Seed magazine has published a discussion of the roots of opposition to genetic engineering.

See the responses here

So much for the idea that Oprah would embrace science-based decision making. A few months ago, on my nature networks blog I suggested that we start a movement to lobby Oprah to place a non-fiction science book on her list every few months.

I thought she would go for the idea. After all, she supported Obama and likes to read. Sadly it seems that may be all she has in common with scientists.

In their weekly recap, ScienceBlogs now reports that:

Oprah Winfrey and notorious anti-vaccination supporter Jenny McCarthy sealed a contractual deal that will enable McCarthy to spread her belief across several platforms that vaccines cause autism. These claims are vehemently opposed in the scientific community, as they remain virtually unsupported after years of rigorous scientific investigation and, if heeded as true, have lethal consequences in the form of diseases like measles, mumps and rubella. With support from Oprah, McCarthy is slated to host a syndicated talk show and maintain a blog. According to ScienceBlogger PZ Myers, this is “proof that there is no god.”

It may be time for PZ to start his own talk TV show

So much for the idea that Oprah would embrace science-based decision making. A few months ago, on my nature networks blog I suggested that we start a movement to lobby Oprah to place a non-fiction science book on her list every few months. The idea was to create a forum in the mass media to discuss real science in front of millions.

I thought she would go for the idea. After all, she supported Obama and likes to read. Sadly it seems that may be all she has in common with scientists.

In their weekly recap, ScienceBlogs now reports that:

Oprah Winfrey and notorious anti-vaccination supporter Jenny McCarthy sealed a contractual deal that will enable McCarthy to spread her belief across several platforms that vaccines cause autism. These claims are vehemently opposed in the scientific community, as they remain virtually unsupported after years of rigorous scientific investigation and, if heeded as true, have lethal consequences in the form of diseases like measles, mumps and rubella. With support from Oprah, McCarthy is slated to host a syndicated talk show and maintain a blog. According to ScienceBlogger PZ Myers, this is “proof that there is no god.”

It may be time for PZ to start his own talk TV show

Our friend Elliot (age 13) has recently been announced as one of 15 winners across the country of the 2009 National Geographic Kids Hands-On Explorer Contest. To win, he submitted a photograph and essay about one of his own recent explorations. He, of course chose an image from his vast collection of snake photos. This one was of a yellow-belly racer that he saw and photographed in Stebbins Cold Canyon UC Reserve. He wrote a 300-word essay about the canyon and about the day he photographed the snake.

And even more exciting is that the prize is a 12-day trip to Peru at the end of May to visit Machu Picchu and the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest for the winners and their chaperones! He also gets a new cool Nikon camera to take with him on the trip.

Elliot
Hands on Explorer Challenge Essay
2/3/09

Splash! After the three-mile hike through a dry rocky creek bed, the feeling of cool water is welcome as I plunge into the deep clear pool. The high walls of the canyon tower around me and before me is a mossy waterfall. Iridescent hummingbirds drink from the trickling falls and swoop overhead.

This is Cold Creek Canyon. Ever since I was a small child I have come here with family and friends, yet with every visit, I discover something new. Once it was a bobcat track along the creek, another time a pileated woodpecker in a massive oak tree. But my favorite things have always been the canyon’s reptiles and amphibians.

My love of herpetology began when I was 13 months old and I surprised my parents by pulling a garter snake from a grassy lake. Ever since I have been fascinated by these creatures and I look for them wherever I go. I spend hours researching, photographing, writing field notes, and keeping a life list of the over 165 species and subspecies of reptiles I have seen in the wild.

On this day in the canyon, my mother and I have an extraordinary experience. While sitting by the creek, we notice a yellow-belly racer come out of a hole. A nearby sound makes us look up and we see two racers together in a tree and three more below. I realize that the smaller snakes are males following one large female’s pheromones and that the snakes in the tree are mating.

I photograph the entire event. The photo here is of the first snake we saw. It is my favorite shot in the series because of the snake’s alertness as it searches the air with its tongue for scents. Whenever I see it, I remember this amazing day.

Here is an interesting and radical proposal to think about:

End the University as We Know It

I am not wild about the idea of abolishing tenure (after all there is no evidence that human nature has changed so much that we dont need to be concerned about politicians firing professors who dig up information they do not like) but I do like the idea of increasing collaborations between departments to create interdisciplinary teams that focus on societally important issues like water and, importantly, disease.

A story today by Andrew Revkin in the New York Times reveals that for more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.

George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.

‘They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.’ "

Why does this sound so familiar?

The debate on GE crops has gone a similar route, although this time the concerted campaign to mislead the public on the scientific consensus about a critical environmental issue of our time has come from a coalition from the progressive left rather than the right using nearly identical tactics. As is clear from numerous scientific reports from leading scientific agencies such as the National Academy of Sciences, the broad scientific consensus is that the GE crops on the market are safe to eat and have clear environmental benefits.

Is there a philosophical conversation to be had on whether or not we want bacterial genes in our crops? Certainly.

Do we need to integrate ecologically-based farming practices into your production food system? Absolutely

Can we say that ALL GE crops in the future will be safe to eat? No.

