StemCell Therapy

The impending need to feed almost 10 billion people by 2050 is fuelling innovation in the agri-food sector.

Vertical farming is one such example. Tipped to play an increasingly important role in global agriculture, plant factories as they are otherwise termed are vertically-stacked, fully controlled environments used to produce food.

The technology has been praised for its potential to help societies meet elevated demand for food, without the need for additional farmland.

Analysts appear similarly persuaded. According to Global Market Insights, the vertical farming market is expected to expand by 25% by 2024, to reach a value of 11.4bn.

However, feeding growing populations with vertical farms, and using the same seeds and plants used in conventional agriculture today to do so, demonstrates a lag in innovation, suggests Aberystwyth Universitys Professor Huw Jones.

Vertical farming technologies are advancing, and fast. Today, it is possible to automate a number of processes in urban agriculture, including the sowing of seeds, and monitoring of LED lighting.

Climate including temperature, humidity, and CO levels can also be controlled externally, and machine learning can be leveraged to help save electricity and water use.

In order to get the most out of urban agriculture innovations, plant technology will have to similarly advance, said the professor of translational genomics for plant breeding at the Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum last week in London. The kinds of plants that we are going to ultimately have in [plant factories] are not going to be the same kind of plants that we have in soil.

We have huge innovation in hydroponic vertical farming, the professor continued, but we are still using the old seeds. What we are lacking, therefore, is the plant architecture itself, he stressed.

Professor Jones does predict this will change, but it will require gene editing to do so.

Greater understanding of DNA sequencing and genome editing, alongside reduced costs in gene sequencing, has helped to encourage interest in plant technology, he explained.

Plant-specific transcription factors, for example, have garnered much attention in food science. Transcription factors are genes that control the transcription of other genes in fruit and vegetable colour, texture, and aroma, we were told.

As a result, scientists can alter the colour of tomatoes, or the smell of fruits, he continued. We can make completely new fruits by harnessing these genes that control genes [with] these MYB transcription factors.

In vertical farming, gene sequencing could also help bridge the technology gap between vertical farming and plant architecture.There is a lot of research underpinned by the understanding of the gene sequence. We understand how to change the internode length of these sorts of plants. [We know] how to change the fruiting patterns, so that we can make plants that are much more suitable to those kinds of new agricultures.

In Europe, the scientific community regularly voices its support of genetic technologies. Both conventional genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetic editing tools such as CRISPR/Cas have been praised for their potential to help develop more robust crops in the face of climate change.

Genetic editing using CRISPR/Cas technology involves removing part of the genetic code, as opposed to GMO methods, which uses genetic engineering to insert new code.

However, EU regulation has put Europe out of step with the rest of the world, argued Professor Jones, particularly in countries where very simple genome editing falls outside of their GMO legislation.

Here, the professor is referring to the European Court of Justices (ECJ) July 2018 ruling. According to its decision, crops obtained by mutagenesis are classified as GMOs in Europe, as the techniques and methods of mutagenesis alter the genetic material of a plant in a way that does not occur naturally.

Describing this legislation as too heavily politicised to onboard biotechnology, Professor Jones suggested the UKs impending departure from the EU could present an opportunity for the sector.

This is an area that the UK, post-Brexit, could look at to really rationalise the regulation of mutation breeding, he said. That has always been outside the GMO scope. And to think about simple genome editing where that is synonymous with old mutation breeding techniques and also to exclude that.

In the case that such editing, which in the future may fall outside of GMO legislation, produces a novel food, the professor agreed it should be categorised by novel foods legislation.

In any case, Professor Jones is convinced that over the next ten years, there will be significant innovation in food biotechnology. Some of which, wont fall neatly into novel food or biotechnology regulations. So, I think we have some interesting times ahead to see how these things are going to be regulated.

Continued here:
Vertical farms of the future require genetically edited plants, says scientist - FoodNavigator.com

As the labour market rapidly changes, new, nearly real-time data and metrics give us better insight than ever before into what the jobs of the future will look like.

The kinds of jobs emerging in the global economy span a wide range of professions and skills, reflecting the opportunities for workers of all backgrounds and educational levels to take advantage of emerging jobs and the new economy. Identifying emerging jobs and the skills that they require provides valuable insights to inform training investments, and paves the way for a Reskilling Revolution, as individuals seek new skills to keep pace with change.

But for all of the opportunities that the new economy will bring, there are stark skills gaps and gender gaps that must be addressed. If we dont, they will continue to widen in the future.

Here are five things we can learn from this new data:

Not every emerging job requires hard tech skills, but every emerging job does require basic tech skills such as digital literacy, web development or graphic design. Three of the jobs in the World Economic Forum's Jobs of Tomorrow report cloud, engineering and data clusters, which are also among the fastest-growing overall require disruptive tech skills like artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, or cloud computing. Because technologies like AI are so pervasive, many roles in areas like sales and marketing will require a basic understanding of AI.

These disruptive tech skills are in high demand across the board. Blockchain, cloud computing, analytical reasoning and AI are among the most in-demand tech skills we see on LinkedIn.

While they arent growing as quickly as tech-dominated jobs, new sales, content production and HR roles are also emerging as a complement to the rapidly growing tech industry. Our research shows talent acquisition specialists, customer success specialists and social media assistants among the fastest growing professions all roles that rely on more diverse skills sets, especially soft skills.

Share of skills clusters by selected professional cluster

Image: World Economic Forum

Demand for soft skills is likely to continue to increase as automation becomes more widespread. Our latest Global Talent Trends Report shows that HR professionals are identifying the demand for soft skills as the most important trend globally. Skills like creativity, persuasion, and collaboration which all top our list of most in-demand soft skills are all virtually impossible to automate, which means if you have these skills youll be even more valuable to organizations in the future.

While the data reflects a diversity of opportunities for workers of all backgrounds and educational levels, further analysis shows a worrying imbalance in those obtaining the latest skills. In our ongoing research on gender with the World Economic Forum, we found that the largest gender gaps among emerging jobs are in roles that rely heavily on disruptive tech skills, with the share of women represented across cloud, engineering and data jobs below 30% (for cloud computing its as low as 12%). Its critical to close this gap because these disruptive tech skills will have an outsized impact on the direction of society and the economy.

While there is certainly room to improve gender parity by embracing greater diversity in hiring and more inclusive managerial practices, our data suggests that those gains, while important, will not be sufficient to achieve parity.

We have to think creatively about ways to fill these emerging skills and roles so that we prevent these gaps from intensifying in the future. Our research to understand these issues has uncovered some very achievable, scalable solutions.

Firstly, taking advantage of existing and adjacent talent can make a massive contribution to the rapid expansion of talent pipelines. Our research reveals that training and up-skilling near AI talent could double the pipeline of AI talent in Europe.

Opportunities by selected professional cluster and occupation, 2014-2019

Image: World Economic Forum

Taking a similar approach with the gender gap, weve found that sub-groups of disruptive tech skills where women have higher representation genetic engineering, data science, nanotechnology and human-computer interaction could expand the pipeline of talent for the broader set of tech roles that rely heavily on disruptive tech skills.

While both of these approaches can help us make meaningful progress, closing the skills and gender gaps depends on a lot more than just making sure talent has the right skills. Its a simple truth that who you know matters, so we also have to close the network gap the advantage some people have over others based purely on who they know.

Our research on the network gap shows that living in a high-income neighbourhood, going to a top school and working at a top company can lead to a 12x advantage in accessing opportunities. This means that two people with the exact same skills, but who were born into different neighbourhoods, may be worlds apart when it comes to the opportunities afforded them.

All of these new metrics and insights can help us pinpoint the skills and jobs of the future, but its going to take more than data to ensure that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an equitable one. If we are going to make meaningful change, we need businesses and political leaders to re-evaluate the norms through which we shape policy, make hiring decisions and ultimately level the playing field for those who face barriers to opportunity.

As we convene at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Im asking leaders to join us in making progress towards closing these gaps. It will create better, more innovative businesses, stronger economies and ultimately help create fairer societies.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.

Written by

Allen Blue, Co-Founder and Vice President, Product Management, LinkedIn

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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5 things we know about the jobs of the future - World Economic Forum

In co-founding Ginkgo Bioworks, Reshma Shetty has helped enable the entire synthetic biology ... [+] industry while inspiring a generation of new biological engineers. Heres what she told me about starting a biotech company.

Dr. Reshma Shetty is no stranger within the synthetic biology community. In 2008 she co-founded Ginkgo Bioworksa company youll definitely hear about if you havent alreadyalong with fellow MIT grad students Austin Che, Barry Canton, and Jason Kelly, and their graduate adviser, Professor Tom Knight. They started with a simple but revolutionary goal: help people design and build organisms. A decade later, Ginkgo achieved unicorn statusa private company valued at over $1 billionand it finds itself at the fore of the synthetic biology revolution with customers seeking to build organisms for use in fields as diverse as health, food, agriculture, cosmetics and materials.

Shetty has been through the whole journey and has been a major influence in the synthetic biology community. She had a major role in the first International Genetic Engineering Machine (iGEM) Competition with her co-founders. In 2008, she was named one of Eight People Inventing the Future by Forbes and, in 2011, one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company.

Shetty is an upbeat talker. If theres any stress or jadedness from navigating a company from birth to unicorn over a decade, it doesnt show. There is a sincere enthusiasm in her voice, especially when we discuss the science. When I caught up with her a few weeks back, one of things I wanted to know was: what do you do when you realize youre riding a biotech unicorn?

What was the moment when you realized that Ginkgo was going to be big?

It was when we closed our Series B financing. It was a $45 million round or roughly speaking, so that was more dollars dumped into our bank account at one instance than we ever had before.

My thought was, well pretty serious people withserious capital are choosing to take a bet on us.

This was confirmed for her in 2017 when Bayer chose to work with Ginkgo on engineering biologicals for agriculture, proving the intrinsic value of their platform and cementing Ginkgo as a platform company.

It proved three things at the time. One, that engineered microbes in the environment could be a thing, that [they] could be a product category. There are serious people taking serious bets that we're going to be able to release engineered microbes in the future. Two, that Ginkgos platform had value even in areas that we hadn't previously been in. Three, it proved to the world that Ginkgo was really a platform company, that we weren't simply going after a few products in the industrial biotech market.

It wasnt easy sailing for Gingko from the start though. Right after the company was founded, the global economy took a nosedive.

I think we incorporated in July of 2008 and, like literally, within the next month or two, the fiscal crisis hit, says Shetty.

In many ways this was not the ideal time to be starting a business and looking for investment, leading to creative thinking in getting the company going.

What did you learn in those early days that biotech companies could benefit from?

