears in any WSU offered course listings. After his mysterious departure from Washington State University, he formed a new consulting agency and testing service called Hygeia Analytics (www.hygeia-analytics.com).

The Organic Center (TOC)

Benbrook served as “chief scientist” for TOC from 2006-2012. TOC is an independent NGO funded mostly by the organic industry until 2011 when it formally merged with the Organic Trade Association, an . Benbrook led research to support organic agriculture via denigrating conventional agriculture, specifically developing research and public relations campaigns attacking the efficacy and safety of modern crop protection (pesticides) and plant biotechnology (GMOs).

Benbrook Consultant Services/AgBiotech-Info.net

Since 1990, Benbrook has served as a scientific and technical consultant to the organic food industry and organic-supporting advocacy groups. In this capacity he has also served as an expert witness for litigators (including The Center for Food Safety in pesticide and biotechnology-related cases suing the federal government and ag biotech companies. He also owned and ran the website and listserv Biotech Info Net (no longer active). Benbrook’s clients include national consumer and environmental groups, international organizations, companies, federal and state government agencies, trade associations, and academic research organizations.[15]

Benbrook Consulting still exists, but he has expanded into analytical reporting, testing services and lobbying support. He has worked with anti-GMO group US Right to Know, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Church of Scientology law firm formally known as Baum Hedlund.  He contributed his services to campaigns to influence the European Parliament to ban glyphosate and ban the weedkiller dicamba in the US. He provided technical support to a Maharishi Movement-linked study claiming glyphosate causes Alzheimer’s disease.

Benbrook was a consultant to Whole Foods in guiding them to a 2014 launch of a “Responsibly Grown” ratings system. Under his guidance, Whole Foods determined what agro-chemicals it considered harmful or less harmful. Some organic products were rated as ‘harmful’ under this system and some non-organic produce treated with far harsher ‘natural’ chemicals, were listed as ‘best,’. It created a furor among organic purists and scientists alike, and was eventually abandoned.

National Research Council

From 1984 to 1990 Benbrook served as executive director for the Board of Agriculture at the NRC. Benbrook claims he left this position because of his opposition to his role in opposing the findings of a NRC study on children and pesticides, which he believed was too soft. However, according to a 1993 letter from National Academy of Sciences president Frank Press to Bill Moyers, Benbrook was asked to resign from this position following repeated violations of NAS guidelines regarding non-biased, non-partisan and professional science staff statements even before the child pesticide study was completed. Press wrote:

The editing of the documentary will lead viewers to the erroneous conclusion that the employment of Charles Benbrook at the NAS-NRC was terminated as a result of his role as the director of the study on children and pesticides. This simply was not the case. The facts are that Mr. Benbrook was warned both orally and in writing on multiple ocassions, long before the Landrigan committee began writing its report, that his public comments in speeches, testimony, and in print, on studies already completed and on other matters were inappropriate to his role as a member of the NRC professional staff. Indeed, in a letter of warning that I wrote to Mr. Benbrook on November 14, 1989, I stated that “the NRC corporate entity must be non-partisan, and professional staff statements should reflect views that have resulted from our process of balanced committee analysis and careful review. Your actions… do not conform to that process and you have been frequently advised to be more careful.” Mr. Benbrook chose subsequently to ignore the specific guidance contained in the letter and, after yet another such incident regarding a public statement he made on an unrelated matter, he was asked to resign one year later, when the children and pesticides study still was in an early stage of development.[16]

U.S. House Agriculture Committee

From 1981 t0 1984 Benbrook served as a sub-committee staff person to U.S. House of Representatives George E. Brown and Congressman Jim Weaver of Oregon.

Office of the President, Council of Environmental Quality

From December 1979 to March 1981 Benbrook served as an agricultural policy analyst.[17]

Advocacy

Benbrook actively advocates that GMOs can cause known allergies or post other safety challenges and pesticides are unsafe, unjust and unsustainable. He claims organic farming is a safer, healthier and superior system. He collaborates with Consumers Union’s Michael Hansen on glyphsoate and chemical EDC advocacy [x]

Benbrook has participated in numerous organic industry advocacy initiatives, conferences and petition campaigns opposing GMOs. Environmental groups include the Center for Food Safety, Friends of the Earth, Environmental Working Group, US Right to Know, the Organic Consumers Association, and the Pesticide Action Network. Benbrook is a member of Bioneers and affiliated via his consulting with Consumers Union; other advocacy-consulting engagements include:

  • Western Organization of Resource Councils, co-author and research source for anti-biotechnology publications
  • Greenpeace – research consultant/source, event speaker for biotechnology related publications and events
  • Center for Food Safety/Andrew Kimbrell – research consultant/ source for biotechnology related litigation and publications
  • International Center for Technology Assessment/ Mark Ritchie – research consultant/ source for biotechnology related lobbying and publications
  • Just Label It campaign (Organic Voices 501c4 lobbying arm of organic companies)

Sample Quotes

  • “Biotechnology is not a system of farming. It reflects no specific philosophy nor is it guided by a set of principles or performance criteria. It is a bag of tools than can be used for good or evil, and lots in between.” The Economist, November 2009.
  • “Clearly the biotech industry will ultimately be held responsible for negative impacts of their technology. It may take lawsuits or class action lawsuits. The system has to change; it is unjust and not sustainable,” The Organic & Non-GMO Report, February 2011.
  • “There have been dramatic changes in the transgenic composition of GE corn and soybeans over the last five years, coupled with a substantial increase in reliance on pesticides and Bt toxins. Compared to the first five years of commercial use (1996-2000), today’s GE corn and soybeans in the U.S. require:
  • About twice as much herbicide per acre, with glyphosate/Roundup accounting for essentially all the growth;
  • In corn, two to six Bt toxins to deal with European corn borer and the corn rootworm complex;
  • Delayed release, systemic seed treatments including at least two insecticides and two fungicides, one of which is a nicotinyl implicated in honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder;
  • A return to corn soil insecticide use as a component of Bt-gene, resistance-management programs (eroding a portion of the reduction in insecticide use brought about by Bt corn);
  • Significant and historically unprecedented increases in fungicide use on corn (11 percent of crop acres were treated in latest USDA pesticide use survey 2010, no more than 1 percent was treated previously); and
  • Approval and commercial planting in the U.S. of the first GE crop that will be consumed in significant quantities by humans in a largely unprocessed form – Bt and RR sweetcorn.” Charles Benbrook – GE Crop Risk Assessment Challenges: An Overview, Food Safety News, 6 May 2013

Criticisms

  • See “forced resignation” citation regarding Benbrook’s termination from the National Research Council at the NAS, noting, “Mr. Benbrook was warned both orally and in writing on multiple occassions that his public comments, in speeches, testimony and in prent on studies already completed and on other matters were inappropriate to his role as a member of the NRC professional staff.”
  • Grass Fed Cows and Better Milk: Is Industry Funding a Bad Thing When it’s an Organic Corporation? by the American Council on Science and Health, March 2018. “One co-author, Dr. Chuck Benbrook, is an agricultural economist who was unceremoniously kicked out of the school where he was a glorified adjunct once his organic industry funding dried up. He is the poster child for industry shill. Benbrook has a bad habit of massaging study setup to achieve a goal rather than being prospective, and CROPP Cooperative funding his activism while at Washington State University where he literally offered to produce results for a fee.”

Regarding Benbrook’s 2012 report on GMO and pesticide impact use in the United States:

  • Dr. Alan McHughen (UC Riverside) and researchers Graham Brookes and Janet Carpenter documented various “inaccurate claims”, “inaccuracies and biased assumptions” and “misleading use of official data.” They wrote Benbrook relied on his “own interpretations and assumptions” for over-estimating pesticide use on GMO crops while underestimating use on conventional and organic crops and that Benbrook produced no references from reputable science journal published research to support his allegations of human health risks from GMO Bt crops.[18]
  • “The data on which Benbrook relied do not, in fact, support his conclusions. His work exemplifies the observation of biologist James F. Bonner, who once said about the research results of a competitor that did not agree with his own, “There are a thousand ways to do an experiment wrong.” Benbrook has found many of those ways, and his recent article serves as a case study of how to bend the data to support a preordained (and insupportable) conclusion.” and “While at his previous position at the U.S. Organic Center, which is ideologically and intractably (and irrationally) opposed to genetic engineering, Benbrook authored many other papers with similar claims about genetic engineering. None were published in reputable peer-reviewed journals and when independently assessed, they were invariably exposed as being misleading and inaccurate. From his new perch in academia, Benbrook has sought credibility by managing to get one of his ideological screeds into a peer-reviewed journal.” – Graham Brookes is an agricultural economist with the UK-based consultancy business PG Economics and author of 13 peer reviewed papers on the economic and environmental impact of genetically engineered crops. With, Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.[19]

Regarding Benbrook’s Organic Center (OC) 2009 reports on GMO, pesticide use and seed choice in the United States:

  • PG Economics: “The OC’s assessment of the impact of biotech herbicide tolerant traits (HT) is disappointingly inaccurate, misleading and fails to acknowledge several of the benefits US farmers and citizens have derived from use of the technology… Its conclusions are highly dependent upon the assumptions used, and perceptions of the author, as to how seed markets work and farmers behave. We consider that the mainstream US market evidence does not support the OC report conclusions.” PG Economics briefing note 4 December 2009, “The Magnitude and impacts of the biotech and organic seed price premium: US Organic Center report assessment by PG Economics” & PG Economics Briefing note: 19 November 2009, “Impact of genetically engineered crops on pesticide use: US Organic Center report evaluation by PG Economics.[20]

Regarding Benbrook’s 2008 “Nutritional Superiority of Organic Foods” report:

  • Joseph D. Rosen, professor emeritus Rutgers University’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, “My own review of the study, however, shows it to be riddled with flaws and its conclusions unsupported…My own review of this study showed it to be neither rigorous nor able to support the 25 percent “more nutritious” claim. The study suffers from numerous defects, such as inclusion of publications that were not peer-reviewed, studies where the differences in nutrient content between organic and conventional produce were not statistically significant, and publications with insufficient information for statistical analysis. In some cases the study failed to include results favorable to conventional farming while including data from organically grown food that is unavailable to consumers and/or inedible and thus arguably irrelevant.”[21]

Benbrook conflicts of interest while at the Organic Center:

  • “Charles Benbrook is an employee of the Organic Center, so it should not be expected that he has no financial interest in the promotion of organic food sales. Industrial donors to the Organic Center with contributions of at least $50,000 include Aurora Organic Dairy, Horizon Organic, Organic Valley Cooperative, Silk Soy, Stonyfield Farm, White Wave, and Whole Foods Market. Individual donors of at least $50,000 include Walter Robb and John Mackey, co-presidents of Whole Foods; Eugene Kahn, a General Mills vice president and founder of their subsidiary, Cascadian Farm; Mark Retzloff, founder of Horizon Dairies; and Steve Demos, president of combined operations for White Wave, Horizon Organics, and Dean Foods.”[22]

Bibliography

Sample Advocacy Reports:

  • 2008 Report (3.7m pdf) Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years
  • 2004 Report (2.8m pdf) Genetically Engineered Crops and Pesticide Use in the United States: The First Nine Years
  • 2003 Report (869k pdf) Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use in the United States: The First Eight Years
  • 2001 Report (457k pdf) Factors Shaping Trends in Corn Herbicide Use (Including Impact of Herbicide-Tolerant Corn on Herbicide Use)
  • 2001 Report (458k pdf) Troubled Times Amid Commercial Success for Roundup Ready Soybeans – Glyphosate Efficacy is Slipping and Unstable Transgene Expression Erodes Plant Defenses and Yields (Executive Summary)
  • 1999 Report (280k pdf) Evidence of the Magnitude and Consequences of the Roundup Ready Soybean Yield Drag from University-Based Varietal Trials in 1998

Peer Reviewed Papers and Contributions:

  • Benbrook, C. Impacts of genetically engineered crops on pesticide use in the U.S. – the first sixteen years, Env. Science Europe, accepted. Forthcoming 2012.
  • Benbrook, C. et al. Methodologic flaws in selecting studies and comparing nutrient concventrations led Dangour et al to miss the emerging forest amid the trees, Am. Jour. Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 90(6): 1700-1. 2009.
  • Benbrook, C. and C. McCullum-Gomez. Organic vs Conventional Farming, Jour. Amer. Dietetic Assoc., Vol 109(5): 809-811. 2009
  • Benbrook, C. The Impacts of Yield on Nutritional Quality: Lessons from Organic Farming, HortScience, (2007).
  • Benbrook, C. et al. Use of ‘resistance risk profiles’ to guide resistance management planning, Pesticide Outlook, Royal Society of Chemistry, 14:3, June 2003.
  • McCullum, C., C.M. Benbrook, L. Knowles, S. Roberts, & T. Schryver. Application of Modern Biotechnology to Food and Agriculture: Food Systems Perspective, J. Nutr. Educ Behav., (2003); 35:319.
  • Baker, B. P., C.M. Benbrook, E. Groth, and K.L. Benbrook. Pesticide residues in conventional, integrated pest management (IPM)-grown and organic foods: insights from three US data sets. Food Addit.Contam Vol 19(5): 427-46. 2002.
  • Benbrook, C. M. et al. Developing a pesticide risk assessment tool to monitor progress in reducing reliance on high-risk pesticides. American Journal of Potato Research, 79 (2002): 183-99.
  • Benbrook, C. M. Organochlorine residues pose surprisingly high dietary risks. J Epidemiol Community Health 56.11 (2002): 822-23.
  • Benbrook, C. Do GM Crops Mean Less Pesticide Use?, Pesticide Outlook, Royal Society of Chemistry, October 2001.
  • Nigh, R., Benbrook, C., Brush, S., Garcia-Barrios, L., Ortega-Paczka, R., Perales, H.R. Transgenic crops: a cautionary tale, Science, Vol. 287 (5460), 2000. Page 1927.
  • Benbrook, C. Apples, Kids and Core Science, Choices, Third Quarter 2000, Am. Ag. Econ. Assoc. 2000.
  • Lynch, S., D. Sexson, C.M. Benbrook, M. Carter, J. Wyman, P. Nowak, J. Barzen, S. Diercks, & J. Wallendal. Working out the Bugs, Choices, Third Quarter 2000, Am. Ag. Econ. Assoc. 2000.
  • Benbrook, C. Why A Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture?, February 6, 1990. Jan-Feb. 1991 issue of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation.
  • Benbrook, C. Appendix B, Private Sector Research Activities and Prospects, in Investing in Research: A Proposal to Strengthen the Agricultural, Food, and Environmental System, NAS Press, 1989.
  • Benbrook, C. Is American Environmental Policy Ready for de Minimis Risks in Water?, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology 8, pp. 300‑307 (1988).
  • Benbrook, C., and P. Moses. Engineering Crops to Resist Herbicides, Technology Review, MIT Press, November‑December 1986, pp. 55‑61, 79.
  • Benbrook, C. First Principles: The Definition of Highly Erodible Land and Tolerable Soil Loss, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, January‑February 1988, pp. 35‑38.
  • Benbrook, C. The Science and Art of Conservation Policy, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, September‑October 1986, pp. 285‑291.
  • Benbrook, C., and W. Brown. Public Policies and Institutions to Enhance Crop Productivity, Crop Productivity Research Imperatives Revisited, proceedings of the Crop Productivity Revisited Conference, December 11‑13, 1985, Airlie, Virginia, pp. 239‑257.
  • Benbrook, C. Carcinogen Policy at EPA, Letter to Editor, Science, Vol 219, page 798. 1983.

