Book Author: Robyn O’Brien (with Rachel Kranz)
Reviewed by Jonathan Latham, PhD (The Bioscience Resource Project)
Allergies and food intolerances are serious medical conditions. They are the cause of many deaths and hospitalizations annually and they predispose to other illnesses. They can also exact a high toll in other ways since worry, inconvenience and lost opportunities can significantly harm the quality of lives.More
Book Author: Jerome Ravetz
Reviewed by Jonathan Latham, PhD
Traditional science as practiced in European and US universities is being confronted on many sides. These challenges are manifested in the rise of alternative medicine and patients groups, well-publicised failures and ethical lapses, criticism from environmental groups and declining student interest in many science subjects. To make matters worse, there is an increasingly cogent intellectual critique of scientific infallibility, objectivity and disinterestedness.More
by Jonathan Latham, PhD
In 2002, peasant associations from all over Asia organised an international scientific conference. The motivation for the conference was the fact that peasants and their leaders had no dialogue with agricultural scientists, either from their own countries or with those from abroad. A lack of support from scientists was not the only motivation however. The peasants had also come to believe that the science with which they were familiar was actively hostile to their way of life. As a result, many had demonstrated outside the UN-sponsored International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Phillipines, a research centre set up specifically to support farming in developing countries.More
Book Author: Peter M Rosset
Reviewed by Jonathan Latham (The Bioscience Resource Project)
Most people would probably agree that the world needs food and agricultural
systems that:
1) provide adequate, affordable, nutritious, tasty and culturally appropriate food,
2) offer rural people the opportunity for a living wage/income,
3) contribute to broad-based development and
4) conserve rural environments, cultural and culinary traditions
Jonathan Latham, PhD
Biologists know that complex traits are typically associated with genetic variation between individuals. Nevertheless, if we hear on the news that obesity, antisocial behaviour or some other disorder has a strong genetic component, we are likely to attach special significance to this ‘fact’. We may be less likely to attribute social factors as a cause and we may be more likely to accept a technological or pharmaceutical solution as a remedy. The disorder may also acquire a credibility and a sense of inevitability that it previously lacked. The reasoning that leads to these conclusions has a certain logic, after all we investigate causes primarily so that we can find remedies, but nevertheless we need to be careful that our thinking is well-founded.More
Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson
Experts do not have an entirely unblemished record of predicting the future of agriculture. In the 1950s it was envisioned that farms would be irrigated with water from icecaps that had been melted by nuclear explosions, this water (naturally) would be stored in ponds, also ‘dug’ by nuclear explosions. In the 1970s another generation of experts was predicting an era of remote control tractors and multi-story farms. Electromagnetic ploughing would prepare the soil for crops that would require only half an inch of recycled water per year and specially coated seeds would be blasted from pipes into crop-specific patterns channelled by underground magnetism (1).More