#655 - Kevin Folta

June 4, 2015

Kevin Folta is a land-grant scientist exploring ways to make better food with less input, also learning and teaching how to effectively communicate science to the public. He is also a professor in and chairman of the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida, Gainesville. 

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hello stalkers and fuck he's

this episode first before I even get to the sponsors I got some some dates coming up I should have been saving myself for the longest time I'm going to tell people about my comedy dates on the podcast that seems kind of ridiculous. The number one platform for promoting shit I don't use to promote me but I'll try to do that more often I've been doing it cuz sometimes at the end when I remember I remember but I got some coming up first of all July 10th I'm at the Cobb Theater at the MGM it's in Vegas and it's the night before the Jose Aldo Conor McGregor fight tickets just went on sale today is Thursday they just went on sale yesterday and the cops here if you haven't been there is fucking also that cirque-du-soleil theaters, freaky cuz behind it is like these mechanisms like that whole stage lifts up and they they have this elaborate thing that they can like literally move the stage of these

Hydraulics you look behind the stage and Izzy's gears and just like what like it's it's kind of daunting looking like feel your fingers getting caught in that shit but it's a giant place is awesome we did it just a couple months ago just a month ago actually and we're doing it again July 10th so it's the great Tony Hinchcliffe Tom Segura and myself in if you haven't seen Tommy one of the funniest fucking guys on Earth without a doubt as is Tony and if you want to talk about like an up-and-coming God has like real fucking potential to be a superstar it's in my opinion it's Tony Hinchcliffe that kid is hasn't even doing comedy a year he already did his first hour special he's tireless he's constantly turning out new material is constantly working and doing sets I'm a big fan of both those guys are fucking awesome and there with me I like me too but not as much as them July 10th at the Cobb Theater so come on down if you're thinking

come and see me this weekend in Irvine it is totally sold out the whole weekend sold out so that's not happening but I do have one other day coming up it's available and that is at the Chicago Theatre on July 24th that's the night before the UFC in Chicago that should be a fun time and that's it we brought to you by multiple motherfuckers number one sport by Squarespace Squarespace is one of my favorite sponsors because it is something that exists now. Just wasn't available just 10 years ago 10 years ago if you wanted to have a website you had to hire someone to do for you now you have an option and it's a simple easy one that can create a professional-looking

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that mini Belgian waffles strawberry lemonade fruit Stars sweet and salty nut medley and don't forget peanut butter Nom Noms bitches right now to go to squarespace.com Rogan you get a free trial of their favorite snacks at squarespace.com Ford / Rogan and last but not least we are brought to you each and every week by onnit. that is o n n i t you know what I got in the mail today Jamie I got a fucking Bigfoot kettlebell that's right bitch is a shit ain't even out yet I got a 90 something pound Bigfoot kettlebell delivered to my house does the UPS guy I'd love me sorry buddy it's bullshit shouldn't have to do that just tell me to go pick it up I'll go pick it up now why

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question answer podcast please without any further Ado welcome Kevin Volta

The Joe Rogan Experience

all day

alright I'm here with Kevin folta Kevin you are a scientist to GMO Foods expert and if there is one subject that gets beaten to death online and in conversation in butchered I've heard many conversations that I had I just walk away from my parties are people started talking about what GMO foods do and what's going to happen and all the horrible things

GMO foods are probably one of the most confusing and also one of the most hated things in in the world today but also one of the most common and most misunderstood right me almost everything it was there's a Neil deGrasse Tyson did a video about this where he was kind of explaining with the term GMO foods like virtually everything you see including things are quote on quote organic at a supermarket have been modified in some way in order to prolong the shelf life in order for them to taste better including corn and tomatoes and oranges and you name it

yeah I think that's the big problem is that your new friend is very well the problem is that we confuse this idea of GMO which is kind of a pejorative term that that we've drive to kind of misrepresent this kind of technology which is really just plant genetic Improvement like you say we've been improving plants for 10,000 years as a species we find the ones that work best and we continue to select those particular lines that have benefits for us and we've been doing this for a long time so everything is different than it was in the wild if you look at the natural forms there are nothing like what you see today in the store so this GMO thing is just the most recent way that we've been able to modify the way a plant behaves in what plant products are and it just has a much more precise extension of conventional breeding but there is a company that Lumes like the Death Star out there in the world of GMO Foods in that company I don't even have to say the name is spoken in hushed terms around the hippie campfires