Affiliations

  • Robyn O’Brien, Allergy Kids Foundation[23]

Personal

  • Contact information: Enterprise, Oregon; Phone: (541) 828-7918; email: [email protected]
  • Hobbies: Fishing, raising rabbits, photography

References

With COVID cases rising, grand-standing legislators propose criminalizing mRNA vaccines or banning mask-wearing

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It is not uncommon for legislators to introduce bills that they know won’t pass but that have symbolic value of some sort, like renaming a bridge or freeway to honor a constituent. Every so often, however, they propose something that is so completely idiotic, anti-social, and authoritarian that it becomes the very personification of irresponsibility. Two examples come to mind, one last February, the other this month.

The first example is legislation that would make it a criminal misdemeanor to administer a COVID-19 or other mRNA vaccine in Idaho. State Senator Tammy Nichols and State Representative Judy Boyle, both Republicans, cosponsored House Bill (HB) 154 which states simply: 

A person may not provide or administer a vaccine developed using messenger ribonucleic acid [mRNA] technology for use in an individual or any other mammal in this state. A person who violates this section is guilty of a misdemeanor.

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State Senator Nichols at candidate forum, May 3, 2022. Credit: Jake King/The Idaho Press

Thus, the prohibition would apply not only to COVID vaccines for humans but also, for example, to mRNA vaccines to prevent rabies or parvovirus in dogs.  

Yes, you read that correctly: Administering an FDA- or USDA-approved vaccine to prevent a potentially lethal disease would be a crime.

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Bad science

There are several ironies in this legislation that indicate how ill-advised it is.

First, the proposal came during the winter COVID surge, at a time when we clearly needed to continue to try to control the pandemic. And despite what you might have heard on FOX News, that need continues: Although cases of COVID are now much lower than at their earlier peaks, they are surging, as are COVID hospitalizations, deaths, and the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 virus (which causes COVID) in wastewater.   

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Vaccines are essential to that effort, and the most widely used, most effective ones are produced with mRNA technology. Two new, updated mRNA-based COVID vaccines were approved by the FDA on September 11th.

Data presented at the February 24th meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices showed that the benefits of the mRNA COVID vaccines, billions of doses of which by then had been administered worldwide, far outweigh the risks. In addition to the documentation from the CDC and FDA, the New England Journal of Medicine has a Covid-19 Vaccine Resource Center with a variety of articles that document the safety, importance, and favorable risk-benefit balance of vaccination. 

Finally, as I alluded to above, Idaho HB 154 did not single out COVID vaccines specifically, so mRNA vaccines for severe infections such as shingles, pneumococcus, meningitis B, and tetanus, were they to become available, would also be prohibited, as would veterinary vaccines.

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It’s difficult to understand the motivation for the Nicholds-Boyle legislation. It is scientifically and medically insupportable, endangers Idahoans and their animals, and is extremely authoritarian — a deadly irony considering Idaho took the lead among many states in 2021, calling mandates a violation of American freedom when President Biden proposed making it a crime to resist getting a vaccine.

“Threatening Americans into compliance damages a country already divided,” said Idaho governor Brad Little after the state legislature passed a bill opposing federal vaccine mandates. I guess Orwellian Big Brother-ism only applies when you don’t agree with the mandate.

The second example occurred on September 5th, when freshman U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) introduced legislation intended to prohibit federal mask mandates from being imposed in the U.S. The so-called Freedom to Breathe Act, which would apply through the end of 2024, “would prohibit any federal official, including the President, from issuing mask mandates applying to domestic air travel, public transit systems, or primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools,” according to the senator’s office. 

“This legislation will ensure that no federal bureaucracy, no commercial airline, and no public school can impose the misguided policies of the past,” Vance said. His rationale? “We tried mask mandates once in this country. They failed to control the spread of respiratory viruses, violated basic bodily freedom, and set our fellow citizens against one another.” 

Saying that masks fail to completely control the spread of respiratory viruses is like saying that because airbags fail to prevent all deaths from car crashes, mandating them should be prohibited. The logic is preposterous. And as for sowing divisiveness, such absurd pseudo-libertarian legislative proposals go a long way toward that.

Sen. Vance seems oblivious to reality. Since the beginning of July, new weekly COVID hospitalizations in the U.S. have tripled, deaths are up about 1.5% and SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater are up nearly four-fold since late June.    

At the risk of stating the obvious (although it might not be to Sen. Vance), masks work, and so do mask mandates.

A study of 33,000 pupils in eight school districts in Massachusetts found an infection rate of 11.7% for the unmasked compared to 1.7% for masked children.

Also in Massachusetts, a study compared the numbers of COVID infections between school districts where compulsory masking requirements were lifted with those where they were maintained. Before the statewide masking policy was rescinded, the trends in the incidence of COVID in the Boston and Chelsea districts — which retained masking requirements — were similar to trends in school districts that later lifted masking requirements. 

However, “after the statewide masking policy was rescinded, the trends in the incidence of Covid-19 diverged, with a substantially higher incidence observed in school districts that lifted masking requirements than in school districts that sustained masking requirements.”

More evidence of the effectiveness of masks and mask mandates is discussed here. An article I wrote recently summarizing the current flood of disinformation on mask wearing appeared last week on the GLP.

Another key finding about masking especially affects students, who are packed together day after day: The use of masks doesn’t just protect the individual, it multiplies the protection of the entire community. As Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and Yale University ER physician Dr. Kristen Panthagani point out:

Viral transmission in a population is exponential. Even if masks only reduce the risk of transmission for each individual by a small fraction, when a community masks, those small effects compound exponentially across a population, making a big dent in cases. Just like compounding interest — a small change in the percentage makes a big difference down the road.

Sen. Vance’s ill-considered legislation, which is unlikely to become law, seems to have been simply an exercise in pseudo—libertarian posturing and virtue-signaling. 

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Find Henry on X @HenryIMiller

Greenwashing or greening agriculture? Food companies developing efforts to prevent carbon in soil from leaking into the atmosphere

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brownsdale

Jason Johnson, Stonyfield Organic’s farmer relationship manager, fires up the AgriCORE soil sampling tool in a pasture with sweeping views of central Maine’s rolling hillsides at Dostie Farm, an organic dairy. The auger bit whirrs as it slices through clover and grass, spiraling downward into the earth to retrieve a sample from the 650-acre (263-hectare) farm on a blustery October day.

It takes Johnson three tries to get it right, and the auger emerges from the ground, encased in a thin layer of dark soil. Leah Puro, agricultural research coordinator at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, scoops the soil into a tiny foil dish, then pops it into a battery-powered oven to remove its moisture before sending it to Yale University for elemental analysis, one of the most accurate methods for measuring the amount of carbon trapped in the soil. Puro slides another portion of the soil into a portable refractometer to measure the carbon content using a newer method called Quick Carbon that’s being tested as a rapid means for measuring carbon in the field.

Noting the soil’s dark color, Britt Lundgren, director of organic and sustainable agriculture at Stonyfield, says, “I bet it’s pretty good. … So, then the trick is to figure out, based on the soil type, how much more carbon it could hold and to what depth.”

Dostie is one of six dairies working with Stonyfield to hone cost-effective methods for measuring soil carbon, and tracking changes associated with farming or grazing practices, through an initiative called OpenTEAM. Eventually, Stonyfield will compensate farmers in its supply chain for storing carbon in their pastures, as part of its “science-based target,” or commitment to cut carbon emissions 30% by 2030.

Soil samples from Dostie Farm are placed in a battery-powered oven to remove moisture before they go to a lab for elemental analysis to measure the amount of carbon trapped in the soil. Credit: Meg Wilcox

Stonyfield’s carbon reduction pledge includes shrinking its energy, waste and packaging footprints, as well, but, Lundgren says, “We know that if we focus on soil carbon alone — and if we have every farm that supplies our milk increase their soil carbon by 1 [metric] ton [1.1 tons] per acre per year — we could get to our entire science-based target with that.”

Stonyfield isn’t the only food company betting big on meeting its carbon reduction pledge by shifting its farmers toward regenerative agriculture practices that sequester carbon in soil, among other benefits. General Mills, Cargill, Danone, Walmart and others have made similar ambitious pledges, and for good reason. Like other food companies, their agricultural supply chains are responsible for a huge portion of their carbon emissions. In fact, researchers recently concluded in Science that world climate goals cannot be achieved without fundamental changes to our food system. Regenerative farming, which centers on building soil health, is one promising pathway for decreasing agriculture’s carbon footprint. But how does a large food company motivate the multitude of farmers in its supply chain to adopt farming practices that bind carbon in the soil? And how do we know that these agricultural practices are truly sequestering carbon, and for how long?

Soil meets climate

It’s well established that certain conservation practices, like no-tillage, cover cropping and rotational grazing, can boost the amount of carbon soil stores. But scientists are still understanding how factors like soil type, climate, previous land management practices and water availability impact just how much carbon is stored, and under what management conditions.

OpenTEAM is one of a number of science-based, collaborations that have emerged to crack these questions. The idea originated in 2015 when Stonyfield’s former parent company, Danone, asked Wolfe’s Neck Center to set up a project that would demonstrate how a dairy could become carbon net zero by improving soil health, while also figuring out how to monitor and verify that. But, “the idea morphed from a demo site that would potentially help Danone and Stonyfield to a global collaboration that could help everybody,” says Dave Herring, executive director at Wolfe’s Neck Center.

Dave Herring (right) and Leah Puro stand in front of a building at Wolfe’s Neck Center, a research center and a working dairy farm that sells its milk to Stonyfield Organic. Credit: Meg Wilcox

Stonyfield’s dairy suppliers form one of 20 farm “hubs” working with OpenTEAM. Midwest row crop farmers supplying General Mills and smallholder farmers in Kenya are among other farm hubs. By aggregating data from small trials around the world, OpenTEAM aims to accelerate scientific understanding of adaptive soil health management.

Agriculture and climate change experts generally view efforts to sequester carbon in agricultural supply chains as a necessary climate mitigation strategy. But they’re keeping a watchful eye on how companies carry out their commitments. Verification by third-party auditors, transparency and public reporting will be key.

Egide Dostie Jr. (left), Selena Brown and Egide Dostie Sr.’s Dostie Farm is one of six dairies working with Stonyfield to hone cost-effective methods for measuring soil carbon. Credit: Meg Wilcox

“I worry about greenwashing within this movement, and with this phrase ‘regenerative agriculture.’ It’s the sexy thing for companies to say they’re doing now,” says Arohi Sharma, policy analyst for the Water, Agriculture & Wildlife Nature Program at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), who adds she’s nevertheless “glad” that companies are making the effort.

Permanence, or the longevity, of soil carbon sequestration is also a concern, given how easily stored carbon can be released if farmers, say, plow their fields. Extreme weather like drought also impacts how much carbon soil releases.

“Regenerative agriculture is not something that will be done in three or five years, not even 10 years. It’s a lifelong commitment that farmers and ranchers are taking. I hope these companies go for the long term,” says Sharma, stressing that this approach to farming is a management philosophy that encompasses much more than carbon sequestration.

Leah Puro and Jason Johnson take a soil sample from a Dostie Farm pasture with an AgriCORE soil sampling tool while the Dosties and Brown look on. Credit: Meg Wilcox

Lundgren says that Stonyfield’s commitment goes through its 2030 science-based target, and that it will verify reductions following protocols set by the Science Based Targets initiative, a partnership among the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), World Resources Institute (WRI), the nonprofit organization CDP and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which is part of the broader coalition We Mean Business.

Permanence is “a fair question,” Lundgren says, adding, “there’s a set of things you can do to steer farmers in the right direction.” Stonyfield is relying on OpenTEAM to help resolve such sticking points. “When you combine things like remote sensing with on-the-ground record keeping and measurement you can have a continual picture of what’s happening at an efficient cost,” Lundgren says. “These solutions aren’t guaranteed to be permanent, but even so, I think they can be an important sink for carbon at a time when we need all the solutions we can get.”

Storing carbon on dairy farms

Founded in 1983 as an organic farming school on a small New Hampshire farm, Stonyfield Organic now earns annual revenues of US$360 million. It sells nationally, but sources milk entirely from northeastern U.S. states. Organic Valley dairy cooperative provides the bulk of its milk, from some 218 farms. Stonyfield also buys directly from 32 farms.

Selena Brown has a name for every one of Dostie Farm’s 210 cows, including this one, Swiss Roll. Credit: Meg Wilcox

Dostie Farm is a direct supplier, although it is currently not supplying Stonyfield. Egide Dostie Jr., a fourth-generation dairy farmer, works the farm with his partner Selena Brown, his father Egide Dostie Sr., and his two teenage children. The Dosties converted to organic four years ago because “the only way we could see making a profit was going organic,” says Dostie Sr. as we walk back from the soil sampling exercise in the pasture toward the barn, where most of the dairy’s 210-cow herd is resting.

Organic certification standards require cows to graze outdoors for a minimum of 120 days per year. “It’s more enjoyable and the cows are happier,” says Egide Jr.

The Dosties supplement the grass diet with organic grain they purchase and hay they harvest. The farm’s soil carbon storage opportunities will therefore come from their rotational grazing practices and the perennial grass species they plant and harvest.

Rotating cows through different pastures allows the grass to regrow and keep roots deep in the earth, which in turn builds soil organic matter and binds carbon in the soil. The mix of grass species planted also plays a role because some species encourage more root growth and soil organic matter, according to Lundgren.

Inside a makeshift office in the farm’s garage, Selena Brown and Britt Lundgren review data from farmOS, a software tool that allows for spatial representation of daily farm records. Credit: Meg Wilcox

Stonyfield has been providing technical assistance to the six farms in the OpenTEAM pilot since last summer. It’s trained farmers on various software tools for tracking farm management practices and soil health that they’ll need to master to receive carbon payments.

Inside a makeshift office in the farm’s garage, Brown clicks through tabs on a laptop computer, demonstrating her facility with one such software tool, farmOS, which allows for spatial representation of daily farm records, including grass heights in pastures before and after grazing. “You can see [the cows] went in at 14 inches [36 centimeters], and it went down to 9 [23], here in Paddock C,” she says, pointing to the screen.

Eventually those data will be linked with soil carbon measurements and information on soil type, to provide feedback on how the Dosties’ pasture management activities are impacting the carbon in their soils. The soil carbon data eventually will be verified by an independent auditor.

Getting farmers up to speed on the tools has taken time and effort, and eventually Stonyfield will need to roll out the system to hundreds of suppliers. Once baseline carbon levels are established, farmers will need further technical assistance to adopt pasture management practices that increase carbon storage.

