If you’ve ever wondered: Are there drugs in my Wheaties? I can assure you there are not—at least not unless your very shady trainer is trying to get you to win the Tour de France. But if the talk today at AAAS (“Drugs in Our Corn Flakes? Our Health and the Economic Risks of ‘Pharma’ and Industrial Crops”) is at all a marker of things to come with the marriage of pharmaceuticals and agriculture, that breakfast of champions might require a prescription.
The idea of pharmaceuticals made out of plants is not a new one, it’s about as new as, well, the idea that we could genetically engineer our plants to provide more of those things that we want—bug repellents, big ears, and higher oil content. All these things have been done and so far they have caused no physical harm to anyone (let us note here that the results of this giant experiment with our food is quite preliminary).
Today, Paul Gepts, Robert Wizner, and Charles Arntzen give us mixed messages on whether or not we should be tampering with the genes of our food sources for the greater good. Here are two tales from the discussion: a cautionary tale and a tale of hope.
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Today at the Hynes Convention Center in the heart of Boston, AAAS went “Into the Deep” with a symposium exposing deep-sea coral as an ancient organism (older than you’d think), a tool that can be used to measure climate change, and a victim of trawling, disappearing at an alarming rate.
Deep-sea corals may be the oldest known organisms in the ocean, says Brendan Roark, a geochemist from Stanford University. The oldest among them were once thought to be about 1,800 years old, but Roark’s new radio carbon dating studies show they can be as old as 4,200 years. The key to the new evidence was provided in the finding that these corals grow much more slowly than previously thought–it takes one species over 700 years to grow an inch. Flying in the face of conventional thinking, Alberto Lindner of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil says that deep-sea corals are actually the ancestors of their shallow-water cousins. Warm, sunlit shallow seas were once thought to be the cradles of coral diversity. But Lindner’s DNA evidence shows that the more familiar shallow water corals, such as those that form the Great Barrier Reef, are actually the new comers on the evolutionary scene. (more…)
Welcome to the biggest science conference on earth from the world’s largest science society—the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Discover is here in Boston, exploring Science and Technology from a Global Perspective, blogging on four days of lectures, presentations, interviews, and discussion from hundreds of researchers, thinkers, and developers of science and technology. Keep your eye on Discoblog for updates from AAAS on the latest work with satellites and climate change, a look at sharks’ key roles in the ocean, new ways to get rid of nuclear waste, how statistics—not steroids—have ruined baseball, robotic development, and a variety of other topics we’ll be covering.
