Bioscience Resource Project News and Views

The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy today are releasing a trove of rediscovered and newly digitized chemical industry and regulatory agency documents stretching back to the 1920s. The documents are available at PoisonPapers.org.

Together, the papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press. These papers will transform our understanding of the hazards posed by certain chemicals on the market and the fraudulence of some of the regulatory processes relied upon to protect human health and the environment.

“These documents represent a tremendous trove of previously hidden or lost evidence on chemical regulatory activity and chemical safety. What is most striking about these documents is their heavy focus on the activities of regulators. Time and time again regulators went to the extreme lengths of setting up secret committees, deceiving the media and the public, and covering up evidence of human exposure and human harm. These secret activities extended and increased human exposure to chemicals they knew to be toxic,” said Dr. Jonathan Latham, Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project. read more…

Published today (Monday, 26th June) by Independent Science News, “Illegal GE Bacteria Detected in An Animal Feed Supplement,” written by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

Synopsis: Genetically engineered (GE) bacteria have been found in riboflavin vitamin supplements intended for animal feed use, according to newly published EU tests. Contamination of any supplements with GE bacteria is illegal in the European Union. Through culturing and DNA sequencing, EU biosafety agencies were able to show that this illegal GE strain was itself a deliberate or inadvertent contaminant since it did not correspond to any strains that the manufacturer claimed to be using.

The findings, just published in the journal Food Chemistry, were made by regulators from Germany and Italy who were sampling Chinese imports.

Read the full news story at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/illegal-ge-bacteria-detected-in-animal-supplement/

Reference:

Exotic and Endemic Plants and Animals of Nepal is a new e-book of poems for children by Ann Mayer, with beautiful color artwork by children from the Nepal Orphans Home. You can download it here: Exotic and Endemic Plants and Animals of Nepal.

In 2016, Ann, a former Bioscience Resource Project Editor, published her first e-book: Endangered Animals of Nepal – Poems by Ann Mayer (with colorful animal illustrations by youth members of the A-Team for Wildlife). To download and learn more about Endangered Animals of Nepal, please go to: https://bioscienceresource.org/endangered-animals-of-nepal-poems-by-ann-m-mayer/

Both e-books may be downloaded, printed and shared for free and Ann Mayer can be contacted using this form https://bioscienceresource.org/contact-us/

Please put Ann Mayer e-book as the subject of your email.

“The Meaning of Life (Part I)” by Jonathan Latham, PhD was published on Tuesday 21st March, 2017 by Independent Science News.

From the author: This article is highly relevant to the food movement. We hope it will become (along with “Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life”) an essential text in the education of food producers, food activists, and environmentalists. The connections between food concerns and genetics are many:
1) a gene-centric view of life is a vast diminishment of biological possibilities, including but not limited to minimising or denying the possibility that you or your customers may be harmed by poisons and pesticides, or that your farming can be improved by changes to the system and not just by the genes in the crop. 2) A gene-centric view of life is inherently reductionistic.
3) Because a gene-centric view of life is reductionistic, like any reductionist concept, is easily twisted for commercial or political purposes because it removes the key elements of understanding from a form in which anyone can understand them (like overall health) into a formulation that can be misrepresented or mismeasured—this is the scientific basis of promoting “superfoods” and vitamin pills over natural foods, for example.

For reasons such as these I wrote in the article: “A genetically determinist society is therefore one not capable of understanding itself as directly at risk from irresponsible corporate activities and government indifference. It is fundamentally defenceless against polluters, junk food marketers, community dislocation, and other threats to human integrity.
In a wider political frame, the history of the 20th Century shows that a genetic determinist society is also vulnerable to fascists, racists, dictators, and warmongers. All this too is the product of a century and a half of the manipulation of biological science.”

Article Synopsis: In a previous article I showed that DNA does not deserve its reputation as a biological “master molecule” and that it has no special powers of organismal control. To prove it, in diverse disciplines of biology, compelling alternative explanations of biological phenomena—as properties of systems and not genes—are emerging that refute traditional thinking. This paradigm-shifting conclusion, outlined in “Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life”, nevertheless begs an obvious question. If the role of a master molecule was truly scientifically undeserved, how could DNA ever be considered to occupy it?
The answer, it turns out, is that DNA has a fascinating but little-known scientific history. It was consciously fashioned into its role by wealthy institutions who were helped by influential scientists. This remarkable historical manipulation of the science of genetics is solidly documented and it explains how DNA emerged as a master molecule even in the absence of the necessary scientific evidence. This aspect of DNA has been largely ignored by historians of science who have assumed that this manipulation was tangential to the history of biology and merely sped up the inevitable discovery and understanding of DNA. The new developments in systems biology show, instead, that this manipulation subverted the whole course of scientific history and turned biology, in effect, on its head.

Read the full article at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-meaning-of-life-part-i/