June 07, 2004

• Great (if depressing) story. Thanks, and I hope you post the followup stories in this thread.
• Reminds me of a news article I read a little while ago, about an executive who founded a biotech company with his own money in order to research a cure for a rare disease his own children had. Eventually they came up with some promising data, and were faced with the decision of whether to go forward themselves, or let themselves be bought by a larger firm with more resources and experience in bringing drugs through approval. Meanwhile, the executive's children were going downhill fast. The father decided to sell his company, so the cure would be available sooner for his children. Development on the cure was finished. It was time for human trials. The executive's children were in dire straits... and he couldn't get the drug his own company discovered, the drug he founded the company to research, for his own children. Somehow this was considered too suspicious by the new parent company. Somehow they reasoned that this would possibly bias the trials. They were going to trial the drug on someone suffering the disease, it didn't really matter who in the least, and there were only two possible outcomes. It would work or the sufferer would die of the disease, but it wouldn't involve the executive's children.
• The Dawn of McScience
• Here's a MeFi thread about the article Nal is talking about (it's from the WSJ so you have to be a subscriber.)
• Mali's people reap no reward from cloned wild-rice gene. News to follow, film at 11. (My most sincere and profound apologies to the good people of Mali, naturally.)
• Part 2: Globe-trotting genes. Welcome or not, modified strains pop up in crops near and far.
• That's no surprise; the rhetoric around helping the poor is as empty and a Monsanto excustive's soul. Even if I though it was sincere, I would point to the history of the "green revolution" in the sixties, with high-yield strains of plants being introduced to third world farmers to replace their lower yielding varieties. The results were almost uniformly awful; high-yield Western strains of many staples turn out to require a huge investment in Western techniques to maintain, meaning expensive fertilizer, mechanisation, and so on, and to be very susceptible to disease and pests. The lower yield crops were a lot hardier; it all ended in tears.
• Part 3: Biotech industry funds bumper crop of UC Davis research World battles over biotech firms in S.F.
• At least 25 arrested in biotech protests
• Part 4: Scattered efforts "California is home to the nation's most diverse and valuable agricultural industry and a center of organic farming. Its cornucopia of crops can be bound for biotech-wary markets in Japan or Europe. The smallest genetic mistake could send customers fleeing. Yet California takes almost no role in regulating genetically engineered crops or food."
• U.S. bioterrorism research leaps past defensive tactics
• Part 5: Grocery quandary "A decade since the debut of gene-spliced food, biotechnology is a dominant presence in world agriculture. But the distribution of biotech foods is uneven. Dancing around deeply divided opinions over the technology's health and environmental safety, and over its social and economic effects, the global food industry approaches genetic engineering with a double standard.
• Here's another great series the SacBee did, this one on California's impact on the global environment: State of Denial.
• Food Makers Changing Genes
• The open-source model is a good way to produce software, as the example of Linux shows. Could the same collaborative approach now revitalise medical research too?
• Thanks for all these articles. I was having a long discussion/argument with my fiance the other day about GM and biotechnology. He was saying that too much of the anti-GM lobbying was based on fear-mongering and images of 'frankenfoods' with little attention paid to the actual scientific and social issues, whereas I was trying to point out that there are scientific and social problems inherent in many of the current GM products, just as rogerd points out happened with the 'Green Revolution' crops - that they are dependent on Western techniques, produce more in the first season, but are less hardy and produce less from second generation seed, etc. But we were both right - even though scholars (and the SacBee) are talking about the issues that I brought up, the public are talking about frankenfoods, and I think that is undermining attempts to discuss the pros and cons of agricultural innovations sensibly.
• The protesters at a San Francisco biotech summit were scientifically illiterate and politically irrelevant. But they were also right.
• "The cosmic irony is that these people have tapped directly into the most profound and basic social truth of modern life. But rather than being energized by this connection, the sheer voltage of reality has them paralyzed. What they know in their hearts is that they are witnessing the ascendancy of the corporate capitalist model for controlling human behavior and ultimately human consciousness. These people correctly recognize that they are the subject of the most massive and sophisticated behavior modification campaign in human history -- a campaign that appears to be going splendidly. They have correctly identified BIO as a manifestation of this campaign, but have incorrectly targeted it as a causal agent. Biotechnology is much too young an industry to have any real control. The folks at BIO are simply the newest merchants on a very old trade route. The route itself is the product of powerful trade winds that blow at the behest of far more ancient market forces, forces that control transportation, energy, weapons and the ultimate power that resides with those who take and hold entire regions of the planet itself."
• Whoever controls the seed controls the food. And as a new film documents, the dangers of monoculture, industrial agriculture – and Monsanto – bode poorly for the future of food.
• Seeds of Deception
• Genetic Pollution
• 'Suicide Seeds' Could Spell Death of Peasant Agriculture, UN Meeting Told
• Monsanto Turns About on Terminator
• Terminating the "Terminator" Seed: Broken promises and sterile seeds could alter the lives of food producers
• Monsanto whistleblower says genetically engineered crops may cause disease.
• The Seed Gestapo And Third World Farmers
• Rice containing human genes approved by USDA
• Seeds of wisdom: Seed-savers and greens unite to challenge Monsanto's latest cash cow
• Seeds of ignorance: Investigative journalist reveals serious safety concerns about GM food