At the time everybody said that the way to start a biotech start-up is to go raise money immediately because you need some amount of money to be able to start a lab and get going. The thing I had to learn and realize was that no, actually, it is possible. If you're creative enough, savvy enough and patient enough, then you can in fact bootstrap even a biotech start-up.

Shetty stresses the importance of having the space to figure out their technology platform and business model and ask themselves how to take it forward. Having Knight and his wealth of experience on the team certainly helped.

Tom always said Oh, its a good idea to bootstrap in the early years regardless, based on his prior experience starting companies. But circumstances certainly reinforced that and I think that was really helpful that we spent the first few years bootstrapping the company.

Was it natural having your former advisor on the team?

Yeah, very natural. Tom, hes a pretty low-key guy, but he's also been very ahead of his time when it comes to thinking about the technology and technology trends. Early on it was great because Tom has started and run a company before and there were some obvious pitfalls that he could help us avoid and talk a bit about options.

And your other co-founders, what is it about them that makes them special?

I think probably for me the biggest thing is that we've now been working together for almost 20 years, says Shetty, referencing their time at MIT in the years before Ginkgo.

And even now, if I'm struggling with something or I'm trying to dig through how to solve a problem, I would want to talk to Tom, Barry, Austin, and Jason. I always come away having learned something or clarified my thinking or somehow changed how I was approaching a problem. To me, that is the real hallmark of excellence.

Despite all those shared experiences, they still learn from one another and solve problems together. Shetty considers her colleagues to be mentors too, saying shes benefitted from them as much as from her supervisors through the years.

Anybody can be a mentor, she says.

They are all engineers at heart, so the most exciting things for the Ginkgo team are around potentially world-changing technologies that can jump quickly from dream to reality.

What are the engineering challenges youre most excited about these days?

Bayer and Ginkgo, through our joint venture in Joyn, are going after nitrogen fixation. It has long been a dream of folks. Could we reduce fertilizer usage by using biological nitrogen fixation instead?

This project has been close to Shetty since her academic days, but therapeutics and Ginkgos collaboration with Synlogic, who develop bacteria as living medicines, has also piqued her interest.

There's all these areas of metabolism that lead to devastating diseases and the idea that you could engineer microbes to basically treat them is a cool idea!

Is there any particular problem youd like to solve through engineering biology?

How do you think about leveraging biology to make a positive impact on the environment? That's one I think has been on our wish list for a while.

Enabling the future of synthetic biology is a big part of how Ginkgo operates, even since the early days. The founders were involved in establishing iGEM and their platform is well suited to collaborative efforts.

How do you see Ginkgos role to give back and enable the next generation of synthetic biology?

I think one thing that has been a longstanding ask from folks in the community is how are we going to open up our cell programming platform to more people? Early on, that seemed crazy to even think about, she says, citing the skill set required to use and build it. I think we've come a long way since then so we can say actually maybe we get started thinking about opening up the platform to more folks.

Shetty says initial collaborations like Joyn, (Ginkgo spin-out) Motif, and Synlogic mean they can learn how to open their platform better. Relationships with accelerators like YCombinator and Petri are the next steps. They acknowledge that opening their platform will only benefit and accelerate biological engineering.

Our conversation then moves onto a more human element of running a company, a reminder that its never all about the science.

Do you have any mistakes or regrets in how youve done things?

The biggest regret I have is actually not thinking consciously about diversity and inclusion issues earlier in Ginkgos history. We started thinking about them seriously in about 2015 or so, when we were still relatively small, about 30 people. But we could have thought about diversity and inclusion even earlier.

Shetty reveals its easier to change the balance in a company when its just a handful of people.

Can we be doing better on diversity as a whole?

I would say that synthetic biology as a field has always been pretty good in that it thought about issues outside of just the science and engineering itself. I think the field always fosters that broader perspective. So I think it's been more natural and more normal to think about diversity and inclusion issues in the synthetic biology community as a result, says Shetty, We're by no means beyond reproach but there's more of a willingness to talk about these issues and really try to take proactive steps.

Do you have any advice for those starting a company?

The thing I like to tell people is that, if you're going to start a company, don't do it for the money. There are a lot of easier ways to make money in the world. Start a company because you think a company is really the best way to go tackle a problem that you're passionate about.

Any final thoughts?

I think that we've come a long way in terms of our ability to engineer biology, but we still have a long way to go. Fundamentally, biology is still not yet a predictable engineering discipline and its important to remember that. Because its still not yet predictable, we have to iterate through different designs and search for a functional design whenever we're trying to engineer a GMO. We have more work to yet do to bring down the cost of doing genetic engineering so that we can explore more and more of design space.

Follow me on twitter at @johncumbers and @synbiobeta. Subscribe to my weekly newsletters in synthetic biology and space settlement.

Thank you to David Kirk and Kevin Costa for additional research and reporting in this article. Im the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the companies that I write about including Ginkgo Bioworks are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest heres the full list of SynBioBeta sponsors.

Read more from the original source:
An Interview with Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty On Co-Founding Synthetic Biologys First Unicorn - Forbes

A little while ago, we covered the idea ofusing photovoltaic materials to drive enzymatic reactionsin order to produce specific chemicals. The concept is being considered mostly because doing the same reaction in a cell is often horribly inefficient, because everything else in the cell is trying to regulate the enzymes, trying to use the products, trying to convert the byproducts into something toxic, or up to something even more annoying. But in many cases, these reactions rely on chemicals that are only made by cells, leaving some researchers to suspect it still might be easier to use living things in the end.

A new paper in Nature Catalysis may support or contradict this argument, depending on your perspective. In the end, the authors of the new paper re-engineer standard brewers yeast to produce molecules that can be used as fuel for internal combustion engines. The full catalog of changes they have to make is a bit mind-numbing, and most achieve a small, incremental increase in production. The end result is a large step forward toward biofuel production, but the effort involved is intimidating.

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See original here:
Re-engineering yeast to create biofuel appears possible, 'but the effort involved is intimidating' - Genetic Literacy Project

The legendary Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), which tracks issues related to technology and global security, has issued a terrifying warning: We are less than two minutes to midnight on the Doomsday clock. Its very bad news, representing the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced.

What makes this moment so perilous? The scientists statement includes warnings over the cyber-weaponization of information, the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) in making military decisions, the destruction of treaties meant to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, the abandonment of global agreements to limit climate chaos, the spread of genetic engineering and synthetic biology technologies, and more. It does not account for the escalated likelihood of atomic reactor disasters, but based on at least one BAS publication, it should.

Since 1947, this prestigious band of elite scientists and global thinkers has been putting out a clock meant to time the peril of a global apocalypse. First issued at the dawn of the Cold War, it has mostly focused on the dangers of atomic warfare. Its countdown to Armageddon has been set as far away as 17 minutes from midnight, a hypothetical time of human extinction. That relatively optimistic assessment came in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the definitive end of the Cold War.

Get the latest news and thought-provoking analysis from Truthout.

In 2018, the BAS set it at two minutes, the closest to catastrophe it had ever been. They repeated that estimate in 2019. But this years announcement has taken us inside the two-minute warning with a hair-raising litany of likely lethal catastrophes set to occur within 100 theoretical seconds.

Donald Trump is mentioned only once by name, in conjunction with his decision to trash the Paris Accords on climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. The scientists urge whoever wins the 2020 election to reinstate the U.S. commitment limiting carbon and other climate-destroying emissions. The BAS also cites Brazilian dictator Jair Bolsonaro for his decision to allow the destruction of the Amazon, with huge impacts on climate.

The BAS strives to maintain a non-partisan image. But Trumps presence in the White House clearly hangs over any assessment of humankinds survivability. The specter of his finger on the nuclear, ecological and financial buttons for the next four years hangs over humankind like a pall but goes otherwise unmentioned in this Doomsday assessment.

Also unmentioned is the question of more than 450 atomic power reactors worldwide. A small but vocal outlier coterie has argued that nuclear energy combats global warming by emitting less carbon that coal burners. But the Bulletin recently enshrined a major assessment by the esteemed Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, warning that commercial reactors pose a serious threat to human survival on this planet.

Published in August 2019, The false promise of nuclear power in an age of climate change argues that the 450 atomic reactors now deteriorating worldwide pose an existential threat to our survival. Writing with Professor Naomi Oreskes, Lifton warns that atomic energy is expensive and poses grave dangers to our physical and psychological well-being. Citing costs of nuclear juice at $100 per megawatt-hour versus $50 for solar and $30-40 for onshore wind, the authors say that the industry suffers from a negative learning curve, driving nuke costs constantly higher while those for renewables head consistently down.

Citing the unsolved problem of radioactive waste management, the BAS article warns of the ongoing impacts of major disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl (and potentially more to come), whose fallout kills humans and does untold damage to the global ecology. Lipton and Oreskes say we need to free ourselves from the false hope that a technology designed for ultimate destruction can lead to our salvation. They favor making renewable energies integral to the American way of life.

In addition to nuclear and climate issues, the 2020 Doomsday assessment emphasizes some relatively new concerns. In the last year, it says, many governments used cyber-enabled disinformation campaigns to sow distrust in institutions and among nations, undermining domestic and international efforts to foster peace and protect the planet.

By attacking both science and the fabric of international peace accords, some global leaders have created a situation that will, if unaddressed, lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later.

That situation includes AI and hypersonic warfare, both escalating at a frenzied pace. Now used in ultra-fast attacks, AI is dangerously vulnerable to hacking and manipulation while making kill decisions without human supervision. In nuclear command and control systems, the BAS warns, research and experience have demonstrated the vulnerability of these systems to hacking and manipulation.

This is an absolutely terrifying brew. The spread of disinformation, the contempt for science and expert opinion, the undermining of global agreements on arms control, and climate change are all deadly. Add in the new world of AI and hyper-sonic warfare, then pile on autocrats like Trump and Bolsonaro, and finish with the certainty of more disasters from 450 crumbling, obsolete atomic reactors.

All in all, its small wonder the Bulletin has taken us past the two-minute warning. It will clearly take every ounce of our activist strength to save our species from the final whistle.

Read more from the original source:
Trump's Presidency Brings Us Closer to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock - Truthout

Even for the most elite of bacteria-killers, these superbugs were a challenge.

Theyd delayed Mallory Smith from getting a lung transplant, and when shed finally had the surgery, the bacteria quickly migrated into her new lungs. They shrugged off cocktail after cocktail of antibiotics. Finally, Smiths father proposed an unusual last resort: finding viruses that parasitize bacteria and injecting them into his daughter. But the experimental treatment came too late. Smith died on Nov. 15, 2017, a little over a month after shed turned 25.

