Science Facts & Fallacies

Whether you typically crave a drip coffee or something a bit more intricate, we can all agree that caffeine is necessary, right?

As Americans, we’re pretty big coffee drinkers. On average for the five years ending in 2016, the US annually imported 1.45 million metric tons of green coffee beans from countries around the world. That translates into 2.7 billion pounds of roasted beans per year. Each pound of roasted beans can be brewed into about 24 “tall" Starbucks coffees, making the 2.7 billion pounds we import enough to brew about 65 billion of those 12-oz cups of morning joe.

On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, plant pathologist Steve Savage discusses America's collective love of coffee and explains how to calculate your coffee footprint: all the land, labor and pesticides necessary to fuel your daily coffee habit.

Full show transcript available here.

Steve Savage is a plant pathologist and senior contributor to the GLP. Follow him on Twitter @grapedoc. The Pop Agriculture podcast is available for listening or subscription on iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Does Bayer's weed killer Roundup (glyphosate) cause cancer? Three California juries have said yes, while a global consensus of experts says there is no evidence to suggest that glyphosate is carcinogenic. This discrepancy has ignited an intense debate over whether juries should be tasked with answering complicated scientific questions that researchers spend their entire careers studying.

Geoffrey Kabat

On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, cancer epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat returns to explain why courtrooms are no place to determine if pesticides cause cancer. Not only do judges, lawyers and juries lack the proper knowledge to answer such questions, Kabat says, but high-stakes lawsuits with entrenched interests on either side of argument inevitably encourage emotional reactions, not reasoned scientific judgement.

[Editor's note: Listen to Part 1 of the GLP's interview with Geoffrey Kabat: Podcast: Glyphosate, cancer and clickbait: Epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat on how to spot junk science in the news]

Kabat also dives deeper into the science behind the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) "probably carcinogenic" finding for glyphosate, giving special attention to the massive Agricultural Health Study that IARC chose to exclude from its monograph.

Geoffrey Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist and the author of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology and Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks. He is a GLP board member. Follow him on Twitter @GeoKabat

Cameron J. English is the GLP’s senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

The GLP’s Biotech Facts and Fallacies podcast is produced by Sauce Auxiliary and available for subscription on iTunes and Spotify.

Our collective desire to get “back to nature” is probably one of the better instincts from the Woodstock era that still resonates today. On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, plant pathologist Steve Savage discusses how gardening has shaped his understanding of agriculture, and offers seven reasons why you should try your hand at growing your own food.

Full show transcript available here.

Steve Savage is a plant pathologist and senior contributor to the GLP. Follow him on Twitter @grapedoc. The Pop Agriculture podcast is available for listening or subscription on iTunes and Google Podcasts.

A Google search for "glyphosate" returns 10,300,000 results—conflicting news stories, opinion articles and videos of varying accuracy. Some of these reports say this weed killer, developed in the 1970s by Monsanto and now sold by Bayer as Roundup, causes cancer, based on a report from the prestigious UN/World Health Organization-sub agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

Other news stories say the exact opposite: Glyphosate almost certainly doesn't cause cancer, according to most studies, and IARC is an ethically compromised agency whose conclusion conflicts with every other oversight or regulatory body in the world, including three World Health Organization agencies.

Geoffrey Kabat

"Common weed killer glyphosate increases cancer risk by 41%, study says," CNN told its audience in February. Just two months later, US News & World Report announced, "EPA: Glyphosate, the Herbicide in Roundup, Does Not Cause Cancer."

Complicating the situation, Bayer is now facing 11,000 lawsuits alleging that its Roundup weed killer causes a rare kind of cancer called non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. The company has so far lost three of these cases and may be on the hook for billions of dollars in damages.

How do you know the truth? Unless you know how to read dense academic research, it's nearly impossible to separate good science from nonsense. To remedy that problem, GLP editor Cameron English sits down with cancer epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat to review some recent news stories about glyphosate and cancer. Kabat, author of 150 peer-reviewed studies and two books on health risks, offers some quick and dirty tips to help you evaluate the science reported underneath the clickbait headlines that saturate your news feed.

