“Our mission is to provide the highest quality scientific information and analysis to enable a healthy food system and a healthy world”
The Bioscience Resource Project provides scientific and intellectual resources for a healthy future. It publishes Independent Science News, a media service devoted to food and agriculture, and their impacts on health and the environment. It also offers resources for scientists and educators and internships and training for students. Through its innovative scientific journalism and original biosafety review articles, the project provides unique and revealing perspectives on issues that are fundamental to the survival of people and the planet. The project does not accept advertising or corporate funding and is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization. It is completely dependent on individual donations.We invite you to join the Project as a contributor or a donor.
Bioscience Resource Project News and Views
Fracking: the new threat to our food supply?
Today Independent Science News published a review of the important new book by veterinarian Michelle Bamberger and Cornell professor of molecular medicine, Robert Oswald: The Real Cost of Fracking: How America’s Shale Gas Boom Is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food (Beacon Press 2014).
This comprehensive review was written by the Project’s Science Director, Dr. Allison Wilson. It can be read in its entirety on Independent Science News: Fracking: the new threat to our food supply?
New Resource Page: Sewage Sludge (Biosolids) — land application, health risks, and regulatory failure
Sewage sludge (also known as ‘biosolids’) refers to the semi-solids left over from municipal waste water treatment. It contains highly variable mixtures of household and industrial pollutants. These include radioactive material, pharmaceuticals, organic chemicals, antibiotics, and heavy metals, excess nutrients (e.g. N and P), and human pathogens. Its safe disposal has been problematic for municipalities and EPA since the inception of modern large-scale water treatment facilities (1).
Despite its documented harmful impacts, the U.S. EPA and others vigorously promote land application of sewage sludge — to farmers and ranchers as a fertilizer and to households as organic compost.
Many scientific experts argue that the risks of land application are not adequately addressed by EPA’s current 503 sludge rule. They believe the short and long term health of the public as well as the environment are at risk. The Bioscience Resource Project has just added Sewage Sludge (Biosolids) — land application, health risks, and regulatory failure to its resource pages. This page summarizes and links to key scientific papers that provide an overview of the current health, environmental, and political issues around land application of sludges. Included are suggestions for reformulating the problem to ensure clean water without toxic sludge production.
To access the new page see: Sewage Sludge (Biosolids) — land application, health risks, and regulatory failure.
(1) For an illuminating non-technical introduction to the origins of sewerage systems and the creation and disposal of toxic sludge see: Civilization & Sludge: Notes on the History of the Management of Human Excreta by Abby A. Rockefeller.
New on ISN: How EPA Faked the Entire Science of Sewage Sludge Safety: A Whistleblower’s Story
Published today in Independent Science News: “How EPA Faked the Entire Science of Sewage Sludge Safety: A Whistleblower’s Story” by Dr David Lewis. This article is based on a chapter in Dr. Lewis’ new book: Science for Sale.
The US EPA’s 503 sludge rule (1993) currently allows application of treated sewage sludges (aka biosolids) to farms, forests, parks, schools, playgrounds, homes, and gardens. Biosolids are the insoluble wastes that settle out at water treatment plants. They contain complex mixtures of industrial chemicals, heavy metals, mercury, phthalates, flame retardants, hormones, pharmaceuticals, and pathogenic agents. While working at the EPA, senior scientist David Lewis published evidence showing a New Hampshire teenager Shayne Conner died, and other neighbors were harmed, from read more…
New on ISN: Genetic Testing of Citizens Is a Backdoor into Total Population Surveillance by Governments and Companies
Independent Science News has just published: “Genetic Testing of Citizens Is a Backdoor into Total Population Surveillance by Governments and Companies” by Helen Wallace, PhD, Executive Director of GeneWatch UK.
Why is Britain’s Health Service (the NHS), which is legendarily short of money, nevertheless willing to spend hundreds of millions of pounds to collect and store DNA, and build electronic health databases? The official answer read more…
More Than 250 Health Professionals and Researchers Say: Fracking Is Not Safe
Yesterday, a broad-based coalition of more than 250 medical organizations, health experts and researchers – mostly from New York State but some luminaries and fracking researchers from elsewhere as well – sent a letter to New York’s Governor Cuomo and new acting Department of Health commissioner, Dr. Zucker.
The letter lays out recent science and trends in the data on fracking and calls for a 3-5 year concrete moratorium. read more…
New on ISN: EU Safety Institutions Caught Plotting an Industry “escape route” Around Looming Pesticide Ban
Independent Science News has just published “EU Safety Institutions Caught Plotting an Industry “escape route” Around Looming Pesticide Ban” by Jonathan Latham, PhD, Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project.
Synopsis: Documents obtained by the nonprofit Pesticide Action Network (PAN) of Europe reveal that the health commission of the European Union (DG SANCO), which is responsible for protecting public health, is attempting to develop a procedural “escape route” to help companies evade an upcoming EU-wide ban on endocrine disrupting pesticides. This ban arose from strong scientific concerns read more…
Exposing the Toxic Secrets of Corporations and Regulators
Independent Science News
- The Future of the Lab Leak Theory March 17, 2024
- The American Chestnut Foundation Bails as GE Chestnut Develops Growth and Fertility Problems and Fails to Resist the Blight December 15, 2023
- Transgenic Rice Once Again Proposed as Solution to Bacterial Blight Outbreaks, This Time in Africa September 14, 2023
- The Great Raccoon Dog Mystery June 29, 2023
- Children from Gamete-like Cells: Dishing up a Eugenic Future June 19, 2023
- Did West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak of 2014 Have a Lab Origin? October 25, 2022
- Fauci’s COVID Origin SWAT Team Versus the Mojiang Miner Passage Theory May 23, 2022
- Delete, Deny, and Destroy: Chinese and Western Strategies To Erase COVID’s Origin Are Being Exposed By Independent Research April 21, 2022
- Open for Military Business: Ebola Research at Canada’s Only BSL-4 Lab September 27, 2021
- Phylogeographic Mapping of Newly Discovered Coronaviruses Pinpoints the Direct Progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 as Originating from Mojiang, China August 2, 2021