Search This Blog

Showing posts with label Biotechnology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biotechnology. Show all posts

Friday, 7 June 2019

GcMAF - The Persecution of David Noakes and Lyn Thyer

Ian Davis
In This Together

Recently business man David Noakes was released from prison having served six months following his conviction on four charges relating to the manufacture, sale and supply of an unlicensed medicine. Noakes pleaded guilty to all charges including one of money laundering. This is something the MHRA and the mainstream media (MSM) have been very keen to highlight because it casts Noakes as a ‘real criminal.’

Money laundering is an automatically levied charge if anyone ever sells an unlicensed ‘medication.’ Pleading guilty to selling an unlicensed medication automatically makes you guilty of so called ‘money laundering.’ David Noakes is no BCCI executive.

Over 6 years Immuno Biotech made £7.6 million selling GcMAF. Out of that they paid a staff team of 27 including 4 research scientists, 7 doctors, 2 ultrasound staff, 4 nurses and admin staff for 6 years. They paid for the laboratories, staff travel (a significant expense) and accommodation. Any additional revenue they pumped back into GcMAF research and development. The CEO of GlaxoSmithKline earns approximately £6 million every single year.

The alleged medicine is not a synthetic manufactured pharmaceutical. It is actually derived from naturally occurring human protein. It is called ‘Gc Protein-derived Macrophage Activating Factor,’ or GcMAf for short. How and why GcMAF is being withheld from the public, despite an abundance of supporting scientific evidence, reveals a system of corrupt corporate control designed to profit from our sickness and death.

The scientific evidence clearly shows that GcMAF is potentially the most effective cancer treatment ever discovered. At David Noakes trial Judge Nicholas Lorraine-Smith made it clear that GcMAF was not on trial. He accepted that Noakes had acted out of a genuine desire to treat people; he noted that GcMAF had been instrumental in successfully treating people who had been written off by the medical profession and added that he was looking forward to GcMAF being made available to the public. He then sentenced David Noakes to prison.

Read more

Tuesday, 7 May 2019

Lab grown meat backed by Bill Gates to hit shelves in first US state this summer

Nick Meyer
Alt Health Works


Contrary to Biotech talking points, true genetically engineered food has only been on store shelves since the 1990s.

The first commercially available GMO crop was the "FlavrSavr" tomato, which was scrapped due to consumer and corporate rejection.

Since then, many other GMO crops, foods and similar experiments have made their way to store shelves, unlabeled and not tested for long-term safety.

These crops and foods were rushed to market even in spite of warnings from the FDA's own scientists, as detailed in the popular book 'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' by public interest attorney Steven M. Druker.

The latest lab grown food development is a far different type of experiment, however, with sights on rocking the foundation of one of the most profitable industries in the United States: the meat industry.

And now, one Bill Gates-backed project is ready for its close-up, and will be sold on store shelves for the first time this summer.
 

Read more

Thursday, 25 April 2019

Cornell scientists create ‘living’ machines that eat, grow, and evolve

The Next Web

The field of robotics is going through a renaissance thanks to advances in machine learning and sensor technology. Each generation of robot is engineered with greater mechanical complexity and smarter operating software than the last. But what if, instead of painstakingly designing and engineering a robot, you could just tear open a packet of primordial soup, toss it in the microwave on high for two minutes, and then grow your own ‘lifelike’ robot?

If you’re a Cornell research team, you’d grow a bunch and make them race.

Scientists from Cornell University have successfully constructed DNA-based machines with incredibly life-like capabilities. These human-engineered organic machines are capable of locomotion, consuming resources for energy, growing and decaying, and evolving. Eventually they die.

That sure sounds a lot like life, but Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, who worked on the research, says otherwise. He told The Stanford Chronicle:
We are introducing a brand-new, lifelike material concept powered by its very own artificial metabolism. We are not making something that’s alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before.
Just how lifelike? 

Read more

Sunday, 21 April 2019

Zombie Science: Researchers Kept the Brains of Decapitated Pigs Alive For 36 Hours

Dagny Taggart
The Organic Prepper

Scientists seem to be crossing a lot of boundaries as of late, which begs the question: Just because they can do something, does it mean they should?

Advances in brain-related technology are reaching dystopian levels. Scientists recently developed the ability to predict our choices before we are consciously aware of them, and can now translate people’s thoughts into speech. Smart chips that will create super-intelligent humans are in development, and China is mining data from the brains of citizens.

While there are legitimate uses for some of this technology, it doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to realize that much of it could also be used for nefarious purposes. 