[Editor's note: This is part one of a two-part interview]

Geoffrey Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist and the author of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology and Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks. He is a GLP board member. Follow him on Twitter @GeoKabat

Cameron J. English is the GLP’s senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

The GLP’s Biotech Facts and Fallacies podcast is produced by Sauce Auxiliary and available for subscription on

Bet you never thought fertilizer was magical but that changes today! On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, plant pathologist Steve Savage discusses how scientific discovery brought us fertilizer, effectively changing the game for farmers around the world.

Full show transcript available here.

Steve Savage is a plant pathologist and senior contributor to the GLP. Follow him on Twitter @grapedoc. The Pop Agriculture podcast is available for listening or subscription on iTunes and Google Podcasts.

 

For many years, the developing world has been at the center of a heated debate between mainstream scientists and anti-GMO activists. While a booming population puts pressure on farmers in Asia and Africa to produce ever greater amounts of food, scientists say biotech crops—engineered to resist pests and withstand climate change—could boost yields and increase food security in developing countries. Activists, led by environmental groups like Greenpeace, counter that this humanitarian sentiment is merely a "Trojan horse" designed by Big Ag to get smallholder farmers hooked on their GMO seeds.

Joan Conrow, managing editor at Cornell University's Alliance for Science, says the activist version of events has no basis in fact. Working closely with reporters and researchers in Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana and dozens of other countries, she spearheads the nonprofit's effort to set the record straight. It's not multinational seed companies, Conrow says, but farmers and consumers encouraging governments in Asia and Africa to embrace GMO and now gene-edited crops.

Conrow wasn't always an advocate for crop biotechnology, however. As a journalist based in Hawaii for three decades, she was skeptical of companies like Monsanto, whose reclusive nature at the time made her suspicious of their work. But once she saw how anti-GMO groups operate and began investigating the science behind biotechnology, she changed her mind.

On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, Conrow sits down with GLP editor Cameron English to tell her story and break down the Alliance's effort "to promote access to scientific innovation," enhance food security and improve the environmental sustainability of agriculture.

Joan Conrow has 35 years of experience as a journalist, editor, and communications consultant. She specializes in environmental issues, biotechnology, and agriculture. Follow her on Twitter @joanconrow

Cameron J. English is the GLP’s senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

The GLP's Biotech Facts and Fallacies podcast is produced by Sauce Auxiliary and available for subscription on iTunes and Spotify.

In 1982, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first "GMO" pharmaceutical drug in the world, a new kind of insulin synthesized in genetically engineered bacteria known as Humulin. Insulin demand began to climb rapidly in the 1970s and manufacturers feared they couldn't produce enough to keep up. Humulin, therefore, was a major step forward for medicine, providing diabetics with a relatively cheap, abundant supply of the hormone.

The new drug was even more significant because it demonstrated the “scientific and commercial viability” of recombinant DNA technology, according to Henry Miller, the FDA biologist who led the agency's abnormally rapid 4-month review of Humulin. Indeed many drugs, vitamins and food ingredients have been produced with the help of genetic engineering since 1982.

But "government regulation hasn’t aged as gracefully as genetic engineering technology," Miller recounted in a 2018 article for the GLP. 37 years after it approved Humulin, the FDA remains extremely risk averse; getting a new drug through FDA approval can take over a decade and cost more than $1 billion. The agency has an even worse record when it comes to regulation of genetically engineered animals, Miller says:

Regulators have made a horrendous mess of the regulation of genetically engineered animals, which FDA chose to regulate as 'new animal drugs,' including a grotesquely prolonged, 20-plus year review of a faster-growing Atlantic salmon .... As a result, the entire biotech sector of genetically engineered animals is moribund.