Yet her bacterial infection lived on, passed from scientist to scientist, from freezer to freezer, traveling from Smiths hospital room in Pittsburgh, Pa., to a lab in Ann Arbor, Mich., eventually landing in a Petri dish in Jerusalem, some 6,000 miles away. Now, microbiologists at Israels Hebrew University have described a new virus thats especially good at combating Smiths superbug.

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Its a phage that kills the strain that killed Mallory, said Ronen Hazan, who led the team. This was the best one and we decided to name it after her.

It isnt the first bacteriophage as such bacteria-fighting viruses are known that can work against this sort of intractable infection. After all, there are trillions of phages out there, feasting on the bugs that fill our sewage and hunting for hosts in puddles after rain. Even if theyre extreme specialists, attacking only specific strains of a specific species of bacteria, theres usually more than one that infects a particular superbug. Smiths doctors had tried out a few that may have done the trick if injected earlier.

Yet the mere fact that researchers are looking for phages to try as therapies is a sign of how much has changed since and because of Smiths death. The hope is that next time theres a case like hers, a potentially lifesaving treatment will be ready sooner.

The recent surge of phage therapy enthusiasm is a revival of sorts. In the 1930s, you could get phage concoctions to treat everything from dysentery to urinary tract infections to outbreaks of the skin. But then, in the 1940s, penicillin hit the market, and antibiotics became the rage. Eastern European researchers continued to use phages as treatment, but such Soviet science was viewed with suspicion back in the United States.

It was only with the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that Western interest in these viruses-as-treatments began to brew again. Even so, in 2017, many still considered the idea esoteric at best. That was part of the holdup for Smith. There was no established method for finding, purifying, and delivering the viruses her doctors hoped might save her life. When her father reached out to scientists who had a bit of experience with phage therapy, all they could do was send out a frantic flurry of emails and tweets.

Smiths story helped change that. Shed been born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic illness that fills the lungs with a particularly gluey sort of mucus. Not only does that make it hard to breathe it also acts as a cushy home for bacteria. When two friends whod met through swing dancing one a grad student, the other a tech consultant read about Smiths desperate attempt to find a virus that would beat back the bacteria within her, they created an online phage directory to help speed things up. Then, in 2018, the University of California, San Diego, established the first phage therapy center in the U.S.

Yet for a patient with Burkholderia cepacia the kind of bacterial infection that Smith had finding the right phage in time is hardly a shoo-in. Partially thats because its not the most common superbug infection, even among cystic fibrosis patients, so not all that many researchers are working on treating it with phage therapy. But its also because B. cepacia is an especially tricky type of bacteria to phage-hunt for. Some phages the ones that are easiest to use as therapies enter a superbug, replicate like crazy, and cause the host to explode. Others, though, simply integrate peaceably into the bacterial genome. And the phages discovered for B. cepacia often fall in the peaceful-coexistence camp. Plus, for other kinds of bacteria Pseudomonas, say, or Klebsiella a phage might be active against a large swathe of strains; for Burkholderia, Hazan explained, the viruses are choosier.

Thats where his lab comes in. The teams hope is to build up a library of B. cecpacia-killing phages that can be used in cocktails whenever a case like Smiths pops up. To do that, the scientists have collected all sorts of substances most people would rather not deal with. They take the used saliva, urine, and fecal samples from hospitals. Instead of discarding them, we take them and search for phages, Hazan explained. Were looking in water bodies, small lakes. After the rain, in puddles. Whenever a student goes on vacation we ask him, Bring some samples of soil or water or whatever!

They also regularly take wastewater from West Jerusalems sewage treatment plant, which is where the phage active against Smiths bacteria came from. Everybody complains about the smell, but we are finding gold in that sewage, Hazan added.

Three Hebrew University students Chani Rakov, Ortal Yerushalmy, and Leron Khalifa first isolated the phage in question this past December. When they put it into a Petri dish covered in the kind of bacteria that had been collected from Smiths lungs, it began to create clear spots where the superbug was dying off. The decision was unanimous that it should be named BCMallory1, for the initials of the bacteria its active against, and the name of the person who helped inspire the search.

When she heard the news, Smiths mother began to cry. To her, it meant that other families might not have to live through what she did. Its a very bittersweet feeling, said Diane Shader Smith. You know the suffering, and you dont want anyone to suffer, but also you think, Mallory could have lived.

Because bacteria often develop resistance to phages as well, many researchers think its best to deliver a cocktail of phages alongside antibiotics, and Hazan plans to keep searching. Hes also thinking about the possibility of genetically engineering some of the phages his team finds, to make them safer or more efficient bacteria-killers.

We dont want to have another Mallory Smith, said Steffanie Strathdee, co-director of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, at University of California, San Diego, and co-author of The Perfect Predator, a book about how she saved her husbands life through a similar phage hunt in 2016. Smiths case still haunts her, she said: I think about her every day. We came so close to saving her life.

See more here:
Superbug treatment named for patient who inspired its discovery - STAT

With Trumps trial in the Senate going on, it feels like a good time to talk about random news items. I want to distract mystelf from President Trumps pending acquittal.

I spelled mystelf correctly. Mystelf is a legitimate word I made up yesterday to mean my stupid self.

The first news item that caught my eye was about scientists discovery that tardigrades arent as indestructible as weve been told. Tardigrades are those little microscopic animals also called water-bears who look kind of cute with pudgy feet and can survive all kinds of cold. They can survive a drought. Theyve even been subjected to the vacuum of space and lived and shown no ill effects.

But nobody until now, apparently, thought of cooking them. Well, they dont look yummy, Ill admit.

Still, youd think in all this time, someone would have wondered how well theyd do in the noonday sun on a Moroccan summer day. It turns out they cant take it.

Good news for me. The research shows that my stupid body temperature is just the right amount of heat to kill off any tardigrades that find their way deep inside me. It would only take a week or two. Excellent. I had wondered if a tardigrade infestation was possible. I can now relax, safe knowing they could only live skin-deep in me.

My favorite government agency is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency solicits and supports research of all sorts, but usually theyre looking for a defense angle. The reason we can use the internet is because of a project of theirs back when the agency was called ARPA. What was then called the ARPA-net was thought a great system for communication that could function even during a nuclear attack. That was before Russian hackers, malware, denial of service attacks, etc.

Whenever youre bored and fed up with looking at cute cat videos, go to the DARPA website, click the Our Research link and browse all the projects they have going. It gets wild.

You may know some of them. Boston Dynamic Robots came out of one of their projects: robots that walk and run on all fours and can get back up when theyre down. DARPA has pushed a lot of Star Wars-ish projects like that.

Lately theres been a rash of projects involving genetic modification of plants and animals for defense purposes. One of them is called the APT project. APT stands for Advanced Plant Technologies. The goal of the project is to genetically engineer a variety of plants that can be used as sensors to detect chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNE) threats to protect deployed troops and the homeland. See why I like reading these things? Troops and the homeland. Sheer poetry.

Another one of these is the ELM project (yes, they all get acronyms like that its so precious): Engineered Living Materials. This week there was news about the engineering of a kind of living brick. Its a brick you can use like any brick: You can throw it at someones head or use it as a paperweight, but its ingredients include a kind of genetically modified bacteria. The bricks are alive.When you need more bricks, you can break them up and the pieces will grow new bricks. You do have to feed and water them. They eat sand and a certain kind of gelatin, and guzzle CO2. I want one for a pet. I will call her Cyan.

The final news item that caught my eye skirted dangerously close to the Senate trial. I almost looked away in horror when I saw it concerned John Roberts, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who is now presiding over the trial. But it wasnt about that. It was about John Roberts dropping the phrase OK, Boomer in arguments in an age discrimination case before the court.

He was wondering whether saying OK, Boomer to a job applicant in an interview could be evidence for age discrimination later if the applicant gets turned down.

Im glad its getting unpopular to be a Baby Boomer. One of the things Ive hated all my life is there have always been too many of us. Every other generation gets assigned about 10 years. Boomers got 1945 to 1964 20 years. Thats not right. All you people born 1955 to 1964 (that includes John Roberts), I now proclaim you the After-Shock Generation.

Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column,Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd. He can be reached at drwes (at) realchangenews (dot) org

Read the fullJan. 22-28 issue.

2020Real Change. All rights reserved.Real Change is a non-profit organization advocating for economic, social and racial justice since 1994.Learn moreabout Real Change anddonate nowto support independent, award-winning journalism.

Originally posted here:
You can send your tardigrades to space and back, but don't eat one. Got that, boomer? - Real Change News

(Inside Science) -- Castles made of sand could, with the help of bacteria, grow copies of themselves and become as strong as the cement that commonly holds bricks together, a new study suggests.

Such living materials could one day help people colonize Mars, scientists added.

After water, concrete is the most used material on Earth, at a rate of about 3 metric tons used per year for every person in the world. Cement, the primary component of concrete, is the oldest artificial construction material, dating back to the Roman Empire.

Cement and concrete have changed little as technology for more than a century. Now scientists are seeking inspiration from natural processes, such as the way colonies of coral polyps build reefs.

"We want to blur the boundaries between the natural world and the built environment, between what is nonliving and what is living, and create a material that displays both structural and biological functions," said materials scientist Wil Srubar, who heads the Living Materials Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The researchers started with sand, gelatin and a kind of photosynthetic bacteria known asSynechococcusthat is widespread in ocean surface waters. The gelatin retained moisture and nutrients for the bacteria to proliferate and mineralize calcium carbonate in a way that is similar to how seashells form.

In experiments, the resulting material was roughly as strong as typical cement-based mortars.

"I have a small cube of the material on my desk that is 2 inches across that I can stand on," Srubar said.

The material not only is alive, but can reproduce. When researchers halve one of the bricks, the bacteria can help grow those halves into two complete bricks when supplied with extra sand and gelatin. Instead of manufacturing bricks one by one, the researchers showed they could grow up to eight bricks from one.

"Conventional manufacturing approaches make one widget at a time," Srubar said. "By using one brick to grow two bricks, and then four, and then so on, we can explore the idea of exponential manufacturing of building materials. Given that time is money, I think anyone involved in manufacturing would find speeding up manufacturing time very interesting."

Previous research used bacteria to repair cracks in concrete and oil and gas wells by mineralizing calcium carbonate. However, such work typically used microbes that fare very poorly in typical materials used like cement, which are highly acidic -- only 0.1 percent to 0.4 percent of such bacteria survived after 30 days. In contrast, in this new work, 9% to 14 percent of the bacteria remained viable after 30 days assuming at least 50 percent humidity was maintained.

One challenge the scientists face is that the material needs to get completely dried out to reach its maximum strength, but such drying stresses out the bacteria. To help keep the microbes alive, the researchers currently have to control the humidity surrounding the material.