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Technical assistance challenges

Providing such technical assistance is a big lift for a team of one, says Lundgren, but even so, Stonyfield has it relatively easy compared to larger food companies with suppliers around the world, growing different crops in different farming systems and growing regions.

“Companies are finding that reaching out to farmers to build relationships in their sourcing regions is very costly and not in their skill set,” says Debbie Reed, executive director of Ecosystem Services Market Consortium (ESMC), a nonprofit organization working with a dozen large food companies, researchers and others, including OpenTEAM, to develop a voluntary market for soil carbon and other ecosystem services.

Selena Brown digs a soil sample while Britt Lundgren (center) and others record data on the pasture in the United States Department of Agriculture’s LandPKS tool. Credit: Meg Wilcox

“The technical assistance piece is what most companies are really struggling with,” she adds. “Food companies are looking to nonprofit groups with boots on the ground.”

Take General Mills, which set a goal of converting 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) in its supply chain to regenerative farming practices to help cut its carbon footprint 30% by 2030, and to net zero by 2050. That goal covers about 20% to 25% of its massive global supply chain, according to Jay Watson, sourcing sustainability engagement manager at General Mills.

General Mills is running three regenerative agriculture pilots now, one with 45 row-crop producers in the U.S. and Canada’s northern plains, a similar program with 24 farmers in the southern plains, and a program with three dairies in Michigan.

The company collaborates with ESMC and OpenTEAM, and provides technical assistance through trainings in partnership with the nonprofit Soil Health Academy. General Mills also offers a three-year, one-on-one coaching program to producers in its pilots, and fosters a peer-to-peer system for learning among producers, according to Watson.

The approach is “very much about accelerating development of local know-how in these places and measuring the impact of different approaches to farm management in these systems,” says Watson. But it’s expensive, and at the end of the three-year pilots, General Mills will develop case studies specific to growing regions and crops that other farmers in its supply chain could learn from.

“We’re one of many players needed in this space to really advance the overall movement,” says Watson. “We’re trying to find those partners, and even peers and competitors, and say, ‘How do we work together?’”

Who rewards farmers?

One of the trickiest problems to solve is how to incentivize farmers to adopt new practices.

As Reed explains, “If you think that undertaking a new practice or systems approach is going to reduce your yield, are you going to do it?” What’s more, Reed says, “we don’t have good economic data on the costs of changing to different systems, and the potential benefits of having done that.”

Another challenge is that carbon markets pay after the work is done, not upfront. Companies are exploring different models for compensating farmers, says Reed. Some share costs, such as for the purchase of cover crop seed. Others offer a long-term contract and commit to pay the cost differential if yields drop. “Over time we’ll see which ones move the needle the most,” Reed says.

“When you think of the scope of the problem that climate change poses, why wouldn’t you do it?” –Britt Lundgren

Lundgren is wrestling now with how to structure Stonyfield’s incentive program so that it has enough funding to motivate its farmers to participate and eventually change practices, while weighing the cumulative cost to the company if all 250 farms participate. “Can you justify those things, or are there other market participants, like Microsoft or Google, that want to buy land-based [carbon] credits, that we should be connecting to our farmers?” she asks. In other words, Lundgren is grappling with whether to pay farmers directly or connect them to soil carbon markets where companies with corporate climate commitments look to buy carbon offsets.

Meanwhile, the preliminary soil results for Dostie Farm came back at 2.17% carbon content at 15 centimeters (6 inches) depth and 1.67% at 30 centimeters (12 inches). That leaves a lot of room for growth, says Lundgren, because optimal levels for pasture are 8% to 9%.

Lundgren is not ready to make recommendations, however, because she wants to see more samples from other parts of the farm. Ultimately, she expects the farmers supplying Stonyfield to consult with a pasture management expert.

With all of the work remaining to get Stonyfield’s incentive program up and running, it will be another year before dairy farms can start participating.

Lundgren says it’s “a tall order” to get 250 farms to increase their soil carbon by 1 [metric] ton [1.1. tons] per acre by 2030. “But when you think of the scope of the problem that climate change poses, why wouldn’t you do it?”

Meg Wilcox is an environmental journalist covering agriculture, fisheries, environmental health and the business of sustainability. Follow Meg on X @WilcoxMeg

A version of this article was originally posted at Ensia and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Ensia on X @ensiamedia

Pesticides and Food: It’s not a black or white issue — How do organic pesticides compare to synthetic pesticides?

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Many consumers choose to buy higher-priced organic produce because they believe organic foods are not grown using pesticides and therefore are healthier for humans and for the environment. However, organic farming can include any pesticides derived from natural sources. This distinction does not mean organic pesticides are necessarily less toxic than synthetic pesticides. The reality is more complicated.

Editor’s note: This is part four of a six-part series on pesticides and food. Read part one, part two, part three, part five, and part six here.

How do organic pesticides compare to synthetic pesticides?

There is a large variation in pesticide toxicity and environmental impact, within and between organic and synthetic pesticides. For example, even within copper fungicides, which are permitted in organic farming and used by conventional farmers as well, there is a large variation in toxicity.

A graph comparing acute toxicity of five copper fungicides (copper sulphate, basic copper sulphate, basic copper sulphate and hydrated lime, cuprous oxide, and low load copper soap).

The graph above shows the median lethal dose (LD50), one way to measure acute toxicity of chemicals. This value is the dose required to kill half the members of a tested animal population after a specified test duration. This means that a high LD50 represents a low-toxicity substance – the higher the number, the lower the toxicity. For the purpose of this graph, I subtracted the LD50 from 1000 so that a high value would represent a high-toxicity substance.

There are some organic pesticides that are very safe and have a low impact on the environment. There are also some synthetic pesticides that are safe and environmentally-friendly.

For example, here is a comparison between two insecticides, one organic (Bt) and one synthetic (diazinon):

Three graphs showing a comparison of acute toxicity, half-life, and environmental impact quotient for two pesticides: bacillus thuringiensis and diazinon.

In the case of Bt and diazinon, the organic pesticide is less toxic and is less likely to negatively harm the environment. However it’s not always the case that the organic option is the most environmentally-friendly.  Here is a comparison between two organic fungicides and two synthetic fungicides:

Comparison of acute toxicity and environmental impact quotient for two organic (sulfur and copper sulphate) and two synthetic pesticides (chlorothalonil and captan).

It is clear that toxicity and environmental impact varies quite a bit within both organic and synthetic pesticides.

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Much of the information about pesticides online focuses on hypothetical dangers of synthetic pesticides and represents organic farming as a pesticide-free alternative that is better for the environment. However, this dichotomy is misleading. The only overall difference in pesticide use between organic and conventional farming, is that organic farming uses only pesticides from natural sources.

Individual pesticides must be compared to understand differences in toxicity and environmental impact because there is so much variability in both organic and synthetic pesticides. This is also true for farming practices. Organic farming practices can be more sustainable, but this is not always the case. In the next post, I will give a specific example of when organic farming practices can be less sustainable than conventional farming.

Kayleen Schreiber is the GLP’s infographics and data visualization specialist. She researched and authored this series as well as creating the figures, graphs, and illustrations. Follow her at her website, on Twitter @ksphd or on Instagram @ksphd

Marc Brazeau is the GLP’s senior contributing writer focusing on agricultural biotechnology. He also is the editor of Food and Farm Discussion Lab. Marc served as project editor and assistant researcher on this series. Follow him on Twitter @eatcookwrite

This article was originally posted on the GLP January 30, 2019.

Viewpoint: Outdated organic technology? By rejecting gene editing, growers left with more disease-prone, pest-infested crops

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East Yorks mixed farmer Paul Temple suggests that in closing its mind to new genetic technologies, the organic sector may miss out on a major opportunity to transform the productivity, sustainability and viability of its farming systems. This is particularly the case if, as is widely predicted, the use of gene editing rapidly becomes commonplace in conventional breeding, but remains prohibited under organic standards. Organic growers may be left with older genetics gradually becoming more and more outclassed, more prone to disease and pest infestation, further widening the productivity gap between organic and non-organic. Increasingly, there are voices within the organic industry who would appear to agree, he notes.

I am increasingly bemused at the dogmatic rejection of gene editing by the organic lobby. After all, these techniques introduce no foreign DNA, can help reduce or eliminate the need for synthetic pesticides, and are immeasurably more precise and effective than older forms of mutation breeding using chemicals and radiation, which the organic industry accepts.

The reason for their opposition may be that they perceive some form of marketing advantage in remaining GE free, even if it consigns their farming systems to less productive, and in many cases more environmentally damaging, forms of food production.

But the jury is out on that one. Twenty-five years ago, scaring people about the hidden dangers of GMOs may have given a lift to organic sales, but the world is a very different place today.

War in Ukraine, Covid 19, the impact of climate change and spiralling food and energy costs have changed people’s outlook. The general public is much more willing to embrace new food and farming technologies where they are used to tackle challenges of food security, health and climate change.

This was evidenced in recent research conducted by the FSA, which showed that almost two thirds of the consuming public would eat gene edited food if, for example, it offered health benefits (65%), was better for the environment (64%), was safer for people with allergies (64%), tasted better (62%), was cheaper (61%) or more resilient to a changing climate (60%). 

screenshot pm

Surely those polling figures are remarkable, and a marketeer’s dream when bringing out a new product to find, pre-launch, that two-thirds of your potential customer base want to try it out! 

And this is precisely how early applications of these techniques are being used.

To date, nine field trial notifications for gene edited crops in England have been announced by Defra since simplified arrangements were introduced in March last year for experimental release of gene edited plants. Virtually every application is focused on innovations which will improve our food supply, health and environment, whether in terms of reducing food waste (pod-shatter resistant oilseed rape, non-browning potatoes), reducing pesticide use (late blight resistance in potatoes), healthier eating (Omega-3 enriched camelina, tomatoes higher in provitamin B3), or safer food (low-asparagine wheat).  

This suggests to me that in closing its mind to these technologies, the organic sector may be passing up a major opportunity to transform the productivity, sustainability and viability of its future farming systems.

This is particularly the case if, as is widely predicted, the use of gene editing rapidly becomes commonplace in conventional breeding, but remains prohibited under organic standards.

Increasingly, there are voices within the organic industry itself who would appear to agree.

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That certainly seems to be the position of Danish organic body Økologisk Landsforening (Organic Denmark), for example, whose response to recently published EU plans for the future regulation of new genomic techniques (NGTs) questioned the proposed ban on NGTs in organic farming, suggesting that this position should be reviewed with such techniques expected to become widespread in conventional plant breeding.

Another leading proponent of organic agriculture, Swiss researcher Urs Niggli, who was director of the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) from 1990 to 2020, has also urged the European organic industry to change its position on gene editing to avoid being left behind.

In a recent interview with the German magazine Spektrum, Professor Niggli acknowledges that “GMO-free” is a selling point for organic, and that organic associations have deliberately kept the fear of molecular biological breeding methods high in order to distinguish themselves on the market.

urs niggli
Urs Niggli. Credit: Stephan Röhl/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

But he suggests that this view is outdated, with new gene editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 enabling targeted mutations at individual sites of the genome, as happens all the time in nature or in conventional breeding. And while these changes can also occur in nature, with CRISPR-Cas9 breeding progress is much faster, bringing many advantages for agriculture and society, he says.

Urs Niggli warns that by rejecting gene editing, the organic sector could lose its pioneering edge in sustainable agriculture, consigned to producing 20-50% lower yields than conventional farming, and missing out on potential solutions to current production challenges such as reliance on copper-based fungicides for disease control.

Meanwhile he predicts that gene edited crop varieties will become the norm in five to ten years, led by the Chinese and American markets, supporting a global trend to move away from manufactured nitrogen fertiliser and chemical pesticides. This would put organic farming in danger of being left behind, especially in terms of sustainability, according to Professor Niggli.

This poses a major dilemma for the organic industry, since the viability of organic farming when practised at scale hinges critically on routine access to non-organic inputs under ‘emergency’ derogations where the equivalent inputs are not available in organic form.

Although organic consumers paying a hefty premium may be blissfully unaware, there are many examples of situations in which organic producers rely on non-organic inputs of seed, feed, forage, youngstock, breeding stock, antibiotics and anthelmintics.

Last year, for example, despite a long-term decline in the area farmed organically in the UK, authorisations of non-organic seed use by organic sector bodies reached a record high, at more than 17,000 individual derogations.

If the organic sector maintains its ‘zero tolerance’ approach to gene editing, while these techniques become routinely used in mainstream plant breeding, such derogations will no longer be available, and organic growers will be left with older genetics gradually becoming more and more outclassed, more prone to disease and pest infestation, further widening the productivity gap between organic and non-organic.    

So I would urge the organic sector to open its mind to the potential opportunities offered by these technologies. 

What is there to lose?

There’s an awful lot to gain. 

Paul Temple manages a mixed arable and livestock farm on the East Yorkshire Wolds, producing cereals for seed, oilseed rape, vegetables and beef. He is a past vice-president of the National Farmers Union, former chairman of the Copa Cogeca Cereals, Oilseeds and Protein Group, and founder of the European Biotech Forum. Paul is also a board member of the Global Farmer Network, which brings together strong farming leaders from around the world to amplify the farmers’ voice in promoting trade, technology, sustainable farming, economic growth, and food security. Find Paul on X @PaulWoldfarm

A version of this article was originally posted at Science for Sustainable Agriculture and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Science for Sustainable Agriculture on Twitter @SciSustAg

Mask up again? As COVID cases rise, look to science and not pundits

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coronavirus children in mask

I can’t believe we’re having this discussion in September 2023, just as the fall respiratory virus season commences, but the politicizers of COVID won’t let up. Consider the ill-timed article by John Tierney last week in City Journal claiming that “maskaholics are incorrigible” and everyone should reject masks because “we’re rational”.

Unfortunately, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is not rational. It mutates randomly, and then is subject to the rules of Darwinian evolution; the fittest progeny survive and proliferate. A variant called EG.5 (dubbed “Eris”) is currently dominant, but two new ones, BA.2.86 (“Pirola”) and FL.1.5.1 (“Fornax”), have emerged.

Together, they are driving yet another surge. COVID hospitalizations and deaths have recently increased about 20% week over week, wastewater concentrations of virus are trending up, and there has been a report of a superspreader event in Nashville. Various schools, hospitals, clinics, and other institutions around the U.S. are again requiring people to wear masks.

Tierney, a contributing editor at City Journal, has long been on a tear denouncing masks. Last February, in his piece “Approximately Zero,” he tried to make the case that “masks make no difference in reducing the spread of COVID — a claim I debunked shortly after. Now, with cases unmistakably trending upward, he’s back misrepresenting various studies and cherry-picking others.  

Tierney again spins the meta-analysis by the Cochrane Library, a highly-respected British nonprofit that specializes in systematic reviews of health care interventions. Released last January, it has been fuel for the fire for mask skeptics. A top line reading of Cochrane’s conclusion might appear to support Tierney’s rants. As did many mask rejectionists, he quoted its conclusory statement that wearing a mask in the community “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of COVID, or any respiratory disease for that matter.