But if we are going to move to a more sustainable agriculture, feed the growing population and protect our environment, then we’ve got to start by being honest about the science.

The New York Times Sunday magazine “Green Mind” special featured interviews with two exceptional individuals who are leaders of the modern green movement.

Steven Chu is a Nobel-prize winning physicist. Stewart Brand founded one of the most beloved “catalogs” of all time, The Whole Earth Catalog.

Clearly, these accomplishments reflect their creativity, perseverance and love of the natural world. But what I find most inspirational about these two men is that they have been consistently proactive, not reactive, throughout their careers. They are not against things, they are for a green future.

Both Chu and Brand advocate practical solutions to particularly difficult-to-solve problems. “The most important thing is making sure that your home is properly insulated, that your leaky doors and windows are fixed” says Chu. They clearly enjoy implementing new ideas and technology that have environmental benefits. They do not ask if a technology is good or bad, cool or not but whether or not it is appropriate for the task at hand. “The romantic nature-is-perfect approach is just horse exhaust”, says Brand, choosing his words carefully.

These are thoughtful men that we are fortunate to have as leaders of a community-based, science-based movement. They are not reluctant to engage with established institutions (for example, the government of the United States of America) to move the world’s people forward. It is through their efforts and those like them that we finally will reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, make our cities more efficient and establish a more ecological way of farming.

(Full disclosure: I am associated with the Joint Bioenergy Institute, a DOE-funded Bioenergy Research Center that Secretary Chu supported when he was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I also have had the pleasure of meeting Stewart and reading a few advance chapters of his new book “Whole Earth Discipline”, which I highly recommend.)

I try not to travel in the spring. Instead of the stale air of the airplane, I try to get out to the mountains, the beach, the garden or to the nearby foothills.

Last weekend my daughter and I (who is 8 years old today), went for a walk. I thought she was strong enough to do the 5 mile Cold Canyon hike so off we happily went. As we started up the VERY steep hill, her trust began to dissipate. Then the inevitable “I want to go home”.

I definitely did not want to go home. More than that, I did not want her to want to go home.

“Look, a soap plant, the people that were here before us used to dig up this plant and make small brooms”.

She forgot the steepness and we started digging with some twigs. But these plants are not easy to dig up and the soil was not soft. Still, just to dig in the dirt in the quiet. A peaceful and shared task. Finally we gave up digging. Audrey was ready to hike again.

But soon, again, she questioned the purpose of the climb.

“To get to the top of course”, I explained.

She seemed unconvinced so we sat down again and I told her the story of George Mallory who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s. I told her how badly he wanted to be at the top and that he loved his beautiful wife so much that he carried her picture in his wallet with him always. I told her how tall the mountain is and how hard it is to breath up that high. I explained that Mt Everest is 27x taller than the edges of Cold Canyon. And then I told her that he died. For a long time noone knew if he ever made it to the top.

She almost cried and looked at me wanting a better ending than that. Fortunately I had one because I recently heard an interview on NPR with the author of a new book about Mallory. I told her that when his body was finally discovered in 1999, his wallet did not have a picture of his wife. “He must have left it on the peak”, I said. “He promised his wife he would do that if he ever made it there”.

Smiling, we continued on.

Near the top she found a rock and we looked over the central valley to the snow capped mountains beyond. “Tell me another story”. So I did.

“John Muir sat some place in the inner coastal range, just like this. He was an adventurer and loved California. When he saw the mountains beyond the flower-filled valley he decided to go there”

I told her how he walked across the entire valley and into the mountains and how he lived there with the people who lived here before us and the bears and the birds.

We then continued on. With the mountaineers on our minds and the company of the wildflowers- sticky monkdy flower, Mariposa lily, paintbrush, and others- the hike no longer seemed so hard.

Besides we knew there was a swimming hole near the end.

It was a beautiful day in California. Too beautiful to spend blogging.

The Obamas have started planting their garden with 55 varieties of vegetables from a wish list of the kitchen staff — grown from organic seedlings started at the Executive Mansion’s greenhouses.

“The Obamas will feed their love of Mexican food with cilantro, tomatillos and hot peppers. Lettuces will include red romaine, green oak leaf, butterhead, red leaf and galactic. There will be spinach, chard, collards and black kale. For desserts, there will be a patch of berries. And herbs will include some more unusual varieties, like anise hyssop and Thai basil”. A White House carpenter, Charlie Brandts, who is a beekeeper, will tend two hives for honey.

If we all dug up our lawns, planted 55 kinds of vegetables and tended it very carefully, the world would be a better place. That said, who has time? Certainly not the Obamas. The White House grounds crew and the kitchen staff will do most of the work.

Still, I love the symbolism of it, and though it will be costly (vegetables harvested from showcase gardens such as the Obamas’ are much more expensive than produce from an organic commercial farm), it will provide a great education tool for the fifth graders that will help tend the farm and for White House visitors.

I hope one of her assistants plants some corn and teaches them about insects and disease. She can show them how to feel the tip of a mature ear to see if it is filled out. As we described in Tomorrow’s Table, they may discover some ears with hollow spots created where a corn earworm has been feeding.

