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“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

The Long History of Accidental Laboratory Releases of Potential Pandemic Pathogens Is Being Ignored In the COVID-19 Media Coverage

May 13, 2020 |

Published Tuesday, May 5th, 2020 on Independent Science News: “The Long History of Accidental Laboratory Releases of Potential Pandemic Pathogens Is Being Ignored In the COVID-19 Media Coverage“, a new article by Sam Husseini.

Synopsis: Most of the media is treating the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic might have been the result of a lab escape as a wild and reckless accusation. Yet there is a long and extensive history of Potential Pandemic Pathogens (PPPs) escaping from labs all over the world. H1NI flu, for example, is now considered to have been a lab escape as was the UK’s Foot and Mouth disease (FMD) virus outbreak of 2007. Most of these escape events and their consequences are virtually unknown outside of their specialist fields, however. This article provides an overview.

The author, Sam Husseini, is an independent journalist. Read the full article at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-long-history-of-accidental-laboratory-releases-of-potential-pandemic-pathogens/.

Did this Virus Come from a Lab? Maybe Not — But it Exposes the Threat of a Biowarfare Arms Race

May 13, 2020 |

Published Friday April 24th, 2020 by Independent Science News: Did this Virus Come from a Lab? Maybe Not — But it Exposes the Threat of a Biowarfare Arms Race, a new article by Sam Husseini, an independent journalist.

Synopsis: “The work they are doing is absolutely crazy. The whole thing is exceedingly dangerous,” said Lord May, the former president of the Royal Society and one time chief science adviser to the UK government. “Yes, there is a danger, but it’s not arising from the viruses out there in the animals, it’s arising from the labs of grossly ambitious people.”

COVID-19: A wake-up call for biosafety

Apr 17, 2020 |

Published Tuesday April 14th by Independent Science News:
COVID-19: A wake-up call for biosafety, written by Jonathan Matthews, the founder of GMWatch.
Synopsis: Are risks from emerging technologies the highest existential threats we face? Suddenly, the question is getting more attention. It is overdue. By mixing and matching pathogens in labs with poor biosecurity records, says Matthews, we are playing Russian roulette.

Researchers Are Substantially Undercounting Gene-Editing Errors, Concludes a New Paper

Feb 25, 2020 |

Published today (Tues Feb 25th, 2020) in Independent Science News: Researchers Are Substantially Undercounting Gene-Editing Errors, Concludes a New Paper, written by Jonathan Latham, PhD.
Synopsis: New research on mice has found that complex and aberrant DNA insertions are common results of gene-editing. The findings applied across multiple experiments on independent edits from different genome locations. Even more notable, however, these complex genetic rearrangements at the edit site were only rarely detected by standard analytical methods. The authors called this finding “disturbing”. The research suggests, therefore, that not only is gene-editing more error-prone than thought, but that many researchers are falsely claiming to have obtained precise edits.
Read the full article at:

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/researchers-are-substantially-undercounting-editing-errors/

There is now a substantial collection of scientific papers describing various forms of commonplace gene-editing errors. GM Watch has compiled a reference list of these papers (each with a summary of their import) here:https://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19223

The imprecision of gene-editing has important implications for biosafety. These collected papers indicate that the media, biotechnologists, policy makers and regulators have underestimated the risks arising from gene-edited GMOs created for use in agriculture, as well as risks arising from gene-editing’s proposed environmental and clinical uses.

We Need to Connect the 2019-nCoV Coronavirus to Agriculture, by Rob Wallace, PhD

Feb 19, 2020 |

Published Monday, February 17, 2020 by Independent Science News: We Need to Connect the 2019-nCoV Coronavirus to Agriculture, written by Rob Wallace, PhD.

Synopsis: As Wallace describes, “this century we’ve already trainspotted novel strains of African swine fever, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola, E. coli O157:H7, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, Zika, and a variety of novel influenza A variants, including H1N1 (2009), H1N2v, H3N2v, H5N1, H5N2, H5Nx, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2.”

Yet each time governments did nothing “real” to prevent the arrival of the next potential pandemic. Nothing, that is, to identify the roots of how and why these pathogens arise and spread, and uproot them. Instead, as this would mean tackling industrial agriculture and large corporations, “authorities spent a sigh of relief upon each ones reversal, and immediately took the next roll of the epidemiological dice, risking snake eyes of maximum virulence and transmissibility.”

Read the full article on Independent Science News: We Need to Connect the 2019-nCoV Coronavirus to Agriculture

Rob Wallace, PhD is the author of: Big Farms Make Big Flu “In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations…..Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science to derive a new understanding of the evolution of infections. ” He also offers solutions.

Extensive Chemical Safety Fraud Uncovered at German Testing Laboratory by Jonathan Latham

Feb 14, 2020 |

Published today (February 13th, 2020) by Independent Science News: Extensive Chemical Safety Fraud Uncovered at German Testing Laboratory, written by Jonathan Latham, PhD.
Synopsis: The German company LPT Hamburg is prominent in the business of animal testing for the pesticide and pharmaceutical industries. Following an initial investigation by the German magazine FAKT,
which featured filming by an undercover employee, five former employees of LPT Hamburg have come forward. The stories told by these employees are of routine fraud intended to show that harmful compounds were, in fact, safe. One of the compounds tested by LPT Hamburg was glyphosate. Read the full story at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/extensive-chemical-safety-fraud-uncovered-at-german-testing-laboratory/
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