Are scientists taking some research too far?

 

Developments in artificial intelligence are both fascinating and terrifying, but they pale in comparison to a recent discovery in neuroscience.

This headline caught my attention a few days ago:


That article goes on to explain the study:
In March 2018, Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan shared a remarkable bit of news with his peers at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) meeting: he was able to keep pigs’ brains “alive” outside their bodies for up to 36 hours.
The news quickly made its way from that meeting to the media. And now, more than a year later, the details of the radical study have finally been published in the highly respected journal Nature, confirming that what sounded initially like science-fiction was actually sound science — and raising startling questions about what it really means to be “dead.” (source)
Read more

Sunday, 20 January 2019

Monsanto/Bayer Moving to Genome Edit Fruits and More

F. William Engdahl 
 
Not surprising, Monsanto, today hidden behind the Bayer logo, as the world leader in patented GMO seeds and the probable carcinogenic Roundup herbicide with glyphosate, is attempting to quietly patent genetically modified or GMO varieties of fruits using controversial gene-editing. The “beauty” of this for Monsanto/Bayer is that in the USA, according to a recent ruling by the US Department of Agriculture, gene-edited agriculture needs no special independent testing. The developments are not good for human health or safety, nor will it do anything to give the world better nutrition.

The agrichemical and GMO giant Monsanto, which today tries to keep a lower profile inside the German agrichemical and GMO giant Bayer, is moving into the highly controversial domain of gene-editing of new crop varieties. In 2018 as the company was being deluged with lawsuits over its use of the probable carcinogen, Roundup, Monsanto invested $125 million in a gene-editing startup called Pairwise. The link is anything but casual.

Former Monsanto Vice President for Global Biotechnology, Tom Adams, has taken the post of CEO of Pairwise. In short, this is a Monsanto gene-editing project. In a press release, Pairwise says it is using the controversial CRISPR gene-editing technology to create genetically edited produce. Among their goals apparently is a super-sweet variety of strawberry or apples, just what our sugar-saturated population doesn’t need.

CRISPR gene-editing, a stealth attempt by the global agribusiness industry to promote artificial mutations of crops and, as the world was shocked recently to hear, even humans, as in China, is being advanced, much like GMO crops falsely were, as solution to world hunger. Pairwise founder, Keith Joung, told media that their CRISPR gene-edited fruits, “will speed innovation that is badly needed to feed a growing population amid challenging conditions created by a changing climate.” How sweeter genetically-edited strawberries will solve world hunger he leaves to the imagination. Pairwise also says that gene-edited fruits would somehow also cut down on food wasteOne has to be also skeptical there as well, even if it makes nice promotion copy. In addition to super-sweet strawberries, Monsanto plans to use its work with Pairwise to develop new varieties of gene-edited corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and canola crops. And because the USDA unfortunately has given the green light, the new genetically modified foods will undergo no independent testing for health and safety.

Read more

Friday, 22 June 2018

US military wants to know what synthetic-biology weapons could look like

Comment: US military telegraphing what they already know and what they are already experimenting with. Their "concerns" and curiosity are merely a way to suggest Russia is at fault or a legion of terrorists (most of which have been created and funded by the same minds). It's an interesting article when seen as a snapshot of their objectives. 

-------------------------

Antonio Regalado
MIT Tech Review

A study ordered by the US Department of Defense has concluded that new genetic-engineering tools are expanding the range of malicious uses of biology and decreasing the amount of time needed to carry them out.
The new tools aren’t in themselves a danger and are widely employed to create disease-resistant plants and new types of medicine. However, rapid progress by companies and university labs raises the specter of “synthetic-biology-enabled weapons,” according to the 221-page report.

The report, issued by the National Academies of Sciences, is among the first to try to rank national security threats made possible by recent advances in gene engineering such as the gene-editing technology CRISPR.

“Synthetic biology does expand the risk. That is not a good-news story,” says Gigi Gronvall, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins and one of the report’s 13 authors. “This report provides a framework to systematically evaluate the threat of misuse.”

Experts are divided on the perils posed by synthetic biology, a term used to describe a wide set of techniques for speeding genetic engineering. In 2016, the US intelligence community placed gene editing on its list of potential weapons of mass destruction.

“Many different groups have written and spoken about the topic, with a wide spread of opinion,” says D. Christian Hassell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for chemical and biological defense, who commissioned the report in order to obtain a “consensus opinion from among the top leaders and thinkers” in the field.

