Thesis
If you read my post “I’m back!” then you know that I recently finished my thesis. Now that it’s all safely submitted and I can’t make any more changes anyway, I wanted to post parts of the thesis for anyone who might be interested. Here, I’ll start off with the abstract, rationale, and organization scheme. In subsequent posts, I’ll have parts of the introduction and conclusion chapters.
Word cloud for the thesis (excluding citations and figure legends). I like how it looks like an ear of corn.
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I’m back!
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a post. The last substantial post was Biotechnology: communication and politics back in May! I’m slowly getting back into blogging as time allows, such as with the DNA for dinner, and I have quite a few drafts that need to be polished before publishing, half written posts that came about when I just couldn’t ignore some interesting biotech or ag news item despite my best efforts to stay away from Twitter. Just in case anyone’s interested in what I have been up to in my absence, here’s the details…
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Waiter, there’s DNA in my dinner!
GMO Shortens Life Span by Michael. This shirt design was submitted to Atrium in the No GMO t-shirt design challenge.
Threadless recently hosted* a t-shirt contest for Jeffery Smith‘s Institute for Responsible Technology: the No GMO t-shirt design challenge (see Karl’s post Vote for talking, not fighting for more details). One of the shirts really struck me: GMO Shortens Life Span by Michael. The artist proposes an equation:
plants + DNA = death
This slogan really makes me wonder – does the artist know that plants have DNA? Does he know that his own cells are teeming with DNA? That without DNA, life wouldn’t exist? Do most people know that DNA is essential for life? What would the average person say if told that they eat about 100 thousand miles of DNA in the average meal?
If this is the level of understanding, or rather, misunderstanding, that persons have, can we ever expect to have useful discourse on the subject of biotechnology or even biology itself? This worries me greatly. Just in case anyone out there reading this is concerned that DNA is dangerous, I’d like to provide a simple recipe that anyone can use to see and touch DNA for themselves.
Corn as art
Field of Dreams in Dyersville, IA by John Bollwitt.
We often talk about the science of corn (aka maize) but there’s so much more to it. I’ll be leaving corn country soon to start a new job, and I know I’ll miss being in the center of so much maize.
Consider the natural beauty of a cornfield swaying in a summer breeze, with killdeer and red-winged blackbirds calling amongst the buzzing of grasshoppers.
It’s just a cornfield, but the combination of symmetry and asymmetry from afar and up close, of being in the presence of a plant that has been touched by humans for thousands of years, somehow makes it a very interesting place to be – even when I have many hours of pollinating or harvesting behind and ahead of me.
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Lit search failures and hazards
Facepalm by Alex E. Proimos via Flickr.
On Twitter yesterday, @seekblunttruth shared a link with @franknfoode that I thought deserved greater scrutiny. The link is to an ISIS post* titled Bt Crops Failures & Hazards.
Others may spend some time criticizing ISIS itself, and that criticism may be worthy, but here I’d like to focus on the post. I’ll let you check out the post content yourself, but I want to focus on the works cited list.
There are 29 citations. We find 11 sources that are by ISIS authors. It’s ok to refer to your previous work, we do it on Biofortified all the time, but having almost 40% of the citations be self-citations feels like an attempt to pad the citations list. Many of the rest of the sources are either by biased organizations or have been previously debunked either in the literature or in the blogosphere. Read More…