I’ll tell you Norman who.  His biographer, Leon Hesser, called him the Man Who Fed the World.  Science reporter Gregg Easterbrook called him the Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity. I’ve called him a Modern Prometheus.  And comedians Penn and Teller said (well, mostly Penn said) that he was the greatest human being who ever lived.

Norman Borlaug was an American agricultural scientist and plant breeder whose work sparked what is now known as the Green Revolution.  He was recognized with countless scientific and humanitarian awards, including, in 1970, the Nobel Peace Prize. Quite tragically, he died of cancer yesterday, at the age of 95.

Borlaug was born on a small farm in Cresco, Iowa in 1914 and developed an interest in applying science and technology to agriculture during the Depression-era dustbowl that desiccated the Great Plains in the first half of the 1930s.  He went off to study forestry and plant pathology — and compete on the wrestling team — at the University of Minnesota in 1933.  He eventually would complete a Master’s and Ph.D. at the U of M, after brief stints with the U.S. Forest Service that periodically interrupted his studies.  After completing his Ph.D. in 1942, Borlaug worked for two years at DuPont, contributing scientific research for the war effort.

In 1944, Borlaug got the opportunity that would come to define the rest of his life, joining a Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program co-funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Mexican government.  At the time, corn still made up the vast majority of Mexico’s cereal production, even though wheat had been introduced hundreds of years earlier by Spanish settlers.  The problem was that wheat varieties adapted to Mexican soil and climatic conditions were susceptible to numerous problematic diseases.  Borlaug’s team bred various domestic and foreign wheat varieties together to generate cultivars that would resist most of these diseases, then crossed those long-stem wheat varieties with a semi-dwarf wheat variety from Japan in order to produce an adapted variety with stems that were short and strong enough to hold up the better producing seed heads.

Perhaps Borlaug’s biggest contribution was the development of an accelerated breeding schedule he called “shuttle breeding,” which let him improve the genetic composition of his wheat lines twice as quickly as with normal breeding.  Despite opposition from fellow plant breeders who insisted this couldn’t be done, Borlaug and his team would grow one generation of plants at the higher elevations around Mexico City during the summer, and then grow a second generation at sea level some 700 miles to the north near the Sonoran coast during the winter.  Not only did shuttle breeding work, by doubling the progress of Borlaug’s breeding schedule, it also had the fortunate, but unintended side effect of producing wheat strains that were not sensitive the amount of light received each day, as nearly all other plant breeds are.

In just four years, Mexico went from importing almost all the wheat its people consumed to being self-sufficient in wheat production. Borlaug continued working in Mexico, but by the 1960s, his reputation had spread around the world.  He was called on first to travel to India and Pakistan to help improve wheat production there. And after a stunning success, he went on to the Philippines and China, where his innovative breeding methods were used to raise yields in the rice varieties consumed by roughly half the world’s population.  By the 1980s, Borlaug teamed up with Japanese billionaire philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa to try to spread the Green Revolution to Africa.  Wherever he went, the combination of better plant varieties, along with agricultural chemicals such as anhydrous ammonia and other inorganic fertilizers, and synthetic herbicides and insecticides, have helped to more than triple wheat yields in less developed countries since the 1950s.

None of this was easy, however. Borlaug and his colleagues met severe resistance from local seed breeders and farmers set in their ways, as well as national and regional governments who didn’t want to see others succeed where their own programs had failed.  Borlaug wrote in the Foreword to my 2004 book, The Frankenfood Myth, that, “As we created what became known as the ‘Green Revolution,’ we confronted bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers’ customs, habits, and superstitions. … At the time, Forrest Frank Hill, a Ford Foundation vice president, told me, ‘Enjoy this now, because nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually, the naysayers and the bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won’t be able to get permission for more of these efforts.” Indeed, bureaucratic hassles became much worse, he wrote. ”If our varieties had been subjected to the kinds of regulatory strictures and requirements that are now being inflicted upon the new biotechnology, they would never have become available.”

But, perhaps no critics were tougher on Borlaug than western environmentalists.  As Borlaug moved from Mexico to Asia, doomsayer Paul Ehrlich claimed that Borlaug “doesn’t have any idea of the magnitude of the problems in food production.” He said, “You aren’t going to make any major impact on producing the food that’s needed.” And Ehrlich wasn’t alone.  Today, much of the political left still sees the Green Revolution as a failure, despite it’s obvious successes, because it promoted technological tweaks to address the deficiencies of nature, weakened socialist agrarian reform movements of the 1960s and 1970s by improving rural productivity, and permitted the survival of hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of lives who just end up despoiling the environment.

