Nano & Biotech

Scientific American Busts Organic Food Myths

by Greg Conko on July 20, 2011

in Agriculture, Health and Illness, Nano & Biotech, Precaution & Risk

Over at the Scientific American magazine blogs, science writer Christie Wilcox takes on some of the mythology surrounding organic foods, including the belief (Myth #1) that organic farms don’t use pesticides and (Myth #3) that organic farming is better for the environment. I’ve been covering a lot of the same territory over the years (here and here, for example), but it’s nice to see this in a more “mainstream” publication.

A couple of highlights:

What makes organic farming different, then? It’s not the use of pesticides, it’s the origin of the pesticides used. Organic pesticides are those that are derived from natural sources and processed lightly if at all before use. This is different than the current pesticides used by conventional agriculture, which are generally synthetic. It has been assumed for years that pesticides that occur naturally (in certain plants, for example) are somehow better for us and the environment than those that have been created by man. As more research is done into their toxicity, however, this simply isn’t true, either. Many natural pesticides have been found to be potential – or serious – health risks. … Not only are organic pesticides not safe, they might actually be worse than the ones used by the conventional agriculture industry.

And this:

Even if the organic food you’re eating is from a farm which uses little to no pesticides at all, there is another problem: getting rid of pesticides doesn’t mean you’re food that is free from harmful things. Between 1990 and 2001, over 10,000 people fell ill due to foods contaminated with pathogens like E. coli, and many have organic foods to blame. That’s because organic foods tend to have higher levels of potential pathogens. One study, for example, found E. coli in produce from almost 10% of organic farms samples, but only 2% of conventional ones. The same study also found Salmonella only in samples from organic farms, though at a low prevalence rate. The reason for the higher pathogen prevalence is likely due to the use of manure instead of artificial fertilizers, as many pathogens are spread through fecal contamination.

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Hormones in Milk: They Do a Body Good

by Greg Conko on May 11, 2011

in Agriculture, Environment, Features, Health and Illness, Nano & Biotech, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

Post image for Hormones in Milk: They Do a Body Good

Today’s Washington Post Food section contains a number of articles following up on the Post’s “The Future of Food” conference that I wrote about last week. There’s enough misinformation and uninformed opinion there to keep a food policy scholar like myself busy for a week. But one item that’s really gotten my panties in a bunch is the repetition of a pet peeve of mine, which is featured in a quote from Stonyfield Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg:

“I have yet to meet the consumer who says, ‘I want the milk with more synthetic hormones, please.’”

I assume that Hirshberg is referring to the use of recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST) to boost milk production in cows, but the language he and other opponents use to turn consumers against a pretty darn good technology is so misleading that it often makes me assume they’re being intentionally deceitful.

Leave aside, for a moment, that rbST is administered to the cows, not put into the milk, and that there is no detectable rbST in the milk itself. And never mind that milk is loaded with plenty of the cow’s own natural hormones, including endogenous somatotropin. The most egregious problem with Hirshberg’s claim is that Stoneyfield Farms actually adds synthetic hormones to its own dairy products, and they advertise that fact right on the cartons, as well as on the company website — presumably in the belief that consumers will find their presence in Stoneyfield Farms milk a feature, not a bug.

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Prince Charles Says, “Let Them Eat Organic”

by Greg Conko on May 5, 2011

in Agriculture, Environment, Nano & Biotech, Natural Resources, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

HRH the Prince of Wales delivered the keynote address at The Washington Post‘s “Future of Food” conference yesterday at Georgetown University. Tim Carman, from the Post’s Lifestyle section, offers some brief thoughts on the Post blog here. Carman calls the speech “inspiring”, quotes an organic advocate who was “really impressed” with it, and links to the prepared text, which you can find here. I thought it was a load of organic fertilizer, personally, so I submitted a lengthy comment, which I reproduce in full:

It’s not surprising that Samuel Fromartz, an organic farming advocate, would praise Prince Charles for a speech that advocates organic farming. But, while he’s condemning conventional agriculture for its use of “chemical pesticides” and “artificial fertilizers”, HRH might also want to acknowledge that organic farming has its own limitations.

Organic farmers also use plenty of chemicals — just ones that are lightly processed minerals such as copper sulfate, or ones derived from plants such as pyrethrum from chrysanthemum flowers. But, ounce for ounce, organic pesticides are just as toxic as modern synthetic pesticides. And in some cases, such as the organic fungicide copper sulfate, they are far more harmful to the environment. With only a few exceptions, organic pesticides control insects and plant diseases far less effectively than synthetic chemicals, so they must be used in much larger doses.

