Three

The ‘great sex’ debate: Technique or connection?

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couple kissing
The unhappiest time in a sex therapist’s office is around Valentine’s Day, says Dr. Peggy Kleinplatz, a professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of Ottawa. “It’s the day where I see the most miserable couples, the most distressed couples,” she says.

High pressure and expectations can prove an explosive combination for people already struggling with their sex lives. Sex, it turns out, isn’t as easy or simple as popular culture might lead us to believe.

Kleinplatz, trained as a clinical psychologist and sex therapist, has spent many years untangling the many reasons for sexual dissatisfaction. In 2018, she authored a review of the history of treatment of female dysfunctions in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, examining the controversial ways in which women’s sexuality in particular has been viewed and treated over the decades, and what might be the best way forward. She is director of the Optimal Sexual Experiences research team at the University of Ottawa; in 2020, she coauthored the book Magnificent Sex: Lessons from Extraordinary Lovers, inspired by findings from her long-term study of couples.

The recommendations from her and her colleagues’ research about how to build a more connected, fulfilling sex life are now being fine-tuned and rolled out on sex therapists’ couches. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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One reason couples wind up in your office is a mismatch in desire: Perhaps one partner wants sex multiple times a day, and another less than once a month. How common is this?

This is the most common presenting problem in the offices of sex therapists.

The reason couples show up in our offices is not because of a problem in one or in the other, but because there’s a discrepancy between them, which we refer to as sexual desire discrepancy.

This can be problematic because sexuality represents such a central part of one’s identity. The feelings of rejection when your partner doesn’t feel like having sex, and the feelings of obligation when you don’t want to hurt your partner’s feelings, are enormous. A lot of couples end up resting their self-concept on whether or not they’re matching up well with their partner in terms of desire and frequency.

hghrlvfol ac ul srLet’s look at both sides of that coin. First, we have people with a very high sex drive. Is that a “disorder”?

If we look at the early editions of the diagnostic manual known as the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) from the American Psychiatric Association in the 1950s, it listed problems of having too much desire. In women, this was referred to as nymphomania; the corresponding diagnosis for men is satyriasis. The diagnosis of nymphomania in a woman was fairly serious. A possible treatment for it in the 1950s was electroconvulsive therapy or frontal lobotomy. Men who had lots and lots of sex, and lots and lots of sexual desire, were generally not given a diagnosis and instead perceived as normal.

Then along comes the sexual revolution. And all of a sudden, the idea that “too much” was pathological was jettisoned. In 1980, the DSM-III got rid of the diagnoses of too much desire and replaced them with the diagnosis of too little desire. Theoretically, our diagnoses are supposed to be objective, empirical, value-free. But the history of how we diagnose reveals a great deal about sexual and social values.

How has the clinical perception of low desire changed over time for men and women?

In 1980, the DSM authors also said, “We need to do something about the gender bias that was there in the first DSM and DSM-II.” From 1987, they called it “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” for both men and women, when low desire causes distress.

But by the time we get to the DSM-V of 2013, they changed their minds again. They decided to have erectile dysfunction and hypoactive sexual desire disorder, separate, for men. But for women, they said to collapse them to “female sexual interest/arousal disorder.”

Was this decision to lump together desire and arousal a good idea? And by desire, we are talking about the frequency of wanting sex or having sexual fantasies; by arousal, we mean the physiological and psychological response to sexual stimuli.

I think it’s the obligation of clinicians to tease things apart. If you were to walk into your physician’s office and say, “I have a stomachache,” it’s the physician’s job to figure out if you ate something that gave you food poisoning, or if you’ve got an ulcer, or if you’ve got some kind of cancer in your abdomen, right? So I think that when it comes to sexual problems, it’s equally important for the onus to be on the clinician to tease out whether it’s a problem related to arousal or desire, regardless of whether your patient is male, female, trans, non-binary, etcetera.

Some clinicians might recommend compromise in a couple facing sexual desire discrepancy. Is that a good idea?

That is ill-advised. Neither partner is getting what’s actually desired. What clinicians will end up with is resentful patients who don’t trust their judgment.

One of the reasons it doesn’t work is because the clinician is being trapped into treating a symptom of a problem, framed in terms of frequency, rather than getting to the heart of what this symptom represents. It might represent an interpersonal problem, such as difficulty managing conflict. Or it might have to do with the quality of the sex itself.

What looks like a problem of low sexual desire might be evidence of good judgment, perhaps even good taste. If I asked you to think about the last time you had sex, and what feelings come up inside of you, what I’m interested in is the extent to which the feelings that are brought forth within you are more like anticipation, as in “I want more of that,” or more like dread. It’s rational to have low desire for undesirable sex.

If the problem is bad sex, and the solution is better sex — magnificent sex, even! — has there been much scholarly research about that?

The focus of most research has been how to take bad sex and make it less bad. But most people don’t want sex that’s merely “not bad,” or that is mediocre. Most people want sex that makes them feel alive in one another’s embrace. In 2005, our research team began to study people who were having deeply fulfilling sexual encounters. We wanted to study what they were doing right, so that we could learn from them.

Who were these people — whom did you speak with?

Based on my clinical experience, some of the people who had impressed me most were people in their 60s, 70s and 80s who — because of life changes, perhaps disease, or disability, or becoming empty nesters or losing someone close to them — had to reinvent sex. It occurred to me to study other people who’ve been marginalized, who had similarly been forced to reinvent, redefine or re-envision sex.

And so we studied various kinds of sexual-, gender- and relationship-minority individuals: people in their 60s, 70s and 80s; people who are LGBTQ+; people who were in consensually non-monogamous relationships, people who are into kink, etc. All of these people had had to make conscious choices about what they wanted their sex lives to look like.

For the very first study, which we describe in our book, we studied 75 people, interviewing each for 42 minutes to nearly two hours.

What did you learn about magnificent sex? Is it all about orgasms?

Contrary to what we hear in the mainstream media that great sex is all about tips and tricks and techniques and toys that culminate in earth-shattering orgasm, among the individuals we have studied and have come to call “extraordinary lovers,” orgasms were neither necessary nor sufficient components of “magnificent sex.” The qualities that made sex worth wanting were deeper, and less technique-focused.

Each erotic experience is different, but virtually all the extraordinary lovers described the same eight components and seven facilitating factors.

What were these components and facilitating factors?

Two of the components that people tended to mention fairly often were being embodied, absorbed in the moment, really present and alive; and being in sync with and connected to the other person, so merged that you couldn’t tell where one person started and the other person stopped. It’s quite something to be fully embodied within, while simultaneously really in sync with, another human being.

The other components included: erotic intimacy, empathic communication, being authentic, vulnerability, exploring risk-taking and fun, and transcendence. By empathic communication, I don’t just mean verbal communication; I mean being so in tune with your partner that you can practically feel in your own skin the way that your partner wants to be touched most. One participant described transcendence as: “An expe­rience of floating in the universe of light and stars and music and sublime peace.”

Were there revealing differences between, say, men and women?

In the literature they often presume, and maybe even have evidence for, differences between men and women, the young and the old, the LGBTQ versus the straight, the monogamous versus the non-monogamous, etcetera. But in our research, we found that the experience of what we have come to call “magnificent sex” was indistinguishable between these different groups.

There were only two people — me and my then-doctoral student Dana Ménard, now Dr. Dana Ménard at the University of Windsor — who knew who was whom. All the other members of the research team saw only de-identified, written transcripts. And they would look at the transcripts and make assumptions about the participant’s identity and their guesses were inaccurate. The people they thought were men turned out to be women, people they thought were kinky were people who identified instead as vanilla, and vice versa. What it takes to make a person glow in the dark was virtually universal among our participants.

Did you hear any particularly striking stories?

There was one couple that we interviewed, for example, who were both in their 70s, semi-retired. These individuals said: “We used to have sex three times a week. Well, we’re in our 70s now, so we only have sex once a week. When we get home from work on Thursday, we head into our kitchen to begin ‘foreplay’: chop up fruits, vegetables, enough healthy things so that we have enough food to last us until we go back to work on Monday morning, without ever having to get out of bed. We don’t have to do the dishes. We don’t have anything else to do except to have sex with each other for three-and-a-half days. So, we only have sex once a week now. But it lasts from Thursday afternoon until Monday morning.”

That’s an extraordinary example, but it really speaks to a recurring theme in your book of being willing to devote considerable energy, time and dedication to the pursuit of a good sex life.

Yes. One of the myths that we hear constantly in the mainstream media is that sex should be natural and spontaneous. And we see that same myth reiterated in porn. The reality is that extraordinary lovers choose to devote time and energy to this most valued of their pursuits. That’s a crucial lesson for all of us. Great lovers are made, not born.

Has your research led to clinical applications?

Around 2012, we started to study: How might we take the lessons from the extraordinary lovers and apply them to couples who were suffering from sexual desire discrepancy? And could it actually help them?

A lot of psychotherapy is expensive. And it’s out of reach of people with limited budgets or limited insurance. Given that one of the foundations of our work as a research team has been social justice, we decided to be as inclusive as possible by setting up group therapy. We developed an eight-week intervention helping couples to become more vulnerable, authentic, playful and so on.

Does it work?

We now have spent 10 years researching this — and, it works. That’s the short version.

On two psychometric scales of sexual satisfaction and fulfillment, we find clinically meaningful and statistically significant change in couples from the beginning of the intervention to the end. But the really valuable thing is that the changes seem to be sustained six months later: There are enduring changes in their sexual fulfillment. Participants describe marked improvements in trust, creativity, embodiment, negotiation of consent and empathic communication.

How did the pandemic affect your work?

Even in the first year of pandemic we were hearing that there were more and more couples struggling, because they were home 24/7, working from home 24/7, taking care of their kids 24/7. Marriages were strained.

We moved the group therapy online, using a platform compliant with HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) for the sake of security and confidentiality. And our data, much, to my astonishment, showed that the online group therapy is every bit as effective, which makes it even more accessible to more people. It means that they don’t have to pay for parking, pay for babysitters, worry about winter driving or how to find a sex therapist in the middle of Iowa. We’re now training people all over the world who are getting the same effective outcomes.

 

What’s your focus on now? Any new projects in the works?

Our focus now is on offering this approach to therapy for another group of people who may really need it: couples facing cancer. Cancer itself can be devastating to a person’s sex life, as can chemotherapy, radiation and the surgeries that are often required to save people’s lives. So that’s our current endeavor: applying what we’ve learned during Covid-19 about the effectiveness of online group therapy to couples facing cancer at every stage from diagnosis through survivorship. Why not embrace life for as long as we live?

Nicola Jones is a contributing editor and writer for Knowable Magazine and lives in Pemberton, British Columbia. Read more about Nicola on her blog, and Follow her on Twitter @nicolakimjones

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

Viewpoint: GOP Congressmen continue to question safety of the COVID vaccine, raising concerns of feeding vaccine hesitancy

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marjorie taylor greene
It was a late-spring House of Representatives hearing, where members of Congress and attendees hoped to learn lessons from the pandemic. Witness Marty Makary made a plea.

“I want to thank you for your attempts at civility,” Makary, a Johns Hopkins Medicine researcher and surgeon, said softly. Then his tone changed. His voice started to rise, blasting the “intellectual dishonesty” and “very bizarre” decisions of public health officials. Much later, he criticized the “cult” of his critics, some of whom “clap like seals” when certain studies are published. Some critics are “public health oligarchs,” he said.

Makary was a marquee witness for this meeting of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. His testimony had the rhythm of a two-step — alternating between an extended hand and a harsh rhetorical slap. It’s a characteristic move of this panel, a Republican-led effort to review the response to the pandemic. Both sides of the aisle join in the dance, as members claim to seek cooperation and productive discussions before attacking their preferred coronavirus villains.

One target of the subcommittee’s Republican members has drawn concern from public health experts: covid-19 vaccines. Because the attacks range from subtle to overt, there’s a fear all vaccines could end up as collateral damage.

During that May 11 hearing, Republican members repeatedly raised questions about coronavirus vaccines. Right-wing star Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) emphasized the vaccines were “experimental” and fellow Georgia Republican Rep. Rich McCormick, an emergency room physician, argued the government was “pushing” FDA-approved boosters “with no evidence and possible real harm.”

Rich McCormick. Credit: Medpage Today

Some Republican members, who have been investigating for months various pandemic-related matters, are keen to say they’re supportive of vaccines — just not many of the policies surrounding covid vaccines. Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who chairs the subcommittee, has said he supports vaccines and claimed he’s worried about declining vaccination rates.

During the May hearing, he also two-stepped, arguing the covid shots were “safe as we know it, to a certain point.” He questioned the government’s safety apparatus, including VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a database that receives reports potentially connected to vaccines. He said the committee would be “looking” at it “to make sure it’s honest and to be trusted.”

It’s this two-step — at once proclaiming oneself in favor of vaccines, while validating concerns of vaccine-skeptical audiences — that has sparked worries of deeper vaccine hesitancy taking root.

“It seems to me to be implying the government knows the vaccine to be unsafe” and that it’s “covering it up,” said Matt Motta, a political scientist at Boston University specializing in public health and vaccine politics. The implication validates some long-held fringe theories about vaccinations, without completely embracing “conspiracism,” he said.

Vaccine skeptics run the gamut from individuals with scientific credentials who nevertheless oppose public health policies from a libertarian perspective to individuals endorsing theories about widespread adverse events, or arguing against the need for multiple shots. VAERS is a favorite topic among the latter group. When one witness testifying during the May 11 hearing attempted to defend covid vaccination policies, Taylor Greene cited the number of reports to VAERS as evidence of the vaccines’ lack of safety.

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That muddles the purpose of the database, Motta said, which gathers unverified and verified reports alike. It’s a signal, not a diagnosis. “It’s more like a smoke alarm,” he said. “It goes off when there’s a fire. But it also goes off when you’ve left an omelet on the stove too long.”

In a March hearing focusing on school reopening policies, Democratic members of the panel and a witness from a school nurses association frequently touted the important role covid vaccines played in enabling schools to reopen. Wenstrup offered generalized skepticism. “I heard we were able to get more vaccines for the children,” he said. “We didn’t know fully if they needed it. A lot of data would show they don’t need to vaccinate.”

Witnesses can eagerly play into vaccine-skeptical narratives. After a question from Taylor Greene premised on the idea that the covid vaccines “are not vaccines at all,” and alleging the government is spreading misinformation about their effectiveness, Makary suggested that while he was not anti-vaccine, it was understandable others were. “I understand why they are angry,” he said, in response. “They’ve been lied to,” he said, before criticizing evidence standards for the newest covid boosters, tailored to combat emerging variants.

The signals aren’t lost on audiences. The subcommittee has, like most congressional panels, posted important moments from its hearings to Twitter. Anti-vaccine activists and other public health skeptics reply frequently.

“It’s hard for me to think of a historical analogue for this — it’s not often that we have a Congressional committee producing content that has its fingers on the pulse of the anti-vaccine community,” Motta wrote in an e-mail, after reviewing many of the subcommittee’s tweets. “The committee isn’t expressly endorsing anti-vaccine positions, beyond opposition to vaccine mandates; but I think it’s quite possible that anti-vaccine activists take this information and run with it.”

Motta’s concern is echoed by the panel’s Democratic members. “I pray this hearing does not add to vaccine hesitancy,” said Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.), who represents Baltimore.

One witness reiterated that point. Many members “have a lot of skepticism about vaccines and were not afraid to express that,” Tina Tan, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at Northwestern University, told KFF Health News. She testified at the hearing on behalf of the minority.