This failure of the political left, particularly the environmental movement, to acknowledge the usefulness of innovative agricultural technologies led Borlaug to eventually reject the movement he once embraced.  Although he was largely apolitical, one lamentable aspect of Borlaug’s politics was his early belief in the necessity of global population control. But, by the 1990s, Borlaug had a change of heart.  He also became one of the biggest boosters of food biotechnology and one of the biggest critics of those who believe organic agriculture is the only sustainable option. On the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Prize, he said “I now say that the world has the technology — either available or well advanced in the research pipeline — to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called ‘organic’ methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.”

I came to know Norm — and he always insisted that everyone call him Norm — about ten years ago.  He was an energetic, inquisitive, and thoughtful man, and he always spoke with great passion about his own work and that of the countless others whose innovative research he has helped to spread around the world. I had the honor of spending the better part of a week hosting Norm in Washington in May 2004, when CEI arranged for him to give a “newsmaker” speech at the National Press Club.  And, on the occasion of CEI’s 20th Anniversary, we presented him with our first ever Prometheus Award for Human Achievement. Despite being in the presence of one of my very few heroes, I was struck most by Norm’s sheer humility.  I thought it delightful, for example, that, even at 90 years old, the former wrestler still insisted on carrying his own luggage — and Norm seemed like he’d be willing to deck a guy, however well-meaning, for insinuating that he might be so frail as to need his host to carry it for him.

His beloved wife Margaret, an accomplished basketball star in her younger years, died just over two years ago, also at the age of 95. As I wrote then, “It’s not every spouse who will gladly pick up her family and move it to a foreign land, where they will live in modest conditions. [Borlaug had rejected an offer by DuPont to double his salary if he would pass up the position in Mexico.] But, Margaret was a strong and wise woman, and she gladly moved with Norm and their children to Mexico, where they dedicated their lives to helping others by promoting science, technology, and common sense. Her contributions were thus as important to the Green Revolution as almost any other person’s. So, anyone who values freedom and progress owes both Norm and Margaret a great deal of thanks.”

Today, reflecting on Norm’s death, I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s words following the Battle of Britain: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”  Indeed, never was so much owed by so many to a single man.  Norman Borlaug will be sorely missed.

Ronald and Adamchak, who is an organic farmer, reject the dogma that only a narrow-minded organic approach to agriculture can be sustainable.  Instead, they suggest that “a judicious blend” of the best “organic” attitudes regarding soil health and respect for biodiversity on one hand and the best of new technologies and methods such as biotechnology and integrated pest management on the other, is the “key to helping feed the world’s growing population in an ecologically balanced manner.”

Read the Boston Globe column for a quick summary.  But, I very highly recommend the book as well.

“The most striking finding of our survey was that the organic ranges scored worst, or joint worst, at three out of the four supermarkets tested — being rated less tasty and satisfying than even the budget ranges at Waitrose, Tesco and Asda at about twice the price. At Sainsbury’s, organic goods came a poor third to Taste the Difference and standard.”

None of this is news to regulars at this site, who’ve read us discuss various comprehensive scientific studies — like this one, this one, and this one — concluding that organic food offers neither greater nutrition nor greater safety than conventionally produced food does.  Although much of the recent press attention to organic foods has centered around the repeated findings that organic foods don’t have any nutritional benefits, it is just as significant that, as I’ve written here before, it is simply not true that buying organic food gets you less exposure to pesticides.  While organic farmers do not use “synthetic” pesticides, they do use a variety of chemicals to control insects and plant diseases — including such potentially dangerous substances as copper sulfate, rotenone, pyrethrum, ryania, and sabadilla. These “organic” pesticides are derived from minerals or plants, are lightly processed, and thus are considered to be “natural” for the purposes of organic agriculture. Yet, ounce for ounce, most are at least as toxic or carcinogenic as many of the newest synthetic chemical pesticides.

