As new biotechnologies speed up, the efficiency of production increases, which inevitably increases outputs into the environment – and thereby risk. Prof Jack Heinemann is interviewed about risk management and policy by Jodie Bruning of Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility (PSGR). PSGR

 

 

A new report on glyphosate from Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe highlights the wide range of non-chemical alternatives to herbicides that are readily available for effective weed control at reasonable cost. In addition, the report says that about 80% of the wild plants that are currently controlled as “weeds” with herbicides do not harm the yield of food-producing crops. In fact, these plants are critically important for bees and other insect species and should be viewed as beneficial to agro-ecosystems and food security. Not systematically destroying them would prevent a huge waste of money and resources and in turn help reverse the biodiversity crash. @GMWatch on Twitter, commenting on report by PAN Europe

 

 

Scientists have mapped the genome of a conventionally bred drought-tolerant maize variety. Many genes were found to be at the basis of the drought tolerance trait, meaning that it is genetically complex, though the researchers flag up one gene in particular, called ZmRtn16. London-based molecular geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou commented, "Traits such as drought tolerance, being whole physiological responses of plants to their environment, are by their very nature complex genetic traits. They have at their basis the function of multiple gene families. Furthermore, these gene families, which in this case underpin drought tolerance, are functioning within a whole genome context. So they are, as with all complex traits, omnigenic in nature. That is, in order for a complex trait to manifest, it requires the balanced functioning of the total genome of the organism." As GMWatch has said, complex genetic traits cannot be conferred by manipulating one or a few genes, as in transgenic genetic modification or gene editing. They can only be conferred by conventional breeding, which brings together the multiple gene families functioning in a coordinated manner in the context of the total genetic makeup of the organism. So the claims of advocates of gene editing that they can confer tolerance to environmental stresses such as drought are not supported by current understanding of genetic function and appear to lie within the realm of fantasy. GMWatch comment on paper in Nature Genetics

 

 

CBS News has obtained records that appear to show the US government may have paid twice for projects in Wuhan, China, through the National Institutes of Health and USAID. Some of those research projects may be tied to labs implicated in the lab leak COVID-19 origin theory. Sources told CBS News that tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars could be involved and the findings of the investigation could provide new insights into the research. CBS News

 

 

As Sir Jeremy Farrar, the departing director of one of the world’s most influential funders of scientific research, the Wellcome Trust, goes off to become the World Health Organisation’s new chief scientist, there are growing concerns over his central – and profoundly anti-science – role in stifling debate on the pandemic origins by pushing the claim he cooked up with a handful of influential colleagues, including Anthony Fauci in the US, which suggested any idea that COVID might have emerged from some kind of laboratory incident in Wuhan was crazy. The award-winning journalist, Ian Birrell, says Farrar and his co-conspirators only succeeded for so long because almost all Western media failed in their duty to challenge powerful players and vested interests on the crucial issue of the pandemic origins. Patsy journalists churned out reports fed to them by prominent scientists that dismissed as “conspiracy theories” any possibility of a lab leak. Unherd

 

 

Every single anomalous feature of SARS-CoV-2 that leads us to suspect a lab origin, features not seen in over 1,000 years of evolutionary time, was spelled out in a grant just over one year prior to the emergence of the virus. That grant did not propose to do its work in Atlanta, Athens, Cape Town, Milan, or Buenos Aires. It proposed to do this work in Wuhan, writes the evolutionary biologist and Covidologist, Alex Washburne, in a well argued article about why he used to believe the pandemic came from a natural spillover, but now believes SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab. Alex Washburne's Substack

 

 

Scientists dismissed the COVID-19 lab leak theory because they wanted to continue doing dangerous “gain-of-function” experiments to make viruses more deadly, a professor of molecular immunology at the University of Oxford writes in the Financial Times. Anton van der Merwe said that scientists involved in similar work to that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the laboratory implicated in the lab leak, were worried that a ban would be reimposed on the sorts of experiment that make a lab leak much more likely. These include gain-of-function experiments where they investigate if they can enable, by genetic modification, an animal virus to infect human cells or humanised mice. Professor van der Merwe says that scientists used articles in The Lancet and Nature Medicine to create a “false impression” that a natural spillover origin was scientific consensus. He also said there is little justification for doing gain of function experiments and they are not needed to make vaccines. Financial Times

 

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