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Cornell Faculty Refuse to Defend GMO Crops

October 14, 2016 By jrl in Feature Articles No Comments

by Jonathan Latham, PhD


Who would have thought that at Cornell University, arguably the most highly regarded agricultural university in the world, no scientist would speak for the benefits and safety of GMOs?

Perhaps I should have known, however. Last year I was invited to debate the merits of GMOs at Colby College in Maine. Also invited were food activist Jodi Koberinski, Stephen Moose (University of Illinois), and Mark Lynas of the Cornell Alliance for Science and prominent advocate of GMOs worldwide. Soon after Lynas heard I was coming, however, he pulled out of the debate.More

Why the Food Movement is Unstoppable

September 14, 2016 By jrl in Feature Articles No Comments

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

In 1381, for the first and only time, the dreaded Tower of London was captured from the King of England. The forces that seized it did not belong to a foreign power; nor were they rebellious workers – they were peasants who went on to behead the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury who were, after the king, the country’s leading figures. A tad more recently, in the U.S. presidential election of 1892 a radical populist movement campaigned for wealth redistribution and profound economic reform. The populists won five states. All of them were rural.More

107 Nobel Laureate Attack on Greenpeace Traced Back to Biotech PR Operators

July 13, 2016 By jrl in News Articles No Comments

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Greenpeace was denied entrance yesterday (June 30) to a National Press Club Event in Washington, DC of 107 Nobel Laureates. The event was ostensibly organised by a scientific group calling itself Support Precision Agriculture to publicise a letter signed by 107 Nobel Laureates demanding that Greenpeace cease its opposition to “golden rice” and GMO technology in general. Greenpeace was attempting to attend the event. However, senior research specialist on GMOs, Charlie Cray, accompanied by Tim Schwab, senior researcher from Food and Water Watch were both physically prevented from entering the Press Club.More

Financial Conflicts at National Academy Advisory Panel on the Future of GMO Regulation

June 13, 2016 By jrl in News Articles No Comments

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

The National Academy of Sciences needs to urgently address its one-sided work on GMOs say public-interest groups, farmer organisations, and academics. In a letter sent to the Academy’s president today, dozens of stakeholders drew attention to what they called a “troubling trend” at the prestigious scientific institution and its work on agricultural biotechnology.More

God’s Red Pencil? CRISPR and The Three Myths of Precise Genome Editing

April 13, 2016 By jrl in Feature Articles No Comments

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

For the benefit of those parts of the world where public acceptance of biotechnology is incomplete, a public relations blitz is at full tilt. It concerns an emerging set of methods for altering the DNA of living organisms. “Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up“; “We Have the Technology to Destroy All Zika Mosquitoes“; and “CRISPR: gene editing is just the beginning”. (CRISPR is short for CRISPR/cas9, which is short for Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR associated protein 9; Jinek et al., 2012. It is a combination of a guide RNA and a protein that can cut DNA.)More

Many European Pesticide Approvals Are “unlawful” Says EU Ombudsman

March 13, 2016 By jrl in News Articles No Comments

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Many current pesticides in the European Union appear to have been approved illegally the Ombudsman of the EU has said. This judgment was reached on Feb 22nd by the EU Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, following an official complaint against the European Commission’s Directorate responsible for public health and consumer safety (DG SANTE).More

Unsafe at any Dose? Diagnosing Chemical Safety Failures, from DDT to BPA

January 13, 2016 By jrl in Feature Articles No Comments

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Piecemeal, and at long last, chemical manufacturers have begun removing the endocrine-disrupting plastic bisphenol-A (BPA) from products they sell. Sunoco no longer sells BPA for products that might be used by children under three. France has a national ban on BPA food packaging. The EU has banned BPA from baby bottles. These bans and associated product withdrawals are the result of epic scientific research and some intensive environmental campaigning. But in truth these restrictions are not victories for human health. Nor are they even losses for the chemical industry.More

There’s Nothing Parochial About the Issue of GMO Food Labeling

January 5, 2016 By jrl in Feature Articles No Comments

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

The GMO labeling issue has quieted down some but there is still plenty to discuss. Just this week the USDA proposed to redefine GMOs with new loopholes for gene editing. However, it is also possible for reasonable people to imagine that GMO labeling is a sideshow to the real business of the food movement. After all, most GMO foods and GMO crops are visually indistinguishable from non-GMOs, and tiny non-GMO labels can look pretty irrelevant on the side of a soda bottle containing whole cupfuls of sugar. Last week, Michael Pollan, Olivier de Schutter, Mark Bittman and Ricardo Salvador made that error, calling GMO labeling “parochial“. Granted, they wrote “important but parochial”, but qualifying the significance of GMO labeling in any way was a mistake.More

FAO Symposium: Role of Agricultural Biotechnologies in Sustainable Food Systems and Nutrition

December 21, 2015 By jrl in Uncategorized No Comments

I will be in Rome on Feb 15-17 for an International Symposium on “The Role of Agricultural Biotechnologies in Sustainable Food Systems and Nutrition”. Apparently, the details are still being worked out.

Oxford Real Farming Conference

December 21, 2015 By jrl in Uncategorized No Comments

I will be on a panel at the Oxford Real Farming Conference on Jan 6th. The other participants will be Helena Paul and Michel Pimbert. The session will be on “The Corruption of Agricultural Science”.

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Did West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak of 2014 Have a Lab Origin?

Fauci’s COVID Origin SWAT Team Versus the Mojiang Miner Passage Theory

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Delete, Deny, and Destroy: Chinese and Western Strategies To Erase COVID’s Origin Are Being Exposed By Independent Research

Talk: The Mojiang Miners Passage Theory and the Lab Origin Question

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