I have personally always wondered why anyone would be against genetically modified organisms (GMOs).  GMOs, to me, have always seemed like the inevitable next tier in the Green Revolution, and so I often go out of my way not to buy products that advertise “GMO-free” on the label.  But I’ve never actually done any research into why people object to GMOs.  So I finally did some research.  Granted, not enough research to write a paper, or even enough to necessarily have a well-informed opinion on the topic, but it is probably enough for a blog post.

The benefits of GMOs are fairly obvious.  Through genetic engineering, it is possible to increase crop yield, increase crop stress/drought tolerance, increase product longevity, reduce pest management issues, and grow crops on land previously thought to be non-arable.  Taken together, these factors increase overall production and decrease waste.  Good.

There are, however, at least three legitimate potential issues with GMOs as well.  First, insecticide genes inserted into crops could potentially transfer into human gut microflora through the process of horizontal gene transfer, potentially leading to the transcription of insecticides in the human gut.  I highly doubt that an insecticide-producing gene would grant any benefit to bacteria in the gut, and so the expression levels of insecticides will probably be low.  It does, however, seem to me that there should be some oversight to ensure that only human-safe insecticides are produced by GMO crops.

Second, patents on GMOs severely restrict farmers.  My understanding is that it is currently illegal for farmers to plant seeds from patented GMOs grown on their own land, and that these farmers must instead repurchase seeds each growing season for annual plants.  Although this is a potentially important political issue, it isn’t really a GMO-issue.  It is instead an issue with our current intellectual property laws.  The exact same issue would occur for non-GMO crops if it were possible to patent them as well.

Third, and this is the most legitimate claim in my opinion, depending on the genes that are inserted, GMOs might cause allergic reactions that are unforeseeable by the consumer.  A consumer allergic to peanuts can avoid purchasing products that contain “peanuts” in the list of ingredients.  That same consumer, however, might have a hard time avoiding GMO crops that contain the allergenic peanut gene, if the use of peanut genes is not disclosed in some transparent way.  How to disclose a full list of genes and gene products seems like a non-trivial challenge with current technology, and so I can concede that for people with food allergies, avoiding foods that contain GMOs might be reasonable.  But since I don’t have any known food allergies, I think I’ll try to stay foods-labelled-GMO-free free.

It’s been brutally cold this winter–so does that mean we’re more susceptible to the common cold? Many folks (myself included) seem to feel that a severe chill often precedes a cold, because our immune systems must be weakened. I wanted to know if there’s any evidence, so I looked up some recent Cochrane reviews on the common cold and learned the following:

– Vitamin C is useless, UNLESS one happens to be exercising in the Arctic circle, or a marathon runner, skier, etc. Then Vitamin C might be a very good idea.

– Zinc helps, if taken within the first 24 hours of symptoms, but the benefits are offset by the terrible taste and nausea that follow sucking on a zinc lozenge.

– There’s no evidence that echinacea helps, but the appropriate trials haven’t been performed either.

– Sanity check: antibiotics do not help people get over colds, and they do nasty things to one’s digestive system.

So bitter cold (or exercise, or possibly exercise in the cold) may increase susceptibility to the common cold. But despite our poor understanding of the chain of causation, there are evidence-based ways of managing colds. Thanks to the magic of Cochrane meta-analyses, we also have fair warning about evidence-based methods for triggering indigestion.

At this time next month, I’m going to be in Roscoff, France for a conference that I’m very excited about.  This being my first time in France, I decided that I should go a few days early, and spend those days in Paris.  But I have to say, I’m not looking forward to the looks of contempt and distain that I will undoubtedly receive for not being a native French speaker.  I should also say that I’m not a nonnative French speaker either.  I speak no French.  None.

But, being resourceful, I found a potential solution; dress as a mime.   I can fake my way through ordering meals using a combination of gesticulation and pointing — exactly what I would have done anyway.  I can ask for directions the same way — when I don’t understand the directions, I can cup my ear pretending I can’t hear, and then point in a random direction with a confused look on my face.  I don’t know the local laws in Paris, but I’m pretty sure the cops would be lenient on a mime — have you ever seen one in handcuffs?  And if I get tired, I can just sleep on the curb — the stupid, disgusting Americans might even leave money in my hat.

I found this article very refreshing. Given that we have blogged on these issues before I thought I’d share.

Last semester Jo led an interesting discussion on significance testing for one of the graduate student meetings.

This week I stumbled upon this article in Nature that elaborates on what was touched upon during the discussion. The more this issue pops up, the more worried I become over understanding even what I consider to be the most basic of statistical concepts. Should I be analyzing my data differently or is it sufficient to acknowledge the limitations of the chosen method of analysis?