Polling is showing a substantial — and politically driven — level of vaccine skepticism that reaches beyond covid. A slim minority of the country is up to date on vaccinations against the coronavirus, including the bivalent booster. And the share of kindergartners receiving the usual round of required vaccines — the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, inoculation; tetanus; and chickenpox among them — dropped in the 2021-22 school year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Support for leaving vaccination choices to parents, not as school requirements, has risen by 12 percentage points since just before the pandemic, mostly due to a drop among Republicans, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center.

And vaccine skepticism is resonating beyond the halls of Congress. Some state governments are considering measures to roll back vaccine mandates for children. As part of a May 18 procedural opinion, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch cited two vaccination mandates — one in the workplace, and one for service members — and wrote that Americans “may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” He made this assertion even though American military personnel have routinely been required to get shots for a host of diseases.

“We can’t get to a spot where we’re implicitly or explicitly sowing distrust of vaccines,” cautioned California Rep. Raul Ruiz, the Democratic ranking member of the coronavirus subcommittee.

Darius Tahir, Correspondent, is based in Washington, D.C., and reports on health technology with an eye toward how it helps (or doesn’t) underserved populations; how it can be used (or not) to help government’s public health efforts; and whether or not it’s as innovative as it’s cracked up to be. He’s a graduate of Stanford University and grew up in Rochester, New York. Follow Darius on Twitter @dariustahir

A version of this article was originally posted at KFF Health News 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 KFF on Twitter @KFFHealthNews

Viewpoint: ‘Animal individualism’ ― Why picking and choosing which animal species should survive or die is a terrible idea

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france ile de re save big

How should humans care for the beings that share the planet with us? This is one of the defining questions of our time. Between 1970 and 2018, wild animal populations have fallen by an average of 69 percent, according to the World Wildlife Fund, due to factors including habitat loss, overhunting and fishing, pollution, and climate change. In that same period, the human population has more than doubled and, by one estimate, now weighs nearly 10 times as much as all undomesticated mammals put together.

A common reaction is the urge to save individual animals. This urge has been validated by generations of thinkers who have argued for the elimination of animal suffering on ethical grounds. One of the latest in this line is the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, whose recent essays in The New York Review of Books make an expansive case for human action to protect animals from harm.

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In her December piece, Nussbaum proposes that sentient animals should have the chance to live flourishing lives, free of suffering inflicted not only by human activity but also by wild predators. While she acknowledges that “if we tried to interfere with predation on a large scale, we would very likely cause disaster on a large scale,” she still suggests humans should intervene on animals’ behalf — even in the wild, which she describes as “a place full of cruelty, scarcity, and casual death.” The main prescriptions that issue from this approach are surprisingly trivial: Ban tourism that profits from viewing predation; save litter runts; and feed captive animals synthetic lab-grown meat, to name a few.

This kind of thinking is well outside mainstream conservation practice. No major environmental group, to my knowledge, is working in any organized way to thwart orcas, lions, peregrine falcons, owls, and other predators. Scientists dating back to Darwin and beyond have studied natural systems without passing moral judgement on predation or any other mechanisms of evolution and energy transfer.

Nussbaum’s approach, however, is arguably an outgrowth of a less radical, more widely held worldview of animal individualism, characterized by a focus on the rights of specific animals. Highly developed consciousness in many of these creatures is thought to make them susceptible to the sort of suffering our ethical systems seek to avert in human individuals. But individualism — also at the heart of our legal and economic systems — is a terrible guide to stewarding the natural world.

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Credit: Rawpixel (Public Domain)

The crusade for individual animal welfare treats wild animals like pets, often reducing conservation to the protection of hand-picked mascots in isolated bits of habitat that are inadequate to safeguard the climate and large-scale ecological phenomena, such as migration. It causes us to look at nature as an assortment of beings with different ethical standings, rather than as intricate living systems that require a lot of space and a tolerably slow pace of change.

Over my three decades in the conservation movement, I’ve learned that the best approaches set out to save and connect natural systems, not specific animals. True, some commercially prized species of plants and animals — mahogany and pangolins, for example — need special protection from overexploitation. But any approach that fails to conserve ecosystems at large scales will fail sentient and nonsentient life forms alike.

A prime example is the Endangered Species Act, the United States’ main biodiversity law, which provides legal protection for individual species when they are at risk of or nearing extinction. The 1973 law was a landmark achievement. But the law only kicks in when a system is already starting to lose species, and it takes a single-species approach to habitat protections. Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t prevented the collapse of biodiversity at the population level.

Under the Endangered Species Act, conservation debates have often centered on whether a certain species is worth saving. For instance, measures to protect the Delta smelt — a very small fish endemic to California that most Californians have never seen — have been derided by farmers and politicians, including the 45th U.S. president, for stifling the state’s agricultural economy. Critics argue that the protection efforts reduce water flows to Central Valley farms. What is actually at stake in the debate over the Delta smelt, however, is the health of the San Francisco estuary, the largest in California, which has thousands of populations of wild species and millions of humans inhabiting its shores.

At its extreme, the zealous defense of individual prey animals can provide an intellectual fig leaf to scorched-earth predator control. Government-sponsored killing of wolves, pumas, and grizzly bears throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century eliminated these animals from vast areas of North America to keep livestock safe. An awakening to the ecological and moral costs of the slaughter brought reform to these programs, but the reflex to treat predator control as the solution to ecosystem imbalances persists.

In Canada, for instance, caribou are in trouble. To thrive, the animals need to roam though vast mosaics of forest and tundra shaped by fire, birds, groundwater, and insects, among other things. But these natural systems have been disrupted by roads, oil prospecting, and climate change. (The proposed Ambler Mining District road, should it be approved by the Biden administration and the State of Alaska, may similarly impact Alaska’s Western Arctic Caribou Herd.) Mature forests, where caribou feast on lichen, have become scarcer, reducing caribou numbers to the point that wolf predation might push them over the edge. Having failed to respond to the systemic issues, the Canadian government has been compelled to deal with symptoms, killing wolves to keep the caribou alive.

Pumas, which today range throughout Central and South America and western North America, have also been the object of species-specific policies — both to save them and get rid of them. Research shows the folly of viewing them apart from their systems. Scientists have documented ecological relationships between pumas and at least 485 other species, including mammals, birds, invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, plants, and fish. Some of these relationships are with the animals the big cats eat, like deer — an infliction of suffering Nussbaum’s approach would abhor. But the carcasses pumas leave behind feed dozens of species of carrion eaters and diversify vegetation by enriching the soil with nitrogen. Extirpated from their range in the central and eastern United States, pumas are now returning eastward, and scientists say we should let them.

In his 1949 essay “The Land Ethic,” conservationist Aldo Leopold exhorts people to admit all the non-human beings with whom we share territory into our ethical community and to acknowledge the roles various beings play in the ecosystem, rather than focusing on their independent individual destinies. “The Land Ethic” recognizes that the best thing we can do for any individual animal, regardless of whether it is sentient, is love the system in which it’s embedded.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last five years talking to Indigenous peoples — all from cultures that hunt. They live in and around ecosystems their families have stewarded for countless generations. Most of them express a worldview akin to Leopold’s — not as the result of any big epiphany, but as a matter of common sense. Why risk the integrity of the system that feeds you? What is the upside of disrespecting a web of beings that sustained ancestors, provided sounds for your language, and played critical parts in your stories?

One of John Muir’s most famous quotes is “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” One of Shakespeare’s is “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And yet, we sometimes need a fresh reminder that our world is a fabric of dazzling complexity that we must steward with a view of the whole — and with a healthy dose of humility in the face of all that we don’t yet understand.

John Reid is co-author (with the late Thomas Lovejoy) of “Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet,” founder of Conservation Strategy Fund, and senior economist for Nia Tero, a nonprofit that supports Indigenous stewardship of vital ecosystems.

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

Meet the beetles: Mealworms could be a food of the future

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I have a special fondness for the yellow mealworm, Tenebrio molitor.

As a child, I fed the mealworm stage of this beetle to my pet chameleon.

As a teen, I babysat for a family that owned a pet shop. The house was filled with animals, and I was thrilled to be there. That is, until right before bedtime.

As I was trying to get the kids upstairs, a monkey grabbed a can, leaped atop a curtain rod, whipped the top off, and happily sprayed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of writhing, fat, pale mealworms all about the living room. It was great fun collecting them.

Then a few days ago I got a news release from Paris-based Ynsect. The company’s goal: to farm massive numbers of yellow mealworms as food for humans. And I instantly remembered the creatures festooned around that long-ago living room.

Ynsect’s good news was that the yellow mealworm’s genome had finally been sequenced. Thank goodness! It was a tough one to crack.

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Eating mealworms

Farming yellow mealworms for food makes sense.

The planet will be home to more than 9 billion humans by 2050, and our species consumes bountiful animal flesh. A yellow mealworm is an animal, but being an invertebrate, its bulbous, probably chewy body is devoid of nasty bones or gristle. Orkin pest control experts provide some helpful facts about the life cycle.

Mealworms are nutritious. They can be popped into the mouth whole, like cheese doodles, or ground into powder to add to a smoothie or soup. The worms are rich in protein, a great nitrogen source, although we can’t digest the nitrogen in the crunchy chitin coats. The fats are healthy, too.

Feed to protein efficiency ratios. Credit: Ynsect

So nutritious are the worms that the European Food Safety Authority gave them a thumbs up in a 30-page report in November 2020: “Safety of dried yellow mealworm (Tenebrio molitor larva) as a novel food pursuant to Regulation (EU) 2015/228.” Here’s a short version.
.
The Authority deemed yellow mealworms ok to eat for the general population, calling them “not nutritionally disadvantageous.” That’s a triple negative. Why not say the worms seem safe and offer a recipe or two?

They concluded that the animals are nontoxic, but the legions of people who feed mealworms to their pets already know this. In fact, 2 billion people routinely eat insects, mostly in African nations.

The Authority does, however, warn that people who are allergic to dust mites or seafood might react badly to yellow mealworms, with headaches and/or asthma. But the worms are unlikely to pick up toxins in their feed, because they like to eat apples and bran. Still, the adult beetles produce a substance that can irritate human skin, should a meal metamorphose.

Farming mealworms is more environmentally friendly than raising cows, sheep, and pigs. But “despite being promising for sustainable food security, mass production of T. molitar remains relatively primitive and challenging,” the news release from Ynsect laments.

I am unfamiliar with the details of raising anything other than cats and fruit flies, and I kill most garden plants. But as a geneticist, I can appreciate the value of genetic information in breeding. Even Gregor Mendel knew that, calling the units of hereditary information “elementen” before the word “gene” arrived.

A dearth of genome information for mealworms

Projects to sequence the genomes of the species that provide our meat began in the wake of sequencing the first human genomes, near the turn of the century. Genome sequences have been available for years for cattle
cattle, pigs, and sheep. And the chicken genome sequence was published in 2004.

We also have genome sequences for blue whales, armadillos, wallabies, hyraxes, and rats and bats. The list is long, although vertebrate-centric (non invertebrate inclusive).

But mealworms aren’t being discriminated against in genome sequencing priority merely because they do not have bones. Consider the tiny, transparent roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a lab favorite of developmental biologists. Not only was its genome sequence genome sequence published in 1998, but for years we’ve known the journey of every one of its single cells during development, because the animal is see-through. The cells number around 1,000, differing slightly for males and hermaphrodites (no females nor fluid gender. Not sure which pronoun to use).

Meet the beetles

The genome sequence of the yellow mealworm appears in Open Research Europe, from a team from the French National Sequencing Center in Évry, France.

The mealworm genome was a tough one to crack. Attempts to map specific genes to their ten chromosomes, a typical first step, would instead shatter the genome into pieces too short to assemble into the chromosome-sized chunks needed to identify and follow agronomic traits – like growth rate, fertility, size, percent protein in the worm body, disease susceptibilities, and environmental sensitivities. Compare a genome to a book. It’s easier to identify a novel by reading a sample chapter than by listing random words scattered throughout.

We’ve paid much more attention to our own genomes. The first human gene was mapped to its chromosome in 1968. So the yellow mealworm, with its dearth of gene-chromosome assignments, is pretty far behind.

Lifecycle of the Yellow Mealworm. Credit: Patrícia Canteri de Souza et al

The researchers extracted DNA and RNA from T. molitor larvae. DNA comprises the genome and RNA provides a window onto gene expression – which genes are being actively transcribed and translated into proteins. They then compared the genome sequence to that of five relatives, including the familiar red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum. Several mapping and sequencing technologies were combined to get big stretches of DNA sequence and overlap the bases to derive a chromosome-by-chromosome rough genome sequence.

The stats: The yellow mealworm’s genome is about 310 million DNA bases, about a tenth the size of ours. But it has 21,435 genes, which is remarkably similar to us. Only 1.43% of the worm genes are present in heterozygous form, meaning two slightly different sequences are part of each chromosome of a pair. That seems rather genetically uniform to me. Not surprisingly, the genome most closely resembles that of the red flour beetle.

Excitement is high

“The genome, using cutting-edge methods, is of exceptional quality, with DNA sequence lengths almost as long as the chromosomes themselves. This is a major breakthrough for the sector, enabling us to begin unprecedented studies on the relationship between genes. We are at the start of a new science of this beetle and have little doubt that new properties of our insect, particularly in the fields of nutrition and health, are set to be discovered over the coming months and years,” commented Thomas Lefebvre, Ynsect’s Director of R&D BioTech Innovations.

Having the genome sequence in hand will enable “industrial genome selection.” That includes “phenotyping tools” to follow traits and “genotyping tools” to identify the gene variant combinations behind the traits.

A word on insect welfare

Ynsect isn’t the only insect farming company. Illinois-based InnovaFeed and AgriProtein from the UK are farming black soldier fly larvae for protein. But animal rights activists point out that insect farms cost trillions of larval lives a year.

A recent essay in Aeon by ethicists Jeff Sevo and Jason Schukraft addresses the animal rights aspect: “Don’t Farm Bugs: Insect farming bakes, boils and shreds animals by the trillion. It’s immoral, risky and won’t resolve the climate crisis,” the headline and subhed read.

On insect farms, ethicists Sevo and Schukraft point out, larvae meet their doom through freezing, baking, boiling, or shredding, the stress of which can promote cannibalism. Apparently no Temple Grandin of cattle slaughter fame is standing up for arthropod rights.

The ethicists discuss at length the bad things we do to insects. We poison them with flea bombs, keep them away with citronella candles, step on ants, slap mosquitoes, and spray away yellow jackets and bees.

Next, the ethicists consider the possible sentience of the six-legged, evident in the fascinating behaviors of the social insects.

Are you hungry yet? Credit: Raimond Spekking

I can’t argue with that, and began to feel guilty. While I’ve escorted a captured beetle or spider (an arachnid, not an insect) in an inverted Dixie cup outside for release into the wild, I’ve also, back in the day as a Drosophila geneticist, ruthlessly drowned many millions of fruit flies in tanks of mineral oil, or CO2ed them into oblivion. I’ve also killed, in the pursuit of understanding how mutations put legs on insects’ heads, mosquitoes and Tribolium, back in grad school.

I’ve eaten all sorts of plants molded into patties (see Anatomy of an Impossible Burger), but I think I’d have a hard time eating one that began as insect larvae. I just can’t erase the squirmy image. But for those unconcerned with the origin of their food, here’s a Pinterest board offering 47 mealworm recipies – from jello shots to falafel and, of course, burgers.

Enjoy!

Ricki Lewis, PH.D is a writer for PLOS and author of the book “The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It.” You can check out Ricki’s website and follow Ricki on Twitter @rickilewis

A version of this article was originally posted at PLOS and is reposted here with permission. You can check out PLOS on Twitter @PLOS

This article previously appeared on the GLP on February 22, 2022.