Furthermore, while organic farmers eschew synthesized fertilizers in favor of animal manure and so-called “green manures” — nitrogen-fixing legume crops like clover and alfalfa — plowing legume crops and animal wastes into the soil leads to nitrate leaching into groundwater and streams at rates similar to conventional agricultural practices. The chemical properties of soluble mineral fertilizers that are prohibited in organic farming are identical to those of that are released in uncontrolled quantities by the mineralization of organic matter.

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Human Achievement of the Day: Nanospiders in Your Blood

by Michelle Minton on March 10, 2011

in Features, Nano & Biotech, Zeitgeist

Post image for Human Achievement of the Day: Nanospiders in Your Blood

In his writings, noted futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has said that he believes human technology will one day reach a point where the human life expectancy will be radically extended, resulting in near immortality. In a 2009 interview with Computerworld, Kurzweil put the date at which immortality could be achieved somewhere around 2040 or 2050 thanks to the ever-quickening pace of technological development and the rise of nanotechnology that will repair or even replace parts of the human body. Kurzweil may have overshot that date by a few decades, as today’s human achievement is the invention of nanospiders that can crawl along human DNA and change it.

DNA nanospiders, created by Columbia University scientists, are small robots (about 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair) made of DNA molecules. As ScienceNews reports:

The “arachnoid nanobots” have three to four legs and walk across expansive landscapes of exquisitely folded DNA. Some of these molecular machines can take 50 steps all by themselves.  Others sport wiggly arms that can pick up and carry around nanoparticles.

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Of Mice and Men and Christine O’Donnell

by Michael Fumento on October 20, 2010

in Nano & Biotech

A recent exchange between Christine O’Donnell and Bill O’Reilly, with a lack of scientific information on both sides.

O’REILLY: Everybody knows that scientists have enough knowledge to clone a human being if they wanted to.

O’DONNELL: Right.

O’REILLY: But they’re not, at least not that we know of. And now they’re in the monkey realm. And I don’t understand, if that’s the possibility that people might be cured, why the objection. Because I never buy the slippery slope….

O’DONNELL: By their own admission these groups admitted that the report that said, “Hey, yay, we cloned a monkey. Now we’re using this to start cloning humans.” We have to…

O’REILLY: Let them admit anything they want. But they won’t do that here in the United States unless all craziness is going on.

O’DONNELL: They are – they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they’re already into this experiment.

Fact check:

Presumably O’Donnell was misremembering a 2005 report about growing human brain cells within mice. Not the same as an actual functioning human brain. Yes, it has been demonstrated that some mice are more intelligent than members of Congress but no genetic manipulation was required.

Regarding O’Reilly, as per usual when you see the term “everyone knows” it’s a hint of something untrue. It is possible that scientists now have the capability of cloning a human being.

But cloning mice proved fairly easy, sheep much harder, and monkeys much harder yet. Until somebody actually does clone a human being, we won’t know whether scientists have enough knowledge. But of course at some point they will have the knowledge and the will clone humans. And it won’t be the end of the world. We already have human clones. They’re called identical twins.

Top Scientist Calls “Scam” Geron Human ESC Experiment

by Michael Fumento on October 14, 2010 · 1 comment

in Health and Illness, Nano & Biotech

To much celebration and media play, the first human trial of embryonic stem cells has begun.

With a grand total so far of one patient.

“I don’t understand [having] human trials because the animal studies aren’t very convincing,” David Bennett, a University of Alberta neuroscientist renowned for his experimentation with spinal-cord injuries, told me for my AOL News piece today. “My gut feeling is that it’s a scam,” he said.

My article explains why the company behind it, Geron, felt compelled to proceed. It comes down to one word: money. In part, they’ve been spending on this work for 15 years with no human experimentation. Stockholders don’t like that.

But there’s much more to the Geron “scam.”

For example, Geron says it will only treat patients injured in the preceding two weeks. Yet that’s when injured spinal cords are spontaneously generating new cells in an effort to heal.

Studies in cats with completely severed spines show that with mere treadmill exercise, as one found, all of them could walk again without assistance, though sadly their mouse-chasing days were behind them.

