The Changing and Static Nature of GMO Coverage

Over the last couple of years, I have noticed two simultaneous trends about media coverage of GMOs. First, a larger proportion of GMO stories highlight and dispute popular myths surrounding GMOs. Second, the comments on these articles and reasons given to be skeptical or wary of GMOs have not appreciably changed.

A recent New York Times article covered a Hawaiian County Councilman’s decision over a vote to ban GMOs on the big island of Hawaii. Although it was oddly somewhat child-like in its presentation of the process (Claim A is brought up. Claim A is disputed. Claim B is considered. Claim B is disregarded…) the tone of the piece was clearly intended to highlight the value of scientific skepticism. That the councilman, Greggor Ilagan, voted against the ban because it was founded on specious arguments portrayed him as a free thinker among a populism-driven council. Naturally, his side lost and the ban was put into effect.

Many of the comments on the NYTimes article mirrored those of the supporters who attended the council hearings in Hawaii. A minority defend GMOs as safe and useful tools. The majority, however, assert their beliefs that GMOs harm their health or their environment.  Anti-GMO positions usually fall into a few categories: Concerns over the health and safety of eating GMOs. Skepticism of biotech companies (read: Monsanto). Ecological concerns. The benefits of alternative agricultural practices. I hope to spend time with each of these topics over the coming weeks and months. Most are blown out of proportion; many are unfounded. Some, however, do come down to personal stance and belief.

The recent changes in GMO coverage appear to stem from a desire by news organizations to avoid false balance. The standard journalistic practice of neutrally informing the public of both sides of an argument is only valid when there are two even sides. When consensus has yet to be reached. When opinions, morals, or ethics are at stake more than facts. The difficult part of covering GMOs as a topic is that this technology encompasses both broad scientific consensus about its safety and opinions about the proper use of GMOs in agriculture. (And that’s all before we get into misconceptions of the facts that influence people’s opinions.) It is difficult to adequately address these different aspects of the public debate surrounding GMOs because they really lie on different planes.

Plant scientists won’t rest easy until wishy-washy opinions stop influencing scientific policy. GMO skeptics won’t be satisfied as long as their opinions are tossed out even once the facts are agreed upon (which, by the way, rarely happens).

New technologies are messy. My view is that a technological advance is neutral. Our applications of a new technology can be positive or negative. We can split the atom and incinerate cities or fuel them. GMOs have been used fairly conservatively thus far and yet through a combination of pretty terrible PR from biotech companies, an anti-corporate mood throughout the country, and public skepticism driven partly by a false dichotomy between natural and artificial, they remain a pariah in the public eye. Hell, at the end of the day, some would-be opponents say it doesn't even matter. (But ssshhh, don’t tell the commenters that).

The debate surrounding GMOs has lately been described as the left’s own version of climate science denial. Sometimes I use that analogy when trying to drive home how one cannot rely on intuition when assessing a new technology. One has to seek out the facts. Certainly no political party is immune to anti-scientific bias and the progressive left has taken up anti-GMO stances for years now. There is no need to equate GMOs and climate change. But there are similarities in the process by which both global warming and agricultural GMOs are attacked. And process matters.

My own anecdotal contribution to this layman’s media coverage comes from Reddit. Reddit, popularly understood to be largely made up of young, white progressives from North America, has taken a rabid anti-GMO stance for years. (The voting system of Reddit allows one to determine which opinions are most popular, reddiquette be damned.) I've often joined these comment threads to defend the benefits of GMOs or point our popular misconceptions about the technology. Usually I am called out a shill for Monsanto. Lovely.

But over the last couple of years, the top comments have increasingly pointed out misconceptions, biases and untruths in the primary article. More reasonable discussions about the benefits and dangers of GMOs have, slowly, beaten out the vitriol. Perhaps the broader shifts in media coverage of GMOs are in fact slowly trickling through the internet and end up as slightly-more-nuanced discussions rather than ad hominem attacks. If only we could get On The Media to be as interested in this particular topic as they are in asserting that NPR isn't biased!

