Evaggelos Vallianatos (Photo Credit: Homini:)) The plutocratic remaking of America has a parallel in the countryside. In rural America less than 3 percent of farmers make more than 63 percent of the money, including government …
Continue readingCategory: Commentaries
Designed to Fail: Why Regulatory Agencies Don’t Work
William Sanjour* Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We have been “reforming” regulatory agencies over and over again, and over and …
Continue readingWay Beyond Greenwashing: Have Corporations Captured Big Conservation?
Jonathan Latham, PhD (Photo Credit: auspices) Imagine an international mega-deal. The global organic food industry agrees to support international agribusiness in clearing as much tropical rainforest as they want for farming. In return, agribusiness agrees …
Continue reading‘Phantom Heritability’ Indicates Poor Predictive Value of Gene Tests
Helen Wallace, GeneWatch UK (photo credit: jurvetson) Last week, a paper on “phantom heritability” was published by a research group led by Eric Lander, one of the leading contributors to understanding the implications of the …
Continue readingThe Great DNA Data Deficit: Are Genes for Disease a Mirage?
Just before his appointment as head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Francis Collins, the most prominent medical geneticist of our time, had his own genome scanned for disease susceptibility genes. He had decided, so he said, that the technology of personalised genomics was finally mature enough to yield meaningful results.
Continue reading