pronald

For a short 5 minute tour of Bill Gates tackling the controversy of GE crops, please see the blog ERV. Thanks for the plug ERV If you have 45 minutes, watch the entire video here. Bill is serious, sincere and a good speaker with important concepts to convey: The video starts about 11 minutes in.

> WASHINGTON- (AP) The leader of the United States Department of > Agriculture's National Institute for Food Research, Dr. Roger Beachy, > admitted that the release of last week's request for proposals (RFP) > from scientific researchers was "simply a gag to lighten the research…

A few years ago, next to a small barn converted into a winery, I noticed a flyer asking voters to support Measure M, an initiative in Sonoma county that sought to " prohibit the raising, growing, propagation, cultivation, sale, or distribution of most genetically engineered organisms." It pictured…

I try not to travel in the spring. Instead of the stale air of the airplane, I try to get out to the mountains, the beach, the garden or to the nearby foothills. Last weekend my daughter and I (who is 8 years old today), went for a walk. I thought she was strong enough to do the 5 mile hike in the…

Tomorrow's Table's Swiss-Gruyere pie made it to the pi day Pie Bake off finals. If you have time to peruse the entries, please do. Vote here.

For the 2010 Pi day bakeoff, I baked a Swiss chard-Gruyere pie. Shown here is the backdrop to our garden:a mural on the side of our barn, painted with California poppies, rice plants, sunflowers and (look closely) a red double helix. Artist: Jim McCall, Elastic Media. Here is the recipe:…

Check out this great post by Mary M on biofortifed. In it she reviews a new research paper that describes how the use of Bt could potentially save the lives of millions. You can download a video about the researchers and their work here. From Mary's post: "For some people, a great deal of the…

Science Magazine this week published the winners of this year's International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Self-Fertilization: Heiti Paves and Birger Ilau, Tallinn University of Technology Within its tiny white flowers, thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) does what most plants…

Thank you Bill Gates for your work on behalf of farmers and.... for blogging on our book, Tomorrow's Table! If you don't have time to read the full reviews, here are a few excerpts: "This is an important book for anyone who wants to learn about the science of seeds and the challenges faced by…

John Broder writes today in the New York Times that the uproar over the unauthorized release of hundreds of emails and recent revelations about a mistake in the IPCC report threatens to undermine decades of work and has badly damaged public trust in the scientific enterprise. Broder's interviews…

Check out this lovely commentary by Olivia Judson

Eggplants are found in many colors: green, white, purple, yellow, even striped. They are shaped like cucumbers or apples. They are eaten in Italy as melanzane alla parmigiana, in France as ratatouille, and in the Middle East as baba ghanoush. My husband Raoul usually grows Imperial Black Beauty,…

When I give lectures about the global food supply and the environment, often someone in the audience will comment that the best way to solve the problem is to quit producing so much food. I find this type of "Let 'em starve" approach quite horrific from a humanitarian view. It also makes no sense…

I hear it is snowing in 49 out of 50 states today. And this, just after the big snow in Washington. Is climate change to blame? According to climate scientists, we cannot extrapolate based on the events of 1 week. Still, even if we choose to discount the dramatic weather of this week, it is…

At the risk of offending half of the human race, I will say this: Men have no manners when it comes to cell phones. I am traveling this week with plenty of time to pay attention to strangers, not that I have much of a choice. In the airport, men have cell phones pressed to their ears relaying…

Hunkered down in an elegant hotel in Washington DC, watching the epic storm continue unabated, I cannot help but think of award winning author Kim Stanley Robinson's "Fifty Degrees Below", the second novel in his three-part trilogy. In this book, Washingtonians experience the most intense winter…

Applications for the UK awards opened yesterday for the 2010 awards, where four women will be awarded a £15,000 fellowship to help with the scientific research. The awards are now in their 12th Entries can be made online, with an awards ceremony held in June. The L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in…

Roger Beachy has been attacked by some who feel that his willingness to fund work at his non-profit institute with Monsanto money will bias his work as director of NIFA. John Tierney does not think so. Read his opinion piece

Read Emily Waltz' interview with Roger Beachy, the new director for the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the new research funding arm of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). What does Beachy's appoinment mean for researchers, farmers and consumers? Larger, longer grants with…

"Eating with the fullest pleasure- pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance- is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world". Wendell Berry

"Whether it's the science to slow global warming; the technology to protect our troops and confront bioterror and weapons of mass destruction; the research to find life-saving cures; or the innovations to remake our industries and create twenty-first century jobs--today, more than ever before,…

Last year, I attended a Food Symposium at the Mountainfilm festival in Telluride. Many of the speakers offered a simple solution to feeding the world in the face of a population that is expected to grow to 9.2 billion by the year 2050: Eat local. But how much impact will the "locavore" movement…

In an interview with The Times, Gordon Conway, Professor of International Development at Imperial College London and a former government adviser said that the ban on organic farmers using GM crops was based on an excessively rigid rejection of synthetic approaches to farming and a misconception…

Here are some options.

The plot thickens. Reuter's reports that DuPont submitted an 18-page report to the U.S. departments of justice and agriculture last Friday, alleging that Monsanto is unfairly using monopoly powers to drive up prices and defeat the competition. DuPont is asking U.S. regulators to force Monsanto to "…

My fabulous former student Karl Haro von Mogel has just posted another one of his plant breeding videos, this time on tomato and potato breeding. Check it out!

The Long Now Foundation has a fabulous website where you can make predictions about the future that are societally or scientifically important. Make a prediction or challenge a prediction. My prediction is simply this: "By 2020, GE crops will be grown on 10 fold more acreage than they are today,…

Here is another interesting story about Monsanto, in Forbes magazine. The article manages to avoid calling Monsanto all good or all bad and instead looks at what Monsanto means for the future productivity of the global food supply.

Thanks to Alex Palazzo for alerting me to the article The Paranoid Style in American Science by Daniel Engber of Slate. This is a three-part series on radical skepticism and the rise of conspiratorial thinking about science. Unfortunately it is all too familiar. As Alex notes, the series discusses…

The word is spreading- we can feed the world without damaging it, if we can entertain some new ideas. Check out Paul Voosen's article in the NYT and let me know what you think.