Monsanto and well Monsanto was also responsible for a lot of good things I'm sure they have done some creepy shit and they have gotten especially in India I mean very there directly connected to the suicides of countless farmers who can't afford to use their seeds that have to replace every year I mean there's there's good and bad when it comes to the ability to modify things and I think would terrify some people is that a company like Monsanto which has just ungodly amount of money and influence and power I mean they've been sued by the Brazilian government and the Brazil sue them in one and I don't know the exact specifics of the case but it's essentially about those seeds that would explain those Terminator seeds if you could and how how those things were created okay so you touch down three important points

you should not right off the top I have nothing to do with Monsanto I'm not you know I don't work for them I have a scientist believe it I read online that you are a shill that's right out of you are not I am not a I'm a I'm a I'm a Publix I work for the University of Florida on the chairman of a Horticultural Sciences Department in a state where we grow almost no GM crops the difference is that I see tremendous potential for how these Technologies could be helpful for our farmers and we try to get them excited about ways we can apply them in the future but let me go back to your last question about so I don't even know much about this Brazil issue either but I'm sure you can pull up the article we could see it on the big screen is The Terminator the Terminator seeds this is something that never existed in terms of a product that was available a company called deltapine and land back in the 1990's develop the technology to

sure that genetically engineered seeds would stay in the fields they were planted that you wouldn't have pollen leaving and pollinating something else in creating plants and other places pretty good idea for containment and Delta Pine and land had this technology we're basically the embryo of the seed didn't develop properly so it was a dead-end you couldn't replant it and get it to grow out so when Delta Pine and land later was bought out by the big by Monsanto everybody saw the term involves wasn't called The Terminator seed had some of their name but he quickly gained the name Terminator and so these were never growing outside of a greenhouse and the company is said they never will grow them outside of a greenhouse just because of the overlaid implications of what they might mean

but there have been instances of GMO crops but by pollination infecting the lands of people who are not supposed to have these Monsanto crops on and they were sued for having these crops growing on their land correct there's examples where the people have had litigation because they generated the seeds that are a licensed products another word when you're a farmer you buy the seeds from the company and its Monsanto or any of the companies that sell the seeds or six different companies now you buy the seats many of those companies you fill out a form saying I agree to not grow more of this and so there are cases where people have grown more of it and it hasn't been from a little bit of pollen drifting into a field of court cases are all public record in the ones where they been successfully tried and litigated they've been for thousands of Acres of plants that someone would knowingly grow and maybe even treat with Roundup in many cases so that they were selecting for the trade

intent was to sell the seeds that they agreed not to sell oh okay so these stories about Farmers that were getting sued because of cross pollination because they're the GMO crops have infected their their land is not true that's not there's no evidence in the pin the record to show that this is substantiated and what's even more scary about that is that when the company has litigated any of these and one favorable Court decisions they haven't kept the money that any damages went back into the community so again that's what you mean by that just went back to me meaning that if they saw it they sued a farmer and actually won the case any of the funding that was a one as a penalty from that case was giving back to the community where that farmer live and what form I guess just that would guess just financial support for whatever I did was just idea they wanted to get around was that they were somehow suing Farmers to get rich or the pocket the funds and so they

created this Opera 12th this planner this program to put the money back where it came to get the seeds then if they know if you were to go by Korn from let's say Monsanto or da or any of the companies that make it so you can kill the weeds but let this plants grow through if you were to buy those and you were to spray them and then keep the seeds and then grow bulk them up and then start selling them out of your garage the company would come and say no you can't do that so this is what you're doing is you're taking the corn and corn itself is essentially a seed right light bright. The actual the ears of corn you can grow corn from that corn

and that's what they're doing yes so they're essentially it in maybe not corn as much and I can get to that in a second but things like cotton and end in soy you can't it's a lot like software and anesthesia bodnar doctor in Siege of Bonners excellent example of this you can't go buy a copy of Microsoft Office and go home and make 1000 copies and sell them on eBay without Microsoft knocking on your door right this is a technology that takes years and years to develop its a really expensive technology to deregulate something like a hundred thirty million dollars sometimes to deregulate one of these genetically modified lines so the company needs to make money to maintain its R&D and so they asked farmers were the beneficiaries ultimately of this to sign agreements it every year so this is the lawsuit the Brazilian lawsuit if you scroll up Jimmy Swaggart this whole thing is so they face of 1 billion dollar will this isn't 2013 they lost a lawsuit