Still, it is great to see articles such as this one in major mainstream papers like The Times — no matter how sketchy its taste test methodology may have been.  To be sure, The Times and other influential European newspapers and magazines have published opinion articles discussing the same point.  But, as a British colleague of mine wrote to me:

“The article suffered from all the faults of superficial comparison, in this case of taste as determined ‘blind’ (they said) by just a few people. It does not stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny.

What is more to the point is not the information per se but the fact that The Times saw fit to publish three pages under that headline - and for once the headline does really reflect the tenor of the article’s content.  The mood appears to be changing quite significantly in the UK.”

Pace Bob Dylan, The Times, it sure is a changin’.

So it is strange that Streep acts so ungrateful to Child in an interview with the U.K. newspaper the Telegraph. She berates Child for disagreeing with her on boosting organic foods and criticizing fats, proclaiming that Child was “seduced” by a “front orgnanization for agro-business and petrochemical business.”

Streep apparently still has a grudge against Child for refusing to lend her support to Streep’s fringe enviro group Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits. That group was one of the leading promoters of the discredited scare about the pesticide Alar that was spread on apples.

In a low point for Congressional hearings on science, Streep, despite her lack of any scientific credentials, was invited to testify in 1989 before a Senate Labor and Human Resources subcommittee. She proclaimed: ”We don’t know what’s on our food . . . I no longer want my children to be part of this experiment.”

As Neil Hrab, CEI’s 2003-04 Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow, recounted in the American Spectator: “Within weeks of Streep testifying before Congress, Uniroyal, the company that manufactured Alar, began the triage to save its reputation, withdrawing the chemical from the U.S. market. In November of 1989, the EPA ordered a ban on the sale, distribution and use.”

But major scientific bodies would conclude that the Alar scare had been nothing but a bunch of hype. The American Medical Association stated in 1992: “The Alar scare of three years ago shows what can happen when science is taken out of context or the risks of a product are blown out of proportion. When used in the approved, regulated fashion, as it was, Alar does not pose a risk to the public’s health.” Others who condemned the scare included the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Yet in the Telegraph interview, Streep seems oblivious to these facts and to her role in hyping a costly and unnecessary scare. Instead, she bashes Child for daring to question the organic orthodoxy and what many call the “Food Police.”

Streep recalls Child’s turning down a request to help Mothers and Others in its campaign to get supermarkets to carry organic agriculture. “She was very resistant and brushed us off quite brusquely,” Streep says. Also bashing Child’s love of rich fatty foods, Streep rips Child for not making “a connection between the high fat diet of a heavily laden cordon bleu-influenced cusine and cholesterol levels. (I admit I have no idea what “cordon-bleu influenced cuisine” means, but I imagine neither does Streep, who admitted in the same interview that she knew virtually nothing about cooking before she played Child.)

Streep also bashes Child for her involvement with a public health group that also had a long working relationship with CEI in promoting sound science: the American Council on Science and Health.  “I remember being so disappointed that she was in the thrall [of the ACSH],” Streep said. Calling the group a “front organization” for agribusiness and chemical companies, Streep stated, “They seduced Julia into giving them money, so she was on the other side for a while.”

But the only one sucessfully seduced is Streep– into faddish irational fears about conventioanlly grown and fatty foods. Longtime ACSH President Elizabeth Whelan, who knew Child for about 20 years, writes that Child “had two major pet peeves:

•She despised people who demonized specific foods, like butter and sugar.

•She despised activists who terrified people about the safety of their food. ”

Whelan adds: “For Julia, there were no “good foods” or “bad foods” — again, just a variety of foods, all in moderation — including an occasional cordon bleu. Julia, unlike her fictional counterpart, exhibited a constant stream of common sense.”

As for Streep’s charge of ACSH being a “front group” for corporate interests – and similar charges are levied against CEI — Whelan answers that the claim is “absurd — given the organization is funded by a full spectrum of foundations, individuals, and unrestricted grants from corporations.” CEI has a similarly broad-based funding structure.

The cherry on the cake of Streep’s nonsensical rant to the Telegraph is Streep’s claim that “Eventually I think she came around” to Streep’s point of view. But interviews from the last few years before she died show that Child never did “come around” to Streep’s anti-fatty food and anti-food technology extremism.

When asked by Business Week in 2000 what she thought of the low-fat movement, Child replied, “I don’t go for that at all.” She then reiterated the motto of the American Institute of Wine and Food, which she co-founded with winemakers Robert Mondavi and Richard Graff to advance enjoyment of food: “Small helpings No seconds. No snacking. A little bit of everything and have a good time.”