"We're looking to create a desiccation-tolerant strain of bacteria so that we can get full structural capacity while also enhancing microbial viability in super-dry conditions," Srubar said.

All in all, "we're particularly excited about the possibilities of this material technology in austere environments with limited resources," Srubar said. "If you have microorganisms that can grow structural materials in remote places, that could help build everything from a military installation to human settlements on other planets."

Srubar said the current research acts as a proof of concept for the stronger compounds that could be made with the technique.

Ultimately the scientists envision using microbes that not only help build materials but impart structures with extra biological functions.

"You can imagine bacteria that provide materials with self-healing capabilities, or can sense and respond to toxins in the air, or can interact with the environment in other ways," Srubar said. "The sky's the limit with creativity."

"I find it exciting that this new work develops materials that are truly living, in that the microorganisms incorporated into their materials survived at very high rates over time periods of weeks," said Anne Meyer, a synthetic biologist at the University of Rochester in New York, who did not take part in this research. "Creating a truly living material allows the possibility of using genetic engineering techniques to add additional behaviors to the microbes living within the material. Could you incorporate a microbe that could respond to environmental cues to change the toughness or stiffness of the bacteria?"

She added that it might be possible to combine the new research with work from her lab that uses 3D printers to build shapes from bacteria.

The scientists detailedtheir findingsonline Jan. 15 in the journalMatter.

[This article originally appeared on Inside Science. Read the original here.]

Continue reading here:
This Regenerative Building Material is Made From Sand and Bacteria - Discover Magazine

A Trillion ToxicGallons

Oil and gas wells pump out nearly a trillion gallons of wastewater a year, Rolling Stone reported. That's literally a river of waste enough to replace all the water flowing from the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico for more than two and a half days.

Much of that wastewater, often referred to by the industry as "brine," carries high levels, not of familiar table salt, but of corrosive salts found deep below the Earth's surface, as well as toxic compounds and carcinogens.

That water can also carry serious amounts of radioactive materials. The Rolling Stone report, labeled "sobering" by the Poynter Institute, described levels of radium as high as 28,500 picocuries per liter in brine from the Marcellus Shale, underlying Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and West Virginia, levels hundreds of times as much as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would allow in industrial discharges from other industries.

The oil and gas industry's waste, however, isn't regulated like most other industry's wastes, slipping instead through loopholes carved out in the nation's cornerstone environmental laws, including exemptions for the industry in federal laws covering hazardous waste.

"If I had a beaker of that on my desk and accidentally dropped it on the floor, they would shut the place down," Yuri Gorby, a microbiologist who'd studied radioactive materials at the U.S. Geological Survey and Department of Energy, told the magazine. "And if I dumped it down the sink, I could go to jail."

Excerpt from a 1982 report prepared for the American Petroleum Institute and titled "An Analysis of the Impact of the Regulation of 'Radionuclides' as a Hazardous Air Pollutant on the Petroleum Industry."

API's report focused on the possibility that the federal government might step in and regulate those radioactive materials under the Clean Air Act or under federal Superfund laws.

"Depending on the mode of definition," the report adds, "very small quantities of petroleum products could easily contain reportable quantities of [radioactive materials]." A chart lists amounts as small as a half a barrel of crude oil or 17 cubic feet of natural gas as containing "one reportable quantity of uranium or radon" under the most restrictive definition.

The report labels uranium "a somewhat different dilemma" than radon gas. "We estimated earlier in this paper that significant quantities of uranium potentially enter our refineries via crude oil," the report continues. "Little is known of its fate, however."

"Since the law of conservation of matter must apply, it can only end up in the product, the process waste, remain in the process equipment, or escape into the environment," the report notes, calling for more study, particularly of the industry's refining equipment and waste.

1982 API Analysis of Radionuclides in Oil and Gas Industry (PDF)
1982 API Analysis of Radionuclides in Oil and Gas Industry (Text)

Some of the report's most stark language warned about the possibility of federal regulation of the industry's radioactive wastes.

"It is concluded that the regulation of radionuclides could impose a severe burden on API member companies," the report says, "and it would be prudent to monitor closely both regulatory actions."

API spokesperson Reid Porter provided to DeSmog the group's response to the Rolling Stone investigation.

"We take each report of safety or health issues related to energy development very seriously," Porter said. "Nothing is more important than the health and safety of our workers, the local environment, and the communities where we live, operate, and raise families. Natural gas and oil companies meet or exceed strict federal and state regulations and also undergo regular inspections to ensure that all materials are managed, stored, transported, and disposed of safely. Through regular monitoring, ongoing testing, and strict handling protocols, industry operations are guided by internationally recognized standards and best practices to provide for safe working environments and public safety."

API also pointed to a one-page document titled "NORM [naturally occurring radioactive materials] in the Oil and Natural Gas Industry." As of publication time, API had not responded to questions from DeSmog regarding the 1982 report.

10 Years Later, Hazards 'Widespread'; 20 Years Later, Workers Sue OverCancers

Over a decade later, problems persisted, other documents indicate. "Contamination of oil and gas facilities with naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) is widespread," a 1993 paper published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers warned. "Some contamination may be sufficiently severe that maintenance and other personnel may be exposed to hazardous concentration."

Nonetheless, the paper focused on the potential for "over-regulation."

"Where possible, industry input should be directed to minimize an over-regulation of NORM contamination in the industry," author Peter Gray, an expert on radioactivity who formerly worked for Phillips Petroleum Co., wrote. He added that concentrations of radioactive contamination at the time were "relatively low and do not usually present a health hazard to the public or to most personnel in the industry," but added that some facilities "may be hazardous to maintenance personnel in particular."

Peter Gray NORM Contamination in the Petroleum Industry, 1993 Society of Petroleum Engineers (PDF)
Peter Gray NORM Contamination in the Petroleum Industry, 1993 Society of Petroleum Engineers (Text)

The 1993 paper notes that some oil-producing states had passed or were considering passing laws to protect against the industry's radioactive wastes, noting in particular that Louisiana and Mississippi had regulations in effect, and that Louisiana had required "radiation surveys of every petroleum facility in the state."

But state and federal regulators largely failed to act, Rolling Stone found. "Of 21 significant oil-and-gas-producing states, only five have provisions addressing workers, and just three include protections for the public, according to research by [Elizabeth Ann Glass] Geltman, the public-health expert," the magazine reported. "Much of the legislation that does exist seems hardly sufficient."

In documents dated nearly two decades later, from a 2011 lawsuit brought by more than 30 Louisiana oilfield workers who'd developed cancer, plaintiff's experts described as resulting from their exposure to radioactive materials at work.

The 2013 plaintiff's expert report describes in detail how jobs like roustabout, roughneck, and derrickman can expose workers to radioactive materials, including a sludge where radioactive elements concentrate that collects inside pipes and so-called "pipe scale," or crusty deposits that also attract radioactive materials. The case ended in October 2016, following a long string of settlements on unspecified terms by individual plaintiffs in the case, public court records show.

OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURES to RADIOACTIVE SCALE and SLUDGE Coleman Et Al v H C (PDF)
OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURES to RADIOACTIVE SCALE and SLUDGE Coleman Et Al v H C (Text)

Tracking theTrucks

Nobel's Rolling Stone expos depicts radioactive drilling waste sloshing into a striking array of corners.

For example, to keep dust down, the "brine" can be spread on roads, like a stretch in Pennsylvania where Nobel describes a group of Amish girls strolling barefoot. Nobel adds that contractors pick up waste directly from the wellhead and that in 2016 alone, more than 10.5 million gallons were sprayed on roads in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania.

The waste has also been sold at Lowe's, bottled as "AquaSalina" and marketed as a pet-safe way to fight ice and salt, though an Ohio state lab found it contains radium at more than 40 times the levels the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows in discharge from industry. And the radium-laced waste is spilled from trucks transporting it, in potential what the article indicates may be a violation of federal law.

One brine truck driver, identified only as a man named Peter from Ohio, started taking his own samples after being told by another worker with a radiation detector that he'd been hauling "one of the 'hottest loads' he'd ever seen," Rolling Stone reports. "A lot of guys are coming up with cancer, or sores and skin lesions that take months to heal," Peter told the magazine. Tests by a university lab found radium levels as high as 8,500 picocuries per liter, the article adds.

One expert, scientist Marvin Reisnikoff, who'd served as one of the plaintiff's experts in the lawsuit brought by the Louisiana oilfield workers and co-authored the 2013 report, told Rolling Stone that a standard brine truck rolling through Pennsylvania might be carrying radioactive wastewater at levels a thousand times higher than those allowed under federal Department of Transportation (DOT) limits. But, a DOT spokesperson told Rolling Stone, federal regulators rely heavily on industry self-reporting, and the rules seem generally unenforced.

Environmental groups immediately called for congressional hearings into the drilling industry's radioactive wastes.

"This alarming report brings into stark relief what we already knew to be true," Food & Water Watch Policy Director Mitch Jones said in a statement calling for a congressional investigation, "that highly toxic and radioactive waste generated by fossil fuel drilling and fracking cannot be stored or disposed of safely, and in fact is often being intentionally dispersed in our communities."

"It is imperative that Congress hold hearings soon to examine and expose the full extent of the threat oil and gas waste poses to families and workers throughout America," he added, "and take urgent action to halt fracking and the legal and illegal dispersal of the waste currently taking place."

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Scientists Combine AI With Biology to Create Xenobots, the World's First 'Living Robots' - EcoWatch

A nearly invisible bite delivered by a tiny mosquito has the capacity to trigger the fear of dengue in a human being who is millions of times larger than the insect. Such is the deadliness of the disease. However, one may not have to be harrowed by the fear of contracting the disease anymore.

In an effort to combat the spread of dengue, and counter the virus causing it, scientists at CSIRO, and the University of California San Diego have created a breed of genetically modified mosquito that is resistant to spreading all the four serotypes of the disease.

Talking about the research that is the first engineered approach towards targeting all the four serotypes, Dr Prasad Paradkar, senior research scientist, said in a statement, "In this study we used recent advances in genetic engineering technologies to successfully genetically modify a mosquito, the Aedes aegypti, with reduced ability to acquire and transmit the dengue virus."

Why genetically engineer a mosquito?

Over 390 million people are infected with dengue every year. It is caused by the Dengue virusDENV. Mosquitoes are the only known vectors carrying the disease, only other exception being transmission from mother to foetus. The virus has four serotypes: DENV1, DENV2, DENV3 and DENV4. Therefore, an individual can contract the disease four times due to the prevalence of four distinct strains.