“The pooled results of [randomized control trials] did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks,” the review reads.

Tierney appears to have stopped reading the report after that headline, however, because the details paint a more nuanced picture that undermines his mask-rejectionist thesis. In fact, the researchers didn’t even study what Tierney mistakenly thinks they did.

Cochrane didn’t study the effectiveness of masks during COVID. Rather, they reviewed 78 studies, only six of which involved the COVID pandemic and only two of which specifically studied COVID and mask mandates. (And those two focused only on with whether mask mandates were in place but not the actual wearing of masks.)

The data in those few cases were so fragmentary and noisy, the Cochrane researchers concluded, it was impossible to draw any firm conclusion: 

The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. …

There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect.

Died-in-the-wool mask rejectionists jumped on the ambiguities, selectively twisting the findings. Unsurprisingly, Fox News led the charge:

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The confusion spiraled when the lead author of the report, Tom Jefferson, an Oxford University tutor, told conservative columnist Bret Stephens of the New York Times, “There is just no evidence that they” — referring to masks — “make any difference.” 

It’s perhaps understandable that there was some confusion in the days after the release of the muddy-worded Cochrane report. But soon after. the Library’s editor-in-chief, Dr. Karla Soares-Weiser, weighed in, rebuking Jefferson for extrapolating on the very thin data. “That statement is not an accurate representation of what the review found,” she told the Times. Soares-Weiser then released a statement posted on the Cochrane’s website:

Many commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation. Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask wearing itself reduces people’s risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.

Multiple studies — more than 5,000 — underscore the consensus that masks do limit infections and spread. A meta-review published last month by British and Canadian scientists used 5185 unique records of studies performed from the start of the pandemic to January in asking whether: (i) wearing a face mask; (ii) wearing one type of mask over another, and (iii) mandatory mask policies can reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection, either in community-based or healthcare settings. Their conclusion: 

More studies found that masks (83%) and mask mandates (89%) reduced infection than found no effect (12%) … Despite the [risk of bias], and allowing for uncertain and variable efficacy, we conclude that wearing masks, wearing higher quality masks (respirators), and mask mandates generally reduced SARS-CoV-2 transmission in these study populations. (emphasis added).

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Children, schools and mask mandates

But Tierney and his ilk are having none of this. Now they are criticizing mask mandates for endangering the health of children. He cites “an extensive analysis” published earlier this year which found that a mandate had no significant effect on cumulative COVID infections or mortality, but did correlate with one statistically significant effect: a decline in fourth-graders’ test scores. He characterizes this as “an example of the singular cruelty of America toward children.” 

Contrary to Tierney’s (mis)take, here are the relevant conclusions of the study:

State governments’ uses of protective mandates were associated with lower infection rates, as were mask use, lower mobility, and higher vaccination rate, while vaccination rates were associated with lower death rates. State GDP and student reading test scores were not associated with state COVD-19 policy responses, infection rates, or death rates. [emphasis added]

Tierney also goes off in a tirade against what he says is the “possibly toxic effect of prolonged mask-wearing, particularly for pregnant women, children, and adolescents” — the now familiar and notorious “killer mask” claim. His new evidence? A review article published last March by a team of German researchers which concluded a “need exists to reconsider mask mandates … due to chronic carbon dioxide re-breathing.” Another City Journal columnist hyped it in a May column, “The Harm Caused by Masks.”

This “new, but old” killer mask claim has been a conspiracy theory trope since the beginning of the pandemic. In this latest iteration, the German authors, none of whom is an expert in this field and include a veterinarian and a psychologist, posit a made-up malady, “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome (MIES).” But even they acknowledge there are not much data to support their grandiose warnings: “Overall, the exact frequency of the described symptom constellation MIES in the mask-using populace remains unclear and cannot be estimated due to insufficient data.” 

The myth took wings in 2000 when graphics like this circulated on social media.

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Then a video meme of a woman breathing directly onto a carbon dioxide monitor while wearing a COVID-19 mask was posted, and blew up Facebook. She claimed to have a “professional carbon dioxide detector” which would beep when CO2 levels reach dangerous levels. Within seconds, the reading skies from 1,895 to 10,000 while the device beeps furiously. “This is dangerous,” the woman says solemnly.

Not true. “You can repeat this experiment without a mask and you will get the same result,” Lidia Morawska, the Director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at Queensland University of Technology, told Reuters.

Why? The test is bogus for the same reason the claims in the German study don’t make scientific sense. As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explains, carbon dioxide could not possibly get trapped in a mask.

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Dr. Victoria Forster, a cancer research scientist, elaborates in Forbes:

Take surgeons, for example — during long procedures, they wear surgical masks for hours with no ill-effects on their carbon dioxide levels. Having a surgeon with an altered mental state would not be in the best interests of either the patient or the surgeon and thankfully, this simply does not happen…

What about tighter-fitting masks made from denser materials, such as N95 masks, worn by some healthcare workers coming into close contact with COVID-19 patients? Well these, only if fitted appropriately, will filter out coronavirus particles. But they do not protect the wearer from gases and small molecules which freely pass through the filter as they are just too small. 

Although there is a reasonable case to be made that students should not have been kept out of school once the COVID pandemic had stabilized, claims that masks didn’t prevent infection in children are factually wrong. For example, a study of 33,000 pupils in eight school districts in Massachusetts found an infection rate of 11.7% for the unmasked compared to 1.7% for masked children.

Also in Massachusetts, a study compared the numbers of COVID infections between school districts where compulsory masking requirements were lifted with those where they were maintained. Before the statewide masking policy was rescinded, the trends in the incidence of COVID in the Boston and Chelsea districts — which retained masking requirements —were similar to trends in school districts that later lifted masking requirements. However, “after the statewide masking policy was rescinded, the trends in the incidence of Covid-19 diverged, with a substantially higher incidence observed in school districts that lifted masking requirements than in school districts that sustained masking requirements.”

Another key finding that impacts students, who are packed together day after day: The use of masks doesn’t just protect the individual, it multiplies the protection of the entire community. Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and Yale University ER physician Dr. Kristen Panthagani point out: 

Viral transmission in a population is exponential. Even if masks only reduce the risk of transmission for each individual by a small fraction, when a community masks, those small effects compound exponentially across a population, making a big dent in cases. Just like compounding interest — a small change in the percentage makes a big difference down the road.

The choice is yours

Ideological skeptics are not about to be convinced by the accumulating evidence. Their objections are to authorities they see as violating their autonomy by dictating what they must do in the interest of society. However, their disinformation about various aspects of the COVID pandemic is a disservice to the public.

“It is completely understandable that the public and even the scientific community expresses confusion over how well masks protect against a respiratory disease like COVID-19,” noted a team of distinguished researchers at the University of Minnesota led by Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) and Regents Professor at the university. Their nuanced two-part discussion [here and here] is a valuable tool to challenge disinformers.

The team also produced the stunningly informative table below, which illustrates how long it would take for a person to be exposed to a virus when both a carrier and a non-infected person wear different types of masks versus when neither wear masks. Even a typical, cheap surgical mask worn by both parties offers four times the protection compared to neither person wearing a mask; that protection soars to a startling 100-fold greater — 15 minutes versus 24 hours — if both wear the highest-protection N-95 mask.

image

Even if the latest increase in COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths should prove transitory, we are not out of the woods. Another pandemic killer virus will come along, perhaps in our lifetime. If it does, we need to be prepared to utilize all reasonable measures to limit exposure. In July, Australian academic virologist Dr. Ian Mackay published a detailed, well-researched article on the effectiveness and importance of masks. It’s worth a read. He concluded:

[W]e each can take steps to reduce the amount of virus we get exposed to. Masks matter. A mask can help. So can clean or fresh air. As can distance. And these measures work against multiple very different airborne viruses and the diseases they cause. Reducing the infectious dose also means we may get a milder form of illness and still develop an immune response.

Dr. Mackay’s parting advice: “Wear a good mask well – reduce the [number of virus] particles you inhale. Masks matter.”  

Acknowledgment: The author wishes to thank Jon Entine for his innumerable valuable suggestions and superb editorial assistance.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Find Henry on X @HenryIMiller

Sequestering carbon on a gigaton scale: How gene editing can address climate change by reducing atmospheric emissions

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Hardly a day goes by without another piece praising the potential for gene editing to help solve climate change. Nevertheless, the possible contributions of biology and biotechnology have been conspicuously underplayed in most of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) analyses. This is, perhaps, at least partly because it is no small thing to carry an idea from inception to delivery; to bridge the valley of death and deliver a functional solution to a specific problem. But this may be starting to change.

On February 7–8 a small group of researchers met at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in an informal (and partly hybrid) meeting entitled “How Can Agrigenomics Help to Address Climate Change?” The workshop featured speakers from around the world convened to discuss how best to demonstrate proof of concept for selected applications and start to flesh out plans to reduce them to practice at scale. Each of these concepts has the potential to remove gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere within the foreseeable future. Cutting emissions is important but reducing atmospheric carbon concentrations is essential. If we can’t figure out how to do that the fight is lost.

And, how to cut emissions and capture carbon in an arena that incentivizes sneaky usage? Credit: Katie Louise Thomas

Even if humanity succeeds in eliminating carbon emissions altogether—difficult to do while keeping the population fed, housed, and clothed—there is still a large amount of carbon in the atmosphere beyond the capacity of earth’s natural ecosystem processes to absorb. That excess amount is approximately 34 Gigatons—34,000,000,000 tons of carbon.

To bring the concentration of atmospheric carbon back into balance humanity must eliminate those emissions and reduce or eliminate the accumulated excess accrued over the past 200 years, some 200GT. To do that we need techniques that will deliver at scale—very large scale—and economically. With techniques like those described below, and many more, this is tractable. But to do so we need to do more than just innovate technologies; we need to remove obstacles to such innovations in policies, law, and regulation. It’s time for countries around the world, including the United States, and especially the member states of the European Union, to set aside laws and regulations left over from the early days of the biotechnology revolution. These were driven by fears that have long been shown unfounded, and a lack of understanding now thoroughly remedied by experience and must be replaced by policies that will enhance and enable innovations rather than impede them. The world waits.

What follows is a summary narrative of a second meeting on biotechnological innovations for climate change solutions funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The first was held on November 11–12, 2021, at Boston University.

Individual speakers at the latest meeting described specific proposals summarized below and estimated the costs involved and the impact their application could have if it were deployed at scale. Each application has the potential to sequester carbon on the gigaton scale. It is important to note that each of these projects affords multiple opportunities to leverage impacts through synergies with the other projects described, and more. Table 1 highlights some of the projects speakers are pursuing.

Credit: ITIF

Julie Gray, (University of Sheffield) described how rice is a major food crop, but its water intensive cultivation leads to greenhouse gas emissions estimated to account for 2.5 percent of human-induced climate change. This could be substantially alleviated by optimizing crops to reduce water loss and speed the much-needed shift from paddy rice towards dry seeded systems. In collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, novel rice varieties with reduced stomatal density have already been produced through gene editing and trait selection that could be field tested rapidly and adopted by farmers within eight years. The combined impact of enhanced rice drought tolerance, together with reduced methane emissions and energy savings from irrigation could save over 1GtCO2e (gigaton carbon dioxide emissions equivalent) emissions per year, with further reductions possible by application to other major food crops including maize, soybean, and rice as well as biomass crops like poplar and switchgrass.

Mary Lidstrom (University of Washington) described a plan for methane capture from air using aerobic methanotrophs. Methane has a warming impact 34 times greater than CO2 on a 100-year timescale (86 times greater on a 20-year timescale) and a relatively short half-life in the atmosphere (~10 years). This makes it a key short-term target for slowing global warming by 2050. Lidstrom’s team is developing biofilter technology using bacteria that metabolize methane, to remove methane from the air over emission sites, including agricultural areas, where methane is enriched compared to the atmosphere as a whole. This technology will be designed also to reduce production of another greenhouse gas, N2O, by limiting nitrate availability. By targeting tens of thousands of such sites, enhancing the current capacity of such technology, and envisioning a 20-year deployment, it would be possible to remove a total of 0.3 Gt methane (10 Gt CO2eq) by 2050 (0.5 Gt CO2eq/yr), resulting in 0.2oC less global warming.

Lisa Stein (University of Alberta) is working with biological nitrification inhibitors and soil-free systems. While the Haber-Bosch process for N-fixation has enabled a stable food supply for half of humanity, the heavy use of synthetic fertilizers has caused a radical imbalance in the global N-cycle. The resulting increases in nitrate production and GHG emissions have contributed to eutrophication of ground and surface waters, growth of oxygen depleted zones in coastal regions, ozone depletion and exacerbated rising global temperatures. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, agriculture releases approximately 9.3 Gt CO2 equivalents per year, of which methane and nitrous oxide account for 5.3 Gt CO2 equivalents. N-pollution and slowing the runaway N-cycle requires a combined effort to replace chemical fertilizers with nitrification inhibitors based on biological formulations, which after a 10-year span of usage could eliminate at least 30 percent of ag-related GHG emissions (~1.59GT), protect waterways from nitrate pollution, and protect soils from further deterioration. Stein’s team aims to bring biological nitrification inhibitors (BNIs) to the marketplace to curb the microbial conversion of fertilizer nitrogen into greenhouse gases and other toxic intermediates. Worldwide adoption of these plant derived BNI molecules in combination with biological fertilizers would substantially elevate nitrogen use efficiency by crops while blocking the dominant source of nitrous oxide to the atmosphere. In addition to biological fertilizers and BNIs, a second project to curtail N-pollution, soil erosion, and deterioration of freshwater supplies pursues the development of improved microbial inocula to increase nitrogen use efficiency without GHG production in soil-free hydro- and aquaponics operations. The carbon cycle in these systems can be closed by including anaerobic digestion of solid waste followed by microbial conversion of methane into single cell protein for fish feed.

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Pam Silver and Dan Davidi (The SynBio Hive at Harvard Medical School) are exploring ways to enhance both synthetic and artificial photosynthesis. One approach involves generating myriad different forms of key photosynthetic enzymes (e.g., RuBisCO, the most abundant protein on the planet) and then leveraging their expertise in single-cell assay development and genome engineering to improve photosynthesis in photoautotrophic microbes as well as plant cultures in suspension. This system allows them to take advantage of the power and scale of single-cell high throughput screens while maintaining relevance to plant physiology. This has the potential to greatly decrease the time, scale, and cost needed to develop desired plant phenotypes.

In an alternative approach to enhancing natural photosynthesis, they propose to optimize an artificial photosynthetic system that couples the electrochemical production of hydrogen gas to power microbial growth. This offers two major advantages (1) ~10 times greater efficiency in converting solar energy to biomass than photosynthesis in plants, and (2) greater metabolic plasticity, as microbes are much more amenable to genetic engineering, editing, and synthetic biology manipulations compared to plants. They propose to use Xanthobacter autotrophicus – a bacterial strain that performs carbon and nitrogen fixation and uses hydrogen as an energy source – for sustainable and efficient bioproduction. They will maximize the performance of their bionic photosynthetic system by developing genetic engineering tools to apply directed evolution, and rationally designing nitrogenases, rubiscos, and hydrogenases – the key enzymes required for N2, CO2, and H2 uptake. This will produce valuable metabolite commodities starting from only air, water, and renewable electricity.