Child also fully endorsed what another bete noir of many enviros — food biotechnology or genetic engineering. In 1999, Child told the Toronto Star: “I think it’s all fascinating. There’s no one-minute answer. The technology’s here. If they can give us a better tomato, I’m for it.”

Perhaps the best epitaph for Julia Child came from Thomas Lifson, editor of American Thinker, upon her death at age 91 in 2004. Lifson wrote in American Thinker:  ”Julia Child, who played a major role in changing the way Americans think about, prepare and eat food, has died at the ripe old age of 91, after a lifetime of urging Americans to go ahead and use butter in their sauces and fry lardons to render some pork fat in which to fry the beginnings of a stew. Take that, health Nazis!”

A nanotech firm that lives mostly off of government grants lives a sheltered, more docile existence. It doesn’t need to come up with new products that save peoples’ lives, or make them better. They just have to be good at getting grants.

In summary, biotechnology applied to agriculture has enormous potential to enhance our ability to develop seeds for improved crops and for enhanced livestock to enable us to meet the food, feed and fiber challenges of a growing world and stressed ecosystems in coming years. Significant impediments are created by unwarranted or outdated regulatory burdens that could easily be removed. The resulting, stronger scientific basis for regulatory oversight will increase the efficiency of regulation designed to prevent or manage risks and uncertainties while enabling more rapid development of innovative, safer products. Benefits to human health, the environment, global political stability and national security would follow.

[The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe] which fights for the rights of consumers last week started to inspect and recommend that shops selling GMO foods should be closed. CCZ said the GMO foods which have flooded Zimbabwe were mostly powered milk, meal-mealie, rice and chicken.

“We have received a lot of reports of people, mainly children, getting sick after consuming the foods which in most cases will be expired,” said Comfort Muchekeza, the CCZ spokesperson. “We have raided and closed several shops and supermarkets in Bulawayo for selling expired GMO foods. We are working with the health ministry to bar GMO foods from entering the country. The health ministry has mounted check-up points at the country’s borders to inspect foodstuffs coming to into the country.”

So, the issue is expired GMO foods. Former CEI Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow and current Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey makes the following observation:

Reading further into the article, one finds the claim that people are getting sick because they are eating foods past their expiration dates. Could THAT be the problem rather than being made from genetically modified crops?

When you witness your fellow citizens going hungry day after day, it shouldn’t take a genius to realize that drastically reducing the already-dwindling food supply is a really, really bad idea. In fact, I believe most Zimbabweans would agree that expired GMO food is still better than no food at all.

(H/T Reason’s Hit & Run)

While Earth Day has previously focused on traditional concerns like pollution and recycling, we think it’s also a perfect time to think about the challenges human beings themselves face around the world – like hunger, disease and poverty – and the many ways human ingenuity has helped drive them back.

Many thanks to CEI Studio Producer Drew Tidwell for his excellent work on the video.

Critics have long argued that the Title IX cap is in tension with the Supreme Court’s warnings against proportional representation. In a ruling by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court said that it is “completely unrealistic” to argue that women and minorities should be represented in each field or activity “in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population.” (See Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989)). In an earlier ruling, Justice O’Connor noted that it is “unrealistic to assume that unlawful discrimination is the sole cause of people failing to gravitate to jobs and employers in accord with the laws of chance.” (See Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust Co. (1988)).

But the Title IX athletics regulation mandates proportional representation. It contains three alternatives for compliance, but two of them are illusory in the long run. The first way (and only permanent way) to comply is to adopt a quota that artificially caps male participation. The second and third ways, which are only short-term fixes, involve continuous expansion of participation by, or satisfaction of all desire to compete by, the “underrepresented” sex. In a world of finite resources, these latter two ways can only work for a short period of time. I used to work at the agency, the Office for Civil Rights, that administers this regulation, and I think that it would be a mistake to apply standards designed for allocating resources among all-male and all-female sports teams to the very different context of math and science classes, which are coed.

But this is not an Administration that is very good with math and numbers. Obama claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office says it will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run. His budgets don’t add up, either, piling up $9.3 trillion in red ink, and breaking his promises to enact a “net spending cut” and not raise taxes on people making less than $250,000 a year.