Viewpoint: ‘We believe we have developed the first organism that can’t be infected by any known virus’

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'We believe we have developed the first technology to design an organism that can’t be infected by any known virus'
Researchers at George Chuch’s Harvard lab have genetically engineered a bacteria, E. coli, to be totally immune to viruses.

In addition to blocking every virus the team has challenged it with thus far, their E. coli has also been designed so that its modified genes cannot escape into the wild, which does indeed sound like the plot of a lost Michael Crichton novel. (In fact, the parallels to Jurassic Park are there, but we’ll get to that.)

“We believe we have developed the first technology to design an organism that can’t be infected by any known virus,” genetics research fellow and study author Akos Nyerges said.

“We can’t say it’s fully virus-resistant, but so far, based on extensive laboratory experiments and computational analysis, we haven’t found a virus that can break it.”

Production and protection

The main results of the study, published in Nature, could carry big implications for the future of bacteria-based production — for instance, using bacteria to make medicines.

Cells and bacteria can be used as little labs or factories, cranking out any number of small molecules and biological compounds. E. coli, with its well-understood genome and reputation as a workhorse, is used for the production of almost two dozen biopharmaceuticals, including insulin, and is also being used in making biofuels.

But while harnessing bacteria like E. coli can outsource complex chemistry to organisms for whom it is, ahem, second nature, it also leaves these processes vulnerable to viruses.

“Viral contamination in cell cultures remains a real risk with severe consequences: over the past four decades, dozens of viral contamination cases were documented in industry,” the authors wrote in their study.

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Cutting codes

In 2022, a University of Cambridge team thought they had created a virus-resistant E. coli. But when Nyerges, research fellow Siân Owen, and graduate student Eleanor Rand challenged them with random viruses found around Harvard Medical School — including some from a rat nest and the nearby Muddy River — the bacteria proved far from invincible.

The Cambridge attempt hinged on designing the bacteria to make everything it needed using only 61 sets of genetic building blocks, called codons, as opposed to 64. Without those missing codons, the thinking went, the viruses wouldn’t be able to hijack the cells.

To make their virus-resistant E. coli, the team used a special kind of RNA.

This did not prove to be the case.

Rather than being hamstrung, the viruses merely brought in their own genetic pieces, doing an end-around the firewall and getting back to what they do best: infect, replicate, repeat.

Rather than eliminate codons, the Harvard team decided to instead alter what the codons make.

Enter RNA

The new work centers around a specific type of RNA called transfer RNA (tRNA).

The tRNA’s job is to recognize each codon in DNA and then add the correct amino acid to whatever protein is being created — kind of like putting a key component into a car on the factory line. The Cambridge team had deleted codons called TCG and TCA and the tRNA that recognizes them from their bacteria. Both of those codons direct the tRNA to install serine, an amino acid, onto the protein getting put together.

The Harvard team went one step further, by adding in “trickster” tRNAs; when they see TCG or TCA, they install a different amino acid — called leucine — instead of serine.

“Leucine is about as different from serine as you can get, physically and chemically,” Nyerges said.

When a virus busts through the door carrying TCG and TCA, the trickster tRNA slips it leucine instead of serine, creating non-functional virus proteins and blocking it from replicating. (The virus does bring its own tRNA to the party, but the Harvard team believes their cell’s tRNA outcompetes it.)

“It was very challenging and a big achievement to demonstrate that it’s possible to swap an organism’s genetic code, and that it only works if we do it this way,” Nyerges said.

The team thinks it would take a virus developing dozens of mutations — in specific places and at the same time — to hijack their E. coli.

The Harvard team added in “trickster” tRNAs that install a different amino acid. This creates non-functional virus proteins and blocks replication.

Genetic firewalls

Speaking of Michael Crichton, a hallmark of the author’s books is science slipping its bonds and wreaking havoc — think Jurassic Park. The researchers took this concern seriously — a bacteria that can resist all of its natural virus enemies could be a real problem in the wild.

To prevent their genetically engineered E. coli’s code from escaping, the researchers used two different safety mechanisms.

The first was to prevent horizontal gene transfer, a natural process that allows bacteria to swap genes with each other directly. To avoid the engineered code from getting co-opted by a wild bacteria, the team made all the leucine codons in their E. coli into TCG or TCA.

This isn’t a problem for the engineered cells’ trickster tRNA, which uses TCG and TCA to make leucine anyway. But in a non-engineered organism, TCG and TCA are for serine, not leucine. Using serine in place of leucine will lead to junk proteins, genetic code “gibberish,” as Nyerges put it. And if a trickster tRNA itself gets into a normal cell, its amino acid swapping will kill the new cell, hopefully stopping the leak.

For the team’s other safeguard, we go back to Jurassic Park. In the book and film, the animals are made dependent on an amino acid called lysine that the park gives them; without the lysine, they die. Theoretically, this means any dino that escaped would’ve been on borrowed time.

The team’s E. coli was also made to be dependent on an amino acid, one which doesn’t exist outside of the lab. No amino acid, no bacteria.

Next steps

The team next wants to use their codon engineering to create infection-resistant bacteria that can make important materials that would need complicated chemistry otherwise, without the constant risk of contamination by even a single virus.

The work may also prove foundational for genetic engineering going forward.

“Our results may provide the basis for a general strategy to make any organism safely resistant to all natural viruses and prevent genetic information flow into and out of genetically modified organisms,” the authors wrote.

B. David Zarley is a senior staff writer for Freethink, where he covers health and medicine, including infectious disease, psychedelic research, mental health, and the brain. A graduate of SUNY Fredonia, his work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Verge, Jezebel, Frieze, Sports Illustrated, VICE, Paste Magazine, and numerous other publications. Follow David on Twitter @BDavidZarley

A version of this article was originally posted at Freethink 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 Freethink on Twitter @freethink

What are the prospects that we might soon face another coronavirus-like viral pandemic?

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There are signs of a mid-summer surge in COVID-19 cases, particularly in the Midwest and West, that have some experts concerned. But even the very risk-averse expect it to be small relative to past years.

The bigger issue: Are we prematurely letting down our defenses against other viruses as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic fades from the headlines? Although the more than 1.1 million deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases of Americans with lingering long COVID remain a grim reminder of what we have endured, most people have neglected to get the most recent vaccine booster, stopped masking and instead have turned their attention to sun and fun.

However, those of us who study viruses are acutely aware that coronaviruses, one of which is SARS-CoV-2, the etiologic agent of COVID-19, are zoonotic agents – that is, they can spread infection between people and animals. These infections can be caused by viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi. Some infections can be severe and life-threatening, such as rabies, MERS, anthrax, bubonic plague, and SARS-CoV-2, while others are milder. 

The zoonotic nature of COVID transmissibility has been particularly unsettling, as we initially found the virus in bats and minks, and then in pets and later, in local deer populations. Thus, not only do we have to be concerned about the human population, but our animals as well.

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We remain vulnerable to outbreaks, and even pandemics, of zoonotic diseases, and epidemiologists and infectious disease experts are concerned that the next serious one could be caused by a new strain of an old foe, a variant of the N5H1 strain of avian influenza virus. Recently, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) strongly urged that nations collaborate to prepare for this latest threat to our lives and livelihoods.

Avian influenza, or “bird flu,” traditionally spreads among both wild and domestic bird populations. Influenza virus strains such as bird flu and swine flu are able to co-infect animals so that they can mix and match segments of genetic material (RNA) to create new and more infectious and/or more virulent virus strains. Both avian and swine flu have been the source of nasty pandemics, with the 1918-19 Spanish flu (H1N1) perhaps being the most notorious. 

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Influenza strains are designated by the unique epitopes found on the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) proteins, which are found on their surface and assist with their entry and exit into and from cells, analogous to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. A new H5N1 strain might then have an enhanced ability to jump from birds to mammals, raising concerns that it might be just a matter of time before the virus jumps to humans. The greatest concern is that the virus would then become capable of human-to-human transmission.

How does this happen? There are two ways that flu viruses commonly evolve. One is called “antigenic drift,” which consists of small genetic mutations that give rise to changes in the surface proteins of the virus, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA). Those mutations usually produce viruses that are closely related to one another, which means that antibodies elicited by exposure to one flu virus will likely recognize other viruses that arose from antigenic drift.

Another type of change is called “antigenic shift,” a major genetic change that gives rise to new, significantly different HA and/or NA proteins in flu viruses capable of infecting humans. This is more likely to occur when there is co-infection by different viruses — say, human and avian flu viruses simultaneously infecting an animal host — and there is reassortment of RNAs such that new viruses result that are different enough that most people do not have immunity to them. 

Such a “shift” occurred in the spring of 2009, when an H1N1 virus with genes from viruses originating from North American swine, Eurasian swine, humans, and birds emerged to infect people and spread quickly, causing a pandemic. 

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Based on reports from across the world, there is reason to be concerned that we could be in store for a shift event. In 2022, 67 different countries reported H5N1 flu in both domestic and wild bird populations, with over 130 million poultry lost from virus infection or from culling performed to stop virus spread. The 2022 outbreak was the deadliest on record in the U.S., affecting nearly every state and forcing culls of more than 50 million birds. (That’s the main reason that poultry and egg prices spiked last year.)  

Equally if not more disturbing are recent reports of H5N1 among mammals in 10 different countries since 2022. This is certainly an underestimate, as outbreaks of avian flu in mammals would be unexpected and, therefore, underreported. Over two dozen species of mammals are known to harbor the virus, including cats and dogs. The extent of this spread makes it inevitable that the virus will reach humans. 

Avian flu kills almost all the birds it infects, and globally, from January 2003 to May 2023, 876 cases of human infection with avian influenza A(H5N1) virus were reported from 23 countries. Of those cases, 458 were fatal (case fatality rate of 52%).  During the past 18 months, a handful of human cases — but, as yet no human-to-human transmission — have been reported. Infection has been associated with severe symptoms and some deaths. 

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Credit: Mark Pilgrin/Flickr

Like our initial encounter with COVID-19, we are ill-prepared for this “pandemic-in-waiting.” If a new H5N1 variant were highly transmissible from human-to-human, once again we could quickly get behind the curves of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.  

The U.S. response to the COVID pandemic was hindered by a deluge of misinformation and disinformation that emanated from Russia’s propaganda apparatus and its U.S.-based “useful idiots,” including a handful of healthcare professionals and even one presidential wannabe (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.).  It has made communication about the benefits of vaccines, masks, and other interventions extremely challenging, and the numbers of vaccinations against other preventable diseases, such as measles, are down since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. 

There is plenty to be done to prepare. Our immunity against H5N1 is likely to be minimal, so new vaccines are urgently needed. Public health leaders, animal health scientists, and vaccine manufacturers should already be communicating with each other about the risk. Exposure to sick animals needs to be reported. An infrastructure for animal surveillance must be set in place, and we are still underperforming on this, even after all that we have learned from COVID-19. Emerging variants of H5N1 need to be identified and their sequences uploaded onto easily accessible databases. 

The Biden Administration has just created an Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) in the Executive Office of the President, “charged with leading, coordinating, and implementing actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats or pathogens that could lead to a pandemic or to significant public health-related disruptions in the United States.” It will “take over the duties of the current COVID-19 Response Team and Mpox Team at the White House and will continue to coordinate and develop policies and priorities related to pandemic preparedness and response.” President Biden’s past public health appointments have been barely mediocre on their best days, so we are skeptical.

We need to be vigilant about the threat of new influenza viruses. Our population and livestock, and even our pets, might soon be in jeopardy. 

Kathleen L. Hefferon is an instructor in microbiology at Cornell University. Find Kathleen on Twitter @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 Henry on Twitter @henryimiller

We need another source of omega-3 supplements for food and animal feed. Enriched genetically modified rapeseed could fill the gap

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In March this year, Norway’s Food Safety Authority became the latest country to conclude that using Omega-3 enriched GM rapeseed oil in aquaculture feed poses no additional health or environmental risks.

It followed an application by biotech firm Nufarm for approval of Aquaterra, a rapeseed oil genetically modified to include genes from marine algae and engineered to make DHA, an Omega-3 normally only found in fish oils and not present in standard rapeseed oil.

Credit: Aneth David (SLU) via CC-BY-SA-4.0

Interestingly, this was the first application to use a genetically modified product in Norway.

Approvals for the use of the same Omega-3 enriched GM rapeseed oil in aquafeed have also been confirmed by food safety authorities in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA and Chile.

Indeed, Aquaterra is already in commercial use in Chilean aquaculture, the second largest producer of farmed salmon in the world.

There are also signs that other major fish farming regions of the world, including in Asia, are beginning to recognise the potential benefits of biotech crops as a more sustainable feed source for aquaculture.

Last month, for example, a conference in India organised by the Indian Government in association with the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) focused on precisely this issue. Expert speakers highlighted the enormous scope for GM crop-based products not only to enhance the supply of feed ingredients in aquaculture – promoting growth and reduction of input costs – but also to help mitigate the impact of mounting pressure on global supplies of fishmeal and fish oil.

Ensuring the sustainability of marine fish stocks is a critical issue, especially in a year such as this when the El Niño climate phenomenon is predicted to return, placing extra pressure on feedstocks. In particular, El Niño negatively impacts South American catches of species such as Anchoveta in the Pacific, which typically account for around 40% of global fishmeal and fish oil production. The most recent major El Niño event (2014-2016) reportedly reduced fishmeal and fish oil output in Peru and Chile by as much as a quarter.

Credit: NOAA via Public Domain

In recent years, concerns over the sustainability of aquafeed have also impacted the healthy eating profile of farmed fish. A diet rich in omega-3s is health-protective, especially in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), and a key challenge for the salmon farming industry is to sustain the sector’s growth while maintaining levels of the healthy omega-3 oils such as EPA and DHA in the final product.

Over a 10-year period, levels of these beneficial oils in farmed salmon have declined by 50%. This is primarily due to the measures taken to protect marine fish stocks, which mean that while the global salmon farming industry has grown by more than 50% over the past decade, the annual harvest of marine fish oils has remained static at around 800k tonnes, diluting the available fish oil across a bigger pool of production.

This in turn has encouraged a trend of replacing marine oils with vegetable oils, which lack the special health-giving omega-3s found in fish oils, and are changing the fatty acid profile of the salmon fillet the consumer is now presented with – they might now get a product that has less impact on the marine environment, but unfortunately it also less nutritious.

A healthier and more sustainable solution may lie in the application of crop biotechnologies such as GM and gene editing.

My own research has shown how oilseeds like Camelina sativa can be engineered to accumulate omega-3 fish oils such as EPA and DHA, providing a renewable, crop-based alternative to over-stretched marine resources.

Successful aquafeed trials in Scotland have already demonstrated how this could help make salmon farming more sustainable and more nutritious – breaking our dependence on the oceans as a source of fish oils while restoring omega-3 levels in farmed salmon to what they were 10 years ago.    

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It is a major source of personal frustration to me that UK-led innovation at Rothamsted Research, which has long been in the vanguard of these exciting developments, is still limited to tennis court-sized field trials, and its commercial uptake stymied by political opposition to genetic innovation, especially in Scotland.

The science is there. The use of innovative crop technologies is already benefiting aquaculture production in other parts of the world. It is ironic that the Aquaterra GM rapeseed oil was developed after our GM camelina, but has undergone swifter regulatory approval.

An image representing CSIRO’s ‘Food Futures’ oilseeds research program. Credit: David McCleneghan, Victoria Harito and CSIRO via CC-BY-3.0

With vision and political will, these added-value crops could not only support the Scottish salmon farming industry’s ambitious plans to double output from 170k tonnes to 350k tonnes by 2030, but also provide an alternative income stream for Scotland’s farmers, directly connecting agriculture and aquaculture at the national level rather than importing feed ingredients from the other side of the planet, one aspect of the industry’s ‘green’ credentials that is often overlooked.