Hassell says the military’s current view is that “synbio is not a major threat issue at the moment” but bears preparing for, in part because defenses like vaccines can take years to develop.

The current report attempted to weigh potential threats by considering factors such as the technical barriers to implementation, the scope of casualties, and the chance of detecting an attack. It found that while “some malicious applications of synthetic biology may not seem plausible right now, they could become achievable with future advances.”

Among the risks the authors termed of “high concern” is the possibility that terrorists or a nation-state could re-create a virus such as smallpox. That is a present danger because a technology for synthesizing a virus from its DNA instructions has previously been demonstrated.

Read more

Wednesday, 9 May 2018

Before he died, this biohacker was planning a CRISPR trial in Mexico

Emily Mullin
MIT technologyreview.com

Aaron Traywick and his company, Ascendance Biomedical, are connected to a website advertising a gene-therapy trial for lung cancer.

The controversial biohacker Aaron Traywick, who was found dead in a sensory deprivation tank in Washington, DC, on April 29, appears to have been planning human tests of a CRISPR therapy for lung cancer, MIT Technology Review has learned.

Traywick, who was 28, made headlines in February when he injected himself with a DIY herpes treatment in front of an audience at a self-experimentation conference. He was CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, a mysterious company aimed at making gene-based medical treatments available to everyone.

The company had previously live-streamed another self-injection in October 2017. Tristan Roberts, an HIV patient, was filmed on Facebook injecting himself with a compound provided by Ascendance. The company called the treatment a gene therapy and said it was designed to lower the number of HIV particles in Roberts’s blood. It didn’t work: his viral load increased in the weeks following the injection.

Traywick, who had no formal medical training, was also planning to test an experimental lung cancer treatment that supposedly involved the gene-editing tool CRISPR. The therapy was to be offered at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, just a few miles over the US border.

Read more

Monday, 7 May 2018

Millennials 'have no qualms about GM crops' unlike older generation

The Telegraph UK 

 

The advent of genetically modified crops caused a scandal in the 1990s


But the younger generation is largely relaxed about eating GM foods, new research has shown, as farmers called for a post-Brexit technology revolution. 

 

Two thirds of under-30s believe technology is a good thing for farming and support futuristic farming techniques, according to a survey. 

 

Only 20 per cent of millennials expressed concerns about the benefits of gene editing or genetically modifying crops, despite decades of opposition and media warnings. 

 

The poll of more than 1,600 18 to 30-year-olds, carried out for the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC), also found that around two thirds of young people support the use of drones in livestock farming to count sheep and in arable farming to assess, monitor and spray crops. 

 

A similar number also supports the use of innovations such as unmanned aerial vehicles to improve crop security and yields while only one in five object to the use of self-driving tractors on farms. 


Read More

Tuesday, 24 April 2018

Agrichemical Political Power in America and Europe

Evaggelos Vallianatos
greenmedinfo.com 

In November 2014, an open letter signed by about 57 million Americans reached European politicians urging them not to follow America’s genetic engineering path in food and agriculture. Don’t use genetic engineering to modify your crops, the letter said, because GM crops have served us pretty badly here in America. We are convinced the genetic modification of crops is a hazardous and failing technology. 

Genetic engineering for the hegemony of the world

Studies show that animals fed GM foods and / or the weed killer glyphosate become ill from damaged liver, kidneys, gut tissues and gut flora. These animals also suffer from immune system disruption, reproductive abnormalities and tumors. Do we want to eat this kind of food?

With this unsettling evidence from scientific studies, you would think, the letter said, the regulators of genetic engineering in America (Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture) would be alarmed and ban any further fiddling with the nation’s food. On the contrary, these government regulators and the industry justify the modification of crops from studies funded by the biotech industry.

The letter from America went beyond warning that GM foods were not safe. It concluded that GM foods were much more than the application of genetics on food. Modifying crops was intensifying the biocidal effects of industrialized agriculture. It triggered the radical remaking of farming into a perpetual cash cow for agrichemical corporations. GM food was part of a strategy of corporate hegemony over farmers, food and the world.

The open letter put it this way:
Through our experience we have come to understand that the genetic engineering of food has never really been about public good, or feeding the hungry, or supporting our farmers. Nor is it about consumer choice. Instead it is about private, corporate control of the food system. Americans are reaping the detrimental impacts of this risky and unproven agricultural technology. EU [European Union] countries should take note: there are no benefits from GM crops great enough to offset these impacts [on human health and the environment]. Officials who continue to ignore this fact are guilty of gross dereliction of duty.