not a recent article but the farmers that were suing for abusive purchase contracts to scroll down a little bit there Brazil Farmers Court actions are finally up against Monsanto for collecting royalties on rr1 is that round up the Roundup Ready one regarding Elite regard as illegal and for conditioning the sale of new GM seeds in Toca and Tackle rr2 to the signing of a contract seen as abusive according to an article for Valor online braziel lawyer for the farmers representative body estimate the value of the claims against Monsanto at 1.9 billion Brazilian Brazilian heels which is about the US 1 billion processes have not been completed but for the Renee asked him it's a the claims may affect a company's profits you to go find a more recent article cuz they lost that lawsuit and I have no clue this is also coming from sustainable

pulse in GM watch two sources which I have nothing positive to say about biotechnology it wouldn't surprise me if in other countries did try to litigate these let me know anybody can sue a company you know anybody through it so it's it's possible that these things were brought before these governments saying that these were unfair practices to Farmers to make them sign a contract and then repurchase the seed later on so they were talking about before illegally how are they doing that but you just save the seeds from the previous year instead of instead of processing it now you can imagine a corn corn cob has several hundred kernels any one of those represents a new plant so you can have X amount of your acreage dedicated to see production so essentially all you have to do is buy you know a few thousand ears of corn and you would be

plant just a giant area of you know what I wish I knew the number on top of my head but I don't but it would be able to plant replant Mork seats because corn are hybrids and without going into the whole genetics whiteboard thing here every corn is made from two parents that are genetically very different but when you combine them together give you a hybrid that when you cross a hybrid with a hybrid gives you a mixture of seeds that don't give you any uniformity in the Next Generation so since the 1930s the seed companies have been able to resell that hybrid seed to Farmers every year because there's nothing to be gained in in producing your own and sell corn isn't always the best example and the companies have use genetics for going on a Century now to protect their breeders interest so the original corn

before it was modified at all was that corn that you get like for Thanksgiving that you hang on your your door that nobody eats that weird colored funky looking corn is even smaller than that right it's called teosinte and teosinte was basically growing on a bush in Mexico and it gave you 13 little hard kernels on a stick that in a plant would produce some of this and it's it's now being thought from archaeological evidence that people would take these little corn cobs which to call it that is kind of strange the Civil stick with Little Rock's on it and stick it in Fire and pop it and eat it like popcorn cuz it's too hard to do you have to use a lot of water and grinding to make any food out of it but you can imagine how exciting it was when you were a person was using this for sustenance when you found a teosinte plant that may be made twice as many or maybe instead of 13 kernels gave you 26 and so you would select those and plant them the next year and it's really interesting that now you can go back through the 10000 years of

Improvement and we've been able to identify the jeans that were in all of the critical thresholds that shifted this thing from being a bush with lots of little sticks of kernels to being what it is today it really is just a small number of jeans that were changed so before they started modifying jeans how do they select like State how do they because before any genetic modifications were done in Laboratories they had turned this. Or maze we used to call it right that was the Indian word for even though you have a general term for everything from my field corn which is what we think about which is fed to animals run at 80% of GM crops go to animal feed and differentiate that versus what is typically eaten by humans which is usually sweet corn varieties so how did they turn it before there was any genetic modifications done Laboratories how did they turn that corn into what we

delicious and sweet and you put butter on it it's Fantastic Four sure they do that things happen when you from environment in the process of replication of DNA itself you can make errors Cosmic radiation just chemicals in our environment natural chemicals that are out there can induce changes in DNA and these kind of mutation sometimes very rarely result in a change in the plant that's beneficial and at least or at least make you in perspective so in all the plants that we've had all the plants that we have the significant amount of change has come from random mutations that change genes in ways we don't understand pieces of DNA that get up out of the genome and sit down somewhere else randomly they do this all the time viruses in the plants that get into the genome and sit down in places that we have no idea where so genetic

is something that's ongoing in constant and a factor in every genome including our own and so what we're seeing today is just the the long-term effect that of humans have been able to put all the good traits in one place

so when you see those tomatoes that are in the supermarket that are pale and you could play basketball with them those hard tomatoes and then you compare them to like heirloom tomatoes the only difference between those two is that someone had found some tomatoes that had grown extra firm and selected those and use the seeds from those to create more similar tomatoes and only select adults right so you you and your friend too cool things or what is an heirloom in an heirloom is a tomato with outstanding eating qualities that can't work in production commercially cuz it's too much zinc is too much they don't last long at break time but on the other hand so this is what the problem is with our food when you talk about tomatoes strawberries blueberries things at these are non-GMO by the way there's no GMO tomatoes are strawberries people would say there are the problem is is that plant breeding over the last 50 years or say over the last 100 years the objectives of the Breeders has been bigger fruit

