In today's Wall Street Journal my article Science Saves an Old Chestnut discusses the potential benefit of President Trump's executive order requiring USDA, FDA, and EPA to modernize when it comes to biotechnology approval. They have to consider actual risk instead of treating every product like a new invention. They don't make flowers go through tens of millions of dollars and 20 years of...
read moreResearchers set out to find a wine grape so popular no one wanted to change it. And they did, thanks to a genetic database of modern grapevines and 28 archaeological seeds from French sites dating back to the Iron Age. They discovered that Savagnin Blanc (not Sauvignon Blanc) from the Jura region of France was genetically identical to a seed excavated from a medieval site in...
read moreWhen you think "Hamilton" in 2019, you think $800 tickets to a Broadway show in Manhattan, and when you think Manhattan, you think urban wealthy elites and the denial of science that seems to go with it.Not so for "Hamilton" producer Jeffrey Seller and Broadway photographer Josh Lehrer, who are instead funding efforts to use science to clone and plant 100 of the world's oldest and largest...
read morePop culture is in a bit of a quandary. Though food is essential for life, culturally it is no longer a basic necessity, and that's thanks to science. We grow more food on less land than ever dreamed possible. Even Europe, with all its political limitations in agriculture. Food is a cheap commodity and that makes it a values issue.read...
read moreWhen Dr. He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR to prevent future HIV infection in twin girls, there was outrage across the United States, but most of it had nothing to do with science. It was instead concern that a mad scientist with suspect ethics had used a new technology to edit human embryos, and if that remains unchecked Frankenhumans could be born. It may be 2018 but it...
read moreSince 2014, China has spent $4 billion on advanced agricultural science and is approving new technologies rapidly. Meanwhile, our food science regulatory system remains trapped in the 1980s, paralyzed by environmental lobbyists who buy full-page ads in the New York Times claiming they are "unsure", it just "needs more testing."read...
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