P.S. If Nathanael Johnson at Grist hadn't beaten me to it, a six month adventure of teasing apart the incredibly intricate issues surrounding GMOs would be right up my alley. I’m still catching up with the coverage, but what I've seen so far suggests it is well worth a read. Check it out.   

  

Urban, Part One: Urban Humanism

I am a city dweller. I am a proud resident of the City of St. Louis, and a defender of the promise and potential of American cities. There’s a complex story being told in magazines and blogs about the future of the City in this century. The story involves demographics, loosely defined generations, the aftermath of the Great Recession and much more besides. This is a story I hope to contribute to one piece at a time. So, in Part One, I’ll begin with a healthy dose of optimism—perhaps a touch of naivety—and apparently not-quite-coining a phrase that appears most popularly associated with an Italian artist. Without spelling it out until this article, I’ve lately been calling myself an Urban Humanist (mostly in my head to avoid difficult questions and funny looks). Here’s my first attempt at defining what Urban Humanism means to me. Okay, to avoid too much pretension, we’ll skip the capital letters.

Let’s start simple. “Urban” refers to cities, obviously. Here we run up against a difficult question already. What is a city? When I think and speak of cities I refer primarily to urban cores, although in the vernacular it could refer to the core plus inner- and maybe even outer-ring suburbs. City limits sometimes extend too far, and other times not far enough. The urban core is an interconnected commercial and residential mix, with a significant increase in population density over outlying suburbs. To me, the central identifier of a city is that it pushes a large mass of diverse people into a small space. Naturally, this defies strict definitions, but fortunately it’s a concept most people can intuit.

“Humanism” is a broad term that can refer to many different approaches to life, and has complex philosophical definitions. I am borrowing what I consider the ‘spirit’ of humanism, which, as Wikipedia so eloquently puts it, “emphasizes the value and agency of human beings.” ‘Agency’ is such a beautiful word. It conjures up free will, moral action and motivation, all wonderfully human qualities.

There is often an explicitly secular component to humanism that rejects religious doctrine and the supernatural. I mostly want to borrow from this secularism the general belief that, as humans, we have to rely on ourselves to fix the problems we make and improve our own condition. To me, humanism extols the virtue of community and individuality. It celebrates the human spirit, ingenuity and drive, while promoting honest and emotional connections between peers.

My urban humanism is focused on the ability of cities to bring diverse groups of people together in order to create a sense of purpose, community and individual opportunity. Urban humanism to me is the product of, among other things, the superlinear scaling of cities. That is, the sum of an urban core is greater than its parts. Literally. The innovation, ideas, productivity (and crime) all scale faster than population itself would predict. Double the population of an urban core, and GDP will more than double.

The proposed cause of urban superlinearity is the ability to form more social ties with a diverse group of people. The Brownian motion of urban life bumps you into individuals you would never have met otherwise. You can exchange ideas, business plans, information or just pleasantries with a wide range of people. And this is the fuel that drives innovation. These interactions—fleeting and long-lasting—are the raw material of humanity. Of progress.

Urban humanism is the doctrine that these interactions promote the value and agency of human beings. Urban humanism posits that urban living will improve our ability to solve problems facing city-dwellers and farmers alike. Denser populations lead to an exchange of ideas that will move humanity forward faster than isolated, sprawled-out communities will. Simultaneously, urban humanism defends the benefits of diverse experiences for personal fulfillment.

As of 2010, a majority of the world’s population lives incities. For the first time ever, humanity is, on average, urban. And this trend will continue. Barring catastrophe, human beings have now progressed beyond a largely rural existence. That means that our future is inextricably tied to how our cities evolve, how we shape them, and how we respond to urban life. I find that prospect absolutely thrilling! I will continue to explore the realities, opportunities and challenges of city living among other topics on this blog and I hope you join me for that trip.

Sanity in Science

Well in standard blogging style I’ve taken a break and intend to end that now.

In addition to the expected guilt, my motivation today comes from an article that caught my attention. It is written by a recently-tenured computer scientist at Harvard who writes about how she survived her tenure-track position by pretending it was a seven-year postdoc. Now, she writes this article as an associate professor with tenure. This is a different perspective than a faculty member who failed that test. However, she presents a compelling case for dealing professionally and psychologically with the rigors of a tenure-track life.