But there is another pressing reason why it makes sense to cultivate the use of biotech crops as a source of Omega-3 oils.

​Safer food.

​A recent study by Denmark’s DTU National Food Institute reported very high levels of marine-derived persistent environmental pollutants, or PFAS, in organic eggs. So high, in fact, that the authors warned that children aged 4–9 consuming more than 2.5 organic eggs per week may be ingesting unsafe levels of these ‘forever chemicals’.   

PFAS can migrate through the food chain – from fish to fishmeal, which is included in chicken feed, via the hen to the egg, where it binds to the protein in the yolk and then to humans. Credit: Edithobayaa1 via CC-BY-SA-4.0

The study also linked the PFAS found in the eggs to the use of fishmeal, which is routinely fed to laying hens. The authors described how these harmful, persistent chemicals can work their way up the food chain, from fish to hens to humans, accumulating in organic tissue at increasingly higher levels at each stage.

The study’s recommendation? Switch to an alternative, non-contaminated feed source.

Ideological opponents of biotechnology in food and agriculture often contend that these technologies are solutions looking for problems to solve. But with continued growth of the global aquaculture sector, and the ongoing challenges associated with marine feedstocks, the potential opportunities to provide a renewable, plant-based source of healthy Omega-3 oils are undeniable, delivering benefits in terms of sustainability, healthy-eating, economic growth and food safety.

What’s not to like?

Professor Johnathan Napier is a leading pioneer in plant biotechnology and an advocate for the power of GM plants to deliver for the public good. At Rothamsted Research, his flagship research programme involves both GM and gene editing techniques to develop oilseed crops with enhanced Omega-3 levels as a more sustainable, plant-based source of healthy oils for human nutrition and for the aquaculture sector. He is a member of the Science for Sustainable Agriculture advisory group.  

This article is part of a GLP partnership with Science for Sustainable Agriculture (SSA), a new UK-based policy and communications effort offering information, comment and debate around modern, sustainable agriculture and food production. Supported by an independent advisory group of political, scientific and industry leaders from a range of backgrounds, SSA provides a platform to explain the vital role of agricultural science and technology in safeguarding our food supply, tackling climate change and protecting the natural environment. SSA stands ready to comment on and challenge unscientific positions or policy decisions on sustainable agriculture. Further information about SSA is available here. Check out Science for Sustainable Agriculture on Twitter @SciSustAg

7,000+ rare diseases remain untreatable. The genetic revolution and federal research funding offers hope for cures, but vaccine hesitancy and a lack of newborn screening pose hurdles

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There are an estimated 7,000 known rare diseases affecting 30 million people; for 95% of them, there are no treatment options. That dire situation is expected to gradually improve as advances in genetic research and faster government approvals promise to accelerate the development of new cures. But there are road bumps. Signs that the increase in vaccine hesitancy will discourage skeptical parents from bringing young children to physicians could slow the momentum.

Almost 50% of all the new drug approvals by the Food and Drug Administration targeted rare diseases, according to the most recent statistics, from 2020. Eleven years ago, only one in 4 new drugs targeted rare diseases. Total global expenditures on rare diseases therapies could reach $260 billion within two years.

The pace of research has accelerated in recent years because of the research revolution touched off by advances in gene editing, like CRISPR, and gene therapy. More than 60 cell and gene therapy FDA approvals are expected by 2030, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s New Drug Delivery Paradigms Initiative. They range from RNA-based drugs to gene therapies to fixes for pandemic-threatening viruses. Just this week, there was a report that the technology used to develop the mRNA covid-19 vaccines could be applied to deliver life-saving genetic material to the blood stem cells in the bone marrow of animals. If it’s successful on humans, mRNA-developed therapies could dramatically escalate our ability to fight all diseases, including rare ones.

Another driver is an increase in regulatory incentives and fast-tracked approvals. The Orphan Drug Tax Credit and R&D tax credit offset some of the investment costs, and the FDA’s priority review vouchers allow for more expedited drug reviews for rare disease treatments.

Detect, diagnose, treat

Rare diseases tend to strike the youngest. Clinicaltrials.gov hints at what’s to come.

CRISPR is tackling sickle cell disease and thalassemia, while antisense technology is being tried for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Searching for “gene therapy” brings up 5000 hits for this older approach, many targeting childhood diseases.

Treatments work better if begun early, and some on the horizon will impact newborn screening. The goal is to detect signs of medical conditions that are treatable if recognized early, even before symptoms begin. All newborn screening findings must be followed up with diagnostic evidence, such as scans, biopsies, and further lab tests.

So the mantra is detect, diagnose, treat. And the waiting can be the hardest part, as test results confirm what screening suggests.

For years, newborn screening programs have improved and even saved the lives of the littlest. What the included diseases share is that they can be treated – perhaps stalled or cured with a one-time procedure, or controlled with daily or less frequent ways to address symptoms. An example of such an “actionable” condition is a severe combined immune deficiency, of which there are several types, often treatable with a bone marrow stem cell transplant.

To get ahead of the expected influx of “transformative treatments,” Donald B. Bailey, Jr, PhD, and colleagues from RTI International in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, queried newborn screening experts from clinical research, federal or state advisory boards, patient advocacy groups, industry, and state testing laboratories. Their findings, which will help to guide preparation for expanding the newborn “blood spot” panels, appear in JAMA Network Open.

Gearing up to expand newborn screening

Screening a few drops of blood from a newborn’s heel for inklings of serious diseases that can be treated before symptoms arise isn’t a new practice – it began in the 1960s with a single condition, PKU. The devastating effects on the brain are preventable with a highly specialized medical diet begun as soon as possible, which counteracts the inborn error of metabolism.

Today newborn screening programs in the U.S. check for dozens of diseases, but in a state-by-state manner. That means that a newborn in one state would receive treatment while another with the same condition in a different state would not – but the situation is improving as state lists grow.

Still, the pace of adding new conditions to newborn screening panels has been historically slow, because developing and evaluating new treatments takes a long time. But with a host of biotech approaches finally reaching the clinic, how will newborn screening panels keep up?

The online survey asked respondents to rate 20 potential solutions for modernizing newborn screening to handle “an onslaught of new and more effective therapies” that “will constitute a disruptive event for which newborn screening is unprepared,” according to the researchers. Modernization of the entire screening system seems unavoidable, but how should it happen?

The 40 respondents agreed on priorities:

  • Coordinate testing among states
  • Establish larger-scale regional screening networks
  • Align federal programs that deal with newborn screening
  • Expand funding for research, especially to build clinical databases that link mutations with diseases
  • Follow long-term outcomes of treatments

The report looked at newborn screening going forward, but the practice has a rich history. Here’s a deeper dive.

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Probing dried blood spots

In the excitement leading up to birth, new parents may be so overwhelmed that signing the informed consent form for taking a tiny blood sample from the newborn’s heel may go unnoticed. The blood spot is dried and then probed using a technique borrowed from analytical chemistry called mass spectroscopy. It looks for telltale molecules that could indicate specific inborn errors of metabolism. Too much or too little of a particular enzyme or other protein is the first step in what those in the rare disease community term “the diagnostic odyssey.”

DNA is also extracted from the blood spot and tested for a handful of single-gene conditions. They range from the familiar, such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease, to the graphic, like maple syrup urine disease, to the unpronounceable, like long-chain L-3 hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency.

Before drying, blood is also analyzed for its cells. For example, too few T cells could indicate an immune deficiency before the child has a chance to contract infections, which would lead to a diagnosis.

Credit: NIDirect

The Department of Health and Human Services recommends that states screen for 35 “core conditions,” called the Recommended Uniform Screening Panel or RUSP. Twenty-six “secondary conditions” are listed too, which states are adding little by little. The recommendations are not mandates.

Spinal muscular atrophy – a closer look

The state-by-state nature of the newborn screening disease list means that inequities arise – a child who would be treated early if born in one state wouldn’t be diagnosed in another until symptoms appeared, which could take years. Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), provides a compelling and disturbing example.

SMA is devastating, damaging the motor neurons in the spinal cord. The child is extremely weak, with “floppy” muscles that eventually restrict breathing. SMA is the most prevalent genetic cause of infant mortality, affecting 1 in 10,000 newborns in the US. One in 50 people are carriers. It is the second most common single-gene disease of children after cystic fibrosis.

Babies with SMA typically don’t live beyond two years, although I visited a hospice patient with the disease who was 7 – she was on a respirator and feeding tube, and couldn’t move or respond. I read to her. At the other end of the severity spectrum are the fetuses that barely move and, if born, are floppy and blue and only live a few days.

Three treatments have become available for SMA since 2016. The first, the drug Spinraza, takes advantage of a peculiarity of the disease – the mutant gene has a silenced copy right next to it on its chromosome. Spinraza injected into the spinal cord has an “antisense” function, binding to the echo gene and enabling it to instruct the cell to produce the missing protein.

The second SMA drug, Zolgensma, a gene therapy, and the third, an oral drug, Evrysdi, were approved in 2019. Evrysdi alters how parts of the echo gene are cut and pasted to reconstitute the instructions to make the needed protein. Jocelyn Kaiser wrote a compelling article in Science about 3-year-old Evelyn, who received a gene therapy treatment at 8 weeks old that gave her body a crucial missing protein.. Three years later she was dancing around her living room to the song “Happy.” Evelyn’s older sister had died of SMA at 15 months.

Evelyn in 2017 treated for spinal muscular atrophy type 1. Credit: Mike Shanahan/Science

Newborn screening panels added SMA caused by a specific mutation that removes part of the gene (SMN1) in July 2018. “Within three years of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) being added to the federally recommended list of diseases to screen for at birth, Cure SMA is celebrating a significant milestone—85 percent of newborns in the U.S. are now screened for SMA, the leading genetic cause of infant death,” according to a statement from Cure SMA in June 2021.

The organization’s website has a map showing 17 states that still don’t screen for SMA, but several of those have recently come on board. Holdouts include Oregon and Alabama.

Mary Schroth, Chief Medical Officer for Cure SMA, said, “It is abundantly clear, when we identify and treat SMA, often pre-symptomatically, that we can dramatically improve a baby’s breathing, muscle control, and ability to move independently. Early screening is life-saving.”

Will we see “newborn screening hesitancy?”

Expanding newborn screening may seem a surmountable challenge when the focus is on a single disease with a happy ending, such as SMA, which comes with its own gene copy to manipulate. Treating many other conditions isn’t as straightforward. Even if they are, the “natural history” studies that must accompany evaluation of new therapies take years, to assess the extent to which the therapy helps.

Another problem is that for extremely rare diseases, it’s difficult to find enough patients to participate in a clinical trial. That’s why trials of just one person are permitted and have for years been dubbed “n-of-1.” NIH recently rebranded “n-of-1” as  “bespoke.”

These complexities of evaluating new treatments might explain the negative consensus of the respondents to the new survey:

There was little optimism among participants that 30 new disorders could be added to the RUSP (Recommended Uniform Screening Panel) by 2030 or that states could add 30 within 3 years of RUSP approval.

But another challenge that the respondents might not have seen coming is newborn screening hesitancy. If millions of people can refuse a vaccine that could prevent the torturous deaths from COVID, who’s to say that many parents won’t refuse the taking of a drop of blood from their baby’s heel that could prevent a slew of diseases?

Newborn screening hesitancy can happen – in fact it already has. I assign my bioethics students an article in Nature, “A spot of trouble,” by Mary Carmichael, from 2011. She wrote about an activist new mom who feared that the US government was nefariously collecting the DNA of the tiniest Americans.

I ask my students,

If parents refuse newborn screening and their child is later diagnosed with a condition that could have been prevented or managed if it had been detected with a blood spot, should they be held accountable in any way?

How is this scenario different from the unvaccinated who used up critical resources in hospitals during the height of COVID? Shouldn’t they, too, be accountable if they chose not to do all they could to prevent contracting the coronavirus?

Perhaps this skepticism about vaccines will pass and future new parents will not only support but recognize the value of expanded newborn screening.

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

This is an updated version of an article that first appeared on the GLP on January 25, 2022.

‘Stabilize the climate, halt mass extinction, and reduce the risks of new pandemics’: Can rewilding help nature restore itself?

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Rewilding has gone global, and rewilding projects are growing in more than 70 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, Latin America and North America.

The Global Rewilding Alliance, which was created in 2020, says rewilding the Earth will “stabilize the climate, halt mass extinction, and reduce the risks of new pandemics”.

So, what is rewilding and why are countries, governments and conservationists encouraging its use?

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What is rewilding?

Rewilding is essentially about letting nature do its own thing.

Natural processes then shape the land and sea and repair parts that are damaged, explains Rewilding Europe, a Netherlands-based rewilding foundation.

Habitats are left to regenerate naturally and wildlife is free to flourish.

Rewilding examples can include reintroducing missing species and setting aside large areas for nature to grow on its own terms, explains conservation organization Rewilding Britain.

Reducing livestock grazing so trees and vegetation can grow and restoring marine ecosystems, like kelp forests and seagrass, are other rewilding examples.

Why is rewilding needed?

Habitat loss, human exploitation and climate change threaten one million animal and plant species with extinction over the coming decades, government scientists warn.

Biodiversity – the variety of species on Earth – provides the world with food, medicines, clean air and water but is already in crisis, says conservation organization the True Nature Foundation.

In Europe, for example, more than 80% of land is degraded and less than 30% of rivers are regarded as healthy.

Melting glaciers in the Arctic, the drying out of peatlands caused by hotter weather, damage caused by increasing floods, fires and droughts and “unsustainable agricultural systems” are among the threats damaging nature, True Nature says.

Rewilding aims to help nature repair degraded land and restore species diversity. Image: Rewilding Europe

What are the benefits of rewilding?

Rewilding can help combat climate change and reverse species extinction, Rewilding Britain says.

Restored and biodiverse habitats naturally store more carbon, removing CO2 from the atmosphere, where it is warming the Earth and accelerating climate change. If woodlands, peat bogs, grasslands and other natural environments in the United Kingdom were restored, for example, they could lock away more than a tenth of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions a year.

Rewilding can return important species to environments where they play a vital role in species diversity and food chains, Rewilding Europe explains. Rural and urban communities can also earn a living from nature-based enterprises. Letting nature repair itself costs less than having humans actively managing the landscape. Being in nature is also good for our health and wellbeing, Rewilding Europe says.

Examples of rewilding projects

In Italy, a plan to rewild 100,000 hectares of landscape in the Central Apennines 1.5 hours from Rome includes protecting 50 to 60 Marsican brown bears, an endangered bear species.

Improved signage and measures to prevent traffic accidents are being introduced. A team of “bear ambassadors” has also been set up to communicate with local communities.

Other Rewilding Europe projects include reintroducing the Eurasian lynx to countries including Switzerland, Slovenia and Croatia, and growing Europe’s vulture populations.

In Ukraine, True Nature Foundation is helping to bring back lost species, including the Carpathian water buffalo. This will help to restore the wetland ecosystem around the Danube Delta, the second largest river delta in Europe.

In the western United States, ecologists have proposed rewilding 11 areas of government land to help the US fight climate change and protect more than 90 threatened species.

Restoring ecosystems around rivers and streams and boosting biodiversity would help to reduce the risk of wildfires and lower emissions by locking away more carbon in the landscape, the plan’s authors say.

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Is rewilding always a good idea?

Rewilding is the source of much debate.

It is not about shutting local people and communities out of the landscape, BBC Science Focus magazine explains.

Rewilding can help people reconnect with nature, experts say, and rural communities should be involved in developing rewilding projects.

Not every location is suitable for rewilding and careful conservation management is needed to ensure unsuitable dominant species don’t take over, a commentary in The Spectator magazine explains.