On this episode of the Biotech Facts and Fallacies podcast, Miller joins GLP editor Cameron English to recount his time at the FDA, detailing his concerns about the agency's approach to biotechnology regulation. Miller also breaks down the ongoing controversy surrounding GMO food labeling, and explains why the ferocious legal battle over the weed killer glyphosate may have some "tragic" implications for farmers and consumers.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller

Cameron J. English is the GLP’s senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. Follow him on Twitter @camjen...

Scammers are having a moment. On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, plant scientist Steve Savage tackles scams within the agriculture and food realm, including a pesky scam that occurs each year around this time—Environmental Working Group's 'Dirt Dozen' list.

It seems like the world has an ongoing fascination with scammers. Whether it’s tuning into the dueling documentaries about Fyre Festival, the luxury music festival that never was, or the podcast called The Dropout about Elizabeth Holmes’ fraudulent claims about her blood-testing technology and doomed company Theranos, people are captivated by a scheme and con men (and women). Perhaps it’s reveling in the “takedown” of the grifter and vindication of the scammed, or perhaps we enjoy marveling at the sheer audacity of a doomed, and oftentimes, misguided effort. It’s going to take longer than this podcast to get to the root of love of a scam and frankly we don’t have the time, because an annual con called the 'Dirty Dozen' has come out once again.

Yes, its that time of year when the Environmental Working Group (EWG) publishes its infamous “dirty dozen" list. They claim they are “guiding” consumers about which foods are most important and to buy organic to avoid pesticide residues, referring to mostly fruits and vegetables. The Group comes up with their rankings based on the published results of the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program.

The USDA data actually shows that consumers don’t need to worry about pesticide residues because they are only present at extremely low levels that are of no concern for our health. Indeed, health and dietary experts agree that one of the best things we can all do for our health is to confidently enjoy healthful foods, and the last thing we should do is avoid fruits and vegetables because of propaganda from EWG.  There is a great website called “Safe Fruits and Veggies” that provides lots of good links on this topic and has a calculator you can use to visualize the absurd amounts of produce you would have to eat to ever see any health effects of residues.

In another episode called “Dirty Marketing,” I explained why the “analysis” by EWG is so flawed and why none of our food deserves to be called “dirty” in this regard. In the whole scheme of things, the only thing that is “dirty” is the EWG’s fear-based campaigning on behalf of their “big organic” sources of funding.

So, let’s talk about the good news, starting with this thing called the Pesticide Data Program or PDP. Each year, scientists from the USDA make visits to commercial food channels and collect more than 10,000 samples of food. They focus on 20 or so crops each year, but they periodically cover most major commodities, particularly fruits and vegetables. The latest data from 2017 analyzed apple sauce, asparagus, fresh and frozen cranberries, cabbage, cucumbers, grapefruit, kale greens, honey, lettuce, mangoes, milk, canned olives, prunes, snap peas, sweet potatoes and garbanzo beans.

The scientists take the foods back to the lab, wash, peel or otherwise handle as normal, and then test for chemical residues. The results are then published in several forms including a high-level “fact sheet”  and a detailed, 200+page report. They also include the raw data so that others can also analyze it. Each year, I like to take advantage of that transparency, although it’s quite a challenge to read through the 2 million-rows of main data table.

So, what the USDA provides each year are three key piece...

Imagine a world in which would-be parents no longer have sex but conceive children with the assistance of embryo selection and in-vitro fertilization, (IVF) choosing genetic traits to make their children smarter, stronger and healthier than sexual reproduction would otherwise allow. People would still have sex for all the other reasons we do now, but these next-generation assisted reproduction tools would revolutionize health care and possibly change the future of human evolution.

This isn't just a hypothetical scenario out of a science fiction novel; this will be our world beginning in the next three decades, according to science writer Jamie Metzl, author of the new book Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity.

Since 1978, over 8 million people have been conceived with in-vitro fertilization, and parents can already screen embryos for single-gene disorders–including cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, Tay-Sachs and sickle-cell anemia– caused by mutations in the DNA sequence of a specific gene. But by roughly 2045, Metzl argues, many more parents will skip sexual reproduction and opt to screen their embryos for these genetic conditions, motivated by lower costs and the prospect of disease-free children. As our knowledge of genetics grows in the proceeding decades, parents will begin screening embryos for more complex and controversial genetic traits like height, intelligence and physical strength.