But her story also brings up larger questions, largely unaddressed in her own article, about the scientific profession. While I will comment on parts of her article, and I encourage you to read it, I want to focus on the items she left unsaid.

The essay begins by describing the challenges of the job. Talented scientists—the author’s friends—become miserable or opt out for fear of becoming miserable. After proving oneself for years getting a Ph.D. and then years more for a postdoctoral fellowship, a five to seven year tenure-track position seems masochistic. A researcher is likely to be in their mid-thirties by the time the position begins, perhaps with young children. (After all, while academic scientists are good at delayed gratification if anyone is, children can only come so late). In an unfortunate turn of phrase, this is what many researchers consider their first job. And it comes with a firm deadline that is easy to portray as an up-or-down vote: Are you a professional scientist worthy of tenure and a job, or a bum?

The author spells out several coping strategies she used. My favorite is the title: she considered this a seven-year postdoc position. On the bright side, few other jobs will guarantee you a seven year position at the end of which you either renew your contract, so to speak, or move on. I am sympathetic to this manner of thinking. When I was deciding to apply to graduate school, I considered instead becoming a laboratory technician for a year or two to really mull over the big question. Do I want to get a Ph.D.? But since I was not able to consider non-science jobs (verboten in the long science career) I thought I would get a job and a degree at the same time. Graduate school pays pretty well these days. And as long as I’m not a complete screw up, I have a job for five years right out of college in a tepid economy. Not bad.

So her redefining of the position helps dull the anxiety about the final decision. However, here is where I want to move beyond the article. She neglects to mention how failing to secure tenure is not merely a hit to the ego and being fired. It may well end one’s chances of managing one’s own lab in academia. The alternatives are: Try to get a tenure-track position at a lower tier school. Apply for teaching-only positions, which are notoriously low-paid, insecure and usually only a small part of what a talented researcher wants to do. Go to industry, where authority-adverse academics may not exactly thrive. Choose a new career in your early forties. Of course that’s an incomplete list. But failing to secure tenure is definitely a black mark on a scientist’s resume and complicates future high-powered job searches.

There are a couple other strategies worthy of noting. She worked “fixed hours and in fixed amounts.” The breakdown is there for you to read but it adds up to about fifty hours a week of work. Then of course her childcare and household duties, shared equally with her husband. Additionally, instead of cultivating influential friends who would help her win tenure, her work friends were those with whom she could talk openly and share ideas and feel comfortable.

I believe the author had a reasonable approach to her tenure-track position. She became a little Zen about the whole thing and made her research quality the product of a happy life and hard work. More successful researchers need to advocate for this approach. But at the same time, the fact that her strategies seem so novel is a comment on the unfortunate state of the scientific profession.

Despite reduced funding opportunities, graduate programs recruit and train far more graduate students than there are academic research positions. Yet most people earn a Ph.D. to remain in the field they love, academia. It’s not a perfect job, but there are serious perks to being an academic scientist. Yet while many other careers would naturally limit the training pipeline according to the demand for labor, academia seems a little stuck. The upshot is that there is fierce competition for the research jobs that are available. And competition is good. It drives innovation, which leads to novel discoveries and improvements for society. But it also drives good scientists away. It drives them toward industry (a fine choice, but a second choice for many academics), or away from research altogether. After all, being a workaholic does not necessarily correlate with being a good scientific thinker. But it is a necessary qualification for remaining in academic research.

I will end by saying: I am not entirely bearish on the future of science. Far from it, in fact. I believe that scientific funding can be increased again through the work of effective policy makers and scientist-lobbyists. The mismatch between the supply and demand of trained scientists will likely even out at some point. Academia moves slowly. I believe that by communicating with the society that supports our research, we can successfully advocate for putting a higher priority on basic science. That last part is key, in my opinion. Science does not operate in a vacuum and as long as we are supported by taxpayers it is both our duty and in our best interests to open up channels of communication with them. Doing so will likely bring additional support for the work that scientists do and that will lead to a healthier profession in the long run.