There is also an argument that rewilding is a potential threat to food production, when the global population is rising and could reach 10 billion people by 2070.

A study on rewilding in the journal Land Use Policy led by Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland suggests that biodiversity loss and food security are both challenges that need to be managed “within planetary boundaries”. Small farmers report that they are having to find trade-offs between producing food and coping with wildlife.

In a separate article in The Guardian newspaper, Rewilding Europe suggests there is no conflict between food production and rewilding. In the future, food will be produced more intensively in fewer areas, and less productive land will be used for rewilding, the organization says.

Victoria Masterson is a video producer, writer, content creator and factual TV development AP with background in print and broadcast journalism. Find Victoria on Twitter @vickymasterson

A version of this article was originally posted at the World Economic Forum and is reposted here with permission. The World Economic Forum can be found on Twitter @WEF

Chocopocalypse? Social justice, sustainability and economic threats pose increasing challenges to the cocoa industry

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“Chocolate” represents a diverse category of products with distinctive and delicious flavors, often with pleasant “mouth feel,” and a range of sweetness. These items are mostly enjoyed as luxury foods and beverages, but for many people, chocolate is a “priority indulgence.” For now, these items are available and relatively affordable, but that isn’t something that should be taken for granted. Instead, the basic question we should ask ourselves about chocolate is, “what needs to be done to foster progress towards an increasingly responsible and sustainable supply of these delightful foods?” This is a complex topic involving multiple issues within the current industry and a range of uncertainties about the future. At this stage we are not on the verge of the “Chocopocalypse” once threatened in a children’s book, but there are many issues to address.

To start with, this isn’t only about the indulgences of affluent consumers. It is estimated that at the global level the livelihoods of 50 million families are tied to chocolate-related value chain roles from the farming, processing, transport, and distribution of these products. There are 5 to 6 million smallholder farmers who grow the cocoa trees, and they also complete the initial processing steps (pod splitting, fermentation, and drying of the beans).

This on-farm process involves a degree of hand labor that is virtually unheard of in modern agriculture. Many of these farmers lack sufficient access to the training, technical support and modern crop protection tools they would need to grow the crop as productively, safely and sustainably as might otherwise be possible.

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68.7% of cacao production is now in Africa, 16.9% in the Americas and 13.6% in Asia. GRAPH BY AUTHOR BASED ON FAOSTATS DATA

Cocoa is grown in tropical regions all around the world (see graph above). There are 17 countries that produce almost 98% of the world’s cocoa (see table below), but 44 other countries also produce some cocoa.

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The top 17 cocoa producing countries account for 97.9% of recent production, but 44 other countries produce some of the crop. TABLE BY AUTHOR BASED ON DATA FROM FAOSTATS

Within segments of this widely dispersed industry there are instances of social injustice including child labor, or in some instances, forced labor. In some regions, children may be involved in very taxing and even dangerous roles. In terms of socio-economic challenges, the farmers often receive a very low share of the created value. Many cocoa farmers in Africa make less than one dollar per day (the global poverty threshold is defined as $2.15/day). Overall, it is estimated that of each dollar spent on chocolate items at the consumer level, 90 cents go either to the brands and retailers and only 7.5 cents are left to split between the farmers and workers and exporters. Not only is this an ethical issue about farmers struggling to feed their own families, a more equitable system is needed to ensure the future supply.

Palm oil is another key ingredient for the “mouth feel” of many chocolate products, and that is another multi-country crop which is often linked to deforestation. These issues do not apply to all cocoa production, but to a troubling subset.

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There are two main approaches that the broader chocolate industry is pursuing as solutions for these social justice and economic fairness issues. The major players have enough leverage and influence to pursue their own projects. For instance Mars has 350,000 cocoa farmers in its supply chain. In 2018 the global food company and manufactuer launched a Cocoa for Generations strategy and have committed to investing $1 Billion over 10 years in efforts to protect children, preserve forests and improve farmer income. Similarly, Hershey has a sustainability and social justice promise they call “Shared Goodness.” There are sustainability programs at Lindt & Sprungli, Godiva, and many other brands. Companies also work together through multi-stakeholder organizations such as the World Cocoa Foundation which has 95 members.

Another option for both large and small players is to seek Fairtrade certification. That started as a movement in Latin America self-organized by growers, and more recently it has become a means of connecting the diverse stakeholders in a process to establish standards and then to have compliance certified by third party auditors, as is the case for Fairtrade International. On top of a Fairtrade Minimum Price, farmers are paid a Fairtrade Premium, which local cooperatives vote how to use, whether for things like building climate resilience, investing in community resources or as additional income. As an example Tony’s Chocolonely, a chocolate brand from the Netherlands sold in the U.S., has been Fairtrade certified since its founding in 2005 and entered the U.S. market in 2015. Fairtrade International is a non-profit with more than 1,900 Fairtrade certified producer organizations spanning 70 countries worldwide and which seeks to improve the lives of smallholder farmers and farm workers. It has over 37,000 products from over 2,500 brands, with Fairtrade America as the local chapter in the U.S. In an interview for this article, Deborah Osei-Mensah, a female smallholder cocoa grower in Ghana, described feeling more empowered and heard in the way that Fairtrade works with her local cocoa cooperative. She has seen better access to quality planting stock and farming inputs.

So, while there is much room for improvement, the Chocolate industry is taking the social and economic issues seriously and striving to make improvements.

The issue of future supply challenging as it is for most crops, because of the impact of climate change (temperature shifts, droughts, more frequent hurricanes…). It is hard to predict exactly how this will affect cocoa production and what adaptations might be possible (shifting growing areas, using different varieties…). In any case it is a major source of uncertainty.

The other source of uncertainty about future supply is a problem that has plagued this industry for centuries – literally. Damaging plant diseases have repeatedly devastated the cocoa industry and driven it from region to region. Cocoa originated in the Upper Amazon and has been cultivated there for more than seven thousand years. It was dispersed throughout South and Central America, but cultivation intensified in Mesoamerica, Trinidad, Venezuela, and Ecuador after European colonization. In the early 1700s a disease known as “blast” collapsed the industry in Trinidad and the “Frosty Pod” disease decimated the industry in Venezuela and Ecuador.

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A cacao pod with frosty pod rot (Moniliopthora rorei) which can destroy 90% of the beans. CREDIT: USDA/ARS, SHAHIN ALI

Much of the production shifted to Brazil. In the 1980s a disease called Witches’ Broom disrupted the Brazilian industry and accelerated a shift toward Africa which now accounts for 69% of global production. Now, the African crop is threatened by a virus disease (CSSV – cacao swollen shoot virus) and an insect pest called a mirid. Overall, it is estimated that pests and disease reduce global cacao yields by 30-40%. The industry has still been able to keep up with demand, but that is something else that can’t be taken for granted.

Despite all these pest challenges, cocoa production as of 2021 was 5.6 million metric tons – twice the amount in the early 1990s. Even with human population growth that’s 1.4 times as much per person world-wide and 1.7 times as much per person in the high income countries that represent the largest market for chocolate. That supply situation isn’t as positive as it might sound because the increase has essentially only been achieved by expanding the planting area, not through yield improvements (see graph below).

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For the last several decades cocoa production has increased almost exclusively through additional plantings, not through intrinsic yield gains like those seen for most crops. GRAPH BY AUTHOR BASED ON FAOSTATS DATA

Over that same time period, yield gains per unit of area (acre, hectare…) have enabled significantly larger production gains of most crops, but for a variety of reasons that has not been the case for cocoa. Thus, between pest problems, limits on the amount of suitable land, and climate change there is definitely the possibility of supply problems in the future.

This raises an additional complication that comes from having a crop that is produced in the developing world for markets in the rich world. The old saying is that “the customer is always right,” and that is a functional definition of “right” even if the customer has a less than rational preference that is contrary to the producer’s best interest. In the 1990s many academic researchers were starting to use biotechnology to improve a wide range of crops. Dr. Mark Guiltinan of Pennsylvania State University was doing that sort of work with cocoa with backing from major industry players. However, once the anti-GMO movement had gained momentum – brand protectionism by downstream players in most specialty crop industries effectively took biotechnology options “off the table.” That barrier remains even though no actual problems have emerged over the decades of cultivation of major biotech row crops. Europe is particularly active and influential in the chocolate industry and so even approaches like gene editing are unlikely to ever find acceptance even though Europe’s own scientists believe that all of these technologies can be used safely. Organic is another rich world, non-scientific constraint that is sometimes demanded by cocoa customers. That only serves to make pest management more challenging for the farmers.

Fortunately, there are several industry funded efforts underway to work around these unfortunate technology barriers. Several industry supported or fair trade initiatives are seeking to get the cocoa growers better access to the modern tools and information needed to implement Integrated Pest Management. On the genetics front, Mars has been supporting a comprehensive cocoa genetics program at the University of California, Davis. Representative lines for 80% of the known global cocoa germplasm are being maintained in greenhouses there and used for breeding new varieties that can then be evaluated for each growing region. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have been working on ways to accelerate the breeding process for cacao because that plant currently takes a long time to improve because of how long before each new generation begins to bear fruit. These programs are able to utilize the informational aspects of modern genetics (e.g. gene sequencing for Marker Assisted Breeding), but at least for now they are discouraged from using the proven transgenic approaches or even “cisgenic” methods in which a gene from the same species moved to make a faster and more precise change.

There is a venture-funded company called California Cultured which is working on a more out-of-the-box solution for maintaining the supply of chocolate (and also for coffee). They are developing a production system in which single cells of the cocoa plant are grown as a cell culture – essentially a fermentation process. They use plant tissue culture methods to start a cell line and then grow it as single cells fed with sugar and other nutrients.

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In the research phase the cocoa cells can be grown in shaker flasks. IMAGE PROVIDED BY CALIFORNIA CULTURED

California Cultured started with the most flavorful Criollo cultivars of cocoa and have optimized cell lines for specific flavor profiles including those that normally develop in the fermentation, drying and roasting steps in cocoa bean production. They have been working out the details of the production method and are confident that they will be cost competitive by 2025-6 when they anticipate having navigated the FDA approval process that is required because this is considered to be a “novel production method.” While this is certainly no short term solution, it could play an expanding role in flavor enhancement and someday a role in keeping up with growing global demand for chocolate in an increasingly inhospitable world.

Conclusions

The good news is that there are significant efforts underway to maintain production of cocoa in the face climate and pest challenges, and there are continuing efforts to do that in a just and sustainable fashion. Even so there is enough uncertainty to encourage us to consciously appreciate what we have for now and consider whether there is a way for scientifically driven consumers to support some sort of specialized sub-market that could connect the smallholder farmers with the most helpful advanced technologies that the rich world has to offer as solutions for disease and climate challenges. That could be a base from which the broader industry could get relief in the future as needed.

Steve Savage is a plant pathologist and senior contributor to the GLP. Follow Steve on Twitter @grapedoc

Characterizations of indigenous people as ‘savages’ and ‘monkeys’ permeate pop culture

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Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the ethnocentric and misogynistic narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world.

Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.

“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris Commune took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne wrote that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them.

It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”

Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.

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From museums to scientific papers

One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.

The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.

Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “arose randomly.”

But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.

Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.

Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.

The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism

Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 figures that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.

Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living Things”“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker “primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.

One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past.

Rui Diogo is Associate Professor at Howard University and Resource Faculty at the Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology. Find Rui on Twitter @Rui_Diogo_Lab

A version of this article was originally posted at the Conversation and is reposted here with permission. Find the Conversation on Twitter @ConversationUS

Debunking Dunning-Kruger: It’s widely believed that the less you know, the more you think you know. Does everyone think they’re better than average?

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John Cleese, the British comedian, once summed up the idea of the Dunning–Kruger effect as, “If you are really, really stupid, then it’s impossible for you to know you are really, really stupid.” A quick search of the news brings up dozens of headlines connecting the Dunning–Kruger effect to everything from work to empathy and even to why Donald Trump was elected president.

As a math professor who teaches students to use data to make informed decisions, I am familiar with common mistakes people make when dealing with numbers. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that the least skilled people overestimate their abilities more than anyone else. This sounds convincing on the surface and makes for excellent comedy. But my colleagues and I suggest that the mathematical approach used to show this effect may be incorrect.

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What Dunning and Kruger showed

In the 1990s, David Dunning and Justin Kruger were professors of psychology at Cornell University and wanted to test whether incompetent people were unaware of their incompetence.

what dunning and kruger found

To test this, they gave 45 undergraduate students a 20-question logic test and then asked them to rate their own performance in two different ways.

First, Dunning and Kruger asked the students to estimate how many questions they got correct – a fairly straightforward assessment. Then, Dunning and Kruger asked the students to estimate how they did compared with the other students who took the test. This type of self-assessment requires students to make guesses about how others performed and is subject to a common cognitive mistake – most people consider themselves better than average.

Research shows that 93% of Americans think they are better drivers than average, 90% of teachers think they are more skilled than their peers, and this overestimation is pervasive across many skills – including logic tests. But it is mathematically impossible for most people to be better than average at a certain task.

After giving students the logic test, Dunning and Kruger divided them into four groups based on their scores. The lowest-scoring quarter of the students got, on average, 10 of the 20 questions correct. In comparison, the top-scoring quarter of students got an average of 17 questions correct. Both groups estimated they got about 14 correct. This is not terrible self-assessment by either group. The least skilled overestimated their scores by around 20 percentage points, while the top performers underestimated their scores by roughly 15 points.

The results appear more striking when looking at how students rated themselves against their peers, and here is where the better-than-average effect is on full display. The lowest-scoring students estimated that they did better than 62% of the test-takers, while the highest-scoring students thought they scored better than 68%.

By definition, being in the bottom 25% means that, at best, you will score better than 25% of people and, on average, better than just 12.5%. Estimating you did better than 62% of your peers, while only scoring better than 12.5% of them, gives a whopping 49.5 percentage-point overestimation.

The measure of how students compared themselves to others, rather than to their actual scores, is where the Dunning–Kruger effect arose. It grossly exaggerates the overestimation of the bottom 25% and seems to show, as Dunning and Kruger titled their paper, that the least skilled students were “unskilled and unaware.”

Using the protocol laid out by Dunning and Kruger, many researchers since have “confirmed” this effect in their own fields of study, leading to the sense that the Dunning–Kruger effect is intrinsic to how human brains work. For everyday people, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems true because the overly arrogant fool is a familiar and annoying stereotype.

Debunking the Dunning-Kruger effect

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When students are asked to rate their ability objectively, they do much better than when they compare themselves with their peers. Credit: greenwatermelon/iStock via Getty Images

There are three reasons Dunning and Kruger’s analysis is misleading.

The worst test-takers would also overestimate their performance the most because they are simply the furthest from getting a perfect score. Additionally, the least skilled people, like most people, assume they are better than average. Finally, the lowest scorers aren’t markedly worse at estimating their objective performance.

To establish the Dunning-Kruger effect is an artifact of research design, not human thinking, my colleagues and I showed it can be produced using randomly generated data.

First, we created 1,154 fictional people and randomly assigned them both a test score and a self-assessment ranking compared with their peers.

Then, just as Dunning and Kruger did, we divided these fake people into quarters based on their test scores. Because the self-assessment rankings were also randomly assigned a score from 1 to 100, each quarter will revert to the mean of 50. By definition, the bottom quarter will outperform only 12.5% of participants on average, but from the random assignment of self-assessment scores they will consider themselves better than 50% of test-takers. This gives an overestimation of 37.5 percentage points without any humans involved.

To prove the last point – that the least skilled can adequately judge their own skill – required a different approach.

My colleague Ed Nuhfer and his team gave students a 25-question scientific literacy test. After answering each question, the students would rate their own performance on each question as either “nailed it,” “not sure” or “no idea.”

