Biotech Blog Roundup

This week agricultural biotechnology is in the blogosphere. The Council For Biotechnology Information , a sister organization of BIO, writes,

“In a recent paper, the FAO is predicting that in order to properly feed an additional 2.5 billion people while striving towards eradicating poverty and hunger, food production will have to increase by 70 percent over the next forty years. The FAO will be hosting a High-Level Expert Forum in Rome on 12-13 October to discuss “How to Feed the World in 2050″. The Forum will bring together around 300 leading experts from academic, non-governmental and private sector institutions from developing and developed countries.”

The blog, Hawaii Agriculture, writes about Hawaii’s Seed Crop Industry: Current and Potential Economic and Fiscal Contributions report. They write,

“Our primary research conclusion is that Hawaii’s seed crop industry makes significant ever increasing economic and fiscal contributions to the state’s economy generally, and most particularly simultaneous contributions to the agriculture, life sciences and high technology subsectors. In so doing, the Hawaii seed crop industry generates various positive externalities to the state, the value of which has not been assessed in this study. Seed crop industry economic contributions to the state should continue to increase given anticipated industry investments in Hawaii, which will assist achievement not only of economic policy objectives but other objectives as well, the various positive side effects of this industry operating in Hawaii.”

BIO’s own Farmer Gene, wrote a blog post about an article in the New Scientist which discussed the role biotech could play in saving the planet. Farmer Gene mentions the good outcomes from agricultural biotech and then says,

“Many people, especially in Europe, oppose crops like Golden Rice simply because they are genetically engineered, but there is no rational basis for drawing an absolute distinction between conventional breeding and genetic modification. Thousands of years of selective breeding have produced extensive genetic changes in the plants and animals. Yes, there are other ways to improve nutrition and boost yields, but combining these methods with biotechnology could make them far more effective. With a third of species facing oblivion, environmentalists need to embrace a technology that could help to save many of them – and many of us.”

There’s a new book out, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. Newsweek interviews the author, James E. McWilliams. Here’s a sample of the interview,

“You wrote that an all-organic food industry is simply not possible and can be in fact more dangerous than conventional food farming. Why is that? Well, first of all, it's a hypothetical: [all-organic farming] is never going to happen. Two percent of the food that's produced in this country is produced organically. So when we get overly obsessed with organic food and say, "I'm only going to buy organic food," I think we're missing a real opportunity to figure out incentives for the other 98 percent to become more efficient without becoming organic. And there are so many ways this can be done that we're not talking about, like getting conventional farmers to judiciously use chemicals. Right now these products are so heavily subsidized that farmers really do not have an incentive to use them judiciously. They're incredibly cheap, so they dump these things indiscriminately.”

In the world of Seed Law, Consumer Choice sends Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Sugar Beets back to the Deregulation Drawing Board. Agrilawyer writes,

“The Northern District of California handed down a ruling in Center for Food Safety v. Vilsack, No. C 08-00484 JSW (N.D. Cal September 21, 2009) that would requires the USDA to perform an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) as opposed to an Environmental Assessment (EA) in their determination of whether to deregulate Genetically Modified Sugar Beets (known as Event H7-1). The court procedurally granted plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment and denied Defendants' cross-motion for summary judgment in order to line up its decision with the Geertson Seeds decision out of the Ninth Circuit regarding Roundup Ready Alfalfa.”

He finished by writing,

“Simple to this analysis is that consumer choice will be taken into account in the Ninth Circuit (if not elsewhere based on the focus of natural and organic products), and the skepticim especially abroad of GMO seeds should send a message to just use the EIS and scrap the EA in assessing deregulation possibility as of right now.”

This week industrial biotechnology is a hot topic in the blogosphere. The WWF released a report,

“Industrial biotechnology has the potential to save the planet up to 2.5 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year and support building a sustainable future, a WWF report found. As the world is debating how to cut dangerous emissions and come together in an international agreement treaty which will help protect the planet from potentially devastating effects of climate change, innovative ideas how to reduce our CO2 are very valuable."

Kurt Cagle, writes on book publisher O’Reilly’s blog, From Pond Scum to Powerhouse: Algae Biofuels Day in the Sun.

“However, one biofuel is beginning to gain a great deal of research (and investor) interest: Algae. It turns out that there are a number of strains of algae which, when cooked, produce a remarkably pure grade of composite hydrocarbons, from ethanol all the way up to octane and higher chains. In a way, this isn't surprising - most oil and natural gas that currently exists in the world came not from decaying trees and dinosaurs (generally) but rather came as algae in shallow oceans and seas absorbed sunlight, photosynthesized various sugar energies, then died and drifted to the sea floors. Deprived of the oxygen free radicals that would have decomposed them on land, the algae formed thick layers, hundreds or even thousands of feet deep, with the bottom-most layers becoming increasingly compressed by the weight of sludge and water on top of them.”

This week popular blog, boing boing writes about a New Yorker article, Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us. Boing boing writes this,

“One team of biologists, led by Jay Keasling at Berkeley, has had great success with amorphadine, the precursor to the malaria medicine artemisinin: they constructed a microbe to manufacture the compound, and by 2012 they will have produced enough artemisinin that the cost for a course of treatment will drop from as much as ten dollars to less than a dollar. “We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us,” Keasling tells Specter. He envisions a much larger expansion of the discipline, engineering cells to manufacture substances like biofuels. Another scientist, Drew Endy of Stanford, has collaborated with colleagues to start the BioBricks Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed to register and develop standard parts for assembling DNA. Endy predicts that if synthetic biology succeeds, “our ultimate solution to the crisis of health-care costs will be to redesign ourselves so that we don’t have so many problems to deal with,” but he also acknowledges the risks inherent in the field. Synthetic biology, Endy tells Specter, is “the coolest platform science has ever produced, but the questions it raises are the hardest to answer.” Yet he also argues that “the potential is great enough, I believe, to convince people it’s worth the risk.” Specter writes, “The planet is in danger, and nature needs help.” While biological engineering will never “solve every problem we expect it to solve,” he writes, “what worked for artemisinin can work for many of the products our species will need to survive.””

The blog Singularity Hub announces, iGEM 2009: Synthetic Biology Competition Bigger than Ever this Halloween,

“Like some Frankenstein monster composed of space camp, graduate school, and science fair, iGEM is ready to spring to life this Halloween. The International Genetic Engineering Machine competition is now in its 6th iteration and will feature some of the best undergraduate work in synthetic biology the world has ever seen. The main jamboree from Oct 31st to Nov 2nd will allow the more than 110 teams competing to reveal the successes and failures from their summer long foray into the laboratory. As always, iGEM is hosted by MIT and the public is invited to attend the awards ceremony on Sunday November 1st at 8am. If you’re in the Boston area, you definitely want to go. Last year’s winners included bacteria that could produce electricity, e.coli that could hunt and kill other pathogens, and yeast that could give beer high levels of resveratrol.”

And that's all for this week.