This article has inspired a slightly ranty day-in-the-life career track for scientists. I don’t feel in the mood to publish a more negative stance at the moment but I think I will return to the idea for a future post. Non-scientists are usually only presented with successful professors as their image of the profession. And usually the more photogenic, genial souls who put on a good face. But as with most careers, there is a lot of hard work involved and the peculiarities of the career path may be of interest to some. Look for that soon.

Indoor/Outdoor Gardening

Phew! This was a busy day in the garden and I've got a lot to share.

First, a belated update to Indoor Gardening. Now it's outdoors! Starting plants from seed was a resounding success. With the LED grow light setup in the laundry room, the seedlings did great. I just left the light on 24 hours a day and the plants that got the most light right under the fixtures grew quickly and strong. I was able to rotate out the strongest plants to south-facing windows and put the smaller seedlings directly under the lights to grow better.

The tomatoes in particular did really well under the lights and flourished in the window when they were repotted at about 5"-6" tall. I also had success with hot and sweet peppers, eggplant and cucumbers. My rosemary is growing very slowly, but then again I think that's just what rosemary does.

After trying to transplant some lettuces and broccoli when they were still too young, I opted instead to just sow seeds directly in the soil. My front garden became my area for all these cool-weather crops because I was far too lazy to walk over to the community garden plot to dig in the cold, wet soil. But these plants did great when sewn directly in soil and I've had my first big pile of lettuces for a delicious salad. Not surprisingly, I now have more leafy vegetables than I really want and I've tried to pawn off the lettuces to my downstairs neighbors. But it's really fulfilling to have the first harvest of the year behind me and I look forward to more the interesting vegetables of summer. I've got peas going in the front garden too which now have a couple flowers on them so they'll hopefully be producing in the near future.

We've had a pretty cool and very wet spring--the Mississippi is chronically flooding--and so even though it's several weeks past the last frost date of April 15 I haven't been brave enough to put in my warm weather crops until now. Today was a beautiful day for doing so though: warm but not hot, with some occasional cloud cover. I went over to the community plot I've rented for the summer and transplanted four tomato plants, three peppers and two eggplants while putting in some seed onions as well. Oh and a cucumber. I started the cucumber indoors although I don't think that's really necessary or even recommended. I'm not sure they survive transplanting very well, but they grow so quickly that if the transplantation doesn't work I can just sew some seeds soon.

What's really intriguing about tomatoes is that because they have evolved to vine over the ground, wherever the stem touches soil it grows new roots. So a strategy for developing a really strong tomato plant is to remove a few of the lower leaves and dig a short trench. You lay the tomato down in the trench and cover up a lot of the stem with soil, leaving just a few leaves at the top. The top will quickly orient to grow against gravity and the whole stem will turn into a new root structure that will give the aerial portions plenty of support and the ability to gather water and nutrients from a wider area. I haven't done it before, but I'm excited to see if it helps my tomatoes flourish in the summer.

Another strategy I look forward to implementing is to actively prune my tomatoes. If you've ever grown tomatoes then you know that it's so easy for them to get overgrown and even get so big they fall over. This is the problem in trying to pretend that a vine is an upright plant. But apparently an easy solution is just to prune them back, like a tree or a grapevine. Once the plant is established and tries to grow extra stems, you just pinch them off at the base. This puts more of the plant's energy into the remaining foliage and fruits to promote ripening and keep the plant from falling over under its own weight.

Hopefully my tomatoes and other warm-weather crops survive the transplanting process well enough. In truth, I should have more carefully hardened them off to survive cooler temperatures and the scorching sun. But they are so hardy right now and the weather is basically perfect that I think I'll be fine, especially as the tomatoes grow new roots.

That finished off all my indoor plants, so I've turned off the LEDs and I'll have to clean up the soggy, wet cardboard boxes that housed my plants for the last few months. I have some other plants I can start from seed--pole beans, more carrots, some herbs--but I think I'm done with the laundry room setup. It's really satisfying to finally get my plants in the ground after nurturing them for months indoors. I've only ever bought seedlings to transplant, but it seems my own plants are somehow stronger. The whole process definitely gives me a level of satisfaction I haven't known before in my gardening experience and I hope I can repeat it next year.