Working with Nuhfer, we found that unskilled students are pretty good at estimating their own competence. In this study of unskilled students who scored in the bottom quarter, only 16.5% significantly overestimated their abilities. And, it turns out, 3.9% significantly underestimated their score. That means nearly 80% of unskilled students were fairly good at estimating their real ability – a far cry from the idea put forth by Dunning and Kruger that the unskilled consistently overestimate their skills.

Dunning–Kruger today

The original paper by Dunning and Kruger starts with the quote: “It is one of the essential features of incompetence that the person so inflicted is incapable of knowing that they are incompetent.” This idea has spread far and wide through both scientific literature and pop culture alike. But according to the work of my colleagues and me, the reality is that very few people are truly unskilled and unaware.

The Dunning and Kruger experiment did find a real effect – most people think they are better than average. But according to my team’s work, that is all Dunning and Kruger showed. The reality is that people have an innate ability to gauge their competence and knowledge. To claim otherwise suggests, incorrectly, that much of the population is hopelessly ignorant.

Eric C. Gaze directs the Quantitative Reasoning (QR) program at Bowdoin College, is Chair of the Baldwin Center for Learning and Teaching, and is a Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics Department. He is the current President of the National Numeracy Network (NNN 2013 – 2019), and a past chair of SIGMAA-QL (2010-12).

A version of this article was published at the Conversation and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the GLP and the original article. Find the Conversation on Twitter @ConversationUS

Viewpoint: Why do some global cancer research agencies claim that using a cell phone (like drinking Diet Coke with aspartame) poses a cancer risk?

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When it comes to brain cancer incidence rates, we have to distinguish between a scientific approach and a blinkered approach determined to find evidence of what it wants to find.

What about claims that cell phones and radio frequency (RF) energy can cause brain cancer. Many people are convinced that’s a hard fact. After all, a well known, but controversial, cancer assessment agency — the International Agency for Research on Cancer — declared it a “possible carcinogen” in 2011. At the time that touched off a global panic on the internet, much like the recent hysteria over aspartame, which the same agency gave the same classification on July 14.

What many in the media failed to report: IARC makes “hazard” assessments, which only tell you whether a substance or an event could cause cancer, not whether it’s likely to. IARC has found that drinking coffee, eating a burger, going to the hair dresser, sitting in the sun, or having a night-cap are all “possible” or “probable” to cause cancer. In other words, it’s a meaningless classification, although the media, as in the recent hysterical reaction to aspartame, often fall to grasp that. When it comes to “risk” — whether you might get cancer in the real world — like sipping a cup of Joe, using your cell phone is safe.

This discussion is getting tiresome, and I’m loathe to feed the beast. But when people in academic positions at respected institutions make flimsy assertions that many people accept on faith and which can incite a confused warning from a state department of public health, people who are serious about evaluating the evidence have an obligation to speak up.

California moved in December 2021 to release guidelines telling the public how it can avoid harmful “radiation” from cell phones. “Some scientists and public health officials believe radio frequency (RF) energy may affect human health. This guidance document describes RF energy, lists some of the potential health concerns, and provides guidance on how people can reduce their exposure,” the document read.

There are two ways of approaching the question of brain cancer incidence. One is to examine the most comprehensive and reliable data on trends over recent decades to determine whether there has been any consistent, substantial change. If there are changes, one must then ask whether they reflect real changes, as opposed to artifactual changes due to improved diagnostic techniques or coding practices. Only then should one proceed to next step of considering possible causes.

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A second way of approaching the question is to look at statistics on time trends in the incidence of brain cancer, or specific types, latch on to some apparent increase and then invoke a favored explanation — in this case, exposure to cell phone radiofrequency (RF) radiation. This second approach minimizes the difficulty of identifying a solid trend in the statistics that is not due merely to chance variation or changes in data collection procedures. Furthermore, in its eagerness to find evidence of a rise in incidence, it concentrates only on increases and, thereby, ignores the overall pattern of the data. In doing so, it provides a classic example of how to misinterpret statistics.

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Many readers will find what follows technical and tedious. But that is the whole point. It takes hard work to assess these kinds of data critically and determine what one can conclude from them. For example, the demonstration using regression analysis of a significant increase in cancer rates over an extended time period does not establish that there has been a steady increase in rates consistent with an environmental cause. I am writing this piece in this venue — rather than in a scholarly journal — because this question is being raised in the public arena. For this reason, the science relating to the question needs to be aired in the public arena.

There has, in fact, been an increase in the incidence of brain cancer in the U.S. as outlined in a 2012 paper by Zada et al. Researchers from the University of Southern California examined the incidence of glioma in 3 cancer registries over the period 1992 to 2006. The registries are the Los Angeles county cancer registry, the California Cancer Registry, and SEER 12, which combines data from 12 registries in the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program. It should be noted that Zada et al. report the results of regression analyses of trends in brain cancer rates, but in their paper there is no mention cell phones or of any other specific environmental factor.

The authors reported that in all three registries the age-adjusted incidence rate for all gliomas decreased over the 15-year period by 0.5% to 0.8 % per year. However, the incidence of glioma in the frontal lobe increased by 1.4% to 1.7% per year. Regarding glioblastoma (GBM), there was no significant increase in this type overall; however, glioblastoma occurring in the frontal and temporal lobes increased in all 3 registries by 2.4 to 3.0% annually and by 1.3 to 2.3% annually, respectively.

The incidence of GBM in the parietal and occipital lobes remained stable, whereas there was a decrease in “overlapping sites” by -2.9 to -3.6% per year. A tumor is assigned to “overlapping sites” when it is not clearly confined to a single region of the brain.

The key data in the paper make it clear that the increase in frontal lobe GBM is mainly confined to the period 2000 to 2003, particularly in the two largest registries.  Similarly, for temporal lobe GBM there was no increase during the period 1992 to 2000. The increase is largely confined to the period 2000 to 2003. The next most common category is “overlapping GBM,” for which one sees a consistently declining trend after 2000.

Given that the rates for GBM occurring in different areas of the brain tend to fluctuate, it would be of interest to see what happens with more years of data beyond 2006. Does the upward trend continue? Does it flatten out? Does it turn downward?

In fact, we have data from the SEER 13 (SEER 12 plus the LA registry) for the period 1992 to 2014. SEER 13 covers approximately 14 percent of the U.S. population. Looking at data for this longer period, it becomes clear that the rates, and trends in rates, differ considerably in the periods 1992-2002 versus 2003-2014. The rates jump, or step up, after 2002, rather than rising in a steady fashion. For the period 2003 to 2014, there is no significant increase in rates for all GBMs, frontal lobe GBMs, or temporal lobe GBMs. The rates for frontal lobe and temporal lobe GBMs are flat for the period 2003-2014. The step up relative to the earlier period could reflect changes in classification noted in the Dutch paper – one in 2000 and one in 2007 (referred to in my previous column). For “overlapping GBM” there is a clear downward trend in rates from 2000-2014. Some of this reduction must be reflected in the increasing rates in other areas of the brain. All of this suggests that changes in coding of the anatomical sub-site within the brain provide the most plausible explanation for the observed trends, rather than an environmental cause.

Taking things one step further, we have data for a larger set of registries — SEER 18, which includes SEER 12 and LA, for the period 2000 to 2014. In this larger dataset the incidence of glioblastoma (overall, for frontal lobe, and for temporal lobe) was flat from 2003 through 2014.

All of this indicates that, contrary to the assertions of “microwave activists” eager to discern evidence of the impact of radiofrequency energy on brain cancers or some subset of brain cancers, there is no evidence of a consistent upward trend in the rates of any of these entities over the last 12 years.

One other point deserves mention. The activists pointed to the Zada et al. paper as providing evidence of an increase over time in GBM incidence. As we have seen, rather than a consistent increase over the whole period, GBM in the frontal and temporal lobes showed a stepped increase in the period 2000 to 2003 with stable rates thereafter.

But while the activists are eager to point to these increases, which, as argued above, are most likely artifacts of changes in coding or diagnosis, they overlook another point. This is that the temporal lobe is considered the part of the brain that would receive the greatest exposure to RF, whereas exposure of the frontal lobe would be considerably lower. But the data analysis by Zada et al. indicates that the increase is stronger for frontal lobe cancers.

It’s easy to be fooled when looking for trends in cancer statistics and to find things in the data that support your hypothesis. But unless the change is large and sustained, and confirmed in independent datasets, it behooves one to be cautious in one’s claims. Only time and better data (larger datasets and more carefully-analyzed data) will tell whether a slight increase is indicative of a real trend in the data that signals something meaningful.

The value of establishing the“baseline” incidence of brain cancer is that it will allow us to identify a real and substantial change when and if this occurs.

Geoffrey Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist and the author of Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks. Find Geoffrey on Twitter @GeoKabat

This article previously appeared on the GLP on March 22, 2022.

Viewpoint: To mask or not to mask? That remains a hotly debated question in hospitals and other healthcare facilities — although it shouldn’t be

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During the years that the COVID-19 pandemic was murderously sweeping the world, it killed about seven million — more than 1.1 million in the U.S. alone. It upended lives, damaged national economies, and heavily stressed healthcare delivery. 

One of the most visible responses was the introduction of universal masking, a measure designed to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission and, originally, to “flatten the curve” of cases and, thereby, hospitalizations and deaths.  

With the end of the official public health emergency, the wearing of masks has dropped dramatically throughout the United States. When infection rates were high, masking made sense in medium- and high-risk situations, such as crowded or poorly-ventilated indoor venues. As the pandemic has wound down, masks are seldom seen, even under these circumstances. 

Healthcare facilities are one of the last places left with COVID-era mask requirements still in place in most settings. Some have reverted to mandating masking in only very limited circumstances, e.g., when healthcare workers are caring for patients who have impaired immune systems or potentially contagious respiratory infections, or when they, themselves, are ill. 

“[A]s a routine, even in patient care areas, it is now no longer obligatory,” said  Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

Although almost all physicians recognize the benefits of masking, some believe it can disrupt patient care. “[I]t’s no surprise that masking impedes communication. It also can obscure facial expression,” said Dr. Erica Shenoy, an infectious diseases physician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Medical Director of Infection Control for Mass General Brigham. “While these are harder things to measure in terms of isolation or the impact it has on the human connection, those sorts of things are real and they have been documented in studies. And so, it’s not costless.”

Others believe that COVID cases are rare and treatable with more routine care. “The management of COVID is at a point where it can be considered alongside other respiratory viruses dealt with day in and day out, and universal masking is not something that has ever been indicated for those other respiratory pathogens,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore.

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Credit: Boston Herald
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Strategic masking?

There are instances in which patients may have compromised immune systems or underlying health conditions that raise the risk of becoming infected and seriously ill. In those cases, masks are a critical barrier to prevent the transmission of airborne or droplet-spread respiratory diseases.  

For several other reasons, I believe that forgoing wearing a mask even in some more routine healthcare situations is hasty and unwise. First, as noted in an article by four physicians at Harvard Medical School and associated institutions, hospitalized patients are different from non-hospitalized populations. Hospitals (and, to a lesser extent, outpatient facilities) accumulate people who are fragile and vulnerable because of acute and chronic illnesses. They are more likely than the general population to be older and to have comorbidities such as chronic lung, kidney, liver, or heart disease.  The authors lobby for what they call “strategic masking.”

Second, as the authors point out that nosocomial, or hospital-acquired, infections caused by respiratory viruses other than SARS-CoV-2 are common, as are their adverse health effects in vulnerable patients: 

Viruses can also cause substantial harm by exacerbating patients’ underlying conditions. Acute respiratory viral infections are well-established triggers for obstructive lung disease flares, heart failure exacerbations, arrhythmias, ischemic events, neurologic events, and death.

Third, another factor to consider is the phenomenon of “presenteeism” in healthcare workers — coming to work despite feeling sick. Although they should know better, it is common. According to the Harvard group:

Even during the height of the pandemic, some health care systems reported that 50% of staff diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 worked while symptomatic. Studies from both before and during the pandemic suggest that masking among health care workers can reduce nosocomial respiratory viral infections by approximately 60%.

Moving too quickly to unmask?

There are already numerous examples of the negative effects of the abandonment of masking. On April 3, California public health officials lifted the requirement for masking in healthcare facilities and within three weeks, Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa reinstated its masking requirement after an outbreak of COVID in more than a dozen staff members and an unspecified number of patients.  

And in Japan, a month after the government downgraded COVID-19 to a status on par with that of seasonal flu, which resulted in less public vigilance about masking and other precautions, the country experienced a COVID-19 surge. The number of new infections increased to almost double the level seen before the downgrade, according to health ministry statistics.

Moreover, over the past several weeks, we have been seeing a slight uptick in SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater surveillance in the Southern, Northeastern, and Western regions of the U.S., as measured by Biobot Analytics. Johns Hopkins University infectious disease epidemiologist Caitlin Rivers thinks this could presage a mid-summer surge. 

The Harvard group’s article on masking concludes:

[M]asking in health care facilities continues to make sense. Masks reduce respiratory viral spread from people with both recognized and unrecognized infections. SARS-CoV-2, influenza, RSV [Respiratory Syncytial Virus], and other respiratory viruses can cause mild and asymptomatic infections, so staff or visitors might not realize they are infected, yet asymptomatic and presymptomatic people can still be contagious and spread infections to patients.

Adapting to local conditions or ‘play it safe’?

The Harvard authors also suggest that healthcare facilities might wish to adjust masking requirements according to the level of viral infections in the local community. I think that is overly optimistic and puts healthcare workers at unnecessary risk, if an impending surge were to be missed. 

One often-ignored factor is that physicians and nurses have been disproportionately frequent casualties of COVID, not only of acute infection but also of long-term sequelae. The British Medical Association recently published the results of the first comprehensive survey of doctors with post-acute COVID health complications, often referred to as “long Covid.” More than 600 doctors suffering the continuing effects of COVID infection were asked about the impact the condition is having on their health, daily lives, employment and finances. Forty-eight percent said that COVID sequelae had affected their income and that they had been forced to stop work or significantly cut back on their hours. This is damaging not only to the individuals involved but also to the resilience of healthcare delivery going forward.

I would opt for a more conservative approach than that recommended by the Harvard authors. For the foreseeable future, instead of trying to titrate mask requirements according to increasingly less-available data, I would err on the side of more masking in both inpatient and outpatient settings. It is effective, inexpensive, not terribly inconvenient, and applicable to prophylaxis of airborne and droplet-spread infections in addition to COVID. Most important, it is in the best interest of staff, patients, and public health.

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

Concerned about aspartame? Beware of this other “probable carcinogen” on your plate 

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glp
While aspartame’s classification as a possible carcinogen grabbed headlines, the classification of another ubiquitous chemical slid silently beneath the diet cola outrage. The Lyons, France based International Association for Research on Cancer, the IARC, classified the artificial sweetener aspartame as a group 2B “possible” carcinogen in last week’s published evaluation.

Social and traditional media erupted with calls for bans of its use, and freaked-out moms everywhere dumped bottles of soda down the drain and emptied their drawers of Trident Gum to protect their families. Decades of research, and the fact that you’d have to pound down about 14 two liters of diet soda a day to approach a risk threshold, be damned. The IARC rating sent environmental activists into high gear.

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And within hours, tort lawyer firms who make their living off exploiting public misunderstandings about science to shake down companies fearful of billion-dollar jury verdicts were trolling the internet for victims.

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While distracted by Mountain Dews and don’ts, the same evaluation by the IARC classified an unrelated scary-sounding chemical — methyl eugenol  — as a group 2A “probable carcinogen”: which means it poses even a greater cancer threat than aspartame.

