Earlier this week, Olivia Judson posted a much-commented-upon essay on the biology of clouds at the New York Times site.

I am happy to report that in April 2002, Oliver Morton, Hybrid Vigor Fellow and the news and features editor for Nature (as well as the author of two books), wrote a terrific monograph for Hybrid Vigor on essentially the same subject, The Living Skies: Cloud Behavior and Its Role in Climate Change.

The U.K.’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) functions something like the late lamented U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, killed off by Newt Gingrich back in the ’90s. They regularly publish brief but fairly comprehensive, interdisciplinary reports with cross-sector relevance on trends in science and technology.

POST recently published three POSTnotes entitled “Ecological Networks“, “Smart Metering of Electricity and Gas” and “Autism“. The first two POSTnotes for 2008 were on “smart” materials and systems, and synthetic biology.

You can subscribe to the POST reports yourself, by sending an email to: mailto:post@parliament.uk.

“Ecological Networks” considers the possible conservation benefits of ecological network implementation in the UK. Ecological networks are intended to maintain environmental processes and to help to conserve biodiversity where remnants of semi-natural habitat have become fragmented and isolated. Continue reading »

I’m very happy to report that my book, Intervention, has won a Silver Medal in the Science category, in the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Awards competition.

IPPY winners in 65 categories were selected from a total of 2,690 national entries came from “all 50 U.S. states, eight Canadian provinces, and 17 countries overseas.”

In the Science category, I’m flanked by books published by Harvard University Press and Yale University Press. I’m proud that li’l ol’ Hybrid Vigor Press has found itself in such good company. Very proud indeed.

Via the blog at Genome Technology Online, I stumbled onto this terrific essay at The Scientist, called ‘A New Dynamic … Can a Penn State center predict and prevent the next pandemic?’

… During the breeding season, tiny leeches climb aboard the newts, sucking their blood, and possibly transmitting Icthyophonus, a fungus-like pathogen that hides in the newt’s muscle. Newts have other parasites, too. Tom Raffel, a postdoc at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics (CIDD) at Pennsylvania State University, has documented more than 20 different parasites in Pennsylvania newts. Two are new to science.

In the past, a scientist might single out a pathogen, map its life cycle, and describe the consequences for its victims. Although pathogens represent more than half of all life on earth, only a small fraction have ever been studied. So, a new approach to infectious disease is taking root both around the world and here on the shores of Beaver Pond. Raffel doesn’t study newts, or leeches, or Icthyophonus. He studies the Beaver Pond community and the myriad interactions within. Just a few miles away at CIDD, researchers are looking at human pathogens, too - measles, influenza, and Escherichia coli among others - and trying to understand the communities of these pathogens within cities and within hosts, piecing together the way these interactions evolve over time.

Despite advances in vaccine strategies and drug treatments, many scientists worry that not enough is being done to suppress, let alone anticipate, the next pandemic. Scientists at CIDD are taking principles of population biology, community ecology, and evolution and wedding them to epidemiology, immunology, and genomics. This approach could help optimize vaccination strategies, design eradication programs, halt incipient pandemics, and it could identify potential zoonoses before they’ve infected humans. In the three short years that CIDD has been around, it’s become a hotbed of interdisciplinary collaboration with 12 faculty members from departments around the Penn State campus.

Daniel Falush, an evolutionary geneticist at Oxford University, describes one effect CIDD has had in the United Kingdom: “There was a great sucking sound because these famous British scientists were disappearing to Penn State.” Actually, Ottar Bjørnstad, a Norwegian mathematical ecologist, was the first to make the move to State College in 2001. At that time, Peter Hudson was at the University of Stirling in Scotland but was displeased with their new president, who he says wasn’t supportive of biology. When Penn State invited him for a visit, he loved the atmosphere, and it didn’t hurt that his friend Bjørnstad had already scoped out the local pubs. …

[snip]

The piece quotes Hudson as saying, “Our vision really is to have a systems approach to disease,” says Hudson. “Issues that go from intracellular interactions between viruses and cells right the way through to pandemics, something we call the protein-to-pandemic link.”