I observed the regulatory origins of this technology. It happened in the 1990s under the supervision of the Clinton administration.

EPA alone had a Biopesticides Division of about eighty scientists working feverishly on behalf of the biotech and agrichemical companies. Indeed, it was pesticide executives that invented agricultural genetic engineering. This was their scheme of extending the life of their best-selling chemicals, especially weed killers like glyphosate and 2,4-D. Naturally, duping and addicting farmers to the genetic modification of crops complemented the global ambition of giant corporations for the control of the world’s food.

Read more

Saturday, 25 March 2017

5 Biotech Products U.S. Regulators Aren’t Ready For

MIT Technology Review
Emily Mullin

New techniques being used to produce our food or shape the environment raise regulatory questions.

Lab-made meat. Hornless cattle. Designer bacteria. Dozens of futuristic-sounding products are being developed using new tools like CRISPR and synthetic biology. As companies seek to commercialize more of these products, one big question lingers: Who will regulate them?

A new report issued by the National Academy of Sciences says U.S. regulatory agencies need to prepare for new plants, animals, and microbes that will be hitting the market in the next five to 10 years. The new products, the report says, could overwhelm regulatory agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration.

“All of these products have the potential to be beneficial, but the question to me is, how do they compare to the alternative?” says Jennifer Kuzma, co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee that prepared the report.

Here are some products scientists are already working on that U.S. regulatory agencies aren’t ready for.

Read more

Saturday, 11 February 2017

Salk Vaccine Institute creates human-pig GMO

Dr. Mercola
Mercola


In Greek mythology, a chimera is a fire-breathing monster created from different species, most often portrayed as a creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail.

Chimeras have long been regarded as mythical creatures, to the extent that the word "chimera" also means "an illusion or fabrication of the mind" or "an unrealizable dream."1 Among humans, chimeras, or people who have two genetically distinct types of cells, do exist, however.

Most often this occurs among non-identical twins who shared a blood supply in the uterus and end up having more than one blood type (they're known as blood chimeras). The idea of a human-animal chimera has remained confined largely to mythology, however — until now. 


First Human-Pig Hybrid Created
 
Researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, have made history by creating a human-pig hybrid, a task achieved by injecting days-old pig embryos with human pluripotent stem cells.2 Such cells, like embryonic stem cells, are able to divide indefinitely and become any type of cell in the body.

The human-pig embryos were then transferred into adult pigs and allowed to grow for up to four weeks, before they were "removed and analyzed."3

The study noted that more than 2,000 hybrid embryos were transferred into surrogate sows, but only 186 later-stage chimeric embryos survived the process, each with about 1 in 100,000 human cells.
The long-term goal of such research is to figure out if it's possible to grow human organs inside other species, like pigs. Human embryo development, drug development and disease processes could also be studied using chimeras.

Animal chimeras have been developed in the past. For instance, researchers genetically engineered (GE) rat embryos to not produce a pancreas (which controls blood sugar levels), then injected mouse stem cells into them, which resulted in the growth of pancreatic tissue.

They were then able to treat diabetes by transplanting parts of the healthy organs into diseased mice.4

The development of human-animal chimeras has, however, remained in the realm of science fiction until now. Aside from the glaring ethical considerations, these types of experiments have been ineligible for public funding in the U.S., which is why the Salk Institute has had to rely on private funding for the study.5
 

Read more

Tuesday, 25 August 2015

Startup in biotech adds two base pairs to genetic code — and life on earth may never be the same

Aaron Krumins
Extreme Tech


midst the staggering diversity that is life on earth, there is a surprising thread of commonality. That shared ground is the language of genetics. Prior to the discovery of DNA, few suspected that a single molecular code could underpin such a panoply of biological forms - everything from viruses to talking apes.

Even more startling was the discovery that this code consisted of a molecular language only four base pairs in length. It took evolution a billion years to devise this four-letter chemical code. Now for the first time in recorded history, organisms with a new, expanded, genetic code are taking shape in the laboratory. It's no exaggeration to say that life on earth will never be the same.

While the playboy of biology, Craig Venter, has stolen many of the recent headlines in regards to synthetic biology, the more interesting advances in the field are occurring with surprisingly little fanfare. And not without good reason: many of the corporate labs pursuing synthetic biology have little cause to draw excess attention to themselves.

They've learned all too well from the disastrous backlash against genetically modified foods that the public is not necessarily the wisest arbiter of scientific advancement. If we were to ban GMO crops tomorrow, half the population of the world would starve in short order. Yet this seems to be precisely what a large percentage of the "well-fed" in places like the United States are angling for. But I digress.