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how much malaria parasites should invest sexual stages that could be transmitted to new hosts versus asexual growth within the host. Even malaria parasites can’t have it all, and this creates a huge conflict for them. They can invest in growing within the host, and that means a lot of future opportunity to invest in transmission, but the length of the infection is uncertain so those future opportunities may never arrive. The tradeoff is akin to the complex problem of when and how much to put aside for retirement, and neither humans nor malaria parasites seem to plan ahead for the future.

My focus is the conceptual problem, but my knee-jerk reaction to motivating the problem is to talk about applied aspects: what parasites put into transmission they can’t put into making the host sick, so understanding optimal transmission investment could tell us why malaria can be so devastating, and how we might be able to trick parasites into making poor decisions. But Stuart Auld makes a compelling argument that we disease ecologists sell ourselves short by playing up the applied aspects of our work when the basic conceptual problems are so important. Something to consider next time you’re stuck in an elevator…

It is February and I am in Maui, Hawaii — land of sunshine, beaches, year-round growing seasons, lush forests and frogfish that are absurdly interesting. But February means one more thing: I came in time for whale watching season.

Between early December and late March, the sounds of the Hawaiian coast change dramatically. Quiet with dolphins, honu’ea (sea turtle) and fish like the ulua, onaga, wahoo and monchong, the summers here are silent under the waves. In the winter, songs migrate in with the humpbacks. Swimming out deep enough and dipping my head underwater, I can hear the slow beats, moans, cries of a whale song. Only male humpbacks sing, and typically, only during breeding season. Each year the song changes, adding new choruses, called “themes,” or deleting other themes of the song from the previous year. Though whales in opposite corners of the ocean vary slightly in their tune, all males within one population sing the same song. To me this is amazing. Every year we see the same phenomenon: a new song is created, different from the previous year, but identical in sound between individuals. Research on whale behavior has yet to understand why whales sing, how they create the sounds or how they learn to mimic each other so exactly. However, the persistence and precise patterning suggests significance for the trait of singing to be maintained, and the energy to be invested in learning a novel song each year.

In Lahaina, Maui, the town plays a video on whale songs and humpback migration in the main square. I have already watched the video twice. At one point in the video, there is a world map displayed with highlighted blue dots representing whales. Viewers can watch the blue dots migrate back and forth from their breeding grounds, sometimes seeing the rare stray whale migrate into a different population. This is how new song themes are thought to be introduced, allowing for songs to change each year. A stray whale can spread the song of its “home” population into the “foreign” population, making the song appear contagious. What makes this particularly fascinating is that instead of conforming to the song of the new population, the “outsider” whale instead causes the rest of the population to change their song. The video makes the analogy that this would be like one person who speaks Swahili walking into Paris and instead of the Swahili-speaker learning French, all the Parisians start speaking Swahili. With humans we think of conformity happening to favor the masses. A tourist goes to Maui and picks up a bit of the local culture rather than a tourist going to Maui and Maui picking up the tourist’s culture. With whales ,it seems to be the opposite. It is a bit encouraging to think that a single individual can instigate change. We have all sorts of cliche quotes in English — “Be the change you wish to see…,” “One person can make a difference and every person should try…,” — we seem to need reminders that individuals have power or can exert influence, but in whale culture, individuals change culture all the time. We need look no further than at contagious humpback singing to understand how powerful one individual can be in the sea of an entire population. Pretty inspiring.

On Friday night, when I was sitting in the cold for over 30 minutes waiting for a cab, I realized that I wasn’t all that different from a P. falciparum parasite. My chances of success are also influenced by whether or not I operate synchronously with my population. When my cab finally did pull up, I resolved to be an asynchronous organism (at least in the scenarios where asynchrony is beneficial).

Here are some scenarios I’ve identified (through some painful trial and error) that favor asynchrony:

1. Any errand that requires a cab. Don’t do this on a Friday night. My cabbie also suggested avoiding Thursday and Saturday night.

2. Absolutely, under no circumstance, should you attempt to use a laundry mat on a Sunday.

3. For that matter, don’t do any sort of errand that requires sharing a public resource on a Sunday.

4. Avoid the cafeteria between 12pm and 1pm. If you go at 11:45 your lunch will take 20min instead of 50min and you’ll also get first dibs on the salad bar.

I’ve also noticed that in addition to temporal asynchrony it can be beneficial to be spatially asynchronous. For example when you get off a plane, instead of standing in line at the nearest restroom, you should displace yourself from your fellow passengers and use a restroom at a gate where a plane hasn’t just arrived. The benefit of this strategy is highly sex dependent. Men will often lose time walking to a different location since there is always less competition for stalls in a men’s restroom.