Over half of the world population is at the risk of infection, and the rate of infection has seen an alarming rise over the years. Globally, nearly be $40 billion are lost as a result of dengue every year. This the primary motivation behind the development of the new mosquito, as a resistant vector will be unable to carry the virus.

"Mosquito-transmitted viruses are expected to climb over the coming years, which is why CSIRO is focussed on developing new ways to help solve this global challenge," said Paradkar.

Unlike previous attempts at synthetically engineering mosquitoes that were limited by the ability to target only one or two of the major serotypes, this breed of mosquito has shown the ability to resist all the four. As the scientists point out, this presents the future potential to fight all forms of mosquito-borne illnesses.

"This breakthrough work also has the potential to have broader impacts on controlling other mosquito-transmitted viruses," said Omar Akbari, co-author of the study.

Akbari also added that the research is in the preliminary stages of testing procedures to simultaneously negate mosquitoes against dengue and an array of mosquito-borne viruses such as chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever.

The disease is typically characterised by symptoms such as severe fever, muscle aches, and headaches. More severe forms of the disease can cause shock, vomiting, haemorrhage, and sometimes, death.

There is no known treatment for specific neutralisation of the disease. Also, there are no vaccinations available against the disease. Treatment includes prescription of drugs such as acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol, to soothe the pain. Hydration through intake of fluids and occasionally intravenously is another remedy.

Stressing on this immediate need for a cure, Paradkar concluded, "There is a pressing global demand for effective strategies to control the mosquitoes that spread the dengue virus, as there are currently no known treatments and the vaccine that is available is only partially effective."

Originally posted here:
Dengue breakthrough: Scientists develop genetically engineered mosquito to combat the disease - International Business Times, Singapore Edition

There are many pressing areas in need of fresh theological thinking in light of a rapidly changing world. The redefinition of family, the nature of sexual identity, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering

and the digital church.

One of the more pressing concerns will be how much tech can and should be used and how in light of an orthodox and robust ecclesiology. Is someone considered attending if its through an internet connection and a virtual reality (VR) headset? Is it appropriate to perform a digital baptism where avatars are immersed in water? What of a completely computer-generated church using VR and augmented reality (AR)? Which, I might add, already exists.

On the most basic of levels, what is to be thought when people participate through an online service but consider themselves a part of a churchthe so-called bedside Baptists and pillow Presbyterians? Or using apps to attend digital events and enter into corporate prayer through emojis and avatars?

There will be a knee-jerk reaction against such innovations, but there can be little doubt that a new way of doing and being church is being forged through technological innovation and an increasingly digital world. In other words, instead of a knee-jerk negative reaction out of distaste or stylistic preference, it demands vigorous theological reflection that takes the digital revolution seriously.

A single blog is grossly insufficient to tackle this task, but perhaps I could suggest one way of thinking about one of the many questions being raised: If someone is involved in an online campus, should they be encouraged to participate in the Lords Supper as they watch?

Again, this is not about a full-blown theology of the online church, much less the only kind of question that can be raised. So lets just treat it as a sample question in need of theological reflection in light of the digital revolution.

My own conclusion? A qualified yes.

When I was in seminary and pastor of a county-seat First Baptist Church, one of the more meaningful ministries of the deacons was taking communion to shut-ins (I dont know whether shut-ins is still the correct term, but that is what we called them.). We offered communion, or the Lords Supper, once a month. We had members of the church who were physically unable to attendthey were in the hospital, in a nursing home, or in their own homes, but not able to physically leave.

So on Sunday afternoons, following the Sunday morning services that we had communion, the deacons of the church fanned out across our little town and brought a communion kit with bread and grape juice to those people so they could also partake.

The deacons spent a few minutes talking with them, read scripture and prayed, reminded them of the churchs love and concern for them, and then shared the bread and the juice with them. It was beautiful and so much the epitome of the church and the sacrament.

And theologically, what could possibly be the problem? They were members/attenders of the church, unable to physically attend and we, as the church, went to them on the days we celebrated communion to include them in the spirit of community and joint celebration of the sacrament.

Fast forward.

Youre celebrating communion as a church in the 2020s, and you have people unable to attend in person who are joining you online. They may be in a hospital, in a nursing home, a shut-in, traveling on business in a hotel room, on vacation and watching as a family, or living in a place where they have no church home and the online service has been their lifelinebecoming the only church home they are able to have.

What do you do?

Could you use the same theological and ecclesiastical reasoning that was applied by my former church?

What if an online campus pastor were to say, For those of you joining us online who cannot be with us physically, go get a bit of bread and some juice or wine, and when we partake as a church, join us as part of that community.

Why is that different from deacons taking it to them?

Today its just the internet taking it to them and they self-serve the elements. Its still done in full honor of the sacrament, under the leadership of pastors, under the authority of the church and in the spirit of community.

So are there limits to online participation in such things as the sacraments? I would argue that there are. Take, for example, baptism. Do we say, For those of you watching online, feel free to fill your bathtub and baptize yourself as we perform the sacrament of baptism as part of this service?

Heavens, no. Why? Because the goal is to think about each and every question being raised by the digital revolution and the online church both biblically and theologically. And the nature of the sacrament of baptism is that it is meant to be a public profession of faith. That means in front of other people. Its for this same reason that you cannot marry yourself. When a couple marries they make public vows, and it is the public nature of the vows that matters.

Such conclusions may not satisfy everyone, nor do they reflect the way to think theologically about all aspects of the online church. Each will bring its own set of unique theological challenges. But perhaps this shows how we are going to have to reflect, and reflect deeply, about the digital world and the churchs operation in that digital world.

These three things I know: We cannot bury our head in the sand as if there are no new questions being posed to the doctrine of the church (there are); we cannot march blindly forward into the digital world as if theology doesnt matter (it does); and we cannot restrain all ecclesiastical innovation as if there hasnt been a digital revolution

(because there has).

James Emery White

Sources

Dalvin Brown, Online Church: Ministries Use VR, Apps to Deliver Digital Services and Virtual Baptisms, USA Today, December 27, 2019, read online.

About the Author

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and the ranked adjunct professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president.His newest book,Christianity for People Who Arent Christians: Uncommon Answers to Common Questions, is nowavailable on Amazonor at your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit ChurchAndCulture.org, where you can view past blogs in our archive and read the latest church and culture news from around the world.Follow Dr. White onTwitter,FacebookandInstagram.

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Online Communion? Theology and the Digital Church - Dr. James Emery White Christian Blog - Crosswalk.com

The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft that ferried musclebound mice to the International Space Station and back can be seen at the top of this picture taken from the station on Dec. 20, 2019. NASA hide caption

The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft that ferried musclebound mice to the International Space Station and back can be seen at the top of this picture taken from the station on Dec. 20, 2019.

In early December at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, two anxious scientists were about to send 20 years of research into orbit.

"I feel like our heart and soul is going up in that thing," Dr. Emily Germain-Lee told her husband, Dr. Se-Jin Lee, as they waited arm-in-arm for a SpaceX rocket to launch.

A few seconds later the spacecraft took off, transporting some very unusual mice to the International Space Station, where they would spend more than a month in near zero gravity.

Ordinarily, that would cause the animals' bones to weaken and their muscles to atrophy. But Lee and Germain-Lee, a power couple in the research world, were hoping that wouldn't happen with these mice.

"It was worth waiting 20 years for," Lee said as the Falcon 9 rocket headed toward space. "And someday it may really help people," Germain-Lee added.

The couple hope that what they learn from these mice will lead to new treatments for millions of people with conditions that weaken muscles and bones. Among those who might eventually benefit: children with muscular dystrophy or brittle bone disease, cancer patients with muscle wasting, bedridden patients recovering from hip fractures, older people whose bones and muscles have become dangerously weak, and astronauts on long space voyages.

Dr. Emily Germain-Lee and Dr. Se-Jin Lee waited eagerly at Kennedy Space Center for a SpaceX rocket to launch their experimental mice into space in December. Courtesy of Jennifer Read hide caption

Dr. Emily Germain-Lee and Dr. Se-Jin Lee waited eagerly at Kennedy Space Center for a SpaceX rocket to launch their experimental mice into space in December.

For Lee and Germain-Lee, both professors at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, the launch represented a high point in a partnership that began in the late 1970s.

"We met when I was 18 and we were biochem majors in college together," Germain-Lee said.

The Harvard undergraduates clicked. And in those early years, Emily had a teenager's big dreams about what she and Se-Jin might accomplish.

"Wouldn't that be amazing if one day we worked on some project together that had incredible meaning and helped people," she recalled thinking. "All that stuff."

The couple went to medical school together at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

She went on to become a pediatric endocrinologist who treated children with rare bone disorders. He added a Ph.D. to his M.D. and started a lab that studied muscle growth.

Along the way, they got married and had a son. And in the late 1990s, Se-Jin Lee got kind of famous for helping to create some bulked-up rodents known as "mighty mice."

The mouse on the right has been engineered to have four times the muscle mass of a normal lab mouse.

Lee showed me one when I visited his lab in 2006. It had been genetically engineered to have about four times the muscle mass of a normal mouse.

Lee had altered the animal's genes so it wouldn't produce a protein called myostatin. Ordinarily, myostatin limits the growth of muscles. Without it, you get the mouse version of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"If you open up the mouse and actually look at the muscles it is really unbelievable," he told me. "These animals are almost getting to the point where they don't really look like mice." Lee thought his discovery might help people with diseases that weaken muscles. So he began looking for a drug that could block myostatin and duplicate the effects of genetic engineering.

Meanwhile, as Germain-Lee treated more and more children with bone diseases, she noticed that weak bones could lead to weak muscles.

"My bone patients don't escape muscle loss because they have long periods of time where they can't move or their whole lifetime where they're wheelchair bound," she said.

And because she also sees patients with diseases like muscular dystrophy, she realized it could work the other way. "Any muscle disease leads to weakness and any weakness leads to bone fragility eventually," Germain-Lee said.

At home, the couple spent many evenings discussing muscle, bone, her patients and his work on myostatin.

"Probably most people would think we're really odd," Germain-Lee said. "But it's given great meaning to our life."

Over the years, they realized that what many patients really needed was a way to simultaneously strengthen muscle and bone. And remarkably, they eventually identified a drug with the potential to do that.

It's a substance that affects not only myostatin, but also a protein called activin, which is involved in the growth of both muscle and bone. And it would bring together the parallel lines of research each scientist had been following for decades.

Germain-Lee wanted to test the drug on mice in her lab that developed a version of osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease. "I said, oh my gosh I really have to try this, and Se-Jin said sure," she said. "And those were the first set of experiments we did together."

The experiments, published in 2015, were successful. The mice developed both stronger bones and bigger muscles. And the results helped inspire Lee to revive an idea he'd been pursuing for two decades. It involved astronauts.