For the screening platform: Croplands worldwide occupy 18.6 million km2 and assimilate about 10 Gt/y. of CO2 eq. Modeling suggests enhancing photosynthesis can lead to up to a twofold increase in crop yields. Thus, assuming the screen can lead to a conservative 10 percent increase in crop yields by selecting for cells with enhanced photosynthesis, and if 10 percent of the crops globally could be replaced with enhanced crops developed via the screen, their approach has the potential to sequester 10 percent*10 percent10Gt/y = 0.1Gt/y.

For the electrochemical production: The bionic leaf system for converting photovoltaic energy to biomass is ~10 times more efficient than that of natural photosynthesis. Thus, for every unit of solar energy invested, they will fix 10-times more carbon compared to crop land. Assuming the equivalent of 0.1 percent of croplands will be used for electrochemical production (note that this system can be placed in lands that are not suited for agriculture), they would sequester 10Gt/y*0.01*10 = 1.0Gt/y as microbial biomass. They note that this number is a lower bound estimate because the microbial system does not rely on Haber-Bosch derived nitrogen and thus has a lower carbon footprint compared to crops.

The Haber-Bosch process has been incredibly useful since its invention, but now greener technologies may supplant it. Credit: Palma et al,

Ken Nealson (Project Vesta; Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California) described a project involving microbial acceleration of the natural process of silicate-carbonate mineral weathering as a method of atmospheric CO2 drawdown. There is general agreement that rock weathering via the conversion of basaltic (silicate) rocks to limestone-like carbonates offers an excellent (and irreversible) way to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels. The natural rates of such weathering reactions are very slow, but Project Vesta is developing living microbial catalysts that greatly enhance the rate of this weathering. Preliminary work has shown major rate enhancement(s), and the project is now ready to begin screening and genetically engineering microbes to maximize the rate(s) at which they accelerate silicate weathering. The next step will be to scale up to 3,000-liter reactors, followed by medium and then large-scale reactors. Vesta anticipates about 5 million tons of carbon removal per year with current supply partners, and after that there are sufficient mineral reserves and mine tailings to scale beyond the gigaton level in less than a decade. Their approach will encompass coastal, terrestrial (soil) and freshwater mineral enhancement, and include both reactor-based and in-situ systems. Project Vesta has the capability to bring the described approach(es) to scale rapidly, using several labs and field stations where research is ongoing, together with an outstanding scientific, engineering, and administrative staff, already working on permitting and other business issues.

Tobias Erb (Max Planck Society) leads a large team looking for ways to improve photosynthesis beyond its natural limits. Plants generally use only about 1 percent of the sunlight that falls on them to make carbohydrates, consuming or “fixing” atmospheric carbon in the process. Excellent research teams around the world are exploring ways to improve natural photosynthesis and have made considerable progress to date. But Erb and his colleagues are taking these efforts a step further and are on track radically to reinvent photosynthesis using synthetic biology, enzyme engineering and machine learning to create innovative crops featuring a new-to-nature CO2-fixation metabolism with photosynthetic yields increased by 20 percent to 60 percent (potentially up to 200 percent). They have already demonstrated several synthetic pathways for improved CO2 fixation that are up to 20x faster than natural photosynthesis and require 20 percent less energy in the lab. Erb’s team is working to implement these new-to-nature solutions in microorganisms and plants to improve their CO2 uptake efficiency beyond the limits set by natural evolution. Models suggest that their approach could lead to the ability to sequester upwards of 3 GT of CO2 equivalent annually, if applied to crops alone.

Forest Biotech company FuturaGene (parent company Suzano SA, Brasil) is focused on the sustainable enhancement of renewable plantation forest species. Plantation forests constitute only 7 percent of global forest area, but they provide ~50 percent of industrial wood. Shortfalls of 1-4 billion m3 in industrial roundwood supply are projected by 2050, and the productivity of planted forests must triple by 2050 if global climate mitigation and adaptation targets are to be supported and destruction of natural forests prevented. FuturaGene proposes within the next 10 years to deploy genetic modification (GM) technologies (including direct yield-enhancement and photorespiratory bypass) to plantation forestry across the sub-tropics to address those targets and has the ability through parent company Suzano SA to do so at scale. FuturaGene has developed and deregulated (in Brazil) a direct yield-enhanced eucalyptus variety, which is ready for landscape level testing. Current carbon sequestration is estimated to be around 240 tonnes per hectare during a seven-year growth cycle (a 2015 desk study). A 12 percent increase in yield by either route would deliver 270 tonnes/ha/7 years. If yield enhanced clones were planted over the entire 1.2 million ha estate of Suzano this would correspond to 324 million tonnes CO2eq per cycle. Across the entire Brazilian estate of 9 million hectares this would be 2.4 GT CO2eq per cycle.

Xiaohan Yang (Oak Ridge National Lab) proposed, in some detail, a well-documented and justified 3 pronged mutually reinforcing approach to carbon sequestration and climate change adaptation. This would involve increased photosynthesis, increased translocation of captured carbon, and increased soil capacity—and would, if successful, have a major impact. (This proposal was not presented in the workshop, but instead developed pursuant to conversations at the workshop and added afterwards.)

The 3 objectives are (i) integrative engineering of CO2 capture, storage and utilization in fast growing poplar (which can be used as a feedstock for biofuels, biomaterials, and engineered for deeper roots and root architectures for increased carbon storage); (ii) genetically enhanced agave-mediated carbon sequestration and utilization in dry and hot regions; and (iii) the development of “care-free/climate-friendly” lawn grasses. It is noteworthy that increased production of agave would not only contribute to amelioration of malnutrition which will become increasingly serious as the climate changes, but it would enable utilization of the planet’s 500 million acres of marginal land (arid and semi-arid) for production of agave and poplar, and for the sequestration of 18 Gt CO2eq per year of atmospheric carbon. In addition, the crassulacean acid metabolism photosynthesis pathway, which would be utilized, has the unique feature of high water-use efficiency due to daytime closure of stomata for reducing water loss mediated by transpiration, and night-time opening of stomata for CO2 uptake. More generally, CAM genes could also be engineered into C3 plant species to increase drought tolerance.

All of these gene editing strategies could be integrated with other interesting ideas on carbon capture and sequestration. Credit: Rita Erven via GEOMAR

Applying “care-free/climate-friendly” varieties of perennial ryegrass, tall fescue, Kentucky bluegrass and fine fescue that are used in lawns, athletic fields, golf courses etc. will lead to significant reductions in mowing frequency, fertilizer inputs, and water use, and could result in a greater than 90 percent reduction in emission of CO2, nitrous oxide and methane associated with lawn care. Several studies have shown that greenhouse gas emission from lawn care, which includes fertilizer and pesticide production, watering, mowing, and other lawn care practices, is much greater than the amount of carbon stored by lawngrasses. Yang estimates that in the US alone lawn care practices contribute at least of 41.3 million metric tons of CO2 eq.

This picture seems to suggest that the U.S. uses about 1000 gallons of water per day, per person.

Val Giddings (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation) pointed out that while applications such as those explored in the workshop hold considerable GHG mitigation potential, the rate limiting factor in their ability to sequester carbon is implementation, which is contingent on public acceptance. Policies, regulations, and business practices such as industry certification all create considerable barriers to development and deployment of innovative solutions developed with gene editing and genetic engineering. This is the case around the world despite the lack of scientific justification for such discrimination, and in the face of massive experience demonstrating superior safety and sustainability of such technologies. If the acceptance climate is not improved these solutions will not be deployed. Pushing back against the concerted disinformation campaigns from special interests that have driven such discriminatory policies is difficult, particularly for governments, but independent, science-based voices are uniquely suited for the task. There are several entities with proven track records in this space, a handful of which are listed below.

Each of these entities is vulnerable to extinction due to financial uncertainty.

Workshop participants are united in the view that these groups are deserving of support as critically important contributors for enabling future innovations built on genetic technologies. In addition to general support for the ongoing activities of each of these groups, there is a particular need for outreach in the service of alliance building between researchers and receptive environmental NGOs and communities of faith. The most promising opening in decades to receptive environmental NGOs is being pursued by FuturaGene and needs external support. At least one of FuturaGene’s projects is ready for immediate implementation and could provide validation of the approaches of this suite of initiatives fomenting a vital public acceptance breakthrough. Meanwhile the GLP is poised to reach out to communities of faith, building on previous efforts in this space, and also in need of external support.

In summary, many opportunities exist for synergies and cooperation between the several projects described. It follows that the benefit of supporting the projects as a group would be greater than picking and choosing projects to support as from a menu of discrete offerings, and sustained support over time with minimal bureaucratic burden would lead to the greatest returns on investment.

There is agreement across several proposals that the optimal way to reduce CO2 is to improve biological productivity through crop engineering and increasing carbon fixation rates. There is also recognition that nitrogen use efficiency, as mediated by the soil microbiome, is essential to achieving this goal. To further decrease GHGs outside of crop systems, microbial processes including atmospheric methane oxidation and siderophore-mediated silicate weathering have been proposed. Organization to leverage the outputs of the projects described could center around the plant-microbe-geo axis with feedbacks between the atmosphere and hydrosphere. The idea would be to integrate implementation and monitoring of the proposed technologies to incorporate and include synergistic (and unintentional) effects across other eco-spheres (e.g., biosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere). An organizational strategy that interconnects across systems would allow additional projects to be incorporated so long as the intention is to remain conscious of the interconnections and feedbacks. This strategy will also force us to keep in mind that systems necessarily work together and affect one another. We cannot afford to continue the age-old practice of changing one component of a system with the belief that nothing else will change in response!

Adding the estimates from each of the applications described above, the total carbon sequestration capability of projects described in this report is estimated to begin at ~18 Gt CO2eq.

In conclusion, it is appropriate to remember the most important policy issue of all: when considering technologies for climate change mitigation, the all-too-well-known risks of doing nothing must be weighed against the unknown (but almost certainly much smaller) risks of doing something. The failure to develop a perfect solution must not be allowed to prevent measures that offer considerable improvement over inaction. In medicine, high-risk experimental therapies are regularly and rightly justified when the alternative is terminal. It must be borne in mind that we are all together on a road towards considerable planetary warming with massively severe consequences if we do nothing.

The author acknowledges Charles DeLisi, Dan Drell, Ari Patrinos, and Richard Roberts for their keystone roles and contributions to the workshops from which this report is derived. The author thanks Julie Gray, Mary Lidstrom, Lisa Stein, Pam Silver, Dan Davidi, Ken Nealson, Nate Walworth, Tobias Erb, Mike May, and Xiaohan Yang, for providing descriptions of their work incorporated herein.

Val Giddings received his Ph.D. in genetics and evolutionary biology from the University of Hawaii. Val is also president/CEO of PrometheusAB, Inc,  and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. You can follow Val on Twitter @prometheusgreen

A version of this article was posted at Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and is used here with permission. Check out Information Technology and Innovation Foundation on Twitter @ITIFdc

This article previously appeared on the GLP September 14, 2022.

Viewpoint: From ‘Save the Whales’ to ‘Let Children Go Blind’ — Greenpeace’s descent into science rejectionism

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From the early days of Greenpeace when its members were dodging harpoons and Japanese whalers in outboard motor boats – remember “Save the Whales!” — it has leveraged media savvy and an aptitude for political theater to become a $400 million-plus per year behemoth with 26 regional offices operating in 55 countries. Greenpeace claims that its goals are to “ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity.”  However, it seems that humans are excluded from those good intentions.  Dr. Patrick Moore a cofounder of Greenpeace, said it “no longer cares about people and that it had become more interested in politics than science.”(1)  The organization has relinquished nurturing the lives of humans as well as science: For years, Greenpeace’s prodigious PR machine has been spearheading an effort to deny millions of children in the poorest nations an essential nutrient they need to stave off blindness and death. A precursor of that nutrient, vitamin A, has been introduced ingeniously into genetically engineered rice (“Golden Rice”).  (It is readily converted into vitamin A in the body.) However, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Farmers and consumers in less-developed countries will benefit most from the myriad improvements of genetically engineered (GE) plants. Many varieties of GE plants improve food security, which is most critical in less-developed countries, where the success of a crop can literally spell the difference between starvation and survival. In their 1999 Canadian federal tax filings, Greenpeace admitted that they seek not the prudent, safe use of GE foods or even their labeling; rather, they demand nothing less than these products’ “complete elimination [from] the food supply and the environment.”

When asked if future scientific research could change their position, Lord Melchett (2), the head of Greenpeace, said: “I am happy to answer for Greenpeace…It is permanent and definite and complete opposition…” As Patrick Moore said, science was no longer important to Greenpeace.

A prominent target of Greenpeace has long been new GE plant varieties collectively called “Golden Rice.” Rice is a food staple and a primary source of calories for hundreds of millions, especially in Asia. Although it is an excellent source of calories, it lacks certain micronutrients necessary for a complete diet. In the 1980s and ’90s, German scientists Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer developed the “Golden Rice” varieties that are biofortified, or enriched, by genes that produce beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A.

Credit: IRRI via CC-BY-2.0

The World Health organization estimates that 250 million people suffer from Vitamin A Deficiency (VAD), including 40 percent of the children under five in the developing world. VAD is epidemic among poor people whose diet is composed largely of rice, which contains no beta-carotene or vitamin A. In developing countries, 200 million-300 million children of preschool age are at risk of vitamin A deficiency, which increases their susceptibility to illnesses including measles and diarrheal diseases. Every year, about half a million children become blind as a result of vitamin A deficiency and 70% of those die within a year.

Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice has had devastating consequences in the developing world.  Completely divorced from science (3) and reason, they continue to lobby against the regulatory approval and distribution of GE crops in developing countries. Golden Rice is still banned in India. An analysis (4) by academics Justus Wesseler and David Zilberman almost a decade ago found that  1.4 million child-years had been lost due to the delays in the release of Golden Rice in India alone. 

Golden Rice could thus make contributions to human health comparable to Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. Instead, anti-technology groups such as Greenpeace have given already risk-averse regulators the political cover to delay approvals.

Genetically modified food has been a bête noire of left-wing groups for years, although it increases yields, decreases the need to spray pesticides, makes possible no-till farming and reduces CO2 release.  Perhaps they oppose because it combines the evils of being somehow “unnatural” and often comes from corporate research labs. Or maybe it’s simply that they’re grifters, raising money from unsuspecting supporters.

Greenpeace and others who are more interested in slogans than evidence and positive outcomes have not been swayed by the scientific consensus about the safety of GE crops — a consensus that is the result not only of innumerable reports by scholarly groups but also of thousands of risk-assessment experiments and vast real-world experience. In the United States alone, more than 90% of all cultivated corn, cotton, canola, soy and sugar beets has been modified with molecular genetically engineering techniques (with similar numbers in Canada), and in several decades of consumption around the world not a single health or environmental problem has been documented.  (The same cannot be said for less precise, less predictable older genetic modification techniques.)

