Welcome to my personal website. It contains all my web writings since 2009.

Forthcoming appearances

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Catch me at:

Title: “The Meaning of Life”. A  workshop.
The 2019 Biodynamic Conference (Lake George, NY) Nov 20-24, 2019

Title: “The EPA: Friend or Foe?”
at: Soil Not Oil September 9-10, 2019
San Francisco, California
September 9th 7-8pm.

Title: “Are Conservatism and Genetic Determinism the Same Thing?”
Oslo, Norway ISHPSSB 2019
Date: July 7-12th, 2019

Title: “The Politics of Pesticides”
The Golden Notebook (Confirmed)
Woodstock, New York.
April 27th, 2019
A book talk with Mitchel Cohen and others.

 

Gene-Editing Unintentionally Adds Bovine DNA, Goat DNA, and Bacterial DNA, Mouse Researchers Find

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD
The gene-editing of DNA inside living cells is considered by many to be the preeminent technological breakthrough of the new millennium. Researchers in medicine and agriculture have rapidly adopted it as a technique for discovering cell and organism functions. But its commercial prospects are much more complicated. More

Unsealing the Science: What the Public can Learn from Internal Chemical Industry Documents

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A panel discussion with the people who brought the three new chemical industry documents collections to the UCSF library explored what the documents mean for public health and the perils they faced in making these documents public. Professor Stanton Glantz, who began the library with the first collection of internal tobacco industry documents and explained how the documents have been used to inform litigation, documentaries and public policy decisions. University Librarian and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Information Management Chris Shaffer gave an overview of the Industry Documents Library and introduced the panel. Panelists were Dr. Jonathan Latham, Director of the Bioscience Resource Project, and Gary Ruskin, Co-founder and Co-Director of U.S. Right to Know. The panel was moderated by Dr. Tracey Woodruff, Professor and Director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment and Co-Director of the UCSF Environmental Health Initiative, which has supported the development of the Chemical Industry Documents library.
Watch the panel discussion:
https://lecture.ucsf.edu/ets/Play/342d5d84275441b2b97aa9f641d0dca51d

Failing for Forty Years: What the Poison Papers Tell Us About the EPA and How to Reform It

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Dr. Jonathan Latham, Director of the Bioscience Resource Project talked about the importance of the 20,000-document collection and how it exposes problems with both the internal culture of the EPA and its legal framework that are often fraught with industry influences that prevent precautionary decision-making, even when the science clearly points to danger. The documents that have come to be known as the Poison Papers were collected over a period of 40 years by Carol Van Strum, Diane Hebert, Eric Coppolino, and Peter von Stackelberg, who served as custodians of the documents, gathering, storing, scanning, and distributing them. Their ultimate goal was to make the documents accessible to anybody and everybody who might need them. The Park Foundation, The Bioscience Resource Project, Center for Media and Democracy, and the late Rosalind Peterson helped fund this endeavor.

Watch the talk:
https://lecture.ucsf.edu/ets/Play/0b4ef9a0f5af41fdb982aa4a1f0753f21d

FDA Finds Unexpected Antibiotic Resistance Genes in ‘Gene-Edited’ Dehorned Cattle

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By Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

Gene-editing is seen by many as the ultimate in precision breeding. Polled cattle, whose horns have been genetically removed, have been presented as exemplars of this–a socially beneficial use of precise genome engineering. Such hornless cattle were produced in 2016 by Recombinetics, Inc., of St. Paul, Minnesota, a development that was reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology (Carlson et al, 2016). More

As a GMO Stunt, Professor Tasted Pesticide and Gave it To Students

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Imagine you are an undergraduate attending an Ivy League university. You go to a routine department seminar. In the middle of his presentation the professor picks up a container from the lectern. He says it contains a pesticide. As he opens it, a faint cloud of brown powder rises from the tub. It is, says he, “very safe”. Then he digs his finger into the container and tastes some of the contents. He offers it to a man in the front row, who twice refuses it. Walking back to the centre of the room, the professor looks towards you and pushes the container in your direction.

Apparently he wants you to join him in eating pesticide. What should you do? More

EU Threatens To Legalise Human Harm From Pesticides

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By Hans Muilerman and Jonathan Latham, PhD

Current EU regulations forbid human exposure to pesticides that are classified as mutagenic, carcinogenic, reprotoxic (toxic for reproduction), persistent or capable of disrupting endocrine systems. By virtue of these and other protective measures EU regulations are considered the gold standard in public protection.

However, experts who are closely linked to industry (or are part of anti-regulation pressure groups) have taken control of the EU’s new Science Advice Mechanism (SAM). These experts have contributed to a report commissioned to reevaluate the EU’s authorisation of pesticides. The report, called “EU authorisation processes of Plant Protection Products”, and published in late 2018, recommends dramatically weakening the EU regulatory system. Especially notable is the adoption of many ideas previously proposed by the chemical industry. More

Rigging the Science of GMO Ecotoxicity

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Researchers who work on GMO crops are developing special “artificial diet systems”. The stated purpose of these new diets is to standardise the testing of the Cry toxins, often used in GMO crops, for their effects on non-target species. But a paper published last month in the journal Toxins implies a very different interpretation of their purpose. The new diets contain hidden ingredients that can mask Cry toxicity and allow them to pass undetected through toxicity tests on beneficial species like lacewings (Hilbeck et al., 2018). Thus the new diets will benefit GMO crop developers by letting new ones come to market quicker and more reliably. Tests conducted with the new diets are even being used to cast doubt on previous findings of ecotoxicological harm.

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