In a development sure to have far reaching repercussions, scientists working at the drug discovery company called Synthorx quietly announced that it is using an expanded version of the genetic alphabet, one that includes two novel base pairs dubbed X and Y, to create a type of E. coli bacteria never before seen on the face of the earth.  


Read more
 

Thursday, 6 August 2015

The Genesis Engine - We now have the power to quickly and easily alter DNA ...


Subscribe to WIRED Photo by: Richard Mosse 
 

Wired.com

Spiny grass and scraggly pines creep amid the arts-and-crafts buildings of the Asilomar Conference Grounds, 100 acres of dune where California's Monterey Peninsula hammerheads into the Pacific. It's a rugged landscape, designed to inspire people to contemplate their evolving place on Earth. So it was natural that 140 scientists gathered here in 1975 for an unprecedented conference.

They were worried about what people called “recombinant DNA,” the manipulation of the source code of life. It had been just 22 years since James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin described what DNA was—deoxyribonucleic acid, four different structures called bases stuck to a backbone of sugar and phosphate, in sequences thousands of bases long. DNA is what genes are made of, and genes are the basis of heredity.

Preeminent genetic researchers like David Baltimore, then at MIT, went to Asilomar to grapple with the implications of being able to decrypt and reorder genes. It was a God-like power—to plug genes from one living thing into another. Used wisely, it had the potential to save millions of lives. But the scientists also knew their creations might slip out of their control. They wanted to consider what ought to be off-limits.

By 1975, other fields of science—like physics—were subject to broad restrictions. Hardly anyone was allowed to work on atomic bombs, say. But biology was different. Biologists still let the winding road of research guide their steps. On occasion, regulatory bodies had acted retrospectively—after Nuremberg, Tuskegee, and the human radiation experiments, external enforcement entities had told biologists they weren't allowed to do that bad thing again. Asilomar, though, was about establishing prospective guidelines, a remarkably open and forward-thinking move.

At the end of the meeting, Baltimore and four other molecular biologists stayed up all night writing a consensus statement. They laid out ways to isolate potentially dangerous experiments and determined that cloning or otherwise messing with dangerous pathogens should be off-limits. A few attendees fretted about the idea of modifications of the human “germ line”—changes that would be passed on from one generation to the next—but most thought that was so far off as to be unrealistic. Engineering microbes was hard enough. The rules the Asilomar scientists hoped biology would follow didn't look much further ahead than ideas and proposals already on their desks.

Earlier this year, Baltimore joined 17 other researchers for another California conference, this one at the Carneros Inn in Napa Valley. “It was a feeling of déjà vu,” Baltimore says. There he was again, gathered with some of the smartest scientists on earth to talk about the implications of genome engineering.

The stakes, however, have changed.

Read more

Monday, 20 July 2015

Project ATHENA: a surrogate human organ system

Los Alamos National Laboratory
via Sott.net

Surrogate human organs could revolutionize the way biologists and medical personnel screen new drugs or toxic agents. The development of miniature surrogate human organs, coupled with highly sensitive mass spectrometry technologies, could one day revolutionize the way new drugs and toxic agents are studied.

"By developing this 'homo minutus,' we are stepping beyond the need for animal or Petri dish testing: There are huge benefits in developing drug and toxicity analysis systems that can mimic the response of actual human organs," said Rashi Iyer, a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

ATHENA, the Advanced Tissue-engineered Human Ectypal Network Analyzer project team, is nearing the full integration of four human organ constructs — liver, heart, lung and kidney — each organ component is about the size of a smartphone screen, and the whole ATHENA "body" of interconnected organs will fit neatly on a desk.

ATHENA project as it begins to integrate the various organ systems into a single system:  



Friday, 5 June 2015

World's first biolimb: Scientists create living, functioning rat leg

RT

cientists have created the world's first lab-grown biolimb – a rat leg that circulates blood and responds to stimuli. The breakthrough could lead to amputees one day growing their own replacement limbs.

The rat leg, grown by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, has functioning veins and muscle tissue – but the journey toward a living limb actually began with a dead rat.
 
That journey, led by Dr. Harold Ott for the MGH Department of Surgery and the Center for Regenerative Medicine, will be published in the journal Biomaterials in August. 

First, Ott and his team stripped living cells from a dead rat, using a technique called decellularization. This involved soaking the limbs of the dead rat in a detergent solution for a week. The process exposed the rat's scaffolds, or non-living parts. 