I daresay that reality will probably turn out to be a bit less linear than that, but at least their linear thinking is horizontal!

Today, my ‘Re:framing’ column in The New York Times was on the scientific evidence that has been used by industry and the U.S. Agriculture Department to support safety claims about biopharma crops. These are the next generation of plants that have been genetically engineered to grow drugs and industrial chemicals in open fields in the U.S. and around the world.

The column is basically my entire book, Intervention, crammed into 1300 words. As a result I had to leave out some important stuff, so I decided to post some of it here.

One of the things I would have liked to dig into a bit was the USDA’s statement about the amount of scientific input the agency uses to develop its regulations.

As evidence, the person I spoke with mentioned that in 2002, the agency had commissioned a peer-reviewed National Academies study on the subject, called Environmental Effects of Transgenic Plants.

It was a curious example to choose. Because I read that report when I was writing Intervention, and it sure sounded to me like the USDA got handed its head on a plate.

Continue reading »

Scott Rosenberg, a former colleague of mine from the former golden days of the San Francisco Examiner, interviewed me for the Book section of today’s Salon. (He also blogged the interview.)

In the piece, Scott asked me some questions — about how some journalists have overlooked the risk story, and about why I had to publish the book through Hybrid Vigor, rather than through a traditional publishing house — that I hadn’t talked about before.

I really liked this piece in Alternet this morning about the mythology of carbon offsets; thought I’d pass it along. Some of you on this list have been raising these issues with me privately for a while now, and I’m glad to see them start to pick up some steam in the public eye.

Also I’m very interested in the .org from whence the author came: the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis. I know nothing about them yet, but I hope to.

That’s because I have been thinking for a while now that the only reliable action on the big hard complicated problems like climate change and transgenics/biotech et al. is going to come from communities and stakeholders working together, face to face. A lot of the top-down philanthropy we’re hearing so much about is very likely to end up being a band-aid that doesn’t stick.

It’s already pissing off some of the people it’s helping (at the TED conference last week, I am told that a former African minister basically said, ‘Stop helping us, it’s not helping,’ while pointing out that not all of Africa is in the throes of genocide or dying of AIDS), and may pour some unhelpful and possibly even hazardous “solutions” down our throats without us being able to say or do much about it.

For example, the Gates Foundation is trying to start a new Green Revolution in Africa. I hear they’ve already hired two former Monsanto executives to start inundating Africa with custom-designed transgenics crops — despite the fact that Africa has been stalwartly against transgenics since the start.

It’s either tremendously dumb or tremendously cynical (or both) that they are using the words “Green Revolution.” Have they forgotten that the original Green Revolution was a near-total disaster?

The idea behind it was to drive up crop yields in developing countries; the most modern knowledge of genetics and chemistry was used to develop new crop strains and powerful new chemicals to go along with them to serve as fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides.

And it certainly did increase yields in underdeveloped countries like India, Mexico and Sri Lanka, sometimes to an astonishing degree. But because the new higher yield crops depended on large amounts of expensive chemicals, poor farmers ended up not being able to compete in the marketplace with rich landowners and multinationals; this did little or nothing to alleviate either poverty or hunger. And the planet ended up dangerously polluted as a result.

And now the largest philanthropy in the world is trying to do it again?

I wrote a little something about the ongoing potential for these kinds of philanthropic disasters for Worldchanging’s ‘What’s Next’ feature a couple of months back.

Also, apropos of all of this is my NYT column from yesterday about knowledge v. know-how, which was what I hope is the beginning of a longer discussion I get to have in print, somewhere or another, about ways to increase human know-how in the areas where we need it most.

By the way, if you like this column, please email it to your friends and colleages — from the NYT page, not by cutting and pasting. This is an indicator to the Powers That Be what kinds of coverage people like and want.

I can’t believe it took me so long to get this posted. Goes to show what happens when people start reading your stuff and liking it, I guess … I have been busy, busy, busy. Off to Washington DC tomorrow at the crack of dawn, in fact. More on that anon.

