The Science Center

It’s a quick assumption that “science = sinister” when it’s done behind closed doors. But is that fair?

I’ve recently been posting my thoughts on GMO’s. When we left off, I argued that the gap between those who support GMO’s, versus those who prefer what I’ll call ‘natural foods’ goes much deeper than a simple dispute about the facts. I’ll take things one step further with a thought experiment: try to view the collective products we think of as ‘natural foods’ as a sort of brand (used in the same ways Levi’s, Dell, Kraft, etc.). Doing so  - considering the consumer audience for GMOs as potential brand enthusiasts - offers some interesting paths that could lead to the greater acceptance of GMO’s. 

Natural foods share all of the important traits of other products we think of as more traditional brands, like Starbucks coffee or Nike clothing. Obviously each product is already made by a company with a brand, but since the movement in general opposes the showy corporate approach to food, I don’t think it takes too much imagination to picture the industry as a diffuse brand of its own. How are natural foods like a brand? They have brand recognition: you or I could easily pick out the organic options from a lineup with heavily processed foods after just a quick inspection. They have brand loyalty: again, not necessarily for one specific brand, but certainly for natural foods over processed or GMO food. A branded item makes a concrete expression on the viewer - it can say something about what the owner likes or dislikes, how much money they needed to afford such an item, etc. - usually regardless of whether the owner of that branded item intends to send those messages (which is why we choose brands that express our personality, or at least aren’t offensive to ourselves). And I don’t mean to disparage natural foods by using ‘brand’ as if it were an insult, because brands are a dominant component of popular culture, and we all participate in that.

If GMO’s are a brand as well (don’t think Monsanto hasn’t invested a small fortune in brand management and PR), how can we improve their damaged image? One (tongue-in-cheek) proposal - simply raise the price. Market GMO’s as premium products. Higher prices can oddly make a product more desirable. Make GMO’s ritzy and glamorous, and they’ll become must-haves! Another proposal: don’t respond to the critics. Nike doesn’t start its ads with, “Sorry about the child labor, but…” NO! They skip straight to the sports star conquering the world in their gear. Likewise, why let the critics of GMO’s set the tone of the debate? Get celebrities to endorse GMO’s. Have a reality show - the grad student who can make fortified rice the most fortified wins! 

I'd like to share with you two quotes, both ostensibly about the same topic: food.

Food, in the end, in our own tradition, is something holy. It's not about nutrients and calories. It's about sharing. It's about honesty. It's about identity.

Louise Fresco, Dutch professor and writer

And the second:

Civilization rests on people’s ability to modify plants to make them more suitable as food, feed and fiber plants and all of these modifications are genetic... Modern molecular genetics and the invention of largescale DNA sequencing methods have fueled rapid advances in our knowledge of how genes work and what they do, permitting the development of new methods that allow the very precise addition of useful traits to crops, such as the ability to resist an insect pest or a viral disease, much as immunizations protect people from disease.

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) statement 

I tend to agree with the first statement... and the second. While the two parties I quoted aren't necessarily contradicting each other, they certainly approach the topic of food from vastly different perspectives. It is difficult to hold that food is an integral part of your identity while simultaneously viewing it as a commodified substrate for genetic engineering. Again, you can agree with both statements, but to shift from one to the other is not so simple as adopting a different perspective but also a different hierarchy of values, a different vocabulary, and even different 'truths'.

I'm writing this post in part because of an opinion poll I read earlier this week. Take a look for yourself - does anything seem out of place?

Read the fourth entry from the bottom - "Mandatory labels on food containing DNA." 80% of people are in support of such a policy. Never mind that you would be hard pressed to identify any food that doesn't have DNA in it. If any component of the food comes from a plant or animal or a microbe, or came in contact with some pollen, or an employee's dandruff, or someone sneezed nearby... well, you get the picture - nearly everything is covered in DNA.