Some liberal publications are suspicious of scientific advances. The agronomist Norman Borlaug, who pioneered the Green Revolution, saved perhaps a billion lives in the Third World by developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops through biotechnology. For this, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Medal of Honor. For this, he was smeared in the liberal magazine The Nation, which has an irrational phobia of biotechnology and genetic engineering, as being “the biggest killer of all.”

Similarly, the Danish researcher Bjorn Lomborg was demonized and investigated after accurately pointing out that global warming is less of a threat to human health than AIDS and malnutrition.

Unfortunately, despite fairly good evidence of Herceptin’s effectiveness in treating early-stage breast cancer, it was not until 2007 that the New Zealand government agency called Pharmac, which determines what medicines will and will not be covered by the country’s national health care system, agreed to cover Herceptin for early-stage cancers. Herceptin is expensive — in the neighborhood of $60,000 US per patient — and Pharmac wasn’t convinced the treatment was worth it. Ironically, Postrel points out, Pharmac had long agreed to cover Herceptin treatment for late-stage cancers, even though the likelihood of success in treating those conditions are much lower.

In part because the Obama Administration and many congressional Democrats have been pushing for a US-equivalent of Pharmac, Postrel’s article generated an overwhelming number of letters to the Atlantic’s editors. Some will be published in a future edition of the print magazine. But, two days ago, the Atlantic published several of them online, along with a lengthy reply by Postrel. Because her original article is relatively short, Postrel could not fully examine or even touch on many items that she does address in this later response. I recommend that the two items be read together as a two-part essay.

One theme in particular that Postrel develops more fully in part 2, is very important. While it’s true that government run health plans can’t pay for all the treatments every patient would like to have, the problem is that, when a government herds large swaths of its population into public sector health plans with few realistic alternatives, this kind of rationing inevitably means that some patients will not get treatments that could cure them. One letter writer, for example, argues that Herceptin was a poor example for Postrel to highlight because “Multiple cost-effectiveness analyses have shown that, despite its high cost, Herceptin is both effective and cost-effective.” That, of course, was Postrel’s point. She replies, “I used [Herceptin] as an example not only because of my personal story but because its very cost-effectiveness makes it such a striking example. New Zealand chose to ration the drug (and not to cover it at all for early-stage cancer until July 2007) despite its significant benefits.”

Unfortunately, as long as the world’s food production system continues to be highly decentralized and fragmented, there will continue to be foodborne illness outbreaks like the most recent salmonella contamination problem and the E. coli contamination outbreaks seen in the past few years. The trouble, of course, is that food is, by and large, grown outside in dirt, and microbial contamination is a fact of life. Measures can and should be taken by food producers, processors, and packagers to identify contamination where it occurs and remove it from the food chain. But, with over a billion meals consumed in the United States every day, there is not enough money in the world to meaningfully increase inspections of the hundreds of thousands of facilities that produce, process, and sell food in the United States.

Currently, there is no requirement for FDA to inspect any one food production facility on a regular basis, and many facilities go years between inspections. FDA sets its own priorities based on the types of food products and production activities involved, by trying to determine where the likeliest risks lie. That, say the critics, is the root of the problem. FDA needs the financial and personnel resources to inspect every food production facility in the country (as well as foreign facilities that export to the U.S.) on a regular basis.

But will this really do anything productive? In short, the answer is “no.” The proposed Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act of 2009 would expand FDA’s authority substantially, requiring additional money for agency personnel and more frequent inspections. How frequent? Not less than once every 4 years. So, even after this massive influx of taxpayer cash, the best we can expect is that most food production facilities will now be inspected once every four years instead of once every decade. Does anyone really think that’s going to help? Of course not — no thinking person could. Instead, this is designed to make us all feel that the government is “doing something,” while taking more money out of the productive economy and funnelling it to Washington.

If recent stories are true -– that operators of the Peanut Corporation plant in Georgia willfully failed to remove contaminated product from its shipments and did not clean equipment after contamination was identified –- it is hard to imagine that a doubling or tripling of inspections could have prevented this tragedy. News accounts indicate that Peanut Corporation executives actually identified the presence of salmonella in various products and PUT THEM ON THE MARKET ANYWAY.