uniformity big yield disease resistance nothing about flavor and aroma so to meet production characteristics which is what we've been selected for breeders have been looking for these kind of characteristics that don't involve the consumer and so are decline in the flavors and the quality of fruits and vegetables is directly related to the mass breeding not anything to do with GMO So when you say genetic modified in in that in those terms they are kind of genetically modified but they're not modified in terms of being a laboratory in human beings doing some funky stuff with jeans are sort of modified almost naturally and just selected for those modification exactly it in some of the things that we selected for have been the ones that didn't kill us when we were the things that didn't make a poison that. Something that tasted horrible plants make lots of funky compounds and so this was an opportunity for so what we've seen in our

stores right now is the residue of thousands of years of human selection and we can call it genetic modification if we want to but we can differentiate it from what we do in the laboratory which is now we can call adding a transgender or transgenesis moving a gene from one background of genetics to another via laboratory these selections that people have moaned about and I have as well it's horrible when you get a sandwich and has a pale tomato in it because they just taste awful this is there's a there's no science involved in any of that other than selection is no there's no there's no like injection of some alien sort of genetics into those things alien to the plant now there's no there's nothing is more an art than a science being a plant breeder is the most Kick-Ass career these days and has been for a long time plant breeding is essentially inventing the next generation of food and all were talking a

mixing pollen from things that may be normally wouldn't cross together like something that nature would never cross but you got this cool tomato from Europe that has great quality and we can mix it with this great production quality tomato from that grows in Florida or nothing else can grow and now you mix these two together and you get this beautiful tomato that works well and everybody's Garden that's where we're going now but that's not GMO that's just using other types of technology to facilitate this nap this breeding process that breeders do and how would you splice those two together like how would you take it tomato from Europe in a tomato from Arkansas on it somehow or another make them work most of the time it's as simple as plant sexy just emasculate one of them rip all that mail Parts out of it and then you add pollen from a different flower and it's very simple that's what people have been doing to create hybrid varieties Fritter for centuries

so that is not considered genetically modified or it is well this back to the confusion it is certainly a genetic modification you're ramming together genomes that never would have mashed together in a lot in the wild never but at in creating a product that humans have never seen or tasted or tested but yet we find this very acceptable and and very even though it's a very random process we don't know what kind of those those trans poseable jeans or sings jumping around Genome of the main corn types have 500 different genes between them eating one has 500 jeans the other doesn't have so you're mixing together things that have no, nality other than the basic gorguts of of jeans in the gym so this is not I don't think it looks get splicing of things is not what terrifies people what seems that are 5 people is the introduction of things that are not supposed to be in the organic plant and this is something that

that really bugs people on the real the real fear is of disease all these studies that have been done supposedly of rats that got cancer from some sort of Round Up crap explain that okay so let's say we can go let's dive into that so when we're adding jeans across let's say species are across kingdoms through a laboratory and that's what people I think are really strange about it really don't understand this is the part when it's actually terribly simple and we've been doing this since the 1980s of introducing the plant since the 1980s I've been studying it since then and the best example is insulin

that the human gene for insulin is cut out of the human genome placed into a bacterium and then gigantic fermenters of bacteria so we're talking like it an organism that is so different from humans and then we pull out the insulin and we use this to inject in the patient's rather than relying on isolating it from calf cow on pancreas were there can be all kinds of allergic reactions and all kinds of other issues so here we have a source of insulin that's human insulin that's coming through a GMO intermediate that allows humans to live for a low-cost medicine that has no side effects and there's a bunch of instances of that in Arthur and there's about it's not just insulin that they've done with breeding it bacteria it's much other things to her why we bomb did the main enzyme for cheese making is called chymosin and is a camel Gene that's expressed in a bacterium and I'm doing the job that does

everything you know you try everybody's different. It is one of these enzymes in the gut of one of the chambers of the gut of the ruminant stomach and the camel seem to have the one that was the most active in vitro if you can do this test you put the different enzyme in a test tube and see which one it converts the milk into the cheese stuff faster and then you're able to figure out Camel one just because it's a better enzyme for whatever reason now you use that one in bacteria and 95% of cheese that uses a GMO intermediate that is insane how the hell did anybody ever come to the conclusion that a camel would produce the best cheese that's what I do that's on my colleagues do you know we've got this really cool system of public universities were using money from Public Funding from you know your tax dollars to solve problems like how to make better cheese less expensively I'm that's our main thing as a land grant University and in so this is Visa