Based on Twitter logic, since glyphosate is a dangerous Group 2A “probable carcinogen”, methyl eugenol must also be some deadly poison. After all, that’s  the same category as glyphosate, an herbicide lauded by farmers as effective and by an overwhelming number of scientists, including every independent chemical risk agency in the world as safe, yet condemned in social media and trial lawyers as a toxic carcinogen of doom.

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If the reaction to glyphosate’s classification is a guide, the companies that sell methyl eugenol will be sued into financial duress. Activists will clammer for products containing methyl eugenol to be labeled as ‘cancer causing’, especially in California. There will be calls for bans, and lawyers will hammer big checks with class action lawsuits against the crooked Merchants of Poison that produce… essential oils, aromatherapy candles and pesto sauce. According to the National Institutes of Health, pesto-eaters could be exposed to some of the highest levels of methyl eugenol, because fresh pesto is prepared from a large quantity of fresh basil, reflected by basil amounts in pesto sauce products on the market.

That sound you just heard was the thud of aging hippies and Italian food-loving chemophobes hitting the floor. Patchouli oil and basil are loaded with the stuff.

Or maybe it is the sucking sound created from a vacuum of logic that will condemn one chemistry and let another slide by, when it fits their ideological proclivities or someone sees money in the corner of their eye.

Or maybe it is the hypocrisy of indulging in a Class 2A probable carcinogen as part of their identity at the same time fighting against a different Class 2A probable carcinogen is part of their identity.

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Credit: Clean Cooking with Caitlin

The case of methyl eugenol is a stellar opportunity to underscore the hypocrisy in IARC-induced chemophobia. Methyl eugenol is a central component of essential oils, like tea tree oil and citronella. It is a dominant flavor note in nutmeg, lemon grass, cloves and allspice. Methyl eugenol or its metabolites may be detected in the urine of close to 100 percent of individuals that recently ate bananas or oranges. It is present in orders of magnitude higher levels than the parts per billion of glyphosate reportedly found in grocery products deemed deadly toxic by anti-glyphosate interests.

Yet ‘progressive’ dudes with man-buns will slather on methyl-eugenol-laden tinctures and creams. Naturopaths will sing the praises of aromatherapy, while inhaling a Class 2A carcinogen deep into the lungs. Skin creams will give you a healthy glow, as methyl eugenol’s magic combines with essential oils and carnauba wax — and better yet it’s organic!

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And in the widespread application of a IARC Class 2A probable carcinogen you won’t see social media activists slamming Annie’s Heirloom Seeds for profiting off of seeds of death. You won’t see lawyers line up to sue Big Pesto. Irrelevant pseudo-journalists will not write books that reinterpret internal emails at McCormick spices, cherry-picking to denounce cherries.

The point is simple. The archaic IARC classification system has been mobilized by unscrupulous actors to malign chemistries used by industries targeted by activist groups — what they call Big Ag or Big Soda. An IARC classification and its attention-getting headlines are the first stinky step in lawsuits and manipulation of public opinion.

[Editor’s note: Read GLP’s investigative report on how IARC’s aspartame classification is providing gruel to anti-chemical environmentalists and tort lawyers.]

The differing media and advocacy group reactions to classification of aspartame and glyphosate, while ignoring methyl eugenol, ethanol (drinking wine or beer, Class 1 carcinogen) and lunch meat (Class 1 carcinogen) illustrates how pronouncements by IARC and a similar agency based in Italy, Ramazzini Institute, are selectively twisted to mislead, affect public perception, and recruit for a lawsuit class action.

It is clear that the weight and urgency of the IARC classification only matters on products that online quacks, consumer watchdogs, pseudoscience nutrition hawks — and a host of so-called mainstream environmental groups that raise money off of chemophobia with glyphosate tops on their list (e.g., Environmental Working Group, Natural Resources Defense Council, Organic Consumers Association, Union of Concerned Scientists, don’t like. But to the scientific world where the dose makes the poison, the social outrage driven by these monographs breaks trust in science while it lines the pockets of attorneys that profit from misleading campaigns targeting select industries.

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

What should you do when dogs have separation anxiety?

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What to do when dogs have separation anxiety
A couple of weeks after I adopted my dog, Halle, I realized she had a problem. When left alone, she would pace, bark incessantly, and ignore any treats I left her in favor of chewing my belongings. When I returned, I’d find my border collie mix panting heavily with wide, fearful eyes. As frustrated as I was, though, I restrained the urge to scold her, realizing her destruction was born out of panic.

Halle’s behavior was a textbook illustration of separation anxiety. Distressed over being left alone, an otherwise perfectly mannered pup might chomp the couch, scratch doors, or relieve themselves on the floor. Problem behaviors like these tend to be interpreted as acts of willful defiance, but they often stem from intense emotions. Dogs, like humans, can act out of character when they are distressed. And, as with people, some dogs may be neurologically more prone to anxiety.

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So concluded a recent brain imaging study, published in PLOS One, in which researchers performed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging on 25 canines that were deemed behaviorally “normal,” and 13 that had been diagnosed with anxiety, based on a behavioral evaluation. The scans revealed that anxious dogs had stronger connections between several of five brain regions that the researchers called the anxiety circuit: the amygdala, frontal lobe, hippocampus, mesencephalon, and thalamus. The team also saw weaker connections between the hippocampus and midbrain in anxious dogs, which can signal difficulties in learning and might explain why the owners reported decreased trainability in these dogs.

That the neurological architecture of anxious dogs seems to parallel the signatures of human anxiety comes as little surprise to many animal behavior experts. “There is no reason to suspect that the basic neuroanatomy of dog psychopathology is any different from humans,” Karen Overall, a board certified veterinary behaviorist at the University of Prince Edward Island, told me in an email. Indeed, dogs have been found to exhibit several mental conditions similar to those in humans, including anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Alzheimer’s-like cognitive dysfunction.

Yet, pet owners will often use punishment to try to bring a misbehaving dog to heel — perhaps yelling at them, jerking them with a leash, or strapping a shock collar around their neck. Trainers, who are not subjected to regulation or licensure requirements, can be seen in YouTube videos yanking dogs on slip leads to quiet their barking. If evidence suggests that many dogs, like many humans, misbehave because they are struggling with emotions and anxiety, why do so many pet owners and trainers look to punishment as the solution, rather than addressing the emotions directly?

Experts like Overall argue that what anxious dogs really need is basically the same thing that anxious people need: help managing and reducing their distress.

Part of the problem might be that it can be difficult to recognize our pets’ feelings. Emotions manifest in our mannerisms. And so, as Overall describes it, the same anxieties and pathologies we see in humans will likely show up differently in a species that walks on four feet, uses their mouths as hands, and lacks verbal language. Early signs of canine anxiety can be as subtle as lip licking, yawning, or staring into the distance. It’s no wonder that many pet owners don’t notice their dogs’ distress until it takes on more problematic forms, like excessive barking and peeing indoors. Even aggressive reactions like growling and snapping at other dogs or people are likely rooted in fear.

While punishment can sometimes stop these behaviors, it can also backfire. Several studies have documented a link between punishing training methods and increased aggression in dogs. Scolding a dog might stop it from growling, for instance, but it won’t assuage the underlying anxiety, and it doesn’t give the dog information about what to do instead. The dog might go silent but then bite a person with no apparent warning, or act out in other ways. If anything, forceful punishment may deepen the animal’s anxiety, Overall said. A dog that may have merely felt threatened before the punishment knows, afterward, that a threat really exists.

Experts like Overall argue that what anxious dogs really need is basically the same thing that anxious people need: help managing and reducing their distress.

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Credit: Pxfuel (Public Domain)

The foundation of this approach is changing the dog’s environment to set them up for success, Vanessa Spano, a veterinarian with Behavior Vets in New York City, told me. If a dog is barking at other dogs or people on walks, for example, it might help to walk them at less busy times or locations. Often, vet behaviorists will supplement training and environment management techniques with antidepressants, especially when a dog is consistently stressed. Otherwise, Spano says, it’s like trying to administer psychotherapy to a person who’s having a panic attack: “All that advice, just like all that training, is going in one ear and out the other.”

Once a dog’s distress is under control, they can often learn to overcome their anxieties through methods like systematic desensitization. Just as someone with arachnophobia might pet a plush toy tarantula as a first step to overcoming their fear, studies suggest that incremental exposure — reinforced with treats and games — can help pets build positive associations with the stimuli that cause them anxiety. For dogs with separation anxiety, studies suggest that a gradual process of acclimating them to increasing periods of separation, complemented with strategic snack offerings, can help them learn to cope with alone time. The use of antidepressants to calm anxiety has been shown to further increase success rates.

After recognizing Halle had separation anxiety, I embarked on a version of this process. For four months, I avoided leaving her alone at all, which meant frequently using dog sitters and daycare. (Although many cases of canine separation anxiety can be eased in six weeks or so, I had some early setbacks.) Then, I worked on desensitizing her to my departures: I started by simply opening and closing the front door while she gnawed at a bone; once she was able to handle me stepping out the door, I began to leave for gradually longer times. Now, she comfortably naps on the couch when I’m away.

In the future, there might even be more options for pet owners who seek to treat their dog’s anxiety. Yangfeng Xu, the lead author of the PLOS One study, is now working with colleagues to study how dogs respond to magnetic brain stimulation, a technique that has been used to treat depression in humans. The treatment showed promise in one early case study, seemingly calming anxious-aggressive behaviors in a male Belgian Malinois. A couple of weeks after the second treatment, the dog dropped his habit of lunging at other dogs and people, and Xu said he is still behaving well three years later.

To some people, it might seem excessive to extend this type of care to animals. But some vet behaviorists argue that by being more attentive to pet mental health, we humans can improve our own wellbeing. “If we treat non-humans we’ll increase our capacity for compassion for all animals,” Overall told me — humans included. Personally, I found that as I became more attuned to Halle’s emotions, I also grew gentler toward my own anxieties. I stopped beating myself up over feeling burnout in my writing career, for example, and I have instead grown more curious about my emotional responses to stress.

For that, I have a nervous border collie mix to thank.

Ula Chrobak is a freelance science writer based in Nevada. You can find more of her work at her website, or follow Ula on Twitter @ulachrobak

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 Twitter @undarkmag

Prominent international tech-investors throw support behind vaccine-rejectionist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s campaign for Dem nomination

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Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the latest scion of the Kennedy clan to seek the presidency, has a set of unusual fans: some of the most influential tech executives and investors in America. Kennedy’s strong anti-vaccine views are, for this group, a sideshow.

“Tearing down all these institutions of power. It gives me glee,” said one of his boosters in tech, Chamath Palihapitiya, a garrulous former Facebook executive, nearly two hours into a May episode of the popular “All-In” podcast he co-hosts with other tech luminaries. The person who might help with the demolition was the show’s guest, Kennedy himself.

“Me too,” responded David Sacks, Palihapitiya’s co-host on the podcast, an early investor in Facebook and Uber. Sacks and Palihapitiya said they would host a fundraiser for Kennedy, which, according to the Puck news outlet, was set for June 15.

Kennedy’s newfound friends in Silicon Valley were mostly loud supporters of vaccines early in the pandemic, but they have proven more than willing to let him expound on his anti-vaccine views and conspiracy theories as he promotes his presidential bid. During a two-hour forum on Twitter, hosted by company owner Elon Musk and Sacks, Kennedy raised a range of themes, but returned to the subject he’s become famous for in recent years: his skepticism about vaccines and the pharmaceutical companies that sell them.

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Chamath Palihapitiya. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Indeed, on the June 5 appearance, he praised Musk for ending “censorship” on his corner of social media. A promoter of conspiracy theories, Kennedy said various forces are keeping him from discussing his safety concerns over vaccines, like Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff (as part of the intelligence apparatus), Big Pharma, and Roger Ailes (who has been dead for six years).

Kennedy argued an influx of direct-to-consumer advertising from pharmaceutical concerns keep media outlets, like Fox News, from featuring his theories about vaccine safety. Fox didn’t respond to a request for comment.

He then said he supported reversing policies that allow direct-to-consumer ads in media. (Kennedy earlier dubbed himself a “free-speech absolutist” and, later, in a discussion about nuclear power, a “free-market absolutist” and even later a “constitutional absolutist.” Legal scholars doubt the courts, on First Amendment grounds, would be receptive to a ban of direct-to-consumer ads.)

Support for Kennedy in the venture capital and tech communities, which have a big financial stake in the advancement of science and generally reject irrational conspiracy theories, is likely limited. Multiple venture capitalists and technologists contacted by KFF Health News expressed puzzlement over what’s driving the embrace from Musk and others.

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“I think he is a lower-intellect, Democratic version of Donald Trump, so he attracts libertarian-leaning, anti-‘woke,’ socially liberal folks as a protest vote,” said Robert Nelsen, a biotech investor with Arch Venture Partners. “I think he is a dangerous conspiracy theorist, who has contributed to many deaths with his anti-vaccine lies.”

But the ones with the megaphones are letting Kennedy talk. Jason Calacanis, another co-host of “All-In” and a pal of Musk’s, said late in the podcast he was pleased the conversation didn’t lead with “sensational” topics — like vaccines. Still, during the podcast, Kennedy was given nearly five uninterrupted minutes to describe his views on shots — a long list of alleged safety problems, ranging from allergies, autism, to autoimmune problems, many of which have been discredited by reputable scientists.

David Friedberg, another Silicon Valley executive and guest on the show, suggested there wasn’t “direct evidence” for those problems. “I don’t think it’s solely the vaccines,” Kennedy conceded. After an interlude touching on the role of chemicals, he was back to injuries caused by diphtheria shots.

While Friedberg, a former Google executive and founder of an agriculture startup sold to Monsanto for a reported $1.1 billion, pushed back against Kennedy, he did so deep into the podcast, after the candidate had left. Kennedy’s views — on nuclear power and vaccines — manifest “as conspiracy theories,” he said. “It doesn’t resonate with me,” he continued, as he “likes to have empirical truth be demonstrated.”

The muted pushback is a bit of a reversal. Early in the rollout of covid-19 vaccines, many tech luminaries had been among the most loudly pro-shot individuals. The “All-In” crew was no exception. Sacks once tweeted, “We’ve got to raise the bar for what we expect from government”; Palihapitiya begged administrators to “stop virtue signaling” with vaccination criteria and simply mass-vaccinate instead.

That was then. Sacks recently retweeted a video of Bill Gates questioning the effectiveness of current covid vaccines and defended Kennedy from charges of being anti-vaccination.

Musk himself has sometimes suggested he has qualms with vaccines, tweeting in January, without evidence, that “I’m pro vaccines in general, but there’s a point where the cure/vaccine is potentially worse, if administered to the whole population, than the disease.”

Musk isn’t the only top tech executive to signal interest in Kennedy’s candidacy. Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has tweeted Kennedy “can and will” win the presidency.

In some ways, the Valley’s interest in Kennedy — vaccine skepticism and all — has deep roots. Tech culture grew out of Bay Area counterculture. It has historically embraced individualistic theories of health and wellness. While most have conventional views on health, techies have dabbled in “nootropics,” supplements that purportedly boost mental performance, plus fad diets, microdosing psychedelics, and even quests for immortality.

There’s a “deeply held anti-establishment ethos” among many tech leaders, said University of Washington historian Margaret O’Mara. There’s a “suspicion of authority, disdain for gatekeepers and traditionalists, dislike of bureaucracies of all kinds. This too has its roots in the counterculture era, and the 1960s antiwar movement, in particular.”

Darius Tahir, Correspondent, is based in Washington, D.C., and reports on health technology with an eye toward how it helps (or doesn’t) underserved populations; how it can be used (or not) to help government’s public health efforts; and whether or not it’s as innovative as it’s cracked up to be. He joins KFF Health News after stints with Politico, Modern Healthcare, and The Gray Sheet. He’s a graduate of Stanford University and grew up in Rochester, New York. Find Darius on Twitter @dariustahir

Kaiser Family Foundation is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation. Any reposts of this article should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find KFF on Twitter @KFF

Who will have the most progressive crop gene editing regulations: England or the European Union?