As a topic preview, today I hosted an outreach event at my community garden brining some plant scientists to talk about medicinal plants, domestication and GMOs. It was small, but largely successful and as always I've learned more about how to host such events in the future. That post will be up soon.

Clinton Global Initative University

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Clinton Global Initiative University conference hosted by Washington University. While the CGI is fairly well known, I had never heard of CGI U until I saw a headline in the student newspaper at Washington University last fall announcing the conference. It's a meeting designed to bring undergraduate and graduate students from around the world with ideas to address global issues together to meet one another and receive training and support to complete their goals.

Each goal is called a "commitment to action" and is explicitly centered on how to take a grand idea and make progress toward real, measureable action. About 1200 students are invited to attend the conference. The real kicker is that the host university receives 200 of those slots. So all of us at WashU had a much easier time being accepted. It's clearly a reward for the hosting university--which has to provide a huge amount of support, logitics and infrastructure--but the upshot is that the diversity of commitments is increased because of the lower bar for entry.

My own commitment to action is based on my ongoing efforts to bring St. Louis plant scientists and community gardeners together over their common interest in developing strong food systems. In fact, that is my commitment to action. I want to bring these groups together so they can be advocates for one another. So plant scientists are engaged in their own communities, strengthening them through productive uses of public spaces. So urban agriculturalists vocally--and politically--support research to create strong crops. I think it all starts with meeting on common ground and developing mutual respect.

So that's my plan. Although I am already working toward those goals, I still haven't fully fleshed out my ideas or developed a real plan of action to make sure I'm making progress. That was what CGI U promised to offer.

The conference was held across three days, but there was really only one day full of events and workshops. On Friday, they hosted a networking event for all the attendees to grab some food and mingle with one another. Students from WashU, from other American schools and from literally the other side of the world were all there. The menu was a "Taste of the Midwest" featuring provel cheese (a fake provolone native to STL), St. Louis-style barbecue, Italian fair from The Hill, toasted ravioli and other quaint personifications of my new home city.

I wandered over to the cocktail table with the "Agriculture" sign on it--seemed appropriate enough. It turns out that wasn't an accident and I met my mentor there. I had a mentor who was supposed to guide me in my CGI U experience but as far as I could tell she just sent me emails telling me how excited she was and how to download the mobile app.

However, I did meet a woman from Palestine and was so surprised to hear her home country that I completely failed to ask her a dozen questions I might otherwise have. I've only ever met one other Palestinian to my knowledge but never one who was actually living there. Had just flown halfway around the world. I didn't even catch what her commitment was, something related to agriculture as mine is. But that was my first realization that I was playing at a serious level here.

That leads me to mention that coming from WashU, where it was so much easier to be accepted, left me with a bit of an inferiority complex during the event. A huge portion of the attendees--most of them younger than me--had commitments to assist a large population of underserved people around the world. Many of them had already made significant progress. So at times I felt a bit like the kid at the adult table, trying to follow the conversation and sit up straight but accidentally spilling mashed potatoes all over my shirt with my legs dangling uselessly a foot above the floor. Yet at the same time it was an ego boost to be on the same level as truly inspiring students, let alone being in the same room with world-renowned personalities.

The first evening followed with a plenary session. Chelsea Clinton came out and welcomed everyone, introducing the purpose of CGI U. She was followed by President Bill Clinton who spoke and then welcomed the speakers: Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square; William Kamkwamba, writer of "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind"; Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy; Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International. President Clinton moderated the panel discussing entrepreneurship and social mindfulness. It was inspiring and fascinating--that was the goal I believe--and we all took a "class photo" and I wandered home.

Saturday was the primary day of the conference packed with panels and workshops. Unfortunately, there were really only two decisions to make during the entire event: a morning session and an afternoon session, each about an hour and a half long. The rest of the time was taken up with fixed panels covering interesting topics but they didn't directly address how to improve our commitments. The workshops I did choose to attend were amazing, and I found myself wishing I could have filled my days with them because it was impossible to attend all of them.