To cut to the chase: Worldchanging reviewed Intervention last month. And all I can say, still, 2+ weeks later, is wow.

We normally don’t cover problems here on Worldchanging. Indeed, our manifesto says “We don’t generally offer links to resources which are about problems and not solutions, unless the resource is so insightful that its very existence is a step towards a solution.” This book does offer some solutions (about which, more later), but mostly it offers a fervent, well-reasoned call to action. When such an “alarm bell” book offers such clear thinking (I learned more about biotechnology from this book than any other I’ve read), it becomes a step towards solutions. And when the person ringing the alarm bell is no luddite, but one of our brightest technology writers, the alarm demands our attention.

What terrific acknowledgment, from such a terrific source. Quick anecdote about how Alex Steffan heard about the book: In early February I was checking out how Intervention looked on Amazon, as I am occasionally wont to do, and noticed that the Worldchanging book was then (as it is now) offered as a “Better Together” deal with Intervention.

I wrote Steffan a note and he said, “It looks interesting — send it to me.” And the rest, as they say …

This just in from Environment News Service:

Doomsday Arctic Seed Vault Designed to Withstand All Perils

OSLO, Norway, February 9, 2007 (ENS) - A fail-safe vault designed to protect the agricultural heritage of humankind - the seeds essential to agriculture of every nation - will be constructed this year on the Arctic island of Svalbard not far from the North Pole. (You can see the impressively spooky, actual design if you go to the story.)

Today the Norwegian government revealed the architectural design for the Svalbard International Seed Vault, to be carved deep into frozen rock.

“By investing in a global permafrost safety facility for seeds, the Norwegian government hopes to contribute to combating the loss of biological diversity, to reduce our vulnerability to climatic changes, and to enhance our ability to secure future food production,” said Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food Terje Riis-Johansen.

The vault is being dug into a mountainside near the village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Construction is scheduled to begin in March 2007 and to be completed in September 2007. The vault will officially open in late winter 2008.

The number of seeds stored will depend on the number of countries participating in the project. The project aims to prevent needed plants from going extinct or becoming rare if a nuclear war were to break out, because of gene pollution from genetically engineered plants, or due to disease or global warming.

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Whoops, I forgot to post this … the San Jose Mercury News asked me to write a Perspectives piece for the Sunday paper a couple of weeks ago (specifically, January 21st) about the F.D.A.’s decision about cloned meat. The issue isn’t going away, so I figured better late than never …

Here’s the first few paragraphs, to inspire you to click …

Cloned meat: What are the risks?
DESPITE WHAT THE FDA SAYS, NO ONE REALLY KNOWS
By Denise Caruso
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared unequivocally last month that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat. But the assessment process used to make that declaration could in no way reliably conclude that cloned food is safe — and they knew it. The FDA’s own science and risk advisers had long ago told the agency so, but it ignored the warnings.

As recently as 2004, the U.S. National Academies, official science advisers to the government, published a report concluding that the FDA’s and other regulators’ decision-making processes for assessing food safety were flawed and outdated. The report said the methods and techniques used to make these assessments are not sophisticated enough to predict and identify unintended effects from genetically engineered food. The report included cloned food in that assessment.

What’s more, the report strongly recommended that the agencies “enhance [their] capacity for post-market surveillance'’ of genetically engineered and cloned food. In other words, they ought to start monitoring the release of those foods, labeling products derived from them in the marketplace, and deploying far better animal-identification and tracking systems, so that any unexpected health problems could be traced to the source.

Yet regulators, including the FDA, have followed few if any of the study’s sensible recommendations. The FDA’s public statement on the safety of cloned animals certainly didn’t mention these noteworthy and significant shortcomings in its assessment methods.

UPDATE: I also forgot to note that Baruch Fischhoff at Carnegie Mellon sent me a related link, with this note attached:

A few hundred BBC readers comment on eating cloned food. Not so stupid — or at least smarter than those who call them stupid.