Read more

Thursday, 22 January 2015

Synthetic Biologists Develop Genetic Firewall To Control New Life Forms

DesignnTrend

For the new research, labs run by George Church of Harvard University and Farren Isaacs of Yale University developed strains of E. coli bacteria that contain DNA for a synthetic amino acid and also require a synthetic amino acid to survive. 

Because the amino acids do not exist naturally, if the GMOs escaped from a lab or an agricultural area they would not be able to survive, said Isaacs, who is a professor of molecular biology.

Although the two labs created the firewall in bacteria, the same principles can be applied to plants and animals, according to Church, a genomics researcher at Harvard Medical School. "I think we are moving in that direction," he said.

Bioengineers are developing novel organisms which are used in factories to create novel enzymes, biofuels and pharmaceutical drugs.

Novel crops can be created to survive in harsh conditions and to resist pests. Researchers can also create organisms to clean up toxic waste.

"I don't want to be alarmist or anything, but I think the point is that these organisms do spread," according to Church.

Read More


Thursday, 28 August 2014

Monsanto and Ukraine

Joyce Nelson
Counterpunch

Finally, a little-known aspect of the crisis in Ukraine is receiving some international attention. On July 28, the California-based Oakland Institute released a report revealing that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), under terms of their $17 billion loan to Ukraine, would open that country to genetically-modified (GM) crops and genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture. The report is entitled “Walking on the West Side: the World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict.” [1]

In late 2013, the then president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a European Union association agreement tied to the $17 billion IMF loan, whose terms are only now being revealed. Instead, Yanukovych chose a Russian aid package worth $15 billion plus a discount on Russian natural gas. His decision was a major factor in the ensuing deadly protests that led to his ouster from office in February 2014 and the ongoing crisis.

According to the Oakland Institute, “Whereas Ukraine does not allow the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture, Article 404 of the EU agreement, which relates to agriculture, includes a clause that has generally gone unnoticed: it indicates, among other things, that both parties will cooperate to extend the use of biotechnologies. There is no doubt that this provision meets the expectations of the agribusiness industry. As observed by Michael Cox, research director at the investment bank Piper Jaffray, ‘Ukraine and, to a wider extent, Eastern Europe, are among the most promising growth markets for farm-equipment giant Deere, as well as seed producers Monsanto and DuPont’.” [2]

Ukrainian law bars farmers from growing GM crops. Long considered “the bread basket of Europe,” Ukraine’s rich black soil is ideal for growing grains, and in 2012 Ukrainian farmers harvested more than 20 million tonnes of corn.

Read more

Saturday, 2 August 2014

Scientists create transparent mouse complete with see-through organs

The Independent 

Scientists have created see-through mice complete with transparent organs, in a new technique that could pave the way to a new generation of therapies for conditions ranging from autism to chronic pain. 

Mice are frequently used in biomedical research because much of their basic biology is similar to humans, meaning they can be altered in ways that simulate human diseases.

The transparent mice are not alive however, and are currently being used for scientists researching fine details of anatomy.

Vivian Gradinaru, a senior author of the study at the California Institute of Technology, said the research could pave the way for a better understanding of brain-body interactions, more accurate clinical diagnoses and disease monitoring.

Before being treated with chemicals, the mice were euthanised and their skin removed. The team then pumped a series of chemicals through blood vessels, as well as other passages in the brain and spinal cord.

Some of the chemicals form a mesh to hold tissue in place, while others wash out fats that make tissue block light. 

Read more

Tuesday, 17 June 2014

Why Monsanto Created ‘Label GMO’ Movement

Susan Posel

Members of the food industry are suing for the State of Vermont to overturn their law to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The members of the challengers include:

• Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA)
• Snack Food Association (SFA)
• International Dairy Food Association (IDFA)
• National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)

Vermont is a hotbed of activity because other states like Connecticut and Maine have been holding their approved laws in favor of labeling GMO until Vermont’s law was signed by Governor Peter Shumlin.

Food industry lobbyists claim that Vermont’s law is “costly and [a] misguided measure” to mandate and a jumble of “burdensome new speech restrictions on food sellers” that will “set the nation on a path toward a 50-state patchwork of GMO labeling policies that have no basis in health, safety or science.”

The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) who represents Monsanto, Du Pont, Dow Chemical Co and other biotech corporations that manufacture GMO seeds claims that Vermont’s law would raise the cost of an average household’s food costs by $400 annually due to mandatory labeling.

BIO has invested more than $6 million to bribe Capitol Hill into supporting their efforts.

Read more

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...