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When UK Ministers first unveiled plans to diverge from restrictive EU rules classifying gene edited products as GMOs, it was hailed as a major Brexit dividend, giving Britain the freedom to pursue a more enabling, pro-innovation trajectory compared to our counterparts on the continent. Fast forward through Covid, war in Ukraine and successive droughts in southern Europe, and the EU has moved quicker than many expected to overhaul its GMO rules. As the UK Government prepares the detailed implementing rules for the Precision Breeding Act in England, Ministers must ensure we retain a leading edge over the rest of Europe in promoting investment, research and innovation in these technologies, urges Samantha Brooke, chief executive of the British Society of Plant Breeders (BSPB). 

[Recently], the EU Commission unveiled its much-anticipated proposals for regulating plants produced using New Genomic Techniques (NGTs), such as gene editing, in the European Union.

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The proposals create two distinct pathways for NGT plants to be placed on the market. NGT plants that could occur naturally or through conventional breeding (similar to the definition of a Precision Bred Organism under the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 in England), would essentially be regulated in the same way as conventional plants and seeds, with no separate statutory requirement for risk assessment, food and feed marketing authorisation, traceability, food labelling or coexistence arrangements. Other NGT plants would be subject to the EU’s existing GMO regulations.

The EU approach is based on a scientific opinion adopted by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in November 2020 which confirmed that “genome editing techniques that modify the DNA of plants do not pose more hazards than conventional breeding.” ​

Turning to the situation at home, it is worth noting that simplified field trial arrangements introduced in March last year have already led to an increase in research activity, with eight new field trials of precision bred crops notified in England under the new arrangements. That’s twice as many as the entire EU-27 over the same period. As NIAB chief executive Professor Mario Caccamo recently observed, the field trial notifications involved cover a range of crops and traits, all focused on using new precision breeding techniques to make our farming and food production systems healthier, safer, and more sustainable.

This increase in field trial activity demonstrates that more proportionate and enabling regulation of precision breeding techniques can open up the potential for plant scientists, breeders and farmers to keep pace with demands for increased agricultural productivity and resource-use efficiency, healthier food, reduced chemical use, and resilience to climate change.

But that early-stage research needs a clear route to market to realise those benefits in practice.  

Through simplified trials arrangements, and the subsequent enactment of the Precision Breeding Act, the UK Government has led the way in diverging from outdated EU rules which classified gene edited products in the same way as GMOs.

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​But the detail of how the Act’s provisions will be implemented is not yet finalised, particularly in relation to food and feed marketing. Based on the Commission’s proposals, there is a real risk that the EU could be on course to eclipse our lead by regulating NGT products – where they could have occurred naturally or through conventional breeding – in the same way as conventionally bred plant varieties.

​Here in England, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) still appears on course to establish an entirely separate regulatory process for precision bred food and feed products, potentially involving expert committee scrutiny, risk assessment, public consultation, Parliamentary approval and Secretary of State sign-off. That could significantly drive up the red tape, time and costs involved in bringing new precision bred crops to market.

Of course, the EU proposals have a long way to go, with some Member States and MEPs already voicing their opposition. Nor are the Commission’s plans as proportionate and evidence-based as many EU scientists and plant breeders would like, with breeders’ organisation Euroseeds challenging as discriminatory the proposed requirements to label seed bags, to exclude NGTs from organic farming, and to place an arbitrary limit on the number of genetic changes permitted.   

But the direction of travel is clear, and it should be ringing alarm bells with UK ministers who want to see Britain’s scientists, breeders and farmers in the vanguard of these technologies. ​

Outside the EU, BSPB members are operating in a much smaller market-place than our European counterparts. We have a world-leading plant science base, and a highly efficient plant breeding and seeds sector, but for investment and innovation to take place here, our regulations need to be even more agile, responsive and enabling than in the EU, and certainly not more restrictive. BSPB and its members are therefore urging UK Ministers, and the Food Standards Agency in particular, to ensure implementing arrangements for the Precision Breeding Act are as streamlined as possible, and reflect the overwhelming scientific evidence that precision bred products are at least as safe as their conventionally bred counterparts.

Echoing Professor Caccamo, it would be a travesty if the EU, from whose restrictive rules we originally sought to diverge, turned out to have more enabling and science-based rules than our own.   

Samantha Brooke is chief executive of the British Society of Plant Breeders (BSPB). Find Samantha on Twitter @SamBrooke100

A version of this article was originally posted at Science for Sustainable Agriculture and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the GLP and original article. Find Science for Sustainable Agriculture on Twitter @SciSustAg

6 fake news websites stoking fear about crops grown from genetically-engineered seeds

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“Fake news” is now a well-known term, at least to Americans in the wake of the US presidential election. But followers of events in genetic modification of food and crops have been familiar with the “fake news” phenomenon for years. A number of websites have thrived for years, offering misleading stories with alarmist headlines — in opposition to GMO crops and livestock. Some of these sites (they all have a strong, if not exclusive, online presence) focus directly on GMOs, while others provide a forum for selling products, and still others take a broad stroke on a number of environmental and health issues. Here is a selection of these “Fake news” sites.

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Natural news

Natural News, renamed from NewsTarget.com in the mid-2000s, is headed by the self-described “Health Ranger” Mike Adams, who has described biotechnology scientists as “the most despicable humanoids to walk the face of this planet.” [Read GLP’s profile of Mike Adams.] The site publishes original articles, while also aggregating the work of others — almost unanimously in opposition to GMOs, vaccines, or anything it considers to be under influence of corporations. It is affiliated with the non-profit organization Consumer Wellness Center, created in 2006 by Adams.

The website promotes natural health and lifestyle products, including this $2,000 “hydrogen infusion machine.” It was dubbed the “worst anti-science website” by science-based Skeptic.NaturalNews RGB

.] In December, 2016, for example, a story headlined “US Court of Appeals: States and counties can ban GMO crops despite federal laws,” claimed the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had passed a law allowing local and state authorities in Hawaii to enact bans on genetically modified crops. In fact, the Ninth Circuit (which under the US Constitution cannot pass laws) did the opposite: it overruled decisions by county and local officials in Hawaii to ban GMO, citing the authority of the state and the US Plant Protection Act.

And in May, 2016, the site published a story claiming: “CRISPR gene editing lies exposed by genomics expert.,” It wrote:

The biotechnology industry is carrying out a concerted public-relations campaign to promote the idea that new, so-called “gene editing” technologies are the more accurate, safer successor to now-defunct traditional genetic engineering (GE). But this campaign is founded upon several straight-up myths about the new technology, which is nothing more than the same reckless GE paradigm under another name.

The expert? Jonathan Latham, editor of another “fake news” site, Independent Science News. In reality traditional genetic engineering is anything but defunct, since 90 percent of all corn and soybean planted in the US is genetically modified, and, in Hawaii, the papaya industry was saved by the introduction of a modified, virus-resistant version of the popular fruit.

Natural News is not exclusively devoted to opposing genetic modification and promoting organic and “natural” products. Adams has promoted such causes as AIDS denialism, 9/11 truther conspiracies, Barack Obama citizenship ‘birther’ claims and is a believer in ‘dangerous’ chemtrails and the ‘danger’ of vaccines.

Mercola.com

The website Mercola.com has been publishing online for more than 20 years. In addition to selling a wide range of “natural” products, books and fitness plans all under the Mercola brand, it also publishes articles favoring organic foods, and opposing genetic modifications.
Mercola is the creation of Joseph Mercola, an Illinois-based doctor of osteopathic medicine, who claims it as “the world’s No. 1 health Website.” mercola

Arguing that traditional medicine (including vaccines, pharmaceuticals and surgery) kills, he offers alternative cures including prescribing “organic, non-commercially harvested” seaweed supplements to treat thyroid problems. Mercola promotes and sells a variety of “alternative” products; for which he has received multiple warning letters from the FDA.

His website offers a steady stream articles opposing (among other things) GMOs, and which offer his natural products as alternatives.

In a recent article arguing against eating soy, Mercola points to the fact that most soy grown in the US is modified to resist the herbicide glyphosate, which, he claimed is responsible for the disruption of the delicate hormonal balance of the female reproductive cycle. The article cites two studies, one in amphibians and the other in hamsters, showing how (in amphibians) a “tiny amount” of glyphosate caused anatomical abnormalities and (in hamsters) infertility in three generations. None of these appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Instead they were published by the Pesticide Action Network and in the Huffington Post. The site also uses anti-gmo stories to help promote a $99.00 glyphosate testing kit.

Independent science news

newsThis news site was started in 2011, by the Bioscience Resource Project, an organization that says it provides independent research and analysis in the agriculture-related biosciences and has been in existence since 2006. The site is edited by Jonathan Latham, who holds a PhD in virology and has published papers on a wide variety of topics, including genetics.

According to the organization’s website:

Powerful interests routinely succeed in influencing the answers. In science, external forces influence strongly what is studied, what is published, and what is reported. When that happens, individuals (or policymakers) no longer have the information to decide rationally and choose thoughtfully. Society becomes dysfunctional at a fundamental level.

At ISN we chooses (sic) our stories carefully. Most concern simultaneous manipulations of the scientific process, the food/ag system, and the science media.

According to the site, these stories include:

  • “False agribusiness claims about the safety and performance of GMO food and crops
  • Bee Learning Behaviour Affected by GMO Toxins
  • Roundup-Ready to Yield?
  • Regulators Discover a Hidden Viral Gene in Commercial GMO Crops.

At best, the headlines and stories under them are misleading, at worst, they are simply false.

The website has posted stories arguing there is no scientific consensus on the safety GM foods (there is a consensus, actually), a guest post by well-known GM food opponent Vandana Shiva, and conspiracy theories about genetic testing and population mass surveillance by the government. It also has been linked by anti-technology intellectual Naomi Oreskes, who linked one of her Tweets to the website’s article on Monsanto, a piece by Jonathan Latham speculating that GM food (and therefore Monsanto and others who make them) were in peril because Chipotle had vowed to remove GMO products from its restaurants.

Sustainable pulse

This website says it is owned and maintained “by a group of concerned citizens and scientists.” While some editors claim it is based in the UK, it is registered in Bulgaria, and two of its chief editors, Henry Rowlands and Radostin Nonkin, work in Bulgaria. In addition to its site, which predominantly features articles about opposition to GMOs, it is connected to what it calls “reference projects:”

  • GMO Evidence—“a simple resource that shows the global picture of harm from GMOs & Roundup.”
  • GMO Seralini—a main source page for all of Gilles-Eric Seralini’s papers and other materials, including his famous 2012 discredited study on tumors in rats that had been retracted, and subsequently republished in a so-called “pay for play” publication.Sustainable Pulse
  • GMO Judy Carman—a similar source page for Australian anti-GMO advocate and researcher, who is best known for her (also discredited, based on questionable methods) 2013 study in the little-known open access Journal of Organic Systems, in which she claimed to have found a link between genetically modified maize and inflammation of the stomach in pigs.

On its main page, one of its most popular posts is a story, “Review Links Roundup to Diabetes, Autism, Infertility and Cancer,” referring to a 2013 paper by anti-GMO advocates Stephanie Seneff and Anthony Samsel. No link between glyphosate and these diseases by any reputable scientific lab has ever been found.

In a lead story, Sustainable Pulse quoted “experts” from the anti-GMO activist community, such as GM Watch and GM Freeze, on their opposition to testing by Rothamsted Research on a type of wheat engineered to more efficiently use photosynthesis to increase crop yields. While the group also quoted the head of the Rothamsted project, quotes from the anti group questioned whether farmers needed to grow more wheat:

What is the purpose of growing more wheat in the first place? World food production already far exceeds the needs of generations to come but people still go hungry. Nobody is starving because of some fundamental flaw with photosynthesis; they are starving because they are poor.

Which is half right.

The Ecologist

“Setting the environmental agenda since 1970,” according to the news site’s masthead, the organization was established as a journal in London, publishing scientific papers that were, according to the papers’ authors, too radical for other journals and magazines. It published in print until 2009, when it became an online magazine and stopped publishing academic-type papers.

ecologistTaking a clear anti-globalization, pro-local effort stance on issues, it has posted stories pertaining to climate change, the oil industry, nuclear power, animal rights, and genetically modified foods. Jonathan Latham is frequently posted on the site, including this story accusing the Cornell University Alliance for Science for “being chicken,” in allegedly turning down a debate with anti-GMO activists. It turns out that the “invitation” was tucked into a dense comment section on social media. It also has been running stories critical of policies of the new UK government in the wake of the nation’s vote to withdraw from the European Union. The site also posts screeds from Carey Gillam, a former Reuters reporter who left the news agency for US Right to Know, and whose work is reliably anti-GMO.

The Ecologist’s editors and writers often produce pieces that look well-researched, but the conclusions invariably fall in line with their anti-GMO, technology-skeptic editorial trends. In February, a large piece on the Zika virus in Brazil and other parts of South America cited several studies discussing the possibility that a pesticide, or a previous genetically modified virus, was responsible for the microcephaly cases seen early last year. While the story was updated extensively and even refuted some of its earlier claims of “jumping DNA” and inserted transposons, it still concluded that any future release of genetically modified insects (such as the Oxitec modified mosquito):

Were to take place, it could give rise to numerous new mutations of the virus with the potential to cause even more damage to the human genome, that we can, at this stage, only guess at

Russia Today (RT)

Russia Today, or RT as it now known–its pedigree is Pravda, the propaganda organ of the Communist Party–made a headlines in January when a US intelligence report pointed to it as a major propaganda instrument used in attempts to influence the US presidential election. The television network and website (which have US versions) follow a pattern familiar to followers of Russia and the former Soviet Union—a state-run news agency that claims to be independent but generally hews to Russian policies and authorities..

Russia TodayIt is often accused to spreading propaganda and violating journalistic traditions of impartiality. In the United Kingdom, the media regulator Ofcom repeatedly found RT breached rules on impartiality, and of broadcasting “materially misleading” content.

RT reports on a wide range of global issues, much like Reuters, the BBC, AFP or CNN. On GMOs, RT is solidly critical, as is the Russian government, which recently enacted a ban on any foreign GMO from entering the country, and outlawed the creation of a commercial GMO product.

Some stories, including this one on FDA approval of the Simplot potato last year that has a Reuters copyright on it, appear to be straight news, but emphasize comments from anti-GMO activists. The Reuters story heavily quotes Jeffrey Smith, founder of the anti-GMO organization Institute for Responsible Technology:

“It makes sense on paper,” he said of the potatoes that are purported to be resistant to blight – the pathogen responsible for the Great Famine. However, one of the issues is that the effects of modified these genomes are largely unknown.

“When we tamper with the genome in the way that they’ve been doing with genetic engineering in our food supply, you end up increasing allergens, toxins, new diseases or other problems – causes massive collateral damage in the DNA” he said.

This quote, of course, ignores the extensive testing by developers of the potato, reviews by FDA officials, and the advances in knowledge of genetics in general.

A video on RT spends more than six minutes opining on a number of issues, from the so-called “DARK Act,” to alleged “wheat escape” and perpetuates many of the typical myths that are refrains of the anti-GMO movement, such as whether QR codes really work, and the false story of the “world killing” Klebsiella microbe that was modified to increase alcohol production and boost decomposition.

Andrew Porterfield is a writer, editor and communications consultant for academic institutions, companies and non-profits in the life sciences. He is based in Camarillo, California. Follow @AMPorterfield on Twitter.

This article previously appeared on the GLP May 23, 2017.

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