I’m a little concerned that this posting will generate a large subpopulation of asynchronous organisms. If this happens, I’ll have to rethink my strategy (Megan can probably help me with that).

I know it is a Saturday night, and that I just blogged a few days ago. However, I just read this article and I cannot let it pass without a blog post.

Here, in “The Death of Expertise”, author Tom Nichols, a U.S. Foreign Policy analyst and professor at the Naval War College, discusses the meaning of the word “expert” in today’s hyperconnected, information-saturated, “like-share-comment” atmosphere. He makes the point that experts no longer exist, due partially to the fact that the internet and social media allow anyone to find out anything, and anyone to write anything. He does assert that this can often lead to enriching conversation, and true social and political change. However, he points to the danger in everyone’s opinion holding equal weight – the misnomer that democracy has become – leading to real, sometimes terrible, consequences. Pertussis and Playmates, anyone?

Now, I don’t agree with all of his points; a big part of sociopolitical, intellectual movements comes from a small, but motivated group of laypeople speaking up and saying “no, you’re not right, and your degree/experience/position doesn’t give you the right to assume you’re worth more or deserve power over me”. But, this isn’t what’s happening when your friend’s sister’s aunt shares an infographic on facebook about how the government wants to subsidize the murder of your children with GMO corn. Political movements aren’t born out of linking to a Wikipedia page you only bothered to skim. Intellectual dissent doesn’t happen in 140 characters. It happens in a social environment where experts are seen as experts, and their opinions are valued as such – but with an intersection with a public that maintains both general interest and healthy distrust.

I’m sharing this article, because while some of it is a bit egotistical, most of it is an excellently written, albeit hard-to-swallow, look at how feelings =/= facts, but for some reason, we’ve given more weight to emotion than evidence, and disagreement is considered offensive. Yes, in a democratic, “free” society such as the United States, it is expected, and should be protected, that your opinions have the same value as anyone else’s. But you can’t make things up under the guise of equality and expect education, innovation and improvement of society as a whole.

I’m of the firm belief that every high school kid, no matter their economic standing, should have to work a part-time bulls**t job. Even if it’s only a few hours a week. I believe this because I worked at a part-time job from when I was 14 through my junior year of college, and I think it’s probably benefited me just as much as any class in college. Here’s why:

1. You’ll have to clean up crap sometimes. My first job was as an usher/concession worker/indentured servant at a movie theatre. I was paid $5 an hour. It was a large multiplex, with 16 auditoriums. Naturally, that means a lot of bathrooms. The odds were forever not in my favor when stuck on bathroom duty, which is what I did for a while when I first started there. This is where I learned, far before pledging a sorority, the concept of “everybody did it, now it’s your turn”. There’s going to be poop on the floor. And overflowing toilets. And your Sunday shift is 8 hours long. Go.

2. Do things quickly, but do them right. This piece of advice comes from my experience in retail. At the end of high school, when my best friends were Robert Smith and Morrissey, I worked at a Hot Topic, peddling packaged punk rock merch to soccer moms. But I had a lot of organization to do. A LOT. We sold band t-shirts by the hundreds, and every quarter, we needed to take stock of every single item in the store for inventory reports. All of my shifts were closing shifts, because I was in school. So when the mall closed at 10, we’d start our clean-up, consisting of folding hundreds of shirts, replacing hangers, exchanging displays, mopping floors, etc. I learned pretty quickly that accurate efficiency was my best friend if I wanted to get home before midnight.

3. Flattery, flattery, flattery. I waitressed. What else can I say?

4. Appreciate those who do “petty jobs”. They’re way less petty and simple than you think. My last job in college was as a pharmacy technician. I went to college in a small rural town, and even though it was small, we were the highest volume pharmacy for not only that town, but the whole county. There are probably a lot of things you do in your life that you think are complicated. Well, being the middleman between a fuming patient and a health insurance company is one of the most complicated things that exists, I am convinced. When people are sick, and drugs are expensive because their insurance doesn’t cover them, they get angry. And sometimes, they get downright nasty with their words. But being in that position, despite the fact I sometimes left for home in tears because of what someone said, or that one time a guy threatened to shoot me, I have a very deep respect for people on the bottom rung who put up with everyone’s crap. Whether it be the janitor who comes in while I’m still here at night or the person who serves me at the drive through. My PhD will never erase the fact that I’ve worked “petty” jobs…and they’re really hard!

Overall, these jobs also taught me that it’s possible to go from “seriously, what am I doing with my life this was the worst decision ever” to “I love this place and my coworkers are awesome!” within a day. And if I’d never cleaned explosive diarrhea off of a wall, worked a Black Friday starting at 4am, or tried to explain insurance benefits to a meth addict at 1am at the pharmacy, I probably would’ve quit by now.