Even if none of Geron’s patients shows any improvement in sensation or mobility, sensitive tests like electromyography or one mercifully abbreviated to SEP can detect increases in cell growth or something called plasticity.

That would give Geron a chance to claim success when there was none.

Meanwhile, there has already been success using adult stem cells to treat human paralysis. But money for these trials has steadily been diverted to, yes, ESC work.

Incidentally, Bennett has 106 citations in MedLine, but nobody else in the media quotes the real experts. Instead, they go to the “old reliables” who just happen to have millions of dollars invested in embryonic stem cell research. Which is why, unfortunately, you read stuff like this here first.

(See insert: In studies, cats have routinely had severed spinal chords heal to where they could walk unassisted, though Mike’s cat prefers to lay down and “monitor” him in – more ways than one. [Model credit: Aspen H. Cat])

CEI Podcast – September 23, 2010: The Frankenfish Myth

by Ryan Young on September 23, 2010

in Agriculture, Environment, Nano & Biotech, Natural Resources, Podcast, Regulation

Have a listen here.

CEI Senior Fellow Greg Conko, author of The Frankenfood Myth, talks about the promise and imagined peril of genetically modified salmon. The controversial creature reaches normal size twice as fast as unmodified salmon.

Supreme Court Upholds Controversial Antiterror Law; More Clues About Elena Kagan

by Hans Bader on June 22, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Environment, International, Legal, Nanny State, Nano & Biotech, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was instrumental in getting President Clinton to veto a ban on partial-birth abortion.  She also lumped together the NRA and KKK as “bad guy” organizations while serving in the Clinton White House.

The Supreme Court upheld an anti-terror law that is part of the Patriot Act, banning “material support” for groups designated as terrorists by the President.  It rejected a First Amendment challenge in a 6-to-3 ruling. Jacob Sullum criticizes the provision as being unconstitutionally overbroad.  Eugene Volokh comments here.

In another ruling, the Supreme Court made it harder to block biotech food products through meritless nuisance lawsuits, in Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms.

It also issued several other rulings that are summarized here.

Earlier, Obama’s most recent Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, failed to properly defend federal laws protecting crime victims while serving in the Justice Department as Solicitor General.  Obama nominated a radical law professor to one important appellate judge position, and a judge who made excuses for a sexually-sadistic Roadside Strangler to another important appellate judgeship.

In other news, a Louisiana judge blocked the Obama administration from imposing a blanket ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, citing deceit and false claims by the Obama Administration, and a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, a vital safeguard against arbitrary government action.  Earlier, Obama had delayed a clean-up of the Gulf by Louisiana and foreign countries, by imposing unnecessary red tape

Earth Day Agriculture and Sustainable Intensification

by Greg Conko on April 22, 2010

in Agriculture, Culture, Environment, Health and Illness, Nano & Biotech, Natural Resources, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Zeitgeist

What’s the most sustainable way to grow the food we eat? The answer environmentalists give is always “local and organic.”  But, increasingly, the answer from the scientists who’ve studied the question is the exact opposite.  A study from England’s Royal Society issued last October concluded that genuinely sustainable agriculture must embrace the use of science and technology for producing more food on less land.  It suggests that a healthy concern for protecting the environment necessitates the greater adoption of sophisticated agricultural technologies, including fertilizers, pesticides, and bioengineered (or GM) crops.  Why?  Because protecting the environment will require growing vastly more food without bringing new land into agriculture–what the report calls “sustainable intensification.”

And, just last week, the US National Academy of Sciences’s National Research Council issued an in-depth study on The Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States, concluding that, “when best management practices are implemented, GE crops have been effective at reducing pest problems with economic and environmental benefits”.

Among the reports more specific findings:

  • “Adoption of herbicide-resistant crops could help improve soil and water quality.”
  • “Targeting specific insect pests with Bt toxins in corn and cotton has been successful, and insecticide use has decreased with the adoption of insect-resistant crops.”
  • “Many adopters of GE crops have experienced either lower costs of production or higher yields, and sometimes both.”
  • “Farmers who previously faced high levels of insect pests that were difficult to treat before insect-resistant crops have particularly benefited from applying lower amounts of or less expensive insecticides.”
  • “More effective management of weeds and insects also means that farmers may not have to apply insecticides or till for weeds as often.”

An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence amassed during the past two decades suggests that genetically engineered foods have been a huge boon for American farmers, consumers, and the environment.