Greenpeace has variously alleged that the levels of beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A, in Golden Rice are too low to be effective or so high that they would be toxic. But feeding trials have shown the rice to be highly effective in preventing vitamin A deficiency, and toxicity is virtually impossible. Therefore, with no science to support its claims, the organization has been forced to adopt a new strategy: Use disinformation to scare off the developing nations that are considering adoption of the lifesaving products.

For example, Greenpeace issued a press release claiming that 24 children had been “used as guinea pigs in [a] genetically engineered ‘golden rice’ trial.” The reference was to the results of a 2008 study conducted by Chinese researchers and Tufts University and funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health.

The 2008 study demonstrated that the new varieties of Golden Rice did indeed deliver sufficient vitamin A and were superior to spinach for that purpose. As to the ethics of the study, the journal article states clearly that, “Both parents and pupils [subjects] consented to participate in the study.”

Nevertheless, the Greenpeace press release produced a furor in China. Chinese news agencies inaccurately reported that the researchers had conducted dangerous, unauthorized experiments on poor children, and within days Chinese police had interrogated the researchers and coerced statements disavowing the research.

Greenpeace had achieved its aim of significantly delaying, if not actually eliminating, further development of Golden Rice in China.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Greenpeace has taken its scare campaign on the road to other nations. In 2013, Greenpeace alliance MAISPIG trucked in activists to destroy research fields of Golden Rice (5).  Not satisfied with only destroying R&D plots Greenpeace and MAISPIG petitioned the Philippines courts to block research on two GE crops: Bt Brinjal (6) and Golden Rice.  Also, while field trials of Golden Rice were under way, Greenpeace warned that “the next ‘golden rice’ guinea pigs may be Filipino children,” and it persuaded the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, the highest Catholic authority in that country, to weigh in against Golden Rice. As discussed below, the Department of Agriculture finally granted a biosafety permit for propagating Golden Rice in 2021.

Greenpeace has long raised money and its profile by bragging about sabotaging efforts to test environment-friendly GE insect-resistant crops that need less pesticides, but none of its campaigns is likely to be more harmful to the world’s children than its assault on Golden Rice.

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In 2016, 160 Nobel laureates penned a letter (7) imploring Greenpeace to stop its baseless, cynical and harmful activism:

We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against “GMOs” in general and Golden Rice in particular.

Greenpeace ignored the plea, of course, and continued their campaign against Golden Rice.

In 2018 Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States all approved Golden Rice for importation and consumption.  This international approval likely spurred the Philippine government to restart their Golden Rice R&D program. The results (8) were impressive, and in 2021 the Philippine government authorized commercial release of Golden Rice for cultivation.  By late 2022 seventy tons of Golden Rice seed were ready for distribution to Philippine farmers.

Credit: Gustave Deghilage and Flickr via CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

But then Greenpeace did the unthinkable and petitioned the Philippines Supreme Court to block the cultivation and distribution in the country.  Their slick fear-generating campaign convinced the court to halt the distribution and cultivation in the Philippines. It is hard to imagine a more despicable act than denying poor children food that will prevent blindness and death.

In the Nobel laureates’ letter, they posed the question whether the Greenpeace campaign against Golden Rice was a “crime against humanity.”  There is no doubt that it is: Greenpeace is fomenting a massacre of the poor and defenseless. Every government and responsible citizen should expose and oppose Greenpeace at every opportunity and in every way possible.

Notes:

(1) http://www.asianpacificpost.com/article/6770-greenpeace-co-founder-supports-gmo-golden-rice.html

(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1083916/

(3) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/environment-and-development-economics/article/economic-power-of-the-golden-rice-opposition/F31EE0E5B6044B86B5223FF20C409158

(4) https://www.goldenrice.org/PDFs/Safety%252520assessment%252520of%252520biofortified%252520provitamin%252520A%252520rice%252520-%252520Oliva%252520-%252520SciRep%2525202020.pdf

(5) https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/golden-rice-attack-in-philippines-anti-gmo-activists-lie-about-protest-and-safety.html

(6) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbioe.2020.00498/full

(7) https://www.supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-letter_rjr.html

(8) https://www.goldenrice.org/PDFs/Swamy_2019.pdf

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Find Henry on Twitter @henryimiller

Rob Wager is a retired scientist from Vancouver Island University, but he continues his work as a researcher on genetically engineered crops.

A version of this article was originally posted at European Scientist and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find European Scientist on Twitter @EuropeScientist 

 

Insect-resistant Bt GMO crops have helped cut pesticide use. Now Nature is pushing back

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In 2006, a small airplane started buzzing each cotton field in Arizona, a thin, dust-like cloud trailing behind it. The dust was millions of insects called pink bollworms, and the flights were part of an audacious scheme to kill them off.

Pink bollworms are insidious foes of cotton. Their larvae burrow into the plant’s seed pods, called bolls, destroying the fluffy fiber within. Where bollworms infest a field, farmers may spray insecticides many times a year to limit the damage. But the air-dropped insects released in Arizona had been exposed to radiation that left them sterile, so any pink bollworms on the ground that mated with them would produce no larvae.

As part of an effort to eradicate the pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella) from cotton-growing regions in the US, scientists bred the insects (shown) and briefly irradiated the adults, rendering them sterile. Billions of sterile pink bollworms were then released from airplanes over cotton fields, overwhelming wild populations with mates that couldn’t produce offspring.
Credit: Alexander Yelich via University of Arizona

The sterile insects were only the mopping-up part of an eradication campaign. The cotton plants themselves had struck the first, most vital blow. Genetically modified with genes obtained from an insect-killing bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, the plants churned out proteins that are toxic to pink bollworms, making cotton bolls a deadly meal for the larvae.

By 2013, pink bollworms had vanished from Arizona’s cotton fields. In 2018, the US Department of Agriculture declared that the pest had been eradicated from the United States.

It was a remarkable success. Yet the story of engineered Bt cotton and corn also includes repeated failures. In the decades since the crops went on sale in 1996, other insects, such as the corn rootworm and the cotton bollworm (a different species from the pink bollworm), have evolved resistance to not just one but a whole series of toxins from B. thuringiensis. Today, there’s just one remaining Bt gene, called Vip3A, whose toxins reliably kill two pests of corn and cotton, the western bean cutworm and the cotton bollworm. And there are signs that this vital tool, especially for cotton farmers in the southeastern United States, may soon become ineffective.

In an effort to keep these toxins working against the cotton bollworm, a group of academic entomologists has called on the US Environmental Protection Agency to sharply restrict their use, blocking the sale of corn containing the Vip3A gene throughout the South. That way, fewer insects will be exposed to its toxins, lowering the chances that a resistant strain will emerge. Companies that sell Bt corn, including Bayer and Syngenta, oppose this step. EPA officials hope to issue new rules for managing Vip3A and other Bt genes later this year.

It’s just the latest round of a conflict that has accompanied these crops since before they were launched, one that pits the urge to profit from them against the desire to preserve their effectiveness. Scientists have typically advised restraint; they believed, based on theoretical models of insect evolution, that overusing these tools might quickly render them ineffective against many insects. To a remarkable degree, they were correct. Their models foresaw both the successes and the failures of Bt crops, and described ways to prevent, or at least delay, the emergence of resistant insects. But those recommendations often included drastic limits on Bt crop use, which companies successfully resisted.

Some scientists are disturbed to see the caterpillar-killing toxins from B. thuringiensis so quickly squandered. “Seeing resistance now to these traits can be quite disheartening, because there’s so much promise” for reducing insecticide use, says Julie Peterson, an entomologist at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Bt crops will kill only insects that have specific receptors in their gut; some Bt proteins are toxic to caterpillars, others to mosquitoes, still others to root worms. Plants are genetically engineered to produce specific Bt proteins, such as Cry and Vip proteins, in their tissues. When an insect eats the leaves, the Bt proteins begin to break down in its gut. This releases the toxic portion of the proteins. If cells in the insect gut have receptors for the toxins, those toxins bind to the receptors, the cells rupture and the insect starves.

A remedy for resistance

Bruce Tabashnik, an entomologist at the University of Arizona, encountered the ecological theory that shaped the fate of Bt crops in the early 1980s, long before those crops even existed. He refused to accept it at first.

He was a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University, intrigued by mathematical models that predicted how insect populations become resistant to insecticides. The models showed something that he didn’t expect: Insects exposed to extremely high doses of insecticide evolved resistance more slowly than those given more modest doses.

“I didn’t believe it,” Tabashnik recalls. “I thought that the higher the dose, the higher the concentration of insecticide — that resistance would evolve faster. It just makes more sense to me.” He built his own model to check the calculations and got the same result. “I kept doing it over and over and over,” he says.

Tabashnik finally realized that the models factored in something key: Insects could migrate. If a field was sprayed with insecticide, wiping out most insects, it might quickly be repopulated with insects from elsewhere that had never been exposed to the chemical. This had a profound effect. The rare insects that survived a powerful dose of chemicals, perhaps because of their genetic makeup, were likely to mate with one of the insects that flew in from elsewhere instead of another resistant insect.

The model revealed a novel two-pronged strategy for keeping insects susceptible to insecticides: first, a powerful dose of insecticide, and second, a “refuge” nearby where insects wouldn’t be exposed. This haven would act as breeding ground for insects that remained susceptible, and their presence would lower the odds that survivors of spraying would mate with each other and produce resistant offspring. “That’s really the major discovery of this whole theoretical field,” Tabashnik says.

The high-dose/refuge strategy, as it became known, was merely a theoretical possibility at the time. “The idea just kind of sat there,” says Aaron Gassmann, an entomologist at Iowa State University.

The high-dose/refuge strategy can delay the evolution of insects that are highly resistant to Bt proteins. It works like this: Part of a field is planted with a Bt crop, such as corn, that delivers a high dose of toxin to a specific pest. A portion of that field, the refuge, is planted with a non-Bt version of the same crop. Few individuals should develop resistance to the Bt toxins, but if they do, they are more likely to mate with a susceptible individual than a resistant one. If the susceptible trait is dominant, any resulting offspring should be susceptible too.

Then, in the 1990s, the company Monsanto published data showing that its experimental corn and cotton containing genes from B. thuringiensis were incredibly lethal to many larvae from the Lepidoptera insect family. When the larvae fed on these plants, they ingested Bt toxins that bound to specific receptors in their gut, cutting holes in their cell membranes and killing them. The crops killed virtually all of two important insect pests, the European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis, and the tobacco budworm, Chloridea virescens, yet were harmless to most other wildlife and people.

And so, as the best hope of avoiding Bt-resistant insects, entomologists dusted off the old high-dose/refuge theory. They persuaded EPA officials to adopt it. Starting in the late 1990s, whenever the EPA approved a new Bt crop, it also required companies selling those crops to come up with “resistance management plans.” Under these plans, farmers were to keep growing non-Bt crops on some of their land, where insects could avoid exposure to Bt toxins and — hopefully — remain susceptible to them.

Scientists understood that the strategy could fail. In 1998, entomologist Fred Gould, at North Carolina State University, laid out some of its weaknesses in the Annual Review of Entomology. He noted that some insects, by virtue of their biology or life cycle, were less susceptible to Bt toxins than others. In those cases, the crop didn’t deliver the “high dose” that the strategy demanded.

In addition, if the planned refuges were too small, or if fewer insects migrated in than expected, less mixing and mating with Bt survivors would occur than the models assumed. There was “high risk,” Gould wrote, that insects would adapt rapidly to Bt crops.

“We told you so”

Gould’s paper made a big impression on Gassmann, then a young graduate student, fueling an interest in Bt crops that has continued ever since. A quarter-century later, he and his fellow entomologist Dominic Reisig, from North Carolina State, returned to the same topic, in the same journal, and reviewed the performance of Bt crops.

Insect ecologists, it appears, can take a bow and say, “We told you so.”

The scientists observed that in cases where Bt crops delivered a highly lethal dose against a pest, and where farmers maintained plenty of non-Bt refuges, the crops met expectations and sometimes exceeded them. In the United States, Bt toxins continue to kill the tobacco budworm and the European corn borer.

Eradication of the pink bollworm became the most spectacular success of all (Tabashnik calls it his “favorite story”). Instead of a refuge, sterile insects were released from airplanes, performing the same function, but with a twist. They didn’t just prevent insects that survived Bt cotton from mating with each other; they ensured that mating would produce no offspring at all.

Elsewhere, though, Gould’s warnings from 25 years ago were borne out. When essential elements of the high-dose/refuge strategy were missing, the miracle crops failed.

In 2003, for instance, Monsanto started selling corn that contained a new Bt gene that killed a particularly damaging pest called the western corn rootworm, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera. Yet the crop didn’t deliver one prong of what the theory demanded: a highly lethal dose. This insect is slightly less susceptible to Bt toxins, and some rootworms typically survived, raising the risk that they’d mate with each other.

Some of the EPA’s scientific advisors called for strict limits on the use of this corn. They wanted farmers to plant it in no more than half of their fields, in order to reduce the number of insects that survived exposure to the Bt toxin. Monsanto and some farmers objected to these limits.

The EPA also needed to consider what farmers were willing to do, said an agency official who spoke to Knowable Magazine on the condition that he not be identified. “We had to make a determination as to what would actually work.” The EPA eventually decided to let farmers plant rootworm-protected corn on 80 percent of their acreage, the same as permitted in most areas for Bt corn aimed at the European corn borer. When Monsanto later inserted additional anti-rootworm genes into its corn seeds, the EPA allowed farmers to plant them in 95 percent of their fields.

Just six years after the rootworm-protected corn went on the market, farmers started seeing telltale signs of failure. Tall corn plants fell over when the wind blew; closer inspection revealed that their roots had been eaten away. Gassmann collected rootworm larvae from fields and confirmed that they had, indeed, become largely resistant to Bt toxins. Biotech companies introduced several different Bt genes targeting the rootworm, but the insect adapted rapidly to each one.

The western corn rootworm is a devastating pest whose larvae feed on corn roots; if the damage is severe, the plants topple over, as seen in this Iowa cornfield. Credit: Aaron Gassmann

A similar story played out with the western bean cutworm (a corn pest), the destructive fall armyworm and the cotton bollworm (also known as the corn earworm). In each case, the high-dose/refuge strategy didn’t work properly, in large part because too many insects survived exposure to Bt crops. Yet the EPA allowed widespread use of these crops and hasn’t yet imposed significant restrictions to forestall resistance in those species.

All of these pests have now evolved resistance to multiple Bt genes in the United States and several other countries. In India, where authorities were unable to enforce their own restrictions on planting Bt cotton, the pink bollworm also became resistant. All told, 11 pest species in seven different countries have evolved resistance to nine different Bt toxins.

Whenever a Bt toxin stopped working, seed companies came up with new weapons for farmers to use, often a different Bt gene, producing a different toxin. “Every time you have resistance, [the companies] charge more for a bag of seed with a new trait. So the growers pay,” says Reisig, who spends part of his time advising farmers.

The company Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, said in a statement to Knowable that it supports “holistic” approaches to controlling pests that include not just Bt crops, but also judicious use of other tools, including insecticides and crop rotations.