"Astronauts in space have lots of health things that they need to be thinking about," he said, "but certainly at the top of that list would be muscle loss and bone loss.

Without gravity, astronauts can lose up to 20 percent of their muscle mass in less than two weeks, according to research by NASA. And as muscles atrophy, bones begin to weaken too.

So starting in the late 1990s, Lee had approached NASA about funding an experiment to see whether his mighty mice maintained their muscles in space. But his efforts to interest the agency in the project "failed miserably," he said.

That changed after the couple had moved to Hartford, where, in addition to their faculty posts at the University of Connecticut, Germain Lee holds an appointment at Connecticut Children's Medical Center and Lee works at The Jackson Laboratory.

And it was through The Jackson Laboratory that Lee got a chance to send his mighty mice to the International Space Station.

In late 2018, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which manages the International Space Station, contacted The Jackson Laboratory about potential science projects. And Lee's new employer suggested the mighty mice.

Lee and Germain-Lee quickly assembled an experiment that included not only the bulked up rodents, but normal mice that would receive the drug that (on earth) builds both muscle and bone.

The mice, which had gone into orbit in December, were brought back to earth in early January. And since then, Lee and Germain-Lee have been hard at work analyzing what happened to the animals' muscles and bones.

It will take months to know for sure whether any of the mice were able to defy the usual effects of weightlessness. Also scientists rarely discuss experiments before they're published.

But the couple says preliminary results look promising.

Read more here:
Mighty Mice In Space May Help Disabled People On Earth : Shots - Health News - NPR

ARTS WORK IN THE AGE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY: SHAPING OUR GENETIC FUTURES

Through Sunday, March 15

The Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh

Where do we draw the lines dividing art from science, natural from unnatural, and boldness from hubris?

An exhibit at N.C. States Gregg Museum of Art & Design doesnt answer these questions. Instead, it offers head-spinning new ways to ask them at the nexus of art and biotechnology, sharpening our insight into the fields future and expanding our understanding of it into the past.

These hard-to-classify collaborations between artists and scientistsseethe with hot-button issues related to ethics, privacy, human nature, and more. But if they have one message in common, its to be careful what you wish for.

Arts Work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures is the result of more than two years of planning led by Molly Renda, the exhibit program librarian at N.C. State University Libraries, and the universitys Genetic Engineering and Society Center. Guest-curated by Hannah Star Rogers, who studies the intersection of art and science, the main exhibit at the Gregg has annexes in Hill and Hunt libraries.

On a recent tour of the exhibit, Renda and Fred Gould, the co-director of the GESC, said that they wanted to bring artists into the welter of science-and-design innovation taking place at the university because their differing perspectives on fundamental human issues create balance, tension, and discovery.

In the course of this, Ive found that artists tend to be more dystopian and designers are more utopian, Renda says.

There are different ways of knowing things, Gould adds. Thats why Molly came up with the name: not artwork, but arts work. What is an artist supposed to do?

Some pieces take on the dangers of day-after-tomorrow DNA testing and engineering technology. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is best known for Probably Chelsea, a piece in which she collected DNA samples from Chelsea Manning and generated thirty-two possible portraits of the soldier and activist.

When we worry about biotechnology, we usually worry that our food is going to be dangerous. But sometimes you wish for something thats rare: What happens when biotechnology makes it available to you?

The Gregg is showing a similar piece in which Dewey-Hagborg harvested DNA from cigarette butts and gum she found on the street and created probablebut not definitereplicas of the litterers faces, which hang on the walls above the specimens. Dewey-Hagborg demonstrates not only the unnerving extent of whats currently possible with DNA testing, but also the limits, which create misidentification risks.

Other pieces probe how biotechnology might reshape life as we know it. In a film and a sculpture representing an ancient Greek rite for women, Charlotte Jarvis raises the possibility of creating female sperm, based on the idea that, because stem cells are undifferentiated, you could theoretically teach womens stem cells to develop into sperm.

Still other pieces pointedly poke holes in the boundary between science and art. Adam Zaretskys Errorarium (entitled "Bipolar Flowers")looks like a cross between an arcade cabinet and a terrarium. It houses a few genetically modified Arabidopsis specimens, which Gould calls the white mice of research plants. When you turn the knobs, it changes the sonic parameters of a synthesizer, notionally testing the effects of the sound on the mutant plants.

It doesnt really do anythingor does it? Zaretskys experiment with no hypothesis is a playful tweak on science with something a little dangerous in the background.

Joe Davis, a bio-art pioneer, touches on something similar in his piece, which consists of documentation of an experiment where mice roll dice to determine if luck can be bred. Renda says that Davis couldnt get permission to run the test (universities are wary of drawing attention for ridiculous-seeming experiments), so he did it as conceptual art at N.C. State, instead.

Its notable that two artists home in on luck, one of many human concepts that genetic engineering, which will allow us to take control of our bodies and environment in untested ways, will transform. In We Make Our Own Luck Here, Ciara Redmond has bred four-leaf clovers (without genetic modification), which ruins themtheyrelucks evidence, not its cause. This whimsical iteration of unconsidered consequences raises a serious question: What else are we not thinking of?

When we worry about biotechnology, we usually worry that our food is going to be dangerous, Gould says. But sometimes you wish for something thats rare: What happens when biotechnology makes it available to you?

The exhibit takes an expansive view of biotechnology. Maria McKinney uses semen-extraction straws to sculpt proteins from double-muscled breeding bulls, underscoring that weve been tampering with life since long before CRISPR. Biotech feels radically new, but its revealed as part of a centuries-long process.

Another part of the exhibit, which closed at the end of October but can still be experienced through virtual reality at the Gregg, was From Teosinte to Tomorrow, Rendas land-art project at the North Carolina Museum of Art. In what was essentially a walk back through agricultural history, a bed of teosinte, which is thought to be the ancestor of modern maize, waited at the center of a corn maze.

That teosinte was in some sense genetically enhanced by subsistence farmers in Mexico since the time of the Aztecs, Gould says. Now were doing it in the laboratory with the same genesso whats the difference? Arts work is to make us think and question.

Contact arts and culture editor Brian Howe at bhowe@indyweek.com

Support independent local journalism.Join the INDY Press Clubto help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.

Original post:
At the Crossroads of Art and Biotech, a Warning: Be Careful What You Wish For. - INDY Week

Despite the fact that Donald Trump's government is determined to continue sanctioning Cuba - the charter flights from the U.S. to nine Cuban airports were suspended last week because of the country's support for Maduro's regime, according to statements by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - the collaboration between the United States and the island continues, at least on scientific matters. And this should not surprise us, taking into account the great medical advances made by Cuban professionals in the treatment of various types of cancer.

This is what we'll be able to witness in "Cuba's Cancer Hope," a documentary by Llew Smith that will be released next April by PBS and that sheds light on CimaVax, a revolutionary treatment against lung cancer that prolongs the life of patients in very advanced stages and that the Center of Molecular Immunology (CIM) in Habana has taken more than twenty years to develop.

In fact, the results are so encouraging that the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York soon joined the project and will be the first U.S. institution to conduct a clinical trial of the drug produced on the island.

"The future of our country must necessarily be a future of men of science and thought, because that is precisely what we are sowing most," Fidel Castro, 1960.

Llew Smith himself was one of the volunteers to test this pioneering treatment, according to Prensa Latina, and his results, which were made known two years ago, will be part of the documentary.

"The wonderful thing about working with our Cuban colleagues is that they really believe, in their heart of hearts, that medical care is a human right," said Dr. Kevin Lee, director of the Roswell Park immunology department, in a dialogue with the press, praising the medical advances being made in Cuba and its "great potential to treat and prevent cancer of various kinds."

Cuba a pioneer in science

Biotechnology is one of the most developed branches of Cuban science, which began to be promoted in 1980, when Fidel Castro's government created a group dedicated to the production of interphenon, a possible cancer drug, in addition to promoting scientific parks.

This is a commitment to progress that the current president of Cuba, Miguel Daz-Canel Bermdez, acknowledged to Castro on the occasion of the documentary, and which the late revolutionary leader already advocated in a speech made in 1960when he said:

"The future of our country must necessarily be a future of men of science and thoughtbecause that is precisely what we are sowing most."

But the CimaVax is not the only discovery of Cuban scientists, whose achievements can be traced in the history of the island:

In 1881, the scientist Carlos Juan Finlay was the discoverer of the agent that transmits yellow fever, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which made it possible to clean up the areas invaded by this infectious agent and which, in the end, has prevented millions of deaths.

"The wonderful thing about working with our Cuban colleagues is that they truly believe, deep in their hearts, that medical care is a human right," Dr. Kevin Lee from Roswell Park.

Also at Cuba's Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), Heberprot-P was developed, a unique drug that prevents the amputation of diabetic feet by healing ulcers.

In addition, Cuba was recognized by WHO as the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

The documentary "Cuba's Cancer Hope" also includes other therapies being experimented with on the island, specifically for the treatment of different types of cancer, which once again confirms thatscientific advances are breaking down the walls that apparently separate us.

See the original post:
Cuba's revolutionary cancer vaccine builds bridges between the island and the United States - AL DIA News

Although China Agricultural Universitys Li Ning denies embezzling millions of yuan in research funds, a Chinese court ruled last week (January 3) that he is guilty, levying a sentence of 12 years in prison and a fine of 3 million yuan, Naturereports. Lis former assistant, Zhang Lei, aided in the criminal activity, the court found. Zhang, who admitted to the charges, was sentenced to more than 5 years in prison and fined 200,000 yuan.

Between July 2008 and February 2012, Li, famous for his work in animal cloning and genetic modification, took 34.1 million yuan ($4.9 million) in grant money and invested it in companies that he and Zhang had set up to receive the funds, the court found. Li testified that he intended to use the money to support his labs research through a funding gap the resulted from the governments requirement to return unused grant money at the end of the year before applying for new grants in January.

Yuan Chenghui, Lis lawyer, tells the South China Morning Post that Li may appeal.

The conviction and sentencing come after a hearing in late December, five years after Li was arrested in the fall of 2014. In December 2018, more than a dozen members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Sciences petitioned the president of the Supreme Peoples Court of China to rule on Lis case. They praised Lis research and appealed for clemency.

Several other researchers in the country also claimed that the requirement to return unused funds at the end of the year posed a cash-flow problem as they reapplied for new grants each year, and some took a similar tack as Li and Zhang by trying to squirrel some of the money away, according to the South China Morning Post. Indeed, Li and Zhang were not the only Chinese researchers arrested in 2014 for misusing research funds. This requirement of returning unused money has since been relaxed, Naturereports.