Society will be forced to confront some awkward ethical questions as we begin to utilize these assisted reproduction tools en masse. What happens, for example, if this technology spurs a designer baby industry that commodifies human life? Furthermore, will we ostracize parents who chose to reproduce sexually, thus leaving their childen more vulnerable to deadly diseases? Perhaps most troubling, how will we stop totalitarian governments from using this technology oppressively?

On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, GLP's Cameron English sits down with Metzl to discuss how society should approach these evolving assisted reproduction technologies. Although these powerful tools could be misused for nefarious purposes, Metzl argues they also promise to dramatically improve our quality of life and should be carefully regulated and embraced by informed consumers.

Subscribe to the Biotech Facts and Fallacies podcast on iTunes.

Jamie Metzl is a science writer, novelist and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He holds a Ph.D. in Asian history from Oxford and a JD from Harvard Law School. Follow him on Twitter @JamieMetzl and visit his website.

Cameron J. English is the GLP’s senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. He is a science writer and podcast host. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

Need to manage a pest problem? Luckily, there are many ways to do that! From physical to biological and chemical controls, plant pathologist Steve Savage covers an array of pest management strategies farmers can use when an issue arises.

Remember when Bill Murray’s character uttered, “Anything different is good” in the classic movie Groundhog Day? Well, that idea can also be applied to farming and pest control. There are many different ways to farm and many different methods, tools and strategies that farmers can use to control the pests and diseases that prey upon our food.

This is not unlike the journey Murray’s character, Phil, takes in the movie, hilariously trying to make it out of the time loop he finds himself in and to make it to tomorrow. Groundhog Day is a great example of finding different ways to solve a problem, and recently there have been a crop of these types of movies and TV shows making their way to our screens, like Happy Death Day and Russian Doll. They are great reminders that ingenuity and original thinking can help you out of many jams!

If the jam you find yourself in concerns bugs, then you are typically quite open to a few options that involve killing the invaders or hiring an expert service to do the job. If your house or apartment is overrun with ants, roaches or fleas, you are probably going to do something about it! If you are unfortunate enough to get a bedbug infestation, you may have to consider some pretty extreme solutions to eliminate that threat. In an earlier podcast, I described the recently introduced Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, a pest that likes to migrate in the thousands to the inside of houses in the weeks leading up to winter. In these situations, killing something makes sense.

Farmers often find that their crops are being attacked by bugs of various types, and they too need to do something about it. But there are actually lots of different options for pest control on the farm.

Physical methods

Perhaps the most familiar way to kill a bug is using physical tools like a fly swatter or a shoe. That isn’t a practical approach for an entire farmed field, but there are physical approaches used by farmers. For instance, California strawberry growers have found that by running a big vacuum machine over the crop rows, they can keep the population of Lygus bugs in check. That means that you and I will be able to buy strawberries that are not marked and deformed by the feeding of this large, true bug. Homeowners can also buy special bug vacuums that deal with those stinkbugs if they invade your house (apparently you shouldn’t just squish them because of the “stink” part).

Perhaps the simplest kind of physical control is a barrier. For something like a greenhouse for growing vegetable crops, screens are a simple and practical way to keep out bugs, just as they are for our homes.

Traps

Many homeowners from areas where there are lots of mosquitoes use a “bug zapper” to protect themselves while on the porch. The mosquitoes are attracted to a light or source of CO2, then an electrical discharge kills them. In agriculture, the traps might just have some sort of juice with a smell that attracts the bugs, or they might be loaded with an insect sex pheromone that lures the pest into a container from which it can’t escape. Other traps, meanwhile, encourage the bug to land on a sticky surface. Traps used in farming are usually designed to get a feel for what kind of pests will show up in ...