A qualified success

The EPA doesn’t have a specific target for how long Bt crops should keep working – just “as long as possible,” says the agency official who spoke to Knowable on the condition of anonymity. The agency’s scientific advisors, he says, once recommended a timespan of at least 10 years. Some Bt crops failed to reach this goal, but the official has few regrets: “I think we did the best we could,” he says.

Tabashnik, too, is generally pleased. “Overall, I think Bt crops have been spectacularly successful,” he says. Even when insects adapted fairly rapidly, the crops still gave farmers and ecosystems five to 10 years of relief from insect pests and chemical sprays, he says. He’s amazed that Bt crops still control the tobacco budworm and the European corn borer. “Most people, including me, thought we’d see resistance to Bt crops really quickly.”

Some scientists, though, are bothered to see these unique gifts of nature so quickly used up. “It would have been nice if it could have been used in a way that would have delayed resistance for longer,” Gassmann says.

In a way, Bt crops were too user-friendly for their own good. “I think one of the issues is just the convenience,” Gassmann says. Farmers loved them. When they worked, they worked miracles, and it was easier to plant insecticidal seeds than to try controlling pests in any other way, including spraying crops with insecticides.

Today, 89 percent of cotton and 84 percent of corn grown in the United States contains genes from Bt, according to the USDA. In areas such as southern states where corn growers are supposed to maintain 20 percent of their fields as non-Bt refuges, they often don’t comply with the rules.

“When I surveyed growers in eastern North Carolina, about 40 percent say they plant refuge, and some are not telling me the truth,” says Reisig. The reasons, he says, are complicated. Farmers say that they can’t obtain good-quality non-Bt corn seed; seed companies say they can’t afford to produce non-Bt seed if farmers won’t buy it. There’s also a more fundamental reason: Farmers simply don’t like the idea of leaving some of their fields more vulnerable to insect damage.

Corn and cotton that have been genetically engineered to make Bt toxins are planted widely in the United States. Varieties of these Bt crops that are also engineered to tolerate herbicides are included in the data shown above.

With Bt crops covering much of the landscape, insects are exposed to Bt toxins year after year. In evolutionary terms, it imposes powerful selection pressure, increasing the chances that farmers eventually will find resistant larvae consuming their cotton bolls and ears of corn.

Mexico and Australia offer intriguing examples of better outcomes. Mexico allowed farmers to plant Bt cotton but it has banned the planting of Bt corn, mainly because it does not want to introduce genetically modified corn in the region where the crop first was domesticated and where traditional varieties are often planted. Mexico’s cornfields therefore served as an enormous refuge for cotton bollworms, which feed on both cotton and corn. No populations of Bt-resistant bollworm have emerged there.

In Australia, where cotton growers face a related bollworm pest, authorities initially limited Bt cotton plantings to 30 percent of all cotton acreage. Later, cotton that contained just a single Bt gene was taken off the market and quickly replaced with varieties containing two or more; insects are less likely to evolve resistance when confronting plants with such a “pyramid” of Bt genes. Australia’s coordinated resistance management plan, Gassmann says, helped to keep its bollworm susceptible to Bt toxins.

Gassmann says the history of Bt crops teaches the same lesson that entomologists learned from studying chemical insecticides years ago: Insects usually overcome any single weapon that’s overused. He’s pushing for renewed attention to integrated pest management, in which farmers use many techniques to control pests; this can include Bt crops, but also simple ones like rotating crops or nurturing a pest’s natural predators.

The goal is bigger than just extending the useful life of current insect-resistant crops, Reisig adds: It’s to do a better job when the crops of the future come along. And new traits keep arriving as biotech companies race to stay one step ahead of pests. Bayer recently launched cotton varieties containing yet another Bt gene, this one targeting sucking insects like tarnished plant bugs. The company also is deploying corn with RNA sequences designed to interfere with the proper functioning of cells in the corn rootworm.

Yet the Bt experience shows that these tools may prove short-lived. “We’re still doing the same things to stop resistance that we were doing before,” says Reisig, “and we know that it’s going to break.” Vip3A, the last Bt gene standing against several insect pests, is showing early signs of breaking. Cotton bollworms that have been exposed to its toxins in the field are tolerating higher and higher doses.

Though measurable crop losses are yet to be recorded, Reisig says, that gene is essentially “gone.”

Dan Charles is a freelance reporter and audio producer in Washington, DC. He writes about farming, the environment and climate change. Follow Dan on Twitter @DanCharlesNow

A version of this article was originally posted at Knowable and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Sign up for their newsletter here. Find Knowable on Twitter @KnowableMag

Pesticides and Food: It’s not a black or white issue — Part 5: Soil health ― When synthetic pesticides are more sustainable than ‘natural’ organics

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Most consumers believe organic farming avoids pesticides and prioritizes the health of the environment more than conventional farming. However, this is not necessarily the case. Pesticides used in organic farming are sometimes less effective than state-of-the-art, targeted synthetics. This can mean organic farmers sometimes have to use more pesticides and at a higher cost.

Anti-GMO activists in one county in California complained so much about glyphosate (Part 2 in this series addresses glyphosate; read the GLP’s GMO FAQ backgrounder on glyphosate for an extensive analysis of its potential health dangers) that the county switched to organic alternatives , but the alternatives required gardeners to use body suits and respirators during application because the organic substitutes caused eye irritation and respiratory problems. The alternatives were also less effective as glyphosate. And they were as much as sixteen times as expensive.

Editor’s note: This is part five of a five-part series on pesticides and food. Read part one, part two, part three, part four, and part six here.

The inherent restrictions required in organic farming result in organic farmers sometimes having to use more toxic pesticides and less environmentally-friendly technology and farming practices.

5: Soil health―When synthetic pesticides are more sustainable than ‘natural’ organics

Tillage is one example of organic farming being less sustainable than conventional farming. Tillage is a technique farmers use to prepare soil for a crop. It involves digging, stirring and overturning the soil. Tillage helps make it easier to plant crops and destroy weeds.

Illustration of a tractor and tilling machinery on a field.

However, tillage breaks down soil structure, significantly increases erosion, causes the soil to lose nutrients, reduces biodiversity of insects and animals in the soil and releases greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. It is definitely not the most sustainable farming practice. Conventional agriculture has more options to avoid tillage, and some GMO crops aid with no-till weed control, while organic agriculture still has to rely at least in part on tillage, even at the expense of sustainability.

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Conventional agriculture can use herbicide-tolerant crops. These are crops that have been genetically engineered to tolerate specific herbicides, like glyphosate. The graph below shows that when using herbicide-tolerant crops, farmers do not need to rely on tillage as much as conventional farmers (data from the USDA Economic Research Service using data from the 2006 ARMS Phase II soybean survey). However, genetically engineered crops are by definition not available to organic farmers. Therefore, it has been more difficult for organic farmers to adopt no-till farming practices.

Graph showing the percentage of acres where conventional tillage, conservation tillage, and no-till practices on herbicide-tolerant and conventional soybeans in 2006.

The restrictions on organic farming, with the focus on being “natural,” do not allow for some modern improvements that could help increase sustainability, including the reduced use of tilling. While there is some adoption of a roller crimper for organic no-till, the adoption has been an uphill climb, failing to scale:

A graph showing the growth in no-till acreage versus organic acreage in U.S. agriculture from 1990 to 2010.

More recently, no-till adoption has continued to rise in many crops (data from the USDA). You can see the rapid rise that followed the release of the first herbicide-tolerant crops and a slower increase as it pushed into areas where no-till is trickier to get up and running:

Graph showing no-till adoption in selected crops (wheat, soybeans, corn, and cotton).

While organic acreage has been slow to increase (organic acreage data and overall cropland acreage data from the USDA):

Percentage of U.S. organic cropland acreage from 2011 to 2016.

The decisions surrounding optimal farming practices are complex and often do not fall easily into categories like organic versus conventional. In Part 6, the last article of this series, we explain why many consumers prefer organic produce over conventional produce based on inaccurate assumptions about the role of pesticides in organic and conventional farming.

Marc Brazeau contributed to this report.

Kayleen Schreiber is the GLP’s infographics and data visualization specialist. She researched and authored this series as well as creating the figures, graphs, and illustrations. Follow her at her website, on Twitter @ksphd or on Instagram @ksphd

Marc Brazeau is the GLP’s senior contributing writer focusing on agricultural biotechnology. He also is the editor of Food and Farm Discussion Lab. Marc served as project editor and assistant researcher on this series. Follow him on Twitter @eatcookwrite

This article previously appeared on the GLP February 5, 2019. 

Viewpoint: What role can and should genetics play in understanding which people might become violent and commit crimes — and putting them in jail?

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Viewpoint: ‘Using biology to understand criminal behavior has long been controversial. Top criminology programs are pursuing it anyway’
Nearly 2 million people, most of them Black or Latino men, are locked up in the United States. In October 2021, the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, published a report arguing that correctional officials should examine the biology of imprisoned people — their hormones, their brains, and perhaps even their genes.
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To some, such a proposal may sound invasive, even dystopian. The report’s author, Sam Houston State University biopsychosocial criminologist Danielle Boisvert, suggests it offers a chance to streamline a clunky system: By “excluding known biological and genetic factors that affect behavior,” she wrote in the report, “the criminal justice system may be suppressing its ability to fully benefit from its correctional efforts.” (Boisvert did not respond to requests for an interview.)

The DOJ report represents a new frontier in the discipline of biosocial criminology — a decades-long effort to bring biology back to the study of crime. Researchers in the field have scanned the brains of people convicted of murder and scoured the genomes of teenagers who belong to gangs. Biosocial criminology is “really a kind of smorgasbord of a lot of other disciplines, but trying to apply it to human behavior — and specifically antisocial behavior,” said J.C. Barnes, a biosocial criminologist at the University of Cincinnati.

Today, some of the nation’s top-ranked criminology programs are thriving hubs of biosocial research. Biosocial criminologists teach future prosecutors, law enforcement, and correctional officers.

But the rise of biosocial criminology has also sparked alarm among some scholars, who argue that the science is shoddy — and that racist ideas and assumptions animate the field. “The work that they’re doing is really serious, and really dangerous,” said Viviane Saleh-Hanna, a professor of crime and justice studies at UMass-Dartmouth.

Indeed, the use of biology has long divided criminologists. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, criminologists measured the skulls of imprisoned people and analyzed their bone structure. Often, they drew blatantly racist conclusions. Even as biosocial criminology grows more mainstream, it remains an open question whether the discipline can be disentangled from that racist past. A close review of the relevant literature shows that some biosocial criminologists have drawn on discredited ideas that describe Black people as inherently predisposed to crime.

Others, while steering away from writing about race, appear to largely tolerate that work. “There doesn’t seem to be a pushback against the folks who are writing about this in the field,” said Oliver Rollins, a medical sociologist at the University of Washington and the author of “Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain,” a 2021 book about neuroscience and crime. “No one’s challenging these kind of racist components to the science, or the research.”

Talk with criminologists about biology, and one name comes up again and again: Cesare Lombroso. Born in 1835 in northern Italy, Lombroso trained as a physician. He soon grew fascinated with the physiology of people who had been convicted of crimes.

Lombroso dissected the corpses of people with criminal records, examined the feet of sex workers, and visited prisons to measure the dimensions of people’s heads. In his 1876 book “Criminal Man,” he concluded that some people were born with a predisposition to criminality — especially people he considered, without evidence, to fall lower in the evolutionary hierarchy, including southern Italians and people with African ancestry. A collection of human specimens, including 712 skulls, is now preserved in the Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin. (Lombroso also asked that his own corpse, which he deemed as superior, be integrated into the collection; according to the museum’s scientific director Silvano Montaldo, the criminologist’s skeleton is currently on display, while his brain, as well as the soft tissues of his face, are “kept in the warehouses,” in accordance with “the indications of the Italian law regarding exposures of human remains.”)

untitled drawing

Lombroso’s work has been widely discredited. But his influence, historians say, was considerable — including among eugenicists in the early 20th century who sought to identify and eliminate strains of what they saw as degeneracy in populations. “Criminologists consider it edifying to believe that a man can be saved by grace, but refuse to admit that he can be damned by germ plasm,” the American eugenicist Earnest Hooton complained in 1932, reporting on the results of a study of 16,000 incarcerated people. His conclusion: Biology mattered. “I am beginning to suspect that Lombroso, like Darwin, was right,” he wrote.

By the late 20th century, that legacy had left many criminologists hesitant to engage with biology. Still, amid advances in genetics and brain imaging, some scholars called for the field to explore a potential connection between biology and crime.

Among them was Anthony Walsh. A former police officer, Walsh entered graduate school in his mid-30s, moonlighting as a probation and parole officer to support his young family. By 1984, he was an assistant professor of criminal justice at Boise State University, preparing students for careers in the criminal justice system. His early research mostly examined sentencing guidelines and the probation process.

Over time, though, Walsh grew frustrated with his colleagues. He thought they spent too much time focusing on the social causes of crime. “Everything and everybody was accountable for the crime, except the guy who committed it,” he told Undark in a 2022 interview. In particular, Walsh wondered if fields like genetics and evolutionary biology could help explain why some people offend, and others do not.

Those kinds of inquiries could face backlash. For example, in 1992, the National Institutes of Health agreed to fund a conference on genetics and crime. The federal science agency later withdrew the funding after an uproar, fueled by revelations that a key organizer had once seemingly compared Black urban neighborhoods to jungles. Critics worried that genetics would become a high-tech tool for racial profiling.

Criminologists like Walsh did little to dispel such fears. In 1997, he and a colleague, Lee Ellis, drew on the speculative theories of a white-supremacist aligned psychologist to suggest that White people had evolved to be less violent than Black people, and that biology could explain why more Black people than White people end up imprisoned.

To most crime researchers, those claims have serious problems. Decades of research — in many disciplines — have documented how generations of racism, disenfranchisement, and uneven policing disproportionately direct Black people, poor people, and other marginalized groups into the criminal justice system.

At the same time, experts in human evolution say, biology is a terrible tool for explaining these kinds of racial disparities. For one thing, racial categories are just rough attempts to describe the biological variation among human beings, rather than fixed, coherent categories of people who have evolved along different trajectories. For another, even if scientists can sometimes identify average genetic differences among socially defined groups, those differences tend to be very slight — and have no obvious link to a complex social phenomenon like violent behavior.

ufficio ml
A museum exhibit depicting Lombroso’s private office, including a portrait of the criminologist painted after his death. Lombroso’s work led him to the conclusion that some people were born with a predisposition to criminality — especially people he considered, without evidence, to fall lower in the evolutionary hierarchy. Visual: R. Goffi/Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology/University of Turin

It’s “just kind of fascinating that we would presume that there is something that’s so simplistic about complex behaviors, that it could map on to something like skin color in a fairly straightforward way,” said Deborah Bolnick, an expert in human evolution and genetics at the University of Connecticut.