Wei Qi, a retired researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, tells the South China Morning Post that the sentence was too severe for a researcher who had made major scientific contributionscontributions that Li claimed at trial had contributed tens of billions of yuan economic benefits to the nation. An anonymous scientist who also spoke with the newspaperlamented that [t]welve years is effectively a death penalty for his academic life.

Last month (December 30, the same day as Lis hearing), He Jiankui, who drew widespread criticism from the global scientific community after creating the worlds first gene-edited babies, received a three-year prison sentence and a 3 million yuan fine.

Jef Akst is managing editor ofThe Scientist. Email her atjakst@the-scientist.com.

See the original post here:
Cloning Scientist Sentenced to 12 Years in Prison - The Scientist

(MENAFN - Ameliorate Solutions)

The report presents an in-depth assessment of the Global Red Biotechnology including enabling technologies, key trends, market drivers, challenges, standardization, regulatory landscape, deployment models, operator case studies, opportunities, future roadmap, value chain, ecosystem player profiles and strategies. The report also presents forecasts for Global Red Biotechnology investments from 2020 till 2025.

Industry Overview-

The Red Biotechnology Market is expected to register a CAGR of 5.7% during the forecast period. Red biotechnology is a process that utilizes organisms to improve health and helps the body to fight against diseases. Red biotechnology has become a very important part of the field of diagnostics, gene therapy, and clinical research and trials. Genetic engineering and the development and production of various new medicinal products to treat life-threatening diseases are also part of the benefits of red biotechnology. Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID) and Adenosine deaminase (ADA) deficiency are genetic disorders that were successfully treated with gene therapy. Several promising gene therapies are under development for the treatment of cancer and genetic disorders. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 6,000 to 8,000 rare diseases found and out of them, nearly 80% are genetic disorders. Rising incidence and prevalence of chronic and rare diseases and increased funding in the healthcare industry are the key driving factors in the red biotechnology market.

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Pfizer Inc, AstraZeneca PLC, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, Celgene Corporation, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Biogen Inc, Amgen Inc, Gilead Sciences Inc, Merck KGaA, CSL Limited

Biopharmaceutical Industry Segment is Expected to Hold a Major Market Share in the Red biotechnology Market

- Biopharmaceuticals are medical drugs that are produced by using biotechnology. Biopharmaceuticals are proteins, antibodies, DNA, RNA or antisense oligonucleotides used for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes, and these products are produced by means other than direct extraction from a native (non-engineered) biological source.- The first biopharmaceutical product approved for therapeutic use was recombinant human insulin (Humulin), which was developed by Genentech and marketed by Eli Lily in the year 1982 and in the year 2019, Novartis received FDA approval for gene therapy product in the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) condition. Using an AAV9 viral vector, called Zolgensma, which delivers SMN protein into the motor neurons of afflicted patients.- According to the World Health Organization (WHO), globally Cancer is the second leading cause of death and an estimated 9.6 million deaths in the year 2018.- Increasing incidence and prevalence of chronic and rare diseases and rapid expansion of the biopharmaceutical industries are the key driving factors in the biopharmaceutical industry segment.

North America is Expected to Hold a Significant Share in the Market and Expected to do Same in the Forecast Period

North America expected to hold a major market share in the global red biotechnology market due to the rising prevalence of chronic and rare diseases, increased expenditure in the healthcare industry in this region. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in the year 2019, approximately 1.8 million people will be diagnosed with cancer in the United States and estimated 268,600 women and 2,670 men will be diagnosed with breast cancer. Moreover, the rise in the adoption of advanced technologies in gene therapy and increasing investments in research and development is fueling the growth of the overall regional market to a large extent.

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Red Biotechnology Market Size, Status and Recent Advancements, Forecast 2020 to 2025 - MENAFN.COM

How food and beverage marketing claims can affect the production process | 2020-01-17 | Food Engineering This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more. This Website Uses CookiesBy closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Learn MoreThis website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.

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How food and beverage marketing claims can affect the production process - Food Engineering Magazine

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Bengaluru: Scientists and biotechnology experts from around the world have written two open letters to the Stanford University and the University of California-Santa Cruz (UC-SC) protesting invitations extended to Indian anti-biotechnology activist Vandana Shiva to speak on equitable and sustainable farming methods.

The letters raise concern about Shivas constant use of anti-scientific rhetoric to support unethical positions. They also lay out some of her earlier positions on farming and comments which the experts believe are factually incorrect.

Shiva is a prominent proponent of land redistribution and farmers rights, besides Ayurveda and organic foods. She has been accused of being funded by organic food companies to speak out against conventional agriculture practices.

Known as one of the staunchest critics of genetically modified organisms (GMO), she claims them to be toxic for human consumption a stance that has attractedstrong criticism from the scientific community.

GMOs are widely considered safe and endorsed by most scientific and medical bodies across the world.

Shiva has also been profiled by The New Yorker in an article titled Seeds of Doubt by Michael Specter. The piece is an attempt too debunk her claims.

She has also spoken out against the company Monsanto, which has been accused of engaging in predatory practices while funding genetic and cancer research as well as protecting its seed patents.

ThePrint tried to get in touch with Shiva and both the universities via emails. This report will be updated if and when replies are received.

Also read: A post-chemical world is building as agribusinesses go green

Calling Shivas philosophy unscientific and anti-social, the letter addressed to Stanford cites some ironies associated with Shiva being invited by the institution.

The first concerns Shivas invitation having come from Students for a Sustainable Stanford, because her views are demonstrably, unequivocally anti-sustainable. Her ideas on farming would relegate it to a primitive, low-yielding, wasteful activity.

It goes on to read: Second, the co-discoverer in 1973 of recombinant DNA technology, the prototypic, iconic molecular technique for genetic engineering, was Stanford biochemist Dr. Stanley N. Cohen, who is still a professor of genetics and medicine at the university. Shivas appearance at Stanford is an affront to Professor Cohen and all of the universitys other scientists.

The letter also accuses Shiva of taking large honoraria for dispensing her mendacious and antisocial opinion.

The one addressed to UC-SC similarly expresses surprise that a science-based and ethically inspired institution has extended an invitation to her.

Read the full text of the letter to UC-SC below:

Dear Organizers and Professors,

We are scholars of life sciences and social sciences who have published many scholarly papers and articles about agriculture, food and related biotechnologies.

Perhaps you are unaware of Dr. Vandana Shivas constant use of anti-scientific rhetoric to support unethical positions. We are very surprised that any science-based and ethically inspired institution would invite her to speak.

Here are some (only some) examples of her prejudicial, anti-science, anti-social stances:

Her astonishing tendency to nonsense. See the absurd statement regarding the supposed functioning of the Genetic Use Restriction technology (GURT), from her book Stolen Harvest (p. 82-83):

Molecular biologists are examining the risk of the Terminator function escaping the genome of the crops into which it has been intentionally incorporated, and moving into surrounding open-pollinated crops or wild, related plants in fields nearby.Given Natures incredible adaptability and the fact that the technology has never been tested on a large scale, the possibility that the Terminator may spread to surrounding food crops or to the natural environment MUST be taken seriously. The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet.

One may need to read these statements twice, because they are too bewildering to be understood at first sight. In fact, she claims that sterile seeds which of course cannot germinate can spread sterility. A middle school student expressing such views would fail the biology exam.

Her stunning ignorance: Most #GMOs are #Bt toxin or #HT herbicide tolerant crops. Toxins are poisons. GMOs=Poison Producing Plants. Poisons have no place in food.

Somebody should explain to her that Bt proteins are toxic to some clearly identified classes of insects (plant pests), but not to fish, birds, mammals. See also the scientific papers quoted in response to her delusional post, in particular, a classic study which clarifies that plants naturally produce substances to defend themselves from pests and 99.99% of pesticidal substances in food are natural and harmless to humans.

Her proclivity to offend: Saying farmers should be free to grow GMOs which can contaminate organic farms is like saying rapists should have freedom to rape. She is comparing farmers, who grow crops which are scientifically and legally recognized as safe, to rapists! Its a grotesque insult to millions of honest workers who use modern technologies to farm sustainably and efficiently. Understandably, her outrageous abuse raised many angry reactions (see the replies to the same post).

Her rejection of technologies which help farmers (mostly women and children) to alleviate the painful, back-breaking labor of hand-weeding: Indian women selectively do weeding by hand, hereby preserving our biodiversity (Photo and caption at p. 21.) This is a preposterous statement; any act of weeding is exactly aimed at eliminating detrimental plant biodiversity which, in a field, stifles crops.

As a final treat, a ridiculous statement: Fertilizer should never have been allowed in agriculture, she said in a 2011 speech. I think its time to ban it. Its a weapon of mass destruction. Its use is like war, because it came from war. Let us ask her if she is going to ban metallurgy, since it has been used to forge cannons.

We are confident that our reasoned remarks will be seen by the addressees of this letter, by their colleagues and by students at UCSC as constructive criticism. We are afraid that none of us will be able to attend the event to challenge Dr. Shiva in person. We would appreciate if you can make our letter available to the participants.

Also read: Whats the fuss over the new variety of GM cotton that farmers are batting for

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Scientists write to US universities for inviting anti-science activist Vandana Shiva - ThePrint

There ismounting evidencethat a healthy soil microbiome protects plants from pests and diseases.One of the greatest natural assets that humankind has is soil. But when you drench it with proprietary synthetic chemicals or continuously monocrop as part of a corporate-controlled industrial farming system, you can kill essential microbes, upset soil balance and end up feeding soil a limiteddoughnut dietof unhealthy inputs.

Armed with their synthetic biocides, this is what the transnational agritech conglommerates do. These companies attempt to get various regulatory and policy-making bodies to bow before the altar of corporate science. But, in reality, they have limited insight into the long-term impacts their actions have on soil and itscomplex networksof microbes and microbiological processes. Soil microbiologists are themselves still trying to comprehend it all.

That much is clearwhen Linda Kinkelof the University of Minnesotas Department of Plant Pathology said back in 2014: We understand only a fraction of what microbes do to aid in plant growth.

And its the same where human soil is concerned.

People have a deep microbiological connection to soils and traditional processing and fermentation processes, which all affect the gut microbiome the up to six pounds of bacteria, viruses and microbes akin to human soil. And as with actual soil, the microbiome can become degraded according to what we ingest (or fail to ingest). Many nerve endings from major organs are located in the gut and the microbiome effectively nourishes them. There is ongoing research taking place into how the microbiome is disrupted by the modern globalised food production/processing system and the chemical bombardment it is subjected to.