The insect deposits its eggs on the corn silk that trails out of each ear of corn. When the larvae hatch, they crawl down the silk into the tip of the ear and begin to feed on the kernels. The kids can open up a couple of ears and see the big, fat, healthy earworms, writhing with irritation at being disturbed from such a luscious feast. They can laugh when they learn that the black stuff in the tips of the ears is called “frass,” a euphemistic word for insect poop.

Will she teach them ways to control for this pest? The corn earworm is not a picky eater and will eat almost any crop that we rotate in such as tomatoes, beans, or lettuce, and the adult moth is a good flyer. Even conventional breeding has failed to solve this problem because scientists have not yet been able to find a corn gene that gives protection from earworm. So organic controls dont work very well for the corn earworm making it difficult to control this pest on organic farms. Most organic farmers and consumers accept this problem in exchange for the benefits of not spraying insecticides.

There is one approach that works though. Bacillus thuringiensis is a bacteria that produces a toxin (called Bt toxin) that kills a narrow range of moths and butterflies. French farmers first started using Bacillus thuringiensis in the 1920s but it wasn’t available commercially in France until 1950s, and then in the United States in the 1950s. Today Bacillus thuringiensis is cultured in industrial production facilities and sold either as liquid or a powder with some additives to make it flow and mix better. After it is combined with water and sprayed in the field, caterpillars eat the bacteria in the form of spores and toxin. The toxin destroys the gut walls of the caterpillars and spores and other gut bacteria invade its body. This approach is an example of ‘biological control,’ using live organisms to combat pests and disease. Organic farmers have been using Bt as a “natural” insecticide to control insect pests for 50 years. It doesnt work to control earworms on sweet corn, however, because the worm is burrowed deep within the ear, where the Bt spray cannot reach.

This is why geneticists engineered corn with the Bt gene. GE sweet corn is resistant to the earworm. I hope the First Lady plants some GE sweet corn next to the conventional variety so that this summer the Obamas and the kids could see firsthand how it resists pests and that it tastes the same. There will be less frass to giggle about but more sweet corn.

For years, journalists, television producers and newspaper reporters that write about genetically engineered crops, have used the term “GMO” (genetically modified organism) to describe these new crop varieties. The marketing industry has taken to writing “GMO-free” on their products, as a way to increase sales to consumers fearful of the genetic engineering process.

The problem is that the term GMO is misused and misunderstood.

Take, for example, a recent story on Voice of America about a new rice variety my laboratory and collaborators recently developed that is tolerant of flooding. The producer made a valiant effort to explain how we generated the new variety:

“The new strain is genetically improved, but not genetically modified, so is not subject to tight controls on genetically modified foods.”

Does anyone know what is he talking about? I do, so please let me explain.

Breeders have a 8000 year history of genetic modification (also called genetic improvement or conventional breeding)- that is, they have modified the genome of crop species in a number of ways. Such conventional breeding methods include hybridization (transfer of pollen from one plant variety to another to generate new seed with genes from both parents), mutagenesis (in which chemicals or irradiation are used to induce random mutations in DNA) and embryo rescue (where plant or animal embryos produced from interspecies gene transfer are placed in a tissue culture environment to complete development). Today, everything we eat has been genetically modified in some way.

Genetic engineering, in contrast, uses a direct method to introduce new genes into a crop. Because the transfer is not limited by the relatedness of the parental varieties, any gene, even a gene from another species can be introduced into a crop plant. A committee established by the National Academy of Sciences. to look carefully at the GE process has concluded that the process of genetic engineering is not inherently hazardous. However, as with every other technology used for genetic modification, GE carries the potential for introducing unintended compositional changes. It depends on what gene is introduced or modified. For example, a new celery variety developed through conventional breeding that carried improved resistance to pests caused some farm workers to develop a rash on their hands when harvesting. In contrast, after 1billion acres of GE crops grown over 10 years, there has not been a single instance of harm to human health or the environment.

The method that we used to develop flood tolerant rice is called precision breeding, which is a sort of hybrid between genetic engineering and conventional genetic modification. Precision breeding (also called marker assisted selection) uses DNA technology to detect the inheritance of a desired gene to a seedling resulting from a genetic cross between two parent varieties. The result is the precise introduction of one to several novel genes from closely related species. For example, our flood tolerant rice was developed from a cross of a low-yielding rice variety that carried a rare gene for tolerance with modern, locally adapted modern varieties. The resulting seedlings were screened using precision breeding to develop new varieties with the taste and yield favored by consumers with the flood tolerant trait. The rice is now being grown by farmers in Bangladesh and India, where 4 million tons of rice are lost each year to flooding, enough to feed 30 million people.

Many anti-GE activists reject GE but do accept precision breeding (even though both processes can introduce novel genes that have not previously been tested in modern varieties). Thus, varieties developed through precision breeding are subject only to standard seed certification and not to the strict regulatory approval process required for GE crops.

We need to look at the broader goals of sustainability and food security before ruling out a particular process of crop modification. Each new variety needs to be looked at on a case-by case basis.

To restart the dialog, lets start using the term “GE crops” rather than “GMO” so the consumer will have some idea of what the debate is all about.