But at this point, scientists are left with a dilemma, because correcting this glaring instance of scientific illiteracy would miss the other glaring message of the poll: the public is very concerned about food. Pointing and laughing with the in-group feels cathartic, and I myself engage in plenty of this, but I also don't pretend that endlessly fact-checking the opposition is going to do much to persuade the unpersuaded. That's because anxiety about GMO's and genetic engineering go much deeper than a poor grasp of the facts (although better science education could certainly alleviate the problem). Like the tip of an iceberg, the scientific illiteracy is supported by a huge body of experiences, truths, and external sources of affirmation. (I'll note that scientists are equally illiterate of the opposing worldview.)

An Expensive Crash Landing

The above video shows the fiery result of an audacious attempt: to land a spent rocket on a floating barge in the middle of the ocean. The rocket, owned by Elon Musk's company SpaceX, had already successfully launched cargo destined for the ISS. These resupplying missions are extremely expensive, in part because the multi-million dollar first stage rockets are single use - they normally just crash back down to Earth and sink to the bottom of the ocean. The missions could be much cheaper if there was a way to reuse the rocket, but, as illustrated above, that's easier said than done. Still, navigating the rocket - the size of a 14-story building - to a platform in the open ocean a bit smaller than a football field was no small feat. Here's to a successful landing in the future! (Or at the very least, more epic explosions.)

New GMO potatoes don't bruise as easily, and, when fried, they have less of a potentially harmful chemical. Yet some big chip and french fry makers won't touch them because of the stigma of GMOs.

Fat: that’s not how it works.

Note: This has been reposted from my personal blog.

I read the abstract for this science paper at work and I find the ideas really appealing (am I allowed to admit that I just read the abstract? I’m going to admit that I just read the abstract). In fairness, I didn’t read the whole thing because it involves some intense mathematical modeling, and I think the perspective is valuable regardless of what exactly the data looks like (and speaking of, wtf?).

Lynch and Hagner from Indiana University take on a really big question: why do proteins evolve the way they do? Their answer may sound surprising - essentially, their response is “no particular reason”.

To give some background, proteins are the molecular machines that power cells. They evolve - adapt to new environments, or gain a reproductive advantage over those of other cells - by slowly accumulating mutations, which come from the natural tendency for your DNA to accumulate errors as it is copied over and over again. A really important thing proteins do is interact with each other - to help each other out, to repress one another when appropriate, to communicate, to make new proteins, etc. And to interact, proteins have a physical interface where they meet, and mutations in the protein might disrupt that interface.

You may have learned in biology class that most mutations are harmful to your cells, but the truth is that most mutations have a negligible impact. Imagine if you got a mutation that made your arms one inch shorter. Is that mutation harmful? Maybe marginally, but how plausible is it that having tiny-arms will keep you from reproducing? It’s hard to imagine how such a slight change would get you killed or cause you to have fewer children - put differently, it’s unlikely that the tiny-arms gene will get weeded out of the gene pool. So if that’s the case, even though having tiny arms doesn’t make you more evolutionary fit, there’s a random chance that over time, that mutation (or other similarly neutral mutations) will spread simply because its impact is too small for evolutionary forces to take notice. This phenomenon - the spread of mutations that aren’t harmful or beneficial, but simply different and neutral - is called genetic drift, and it has been acknowledged since the late 1960’s.

Back to the paper. Often, for a given task in the cell, every species has a slightly different protein to do the job. The proteins that replicate your DNA are slightly different from the analogous protein in birds, in chimps, in frogs, in yeast, etc, even though they do the exact same thing. So the authors of the paper ask, why is nearly every protein for a given task unique? Is it because that protein has been finely tuned by evolution to be the perfect solution for the context of a human cell, and that being in a yeast cell will require a different solution? The authors say no, that by and large, such differences can be attributed to random chance. Because of drift, mutations will appear at the interface of two proteins. As long as that mutation doesn’t break the interaction past a certain threshhold - as long as the proteins can still do their job to let the cell survive - it will be tolerated. Next, the partner protein can mutate in a way that better accomodates the first mutation. Now another random mutation appears, and an accomodating mutation follows. This happens again and again until the protein interface has a completely new composition, but it still accomplishes the same task. Was the protein sculpted by the inexorable forces of evolution? Is it now more perfectly suited to the specific needs of its parent cell? No - it simply changed.