Despite such concerns, Walsh and his co-author published their theory in the field’s flagship journal, Criminology. And Walsh soon found himself gaining new colleagues who were interested in biology and crime. Starting in the late 1990s, a growing number of criminologists turned to biology, aiming to integrate genetics, neuroscience, and sociology to produce more robust theories of crime. Some feared they would face professional repercussions for doing so. “My mentor, when I told him what I was doing, was like, ‘John, don’t do this,’” said John Paul Wright, a criminologist at the University of Cincinnati and an early proponent of using genetics to study crime. “He was worried about the consequences for my career.”

Wright and others called the emerging discipline biosocial criminology — a rebranding that was complete by 2009, when Walsh and a colleague edited a book, “Biosocial Criminology,” featuring essays from leading scholars in the young field. (Boisvert, the author of the DOJ report, contributed to a chapter.) A preface, written by another Cincinnati criminologist, Francis T. Cullen, acknowledged the discipline’s troubled history. Biosocial criminologists, he wrote, “will have to show how the new paradigm rejects its repressive heritage.”

Not everyone was convinced that biosocial criminology was so different from its predecessors.

Saleh-Hanna, the UMass-Dartmouth professor, began attending the annual American Society of Criminologists conference in the 1990s, as a student. She soon gravitated towards panels on biology and crime.

At these sessions, Saleh-Hanna sat in the back. She took notes. She rarely spoke. Usually, she said, she was the only Black person — in fact, the only person of color — in the room. “I always felt like I had a responsibility to my own communities to go and listen,” Saleh-Hanna told Undark. “I always knew that they were talking about us.”

The basic process described at the conference, Saleh-Hanna said, felt like a throwback to Lombroso: Scientists looked at the bodies of poor, marginalized people, isolated some biological characteristic, and used it to suggest that those people were inferior or dangerous. “They’re still doing that same work,” Saleh-Hanna said, “but they’re using this new scientific language.”

Saleh-Hanna has sometimes brought a Black colleague, Montclair State University criminologist Jason Williams, to the presentations. He said the sessions often involve all-White academic panels commenting on the biology of people who had been accused of crimes. “Here you are sitting up here on this panel, and you’re generalizing largely people of color, but then also poor Whites,” Williams said. “Anybody who’s really powerless, I think, gets the lower end of the stick with those theories, in those studies.”

Indeed, biosocial criminologists have sometimes used new techniques to circle back to an old conclusion: that biology can help explain why the criminal justice system locks up so many people of color. There’s scant scientific evidence to support that claim. Still, in the same 2009 volume in which Cullen urged the field to reject “its repressive heritage,” his University of Cincinnati colleague, Wright, wrote a chapter arguing that biological differences among racial groups explain disparities in crime.

Portions of the field would go on to celebrate those ideas: Despite Walsh’s ongoing writing about race and crime, the Biosocial Criminology Association honored him with its lifetime achievement award in 2014, citing his “invaluable impact on our current understanding of why people commit crime and delinquency.”

In 2015, six criminologists, several teaching at large public universities, published a sweeping “unified crime theory” in Aggression and Violent Behavior, a peer-reviewed criminology journal put out by scientific publisher Elsevier. In the paper, they draw heavily on the work of the late J. Philippe Rushton, a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Now largely discredited by the scientific community, Rushton spent much of his career arguing that White people have evolved to be smarter, more altruistic, and less violent than Black people. Twisting a theory from ecology, Rushton also argued that some racial groups have evolved to be more fertile — but, in a kind of tradeoff, have also evolved to be more aggressive, less able to exercise self-control, and less intelligent.

Many scientists now describe Rushton’s work as incoherent, riddled with errors, and blatantly racist; his own university eventually disavowed him. The theory is “pulp science fiction” that’s “draped in the lingo of evolutionary theory,” Yale University ecology and evolutionary biology assistant professor C. Brandon Ogbunu wrote in a recent essay for Undark.

j philippe rushton hr getty crop
Reporters and protesters surround psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton at the University of Western Ontario after a lecture in 1991. Biosocial criminologists have drawn on Rushton’s blatantly racist work for years. Visual: Victor Aziz/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Bolnick, the Connecticut researcher, said that Rushton’s theory treats humans as “reproductive machines,” in a way that doesn’t really reflect how people live. “It doesn’t map onto the way any human societies operate, or any families operate,” she said. And Rushton and his acolytes also selectively apply the theory, she said, in ways that mostly just repackage old stereotypes: For example, they spend little time considering the large families of White settlers in the 19th century U.S.

Still, for years, Rushton’s work was cited in the biosocial criminology literature. In the 2015 paper, the researchers drew on Rushton to speculate that this evolutionary path could help explain racial disparities in convictions.

Later that year, the lead author of the paper, Brian Boutwell, took to the right-wing magazine Quillette to complain that biosocial criminologists were being shunned by their colleagues. Around that time, Boutwell and one of his co-authors on the paper, Florida State University criminologist Kevin Beaver, appeared separately on the show of alt-right podcaster Stefan Molyneux to talk about the links between crime, biology, and race. (Wright, one of the Cincinnati professors, appeared on the show too.)

Shunned or not, the authors of the paper maintained active careers. Boutwell is now an associate professor at the University of Mississippi. One of his co-authors, J.C. Barnes, was until recently the chair of the Biopsychosocial Criminology division of the American Society of Criminology. Another co-author, Beaver, now directs the Biosocial Criminology Research & Policy Institute at Florida State University, and he maintains an affiliation with King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. (Beaver did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Many biosocial criminologists are skeptical of such work on race, and worry it will hamper their efforts to gain broader acceptance for their techniques, according to Julien Larregue, a sociologist at Université Laval in Quebec who has studied the field. But, he noted, that criticism is mostly informal: “If you look at publications, I don’t find a lot of pushback.”

In the broader field of criminology, though, some experts have raised questions about certain methods that biosocial researchers use. In particular, some have questioned efforts to draw a line from specific genes to criminality or antisocial behavior.

One of the most persistent critics has been Callie Burt, an associate professor at Georgia State University. Around 10 years ago, Burt was asked to review a paper examining genetics and crime. Trained in sociology, she quickly realized she didn’t have the tools to follow the argument. Undeterred, Burt dove into the genetics literature. “I’ve learned that we know a lot more about genetics than I realized,” she said. “But the more we learn, the more complicated things are.”

Burt had plenty to catch up on. The first sequencing of the full human genome, completed in 2000, was accompanied by a wave of new research aiming to tie specific genes to specific outcomes. Biosocial criminologists embraced that work. In the 2000s, some gravitated toward a then-trendy method called a candidate gene study, in which researchers look at whether a specific gene may be linked to certain traits. Some focused on a hypothesized link between violent behavior and a gene called MAOA. (“‘Gangsta Gene’ Identified in U.S. Teens” read one 2009 headline from ABC News, reporting on work by Beaver and colleagues.) But subsequent research has cast doubt on most candidate gene studies, including those purporting a connection between MAOA and violence. “That finding’s not in great shape,” said Michael “Doc” Edge, a population geneticist at the University of Southern California.

Recently, some biosocial criminologists, including Boutwell and Barnes, have been joining with behavioral geneticists and other scientists on genome wide association studies, or GWAS (pronounced GEE-wahs). The technique, pioneered in the past two decades, scans vast databases of genetic data, looking for correlations between particular genes and certain outcomes, such as height, IQ, or college graduation.

Burt and others argue that even these high-powered new studies rest on some misguided assumptions. Like many other experts, she’s skeptical that it’s possible to disentangle nature and nurture so neatly — in part because the categories of crime and antisocial behavior are themselves so slippery.

The problem, according to Burt and other experts, is that crime and antisocial behavior aren’t straightforward, easy-to-measure traits. Rather, these behaviors are socially constructed and highly variable. Something that’s a crime in one state — such as smoking pot — may be legal one state over. An aggressive action — such as punching someone repeatedly until they lose consciousness — may be celebrated in one context (a boxing ring) and illegal in another (a bar). And two people can be treated very differently for doing the exact same thing: Research suggests that Black elementary school children, for example, are likelier to receive disciplinary action than White children, independent of their actual behavior. And studies often find that Black adults who use drugs are likelier to be arrested and incarcerated than White adults who use drugs.

“We behave in context,” Burt said. She brought up an example: People who have “biological propensities — and I can agree that we have different ones — that might lead to impulsivity or risk-taking or even selfishness and disregard for other people, sort of predatory activities.” In an affluent environment, Burt said, someone with those traits may end up flourishing: They go to Wall Street, where their predatory behaviors lead to large paychecks. Meanwhile, “someone growing in inner city, with not those opportunities,” she added, “may end up engaging in predatory behaviors that are criminalized.”

Burt and other critics say that biosocial accounts of crime just don’t fully account for this complexity. A study linking, say, high testosterone levels with felonies runs the risk of implying that testosterone levels are immutable — and that felonies are somehow a set natural property, like the height of a person or the length of a day, rather than a contingent and shifting target.

Saleh-Hanna sees that as a fundamental problem in the field, one going all the way back to Lombroso. “He created this impression, that we still struggle with every day in this society, this impression that crime can be objectively scientifically defined external to the human perception,” she said. As a consequence, she added, “these notions of crime and criminality continue to be seen as natural parts of human societies.”

Certain biases, scholars say, also shape which kinds of crimes end up under the scrutiny of biological methods — and which do not. “We don’t have a notion that crimes of finance are explained by biology,” said Troy Duster, an emeritus professor of sociology at UC Berkeley. “‘Let’s take the DNA samples of the people who were involved in the Enron scandal’ — no one suggested that.” It’s only when Black, Brown, and poor White people are involved, Duster and other scholars suggest, that criminologists start to turn to biology to understand what might have gone wrong.

Recently, some genetics researchers have tried to address some of these concerns by broadening their target to “antisocial behavior” — a catchall category that can include criminal conviction, but also things like personality test results and behavior in school, although these, too, come with their own biases.

In 2013 Jorim Tielbeek, at the time a geneticist and crime scholar at VU Medical Center Amsterdam, founded the Broad Antisocial Behavior Consortium, or BroadABC, a global network of scholars who hope to uncover some of the genes associated with antisocial behaviors. (The group’s first paper, published in 2017, briefly cites some of Boutwell and his colleagues’ work involving Rushton.) In late October, the consortium published their most recent study, which draws on genetic data from more than 85,000 people.

How much that kind of research can explain remains disputed. For all the power of new tools like GWAS, some geneticists say, they have only highlighted how incredibly complex the relationship is between genes and their environment.

The process, these experts say, is even harder when studying a complicated social outcome like a criminal conviction. Eric Turkheimer, a behavior geneticist at the University of Virginia known for his skeptical takes, told Undark that he would be surprised if such approaches could account for even 1 percent of the variance among something like criminality, once researchers control for confounding factors. “And if that’s true,” he asked, “what good is it?”

Some biosocial criminologists say those sorts of concerns have pushed them to reconsider elements of their work. Boutwell, the University of Mississippi professor, said he has revised his thinking. “I think our sociological colleagues make a stronger case when they talk about the historical cultural factors that have underpinned the disparities that we see,” he said, adding that he no longer stands behind his previous work on race.

One of his collaborators, Barnes, also described changing his approach. Barnes grew up in South Carolina; his stepfather and two siblings work in law enforcement. As a graduate student, he studied with Kevin Beaver at Florida State; a senior scholar in the field described him, in an email, as “possibly the most articulate leader of the younger generation.” In an interview with Undark, Barnes said reading the work of Turkheimer and the behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden had pushed him to take a far more cautious approach to making claims about genetics and crime. He pointed to a more recent, measured paper on genetics and crime that he wrote in 2018. That paper calls on biosocial researchers to pay close attention to social and environmental factors, rather than focusing on genes in isolation. Still, the paper suggests that genetics could say something meaningful about why the criminal justice system incarcerates so many people of color. “The amount of time and care I put into that article,” he said, “is where I wanted things to be focused from there forward.”

Barnes said he’s grown more cautious in drawing conclusions about the complicated factors that drive people to crime. “It’s clear our genetic and biological makeup have an impact on our behavior,” Barnes said. “But can we get much more specific than that? I don’t think we can at this point.”

At least some criminologists have found themselves in a kind of gray area — at once skeptical of certain biosocial explanations of crime, but still open to the idea that biology plays some role in understanding violence and transgression.

When the criminologist Michael Rocque was in graduate school, he worked closely with the late Nicole Hahn Rafter, a feminist criminologist who devoted much of her career to studying Lombroso’s grim legacy, including his influence on the American eugenics movement. Working with Rafter, Rocque said in a recent interview, had an unexpected effect: It pushed him to consider how biology could still be used to responsibly to think about crime.

Today, Rocque is an associate professor at Bates College, and he has published studies documenting how bias affects the disciplinary action faced by young Black students. He’s also a co-author, with Barnes and another colleague, of a recent book on biopsychosocial criminology, and he occasionally uses biosocial methods in his work. “I have just read too much empirical research, and seen too much evidence that genes do matter,” he said. “They’re part of the story when it comes to understanding and explaining criminal behavior.”

Still, he cautioned, studies of things like genetics or neuroscience in crime often remain tentative — and not ready for applied use now. And if they ever are ready for applied use, he said, there will have to be protections in place to make sure their use is beneficial. “In my view, we’re not at the stage where any of this stuff can be put into practice in a responsible way,” said Rocque.

That hasn’t stopped some researchers from exploring potential applications. In fall 2021, the National Institute of Justice held an online symposium to announce a new volume on the study of people who desist from crime. “This volume is a significant achievement in the field of criminal justice research,” said Amy Solomon, a senior Department of Justice official appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, in introductory remarks.

Included in the volume was the 2021 report by Danielle Boisvert, the Sam Houston State criminologist. (Rocque also contributed a chapter.) In a presentation during the session, Boisvert discussed some of the many tools that a biologically-informed correctional system might use. At times, those tools seemed to blur the line between corrections and medical care: For example, Boisvert argued that neuropsychological and physiological testing could help identify developmental issues in incarcerated people, and allow them to receive appropriate care. Such testing could potentially help prisons better evaluate whether or not someone is likely to end up incarcerated again. In some cases, she argued, they may even make a case for keeping a person out of prison altogether.

Afterward, a DOJ staffer posed a question to Boisvert: How could these techniques avoid “condemning people from birth based on their biological characteristics?” Boisvert called for programs that focus on the way the environment manifests in the body — “trauma, abuse, neglect, substance use, traumatic brain injury, lead exposure” — rather than on people’s genes.

“There are other noninvasive low-cost ways that we can incorporate biological factors into assessments,” she said, “that don’t rely on DNA.”

Many experts remain skeptical that such interventions could ever do much to fix a criminal justice system they describe as systemically racist and deeply broken. “If you’re only making that system more efficient, then racism will continue to exist,” said Rollins, the University of Washington sociologist. Things like neurobiological models of crime, he said, aren’t able to address such fundamental problems.

“The only thing that they can really do,” he added, “is reinforce what’s already there.”

Michael Schulson is a contributing editor for Undark. His work has also been published by Aeon, NPR, Pacific Standard, Scientific American, Slate, and Wired, among other publications.

A version of this article was originally posted at Undark and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Undark on X @undarkmag

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