The morning began with a similar session to the previous evening's, moderated by Chelsea Clinton and covering many different issues surrounding women, particularly in the developing world. Then we moved on to the first open slot. I had decided to attend a panel on STEM education because a big part of my commitment is focused on public-facing science communication. It was moderated by a senior advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and featured three women who were focused on STEM education, including one woman who was the team leader of her own commitment to action.

The panel focused on effective ways to improve science education, primarily formal science education in classrooms and universities. The discussion centered around how to attract more students, particularly young women and girls, to pursue STEM fields. All of the panelists agreed that by focusing on the social benefits of science and engineering, we would be able to engage more students, especially women who may be drawn to that purpose.

The panel concluded with a discussion at our table about our commitments and what we could do to improve STEM education. I met Melanie Bauer, a third year psychology graduate student at WashU, whose commitment centered on informal science education. I was very glad to meet a student from WashU with an overlapping interest because while networking with the hundreds of students from around the world was great, I knew I would be much more likely to follow up and collaborate with another student in St. Louis.

In fact, I met up with Melanie for lunch, completely skipping the noon presentation, and I devoured her information about how to write for the university newsletter, Scientific American and about a media fellowship from the AAAS that she was applying for. After the conference, we agreed to work together to write an essay for the National Science Foundation on ways to improve graduate education that was due a week later. We presented our idea for a new curriculum required of all graduate students to train them in communicating science to the public. We could win a cash prize come June!

The afternoon workshop was equally helpful. I thought it was the best choice from what CGI U called "skill sessions", focused on how to monitor and evaluate your commitment to ensure you're making progress. This was a real weakness of my commitment but I learned a lot. Or at least enough to get the juices flowing.

The final event of the conference was hosted by Stephen Colbert, the headlining act of the weekend (besides of course a former president, his daughter, the founder of Twitter, etc. etc.). He came out and riffed on the CGI U by presenting his own "Colbert Galactic Initiative". He then sat down with President Clinton in character for a 15 minute interview that he presented on his Monday night show. Afterwards he broke character--apparently a stipulation of President Clinton's--to talk more seriously about the issues being addressed by CGI and CGI U. Finally, students in attendance could stand up to microphones and ask wither Colbert or Clinton questions, and this portion of the event was apparently livestreamed for audiences at home.

That was basically the end. There was another networking event but I just stuck around long enough to grab dinner and then headed home. And here I'll hang my head in shame because I didn't attend the volunteering event the next morning. I should have. I told them I would. Oops.

But I was already exhausted! It was a fantastic opportunity. I only wish I had been able to attend more panels and workshops during the day on Saturday. Because despite how interesting some of the moderated discussions were, they were less directly helpful for planning my own commitment. More of an inspiration I suppose.

However, I did receive some invaluable help on monitoring the success of my commitment; on current perspectives in STEM education. I met a new friend and collaborator and we've already had a productive relationship arguing our case for more informal science communication training in graduate school. I'll be able to tell grandkids who don't care about the day I almost-kinda met Bill Clinton and Stephen Colbert. I'm very thankful to CGI U for accepting my application to attend and grateful that attending WashU at the right time gave my more modest idea a chance to be heard.

Lindbergh HS

This morning I had the opportunity to speak at Lindbergh High School in St. Louis County about GMOs. I was invited by an advanced science teacher, Bryan Cintel, after he asked around through the biology department listserv for a guest speaker.

It was fortuitous because their AP biology course was already covering biotechnology and GMOs so I was able to contribute to that unit by giving a scientist’s perspective on the matter. Even though I don’t work on GMOs myself, my work as a plant biologist brings up the topic a lot. And since I went into plant biology because of an interest in developing strong food systems, genetic engineering is a topic I’m always trying to learn more about. I’m the resident ‘plant guy’ to a lot of my friends and family so I’m used to covering everything from plant science to organic farming and Monsanto’s legal team. It just comes with the territory.

But I was excited to present to students after presenting at the Community Garden Summit a few weeks back. The students were very advanced—they had covered the cloning of genes, gene regulation, the structure of DNA and restriction enzymes among other topics. So I was able to focus more on the science and biology behind genetic engineering than I was when presenting to the more heterogeneous crowd at the Community Garden Summit. This was my first time giving a presentation exclusively on GMOs and I was happy to have the practice. I know it won’t be my last!