I've been outspoken in the past about scientific crackpots. Here, a Brandeis professor gives a classification of the types of crackpots that inhabit the scientific community. The subject of the article, Chris Miller, is a connoisseur of crackpottery - his PhD advisor dedicated most of his career to arguing that cell membranes don't exist (spoiler alert: they do). The classification looks something like this:

Mountebanks - Basically a snake-oil salesmen. They promise hope, wonder, or the appeal of an outsider, while milking the gullible for money. According to Miller, they almost certainly know they're full of shit, and they're in it just for the money. See: Deepak Chopra, Dr. Oz, the terrible people who sold Ebola cures online. 

Con-men - Unlike the snake-oil salesmen, these fraudsters make specifically articulated, high-profile, fame-generating 'discoveries' that are actually the result of forged data. Miller gives the early 2000's example of a Korean researcher who shot to fame by claiming he could clone human cells, much like scientists had cloned Dolly the Sheep in the 90's. I would offer a much more recent example - the Nature stem-cell controversy from this year, in which a Japanese woman claimed she could trivially reprogram adult cells into stem cells just by dunking them in some acid. The journal swore up and down that they knew the result seemed too good to be true, and they had been extra vigilant in vetting the evidence - but it turns out they had totally made that part up, and it also turns out that two other reputable journals saw through the bullshit and turned down the exact same paper Nature eventually published. 

Heretics - These are people who take on the conventional wisdom of the scientific establishment. Miller distinguishes between two types of heretics. There are the just plain heretics, who have a revolutionary new idea that turns out to be wrong, but for which the heretic will never stop stumping. These types end up ostracized and pathetic. There are numerous examples: Miller's old boss; Linus Pauling, a highly celebrated chemist who, towards the end of his career, claimed that Vitamin C can cure 75% of cancer; see also HIV-deniers, anti-vaxxers, etc. Then there are the heretic-heroes, who are initially derided but ultimately turn out to be right. Miller gives the example of the man who first suggested DNA was the genetic material (as opposed to proteins or RNA) in the 1940's, and the woman who discovered transposable elements or 'jumping genes.' 

Personally, I'm most fascinated by the heretics. The paradigm shifts that they sometimes herald are what push science forward (see: Thomas Kuhn), and yet at the outset, heretic-heroes sound just as kooky as the bonafide crackpots. (Miller shares the story of an Australian doctor who, to prove that ulcers are caused by bacteria and not stress, drank a culture from the stomach juices of a patient.) As a humble grad student who nevertheless wouldn't hate the idea of pushing his field forward, this phenomenon is of more than simply academic interest. I've had the chance to meet with or hear lectures from several scientists who are veritable pioneers in their respective fields this year, and I've tried to decipher the intangibles that lets these individuals blow past their peers (I'll report back when I figure out the secret to genius). 

Did you miss me?!?

If this post showing up on your dashboard reminded you that 'Oh shoot, I still follow THAT guy?', then fasten your thinking cap, because I am back to science blogging (hopefully) for good! (If you're a tumblr robot who has stuck with me through all this time, I thank you for your dedication.)

Here are some updates about me:

I'm now in grad school on the East Coast pursuing my PhD.

My research involves molecular biology, protein evolution, and genome editing. I work mainly with E. coli and human tissue culture.

Here's what you should expect from the blog:

A few posts per week

Posts that tend to be a bit longer

More original content

Posts explaining some of the recent scientific literature

As before, I welcome your questions

A statistically significant dose of knowledge

I hope you're still interested in learning and discussing science with me!

Sincerely,

Scientists discover sea slug with "disposable penis"

If you haven't put much thought into the genitalia of sea slugs, maybe now's the time to start.

A sea slug that is able to detach, re-grow and then re-use its penis has surprised scientists. Japanese researchers observed the bizarre mating behaviour in a species called Chromodoris reticulata, which is found in the Pacific Ocean. They believe this is the first creature known that can repeatedly copulate with what they describe as a "disposable penis". [...]

The Japanese team observed sea slugs that they had collected from shallow coral reefs around Japan. They saw the animals mate 31 times. The act took between a few seconds and a few minutes, after which the creatures would push away and shed their penises, leaving them on the floor of the tank.