The human microbiome is of vital importance to human health yet it is under chemical attack from agri-food giants and theiragrochemicals and food additives. As soon as we stopped eating locally-grown, traditionally-processed food, cultivated in healthy soils and began eating food subjected to chemical-laden cultivation and processing activities, we began to change ourselves. Along with cultural traditions surrounding food production and the seasons, we also lost our deep-rooted microbiological connection with our localities. It was traded in for corporate chemicals and seeds and global food chains dominated by the likes of Monsanto (now Bayer), Nestle and Cargill.

Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason says that glyphosate disrupts the shikimate pathway within these gut bacteria and is a strong chelator of essential minerals, such as cobalt, zinc, manganese, calcium, molybdenum and sulphate. In addition, it kills off beneficial gut bacteria and allows toxic bacteria to flourish. She adds that we are therefore facing a global metabolic health crisis linked to glyphosate.

Many key neurotransmitters are located in the gut. Aside from affecting the functioning of major organs, these transmitters affect our moods and thinking. There is strong evidence that gut bacteria can have a direct physical impact on the brain. Alterations in the composition of the gut microbiome have been implicated in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including autism, chronic pain, depression and Parkinsons Disease.

Recently published research indicates that glyphosate and Roundup are proven to disrupt gut microbiome by inhibiting the shikimate pathway.Dr Michael Antoniou of Kings College Londonhas found thatRoundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate cause a dramatic increase in the levels of two substances, shikimic acid and 3-dehydroshikimic acid, in the gut, which are a direct indication that the EPSPS enzyme of the shikimic acid pathway has been severely inhibited. The researchers found that Roundup and glyphosate affected the microbiome at all dose levels tested, causing shifts in bacterial populations.

This confirms what Mason has been highlighting for some time. However, she has also been pointing out the environmental degradation resulting from the spiralling use of glyphosate-based herbicides and has just written an open letter tothe Principal Fisheries Officer of Natural Resources Wales (NRW), Peter Gough (NRW is the environment agency for Wales).

The letter runs to 20 pages and focuses on glyphosate and neonicotinoid insecticides. She asks who would re-authorise a pesticide that istoxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects and is causing serious eye damage along with various forms of cancers and a wide range of other health conditions?

She answers her question by saying the European Glyphosate Task Force and Jean-Claude Juncker President of the EC along with various regulators in Europe who have basically capitulated to an industry agenda. Mason argues that the European Glyphosate Task Force (who actually did the re-assessment of glyphosate) omitted all the studies from South America where they had been growing GM Roundup Ready crops since 1996. She discusses the suppression of key research which indicated the harmful effects of glyphosate.

The Principal Fisheries Scientist Wales sent Mason two NRW Reports two years ago. In it, Mason discovered that giant hogweed on the River Usk bank had been treated with a glyphosate-based herbicide. NRW had also admitted to not studying the effects of neonicotinoids, which had been introduced in 1994. Mason pointed out to NRW that run-off from farms of clothianidin in seeds would be enough to kill off aquatic invertebrates.

In early January, NRW attempted to explain the absence of salmon and trout in the River Usk on climate change (warming of the river), rather than poisoning of the river, which is what Mason had warned the agency about two years ago.

In Britain, information on emerging water contaminants has been suppressed, according to Mason, and there is no monitoring of either neonics or glyphosate in surface or ground water. In the US, though, measurements of these chemicals have been carried out on farmland and their correlation with massive declines in invertebrates byseparate agenciesand universities in the US and Canada.

Mason notes there has been 70 years of poisoning the land with pesticides. Although the National Farmers Union and the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs in the UK say fewer pesticides are now being applied, the Soil Association indicates massive increases of increasing numbers of pesticides at decreasing intervals (official statistics obtained via a Freedom of Information request).

Readers should consult the full text of Masons open letter on theacamedia.edusite to gain wider insight into the issues outlined above and many more, such as government collusion with major agrochemical corporations, the shaping of official narratives on illness and disease to obscure the role of pesticides and Monsantos poisoning of Wales.

What Mason outlines is not specific to Wales or the UK; the increasing use of damaging agrochemicals and government collusion with the industry transcends national borders. Nation states are becoming increasingly obsolete and powerless in the face of globalised capitalist interests that seek to capture and exploit markets, especially in the Global South.

What follows is the e-mail that Mason sent to Peter Gough by way of introducing her letter to him.

Dear Peter,

The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified glyphosate as a substance that is toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects

Your colleague Dave Charlesworth declared on BBC 1 Breakfast last week that the declines in salmon and trout were due to climate change and warming of the rivers. I told you just over 2 years ago that it was due to pesticides and showed you the proof from assorted NRW documents you sent me.

Why are NRW, the government, top UK doctors, farmers, the corporations, the media and global pesticides regulators protecting the agrochemical industry? All of you could suffer from the effects of pesticides in food, in water, in the air and in rain. Why dont you inform the people?

Monsanto claims that Roundup doesnt affect humans, but their sealed secret studies that scientist Anthony Samsel obtained from the US EPA, shows evidence of cancers and that bioaccumulation of14C labelled glyphosate occurred in every organ of the body (page 9).

The NFU and Defra deny they are responsible for 70 years of poisoning the land and the subsequent insect apocalypse; they should read their own document Healthy Harvest.The National Farmers Union (NFU), the Crop Protection Association (CPA) and the Agricultural Industries Confederation (AIC) combined to lobby the EU not to restrict the 320+ pesticides available to them. The publication is called:HEALTHY HARVEST.[1](Pages 6-9)

The Department of Health and the Chief Medical Officer for England claim that parents are responsible for obesity in primary school children. However, Pesticides Action Network (PAN) analysed the Department of Healths Schools Fruit and Vegetable Scheme and found that there were residues of 123 pesticides in it,some of which are linked to serious health problems such as cancer and disruption of the hormone system.

When PAN informed them, they said that pesticides were not the concern of the DOH. (Page 14, 13-16).

Dr Don Huber, Emeritus Professor of Plant Pathology, Purdue University, US, speaking about GMO crops and glyphosate, said: Future historians may well look back upon our time and write, not about how many pounds of pesticide we did or didnt apply, but by how willing we are to sacrifice our children and future generations for this massive genetic engineering experiment that is based on flawed science and failed promises just to benefit the bottom line of a commercial enterprise. (Page 18)

Kind regards,

Rosemary

Read more:
Gone Fishing? No Fish but Plenty of Pesticides and a Public Health Crisis - CounterPunch

Jan 16th 2020

SINCE THE ancient Greeks, at least, people have recognised that civilisational progress tends to create havoc as well as opportunity. Economists have had little time for such concerns. To them, technological progress is the wellspring of long-run growth, and the only interesting question is how best to coax more innovation out of the system. But in the face of looming social challenges, from climate change to inequality, some are now asking whether, when it comes to innovation, what sort is as relevant as how much.

Early models of growth did not explain technological progress at all, treating it rather like manna from heaven. In the 1980s some economists worked to build endogenous-growth models that said where innovation came from. They explained it as the consequence of investment in research and development, increases in the stock of human capital, or the (temporary) extra profits that can be reaped by firms with new technologies. Other economists have focused more on data than on theory. Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation, a paper published in 2018 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, identifies factors that seem to encourage young people to become innovators. Children who grow up where innovation rates are high, for instance, are more likely to become inventors themselves.

Research has also made clear, however, that technological discovery is not linear, but veers about depending on economic conditions. Some economic historians reckon that early industrialisation was motivated by a desire to replace scarce resources, such as skilled labour, with abundant ones, such as unskilled labour and coal. Early inventors were not simply discovering natures truths one by one, in other words, but trying to solve specific problems. Work on such technological bias blossomed in the 1990s as economists sought to explain why the wage premium earned by college graduates kept rising even as the supply of graduates increased. The answer, some reckoned, was that technological change in the 20th century was skill-biased, boosting the productivity of workers with degrees, but not of others.

In a paper published in 2001, Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology collected these strands in a model of directed technical change. Technological progress, he suggested, is influenced by the relative scarcity of factors such as labour and capital; by how easily one factor can be substituted for another; and by the path of past innovation. Research on a particular technology may reduce the cost of developing complementary innovations in future. Directed technical change is fascinating to contemplate because it allows for alternative technological futures: worlds in which firms wring every efficiency from Zeppelins and pneumatic tubes, rather than from internal-combustion engines and Twitter. If the direction of progress is not set in stone, policy choices could lead an economy down one technological path rather than another. That raises an immediate question: if innovation can be steered, should it be, and if so, how?

Since 2000, published work on directed technical change has focused largely on environmental challenges. Path dependence means that research on fossil-fuel technologies can often be more fertile than research on cleaner alternatives. There are more experts in the relevant disciplines, better-funded research labs and an established complementary economic infrastructure. Efficient decarbonisation might thus require subsidies for clean-energy research, as well as a carbon price. Indeed, efforts to slow global warming represent a massive attempt to realise one technological futurea zero-carbon versionrather than another.

Why stop there? Some futurists, and a few economists, worry that rapid progress in artificial intelligence could lead to mass displacement of labour and social crisis. But in a recent paper Anton Korinek of the University of Virginia notes that not all uses of AI are alike. Clever machines could indeed replace human workersor might instead be engineered to assist human labour: to help people navigate complicated processes or take difficult decisions. Private firms, focused on their bottom lines rather than the potential knock-on effects of their investment decisions, might be indifferent between the two approaches in the absence of a government nudge, just as polluting firms tend not to worry about the social costs of environmental harm unless made to do so by governments. In a working paper co-written with Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, Mr Korinek concludes that directing technical change to favour labour-assisting rather than labour-displacing forms of AI could be a second-best way to manage progress, if governments cannot sufficiently redistribute the gains from automation from winners to losers. This may sound far-fetched, but policy proposals such as Bill Gatess suggestion that robots should be taxed to slow the pace of automation represent steps toward a more micromanaged technological future.

Environmental policies aside, such steps seem premature. A more sophisticated view of technological progress is to be welcomed. But economics lacks the tools, at least for now, to judge which technological path is preferable. The world is too complex to allow economists to compare hypothetical technological futures: to know whether a Zeppelin-based society would operate more efficiently overall than a car-based one. Economists cannot know what surprises lie down one innovation path rather than another.

And questions of technology are not solely, or even mostly, about efficiency. Many are ethical. Innovations with overwhelming productivity advantages could prove devastating to social trust or equity. In the face of radical technological changein AI, robotics and genetic engineeringsocieties will inevitably argue over which technological paths should be explored. Economists views belong in these conversationsprovided they are crafted with humility and care.

This article appeared in the Finance and economics section of the print edition under the headline "Economists explore the consequences of steering technological progress"

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Economists explore the consequences of steering technological progress - The Economist