I borrowed a few slides from my previous presentation but I wanted to make sure I contributed some actual biology that was new to the students. They had learned about genetic engineering in bacteria, but plants are a bit of a different story and I taught them about how we use Agrobacterium to help us transform plants. Or a ‘gene gun’ when we can’t use Agro.

The students had questions ready from an assignment but of course a handful of students in each period spoke up the most and were really interested in the topic, which was great. One girl already knew about Golden Rice, which was a topic I covered in my slides. Of course, some students were interested in the ethics and legal issues surrounding the patenting of genes and whether Monsanto was in the right when they sued some farmers for patent infringement. I always try to make it clear that I’m no expert on Monsanto’s legal issues, but the fact is that I keep abreast of the information as much as I can so I do usually have something to contribute. And the students wanted my opinion on some of the other concerns surrounding GMOs, like the health consequences of eating them. I told them that it was the strong consensus that GMOs are perfectly safe to eat. But I did bring up some of the more legitimate issues that skeptics have with the technology, like the problem of ‘gene escape’ from a genetically engineered crop to a wild relative.

Mr. Cintel asked me to talk a little bit about biotech jobs as well. Although I don’t have direct experience in the biotechnology industry, GMOs and plant science in general are great to talk about in the St. Louis region. We have the highest concentration of plant scientists in the world, largely thanks to Monsanto. But we also have great non-profit institutions like the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and of course Washington University. This gave me a chance to talk about the several different ways that students could become involved with science as a career. It’s not only academic research, but it can be industry work or work at independent research centers like the DDPSC. And I told them that a career in science isn’t necessarily limited to those with Ph.D.s. A place like Monsanto should have jobs for all educational levels where you still get to ‘do science’ at a different level.

I had a great time, even though I had to wake up an hour earlier than usual to get out to the school by 8:10. Several of the students were interested in going into science and I told them that Washington University probably has opportunities for them to do work during the summer even in high school. That’s how I got started.

I hope to speak to more students in the future. Maybe I’ll even return to Lindbergh High School to speak next year on a similar topic.

(Topic preview: I was selected to attend the Clinton Global Initiative University conference taking place at Washington University from April 5-7. My Commitment to Action continues my outreach efforts to bring plant scientists in the region together with the urban agriculture community. I’ll write about that shortly.)

Update to First Sale Doctrine

Well I wasn't expecting this.

On the 'We The People' site, which allows Americans to write and sign petitions for the White House to consider, the Obama administration has issued a formal response about the recently enacted change in the DMCA exceptions about phone unlocking.

Remember, this is the same site that got an official response from the White House about building a Death Star. It's not exactly the halls of power.

However, it's interesting because the White House, more specifically Senior Advisor for Internet, Innovation & Privacy R. David Edelman, detail their opinion that the exemption to the DMCA for unlocking one's cell phone for use on another provider should be maintained.

As a quick recap: The DMCA says you can't circumvent copyrighted software, which includes the measures that lock a cell phone to a given mobile provider. An existing exemption, granted by the Library of Congress, made it legal to do so once your contract ended, even without permission from your provider. Now, that's no longer the case. Even after a contract is up, the provider could forbid you from unlocking. And doing so on your own would be against the law.

The response to the petition specifically notes that the White House respects the "process" that gives the Library of Congress authority to alter these exemptions. It is, after all, the law. And this is, after all, the Executive Branch. But it's intriguing that they've specifically contradicted the Library of Congress' change to this exemption and recommended a role for the FCC and legislators to play in altering the details of phone unlocking. Well, don't hold your breath for legislators doing much of anything.

We'll see if this goes anywhere. So far, I haven't come across widespread reports of maniacal mobile providers chaining people to their off-contract phones. But the change in the law never really made sense anyway. The DMCA was designed to keep people from illegally ripping DVDs and CDs and distributing them without any DRM. (And boy, it did just the trick, didn't it?). Just because the software on the phone is copyrighted doesn't put this case in the same category.