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Not to mention the lead, mercury, and other nasty neurotoxins spewing from our fossil fueled power plants and transportation systems.

...implications, specifically Cassava, which apparently contains a number of cyanate related neurotoxins. I personally never heard of this before, but a glance at Google Scholar seems to indicate a fair amount has been written on the subject. It's intriguing enough, that I may look into it.

It's not all that surprising that diet can have a deleterious effect on health.

Many insecticides are designed to interfere with neurological signals, specifically acetylcholine esterase inhibitors. Some organic phosphoesters used as insecticides, including over the counter consumer products, are disturbingly structurally similar to certain nerve gases used as warfare agents.

I have made personally some disturbing anecdotal observations in my neighborhood on this score, but they are just that, anecdotal and hardly systematic.

This is why I'm rather fond of genetic engineering of foods, since it enables the reduction in the utilization of many of these compounds.

No choice of any technology is without risk, and every choice will exhibit some losers and some winners. The idea is to combinatorially optimize outcomes so as to choose solutions and processes which will provide large benefits that will outweigh the negatives.

It is very clear that feeding 7 billion people on the planet, with many suffering from inadequate nutrition in any case, involves no perfect technologies.

Some technologies of course, persist as obnoxious habits and are clearly unnecessary in the present time, although they may have provided some benefits in a previous time when the scale was smaller. Coal fits this case. It is an unnecessary fuel. All dangerous fossil fuels are in fact unnecessary, and thus the spread of neurotoxins, in most cases heavy metals like Pb and Hg, using dangerous fossil fuels is just, at this point, stupid.

The problem is that some GMOs are beneficial, some are not, and many are the equivalent of patent trolling, mere tools used to tilt the market in favor of big money.

I have a friend who is a genetic engineer. He makes medicines and it's awesome.

Long ago, in another life almost, I was a blood banker watching all of our hemophilia patients die of AIDS. This, after watching many gay male and I.V. drug addict childhood friends die. Fuck in hell for eternity with cholla cactus demon dicks the entire puppet president Ronald Reagan administration and their successors

I have some very, very, very small honor when Hepatitis C blood testing was implemented.

I also have friends and family using GMO insulin.

In the software industry fighting Google, Samsung, Microsoft, or Apple is not an option for smaller players. These same unfair "intellectual property" games go on with Genetically Modified Organisms farm business, and in patent the hybrid business. Sell out or be destroyed. Once upon a time someone sold my software work and turned me into the cynical bitter deeply scarred person I can call up on demand. I try not to, but I still suffer occasional nightmares.

The small farmers growing sustainable "Open Source" heritage crops that are well adapted to local environments, without any expensive high energy fossil fueled inputs, are frequently crushed by the big money players.

I have some awesome tomato plants in my front yard that are still producing today in late November, and still flowering. I ate fresh-from-the-vine tomatoes this morning. The only thing that kills these vines is a hard frost, which, thanks to fossil-fueled global warming is increasingly rare. Sometimes a vine or two will last three seasons. That's their record in my sunny front yard micro-environment, these plants are practically perennials.

I strongly suspect they've picked up some patent disease resistant genes along the way, and they probably wouldn't be so at home in other environments. Therefore, not something "mass-marketable," just seeds I can share with neighbors.

...mostly ACS, but also some meetings connected with analytical chemistry and crop science. I've been to the facilities of Bayer, Syngenta, BASF and yes, Monsanto. Overall, with some minor exceptions, I have positive impressions of the scientists I've met in this large corporations. They do not have fangs dripping blood; most of them are very concerned, as I am, about the health of the world and the need to feed the world.

The big guys are not interested at all in small crops, vegetables, even fruits. For them it's all corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, maybe some of the big oil crops like canola.

Most of the scientific support for small crops is government supported. In New Jersey we have IR-4 for this purpose. The large companies give them some support, but not all that much.

Genetically engineered crops come in three varieties: One is to insert resistance to chemical agents like glycophosphate; a second is to provide disease, insect resistance and drought resistance; the third is to provide nutritional improvements on crops.

In the last case, the "Golden Rice" effort was and is an effort to insert vitamin A genes into rice to prevent blindness among poor people. The Anti-GMO movement has prevented this crop from being planted in many places; many scientists connected with the development of this crop are morally outraged; I am morally outraged. From my perspective, and in the from the perspective of many highly ethical scientists, this is nothing but a naked attack on the poor by first world know nothings who simply hate any science they can't understand. As very few of them have ever passed or even been exposed to a science class, they work against humanity, and from my perspective, are committing a crime against humanity.

Golden Rice

What is going to be the fate of a blind child in a third world country? How many of these people lying on their asses picking lint out of their navels before sending their checks to Greenpeace are going to care about this child and his millions of similar brothers and sisters?

Another effort to improve nutritional values concerns the first world; the effort to insert genes for eicosopentenoic acid into canola, thus making cooking oils from heart disease causing agents into heart disease prevention agents. (Eicosopentenoic acid is the active ingredient in fish oils sold in health food stores, as well as several approved drugs like Lovaza.) If successful, this will save millions of lives lost to heart disease and strokes.

The plant disease preventing gene insertions is also dear to my heart, since I have been pondering for many years the total destruction of the North American American Chestnut forest by the introduction of Chestnut blight (from Chinese Chestnut trees) in the early part of this century. This type of technology makes possible the restoration of this tree - some specimens and cross bred specimens survive - by the insertion of the Chinese blight resistance gene into the tree. I have been pleased to see some reference to these sorts of efforts in the literature. For food crops, like wheat, corn, etc, we need to be aware that these plants have very specialized genetics, developed by breeding over many thousands of years. This creates a risk; witness the famous Irish potato blight disaster - during which millions starved, or the black Sigatoka outbreak that destroyed so many Central American banana plantations. The United Nations' FAO is working to preserve genetic diversity is working to prevent these outbreaks. Similar outbreaks are not impossible for the large food crops.

I would note that the inclusion of drought resistant genes in major crops should be a very high priority, given the climatic instability before us. (A disaster has already been prevented on this score in the case of soybeans - more than 95% of the American crop is now drought resistant owing to GMO technology.)

It is very clear to me that human population has gone beyond the carrying capacity of this planet, but I would rather that the population be reduced as humanely as possible, not by war, famine, and environmental collapse, but rather my managed attrition, a path that will involve many issues dear to many of us, increases in the status of women, education, the expansion of opportunity for all children and adults, and the ability to communicate sensibly and clearly as we plan for the future.

I believe that science and technology, although arguably part of the cause of this population explosion, are keys to unraveling the Gorgon's knot of environmental disaster that lies before us in ever more obvious ways. It is not that science is evil or bad as fools like the membership of Greenpeace would have it, but that its use has too often been informed by ignorance when applied as technology. It's not like Curtis LeMay discovered palmitic acid as a constituent of palm oil (and corn oil), but he was involved in its technological application as napalm.