Ironically, claims that organic farming is a nearer and dearer friend to the environment are difficult to substantiate because organic practices merely trade some environmental threats for others. For example, organic farms do not generate the same sorts of synthetic chemical run-off as modern, industrialized farms. But organic farms do still need to control pests, weeds, and pathogens. They also need to replace soil nutrients drawn off by growing plants. Judged by the standards of those who criticize modern agricultural practices, the techniques that organic farmers use to accomplish these tasks are far from eco-friendly.

While organic farmers do not use synthetic pesticides, they do use chemicals to control insects and plant diseases – including such potentially dangerous chemicals 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.

In addition, because organic farmers must control weeds by using frequent, mechanical tillage – or sacrifice yields – organic agriculture contributes to topsoil erosion and disturbs worms and other soil invertebrates. Compared with modern conservation tillage practices, organic weed control is much more environmentally damaging.  And, instead of soluble nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous fertilizers, organic farmers rely on animal manure and so-called “green manures,” such as legume nitrogen fixation or organic plant matter, to restore soil nutrients. However, plowing legume crops and animal wastes into the soil leads to nitrate leaching into groundwater and streams at rates similar to conventional agricultural practices, and the chemical properties of soluble mineral fertilizers that are prohibited in organic farming are identical to those of that are released in uncontrolled quantities by the mineralization of organic matter.

Ultimately, many Americans have come to believe the organic food industry’s marketing campaign that consuming its products is the environmental way to eat.  But, those claims just don’t stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.

Green Thumbs and GMOs

by Greg Conko on April 13, 2010 · 1 comment

in Agriculture, Environment, Nano & Biotech, Natural Resources, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

A friend just recommended this op-ed published in the Boston Globe on Sunday.  The title and subtitle say it all: “Green Thumbs: Genetically engineered crops are more environmentally friendly than organic ones.”  The author, Elliot Entis, argues that:

There is a green revolution going on, “doubly green’’ according to ecologist Gordon Conway, but it’s one the organic movement does not want to join. This revolution relies on modern biotechnology to create crop hybrids that can better utilize our scarce resources, and there’s the rub: the science is not trusted by organic farmers, and it plays against their economic interests.

and

The organic movement is largely a romantic ideal, far removed in many ways from science. It believes it is environmentally friendly, but it largely avoids science. True environmentalists look at the facts, and those facts do not support the growth of organic farming as a way to feed the world. However, with few exceptions, environmental organizations do not admit to this publicly. Why? Because they share a constituency: citizens who oppose certain elements of mass production farming, who yearn for a simpler time, when things were more natural. But this constituency is built on a shared belief system about the past, not the future.

At some point the contradiction between what organic farming leads to — more land devoted to farming, higher food prices, less biodiversity — and the goals of environmentalists — sustainability, more biodiversity – will fracture this alliance.

Skeptics, including many in the article’s comment thread, argue that a guy like Elliot Entis can’t be trusted, since he has a financial interest in the success of biotechnology and genetically engineered foods.  But those in the biotech industry aren’t the only ones saying these things.

As I wrote last October here on Open Market, environmental guru Stewart Brand has been saying the same thing for years.  And the UK’s Royal Society, one of the most highly respected scientific bodies in the world issued a report last fall calling for broader use of biotech crops and other technologies to bring about a “sustainable intensification” in global agriculture.

And just today, the US National Academy of Sciences’s National Research Council issued an in-depth study on The Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States.  The NRC study concluded that “when best management practices are implemented, GE crops have been effective at reducing pest problems with economic and environmental benefits”.  Among the reports more specific findings:

  • “Adoption of herbicide-resistant crops could help improve soil and water quality.”
  • “Targeting specific insect pests with Bt toxins in corn and cotton has been successful, and insecticide use has decreased with the adoption of insect-resistant crops.”
  • “Many adopters of GE crops have experienced either lower costs of production or higher yields, and sometimes both.”
  • “Farmers who previously faced high levels of insect pests that were difficult to treat before insect-resistant crops have particularly benefited from applying lower amounts of or less expensive insecticides.”
  • “More effective management of weeds and insects also means that farmers may not have to apply insecticides or till for weeds as often.”

An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence amassed during the past two decades suggests overwhelmingly that genetically engineered foods have been a huge boon for American farmers, consumers, and the environment.

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