Fortunately, this kind of conscious cheating is rare in a country like the United States. But, in order to help deter it, penalties for such willful misconduct must be beefed up (so to speak). I’m not suggesting we start executing food plant operators or safety inspectors found to be willfully negligent, as China has been doing recently. Though, for acts that serious, serious penalties are warranted. The penalties for knowingly putting contaminated foodstuffs into commerce need to be more than simple slaps on the wrist.

Finally, it’s worth repeating that we can never realistically eliminate all foodborne illness. The shear size and scope of the problem –- that is, bacteria and viruses are all around us all the time -– means that we must recognize there are diminishing marginal gains to be had from increased spending on food safety. Not that we should accept defeat, but that at some point we have to recognize that diverting more and more public resources to combating an intractable problem means having fewer resources to spend on other things -– like health care, education, occupational safety, etc. -– that could increase safety by a far greater amount.

On the other hand, there are a handful of regulatory changes that could both help the private sector combat foodborne illness while also lower the cost of food safety. For example, food irradiation is a safe and effective technology for killing or denaturing bacteria and viruses in and on foods, such as meat and poultry, grains, and even some fruits and vegetables. But, a variety of regulatory restrictions on the use of irradiation (as well as mandatory labeling that seems designed to scare consumers away from irradiated foods) make it uneconomical for food processors to use irradiation in the United States on a wide-scale basis. The most innovative breakthroughs in food biotechnology are rarely ever tested because the regulation of biotech plants and animals are too costly. And the more recent panic about nanotechnology, combined with burgeoning regulation in that field, could strangle in the crib some of the most innovative efforts to improve food safety.

Thus, FDA, USDA, and EPA -– the same regulatory agencies charged with ensuring that the American food supply is safe -– are actually contributing to lower safety by creating and maintaining poorly thought out rules regarding technology regulation. It ought to serve as a cautionary note that, in trying to make changes that will improve food safety, we need to be conscious that some well-intentioned efforts can actually make us less safe.

Over at The Hill Blog, she writes:

“Furthermore, politicizing stem cell research funding may produce the opposite effect of what stem cell research advocates intend, namely less not more funding and more rather than fewer restriction on the research itself.”

The inherent politicization of government funding — and inefficient overhead expenses of dealing with that reality — has already delayed state-level public funding programs like that established under California’s Proposition 71. Whether or not you support human embryonic stem cell research, government funding for it is decidedly the wrong approach.

The court ruling came in the case of Creekstone Farms Premium Beef v. USDA

Do you live in Europe? If you don’t, do you want to be governed by European policies? It turns out, Europe’s governments pay hundreds of millions of Euros annually to groups which export Europe’s attitudes to governments overseas. …

Such simple accusations completely fail to address what is actually a very complex issue. The FOE is merely one component of a system in which the European Commission, the Member States of the European Union, European foundations, and other organzations, disburse, receive, and redirect hundreds of millions of Euros annually through a widespread network of activist organizations.

The whole piece is worth a read.

But now, states and locals are stepping in and beginning to regulate nanomaterials. The main concern is apparently toxicity. But nanomaterials are very safe and scientists are already examining their toxicity. Nothing is terribly unique about nanomaterials; we are already bombarded with objects on the same size scale. Given that no one has ever been harmed by nanomaterials, regulation seems a bit premature.

Further - and this is a lesson that bears repeating in other contexts - one has to keep in mind the potential harm done by slowing or stopping nanotech research. If nanomaterials will substantially improve medicine, then the costs of delay may be many lives. Even if the only victim is better sunscreen, regulations may put lives at risk. Over 10,000 preventable deaths in the US occur every year because of skin cancer. State and local regulators need to start looking at the unintended consequences of their actions before leaping ahead.

California is also attempting to check that the tests customers ordered were prescribed by a doctor - a ridiculous requirement, given that conducting a genetic test does not put the patient at any risk (unlike, say, a heart stress test).

Part of the problem is that DTC companies do not perform the sorts of simple diagnostic tests that could predict diseases with more certainty (on alleles with higher penetrance) - because, Ars notes, the FDA heavily regulates such tests. Ars sees California’s latest move as a step toward expanding regulation of all genetic tests. Instead, the government should go in the opposite direction: enforce fraud laws to ensure that no spurious claims are made, but allow customers to get their genes tested without extensive FDA regulation or even a doctor’s order. It’s a sad world where we have the technology to know who we are genetically, but the state won’t let us find out.