basic science questions that we strive to answer and I think we are doing a good job with and that's why this GMO thing is so frustrating because we're so down in the Monsanto noise or so that we have solutions that we can't use so like the camel Jean you know what did things that we don't think of that we figure it out is it is it because of the name because that name is associated with his big evil corporation that all GMO Foods or should have looked at in this regard because I mean people are freaking out about camel jeans and cheese they didn't know about it but everybody knows about GMOs and they instantly connect out to Monsanto and they instantly connect Monsanto to Greed and callousness and Indian Farmers commit suicide if you talked about it let me watch this is the problem though is that when you look at the real solutions that are there in science the stuff I care about you. If they went away tomorrow it wouldn't affect

the fact that the science is really good for their company that's profiting off of the science essentially they sell a product the farmers Farmers want improve crops that that take in the big deal for Farmers we have 1% of our people in this country are farming to feed and clothe the rest of us it's such a small amount they're getting by on narrow margins and when you're talking about the disasters that come from heat waves and floods and everything else operating just by breaking even and so a farmers who can get improve seeds that maybe don't require an insecticide because the plant makes its own protection that she was a farmer big box in terms of fuel labor products that they don't have to spray and so farmers have adopted the GM Technologies faster than cell phones in these were these went from 0 to 95% of acreage in just a couple years for five crops

so farmers by the crops Monsanto makes the seeds Monsanto makes the seeds the farmers want the seeds and demand more and that's why Monsanto stays in business they make a product that farmers use the Indians Indian Farmers committing suicide what's the story behind that so the best place to get information on this comes from academic sources and if you look at Ronald Herring who is a professor at Cornell University he's looked at this question very much suicide is a major issue in India and it's very common and now more than ever among young women and certainly is an issue amount of farmers the plant of very risky crop that's cotton cotton is it is a difficult to grow crops that in most areas requires lots of water and if you don't get monsoonal rain is your crop fails so what are the idea that Monsanto crops Were Somehow causing farmer suicides comes from the idea that the seeds are more expensive Farmers go into debt to some degree.

and then when the crop fails they lose the money it doesn't have anything to do with Monsanto per se or with those particular crops the other big issue you have is because these crops so these are cotton plants that make their own insecticide they make a protein completely but not into humans that protects the plant against the against the weevils and other Critters that burrow into cotton and so farmers don't have to spray pesticides and it's a huge deal because it allows them to farm with fewer without having the cost of it they all want this other about many of them want this beef by the seeds now the problem is there's a counterfeit Seed Market where people are selling something that isn't legit and there are delicious utimate problems with farmers who have who commits suicide because of indebtedness but I don't know how much we can directly blame that on the company or or its agents so if someone buys Monsanto cotton side you buy cotton

can you grow cotton that farmer has to make an agreement to not use that cotton to plant more cotton that they have to buy more seeds that's right that's where it gets really confusing with people because you like what why it's a natural process a natural process if you buy that corn I mean and you take that corn and continue to grow corn that's always been how Farmers have done it through the beginning of time now all the sudden some company comes along and says no we own. Corn weave license you that corn you grow the corn once and then you have to continue to buy seeds or mice to grow corn that was never the case before in human history is one company comes along and demands that and that was connected to the suicides of these people in India that this is a totally new situation actually very very much not a new situation I'm plant plant variety protection and protection of plant genetics has been around since the 1930s and Farmers that I mentioned before have been doing this strictly by you

hybrids which don't yield decent plants in the Next Generation so you had to buy them from the company every year more recently and you if you wanted to let's say you bought a apple tree for your app on your Apple Orchard from Cornell University that I won that Cornell University device so we don't even talk about Monsanto let's say a public university apple trees are all propagated by vegetative cuttings you cut off the little Branch grow roots on it grow new tree and you sign a licensing agreement non-GMO but there's things like that strawberries from University of California you sign of Licensing agreement and what does that entail it it says that you will not propagate those plant materials as a farmer that you'll use them to grow your crop and that when you need more you'll buy more and the reason when did Lisa been done for for decades and it's more and more power

really done very often you really started to see an escalation of plant variety protection non-GMO plant variety protection in the last couple decades so in the 1930s did they would say with apples are some of that someone someone figured out a way to selectively breed a really excellent Apple they protected those seeds to the point if you bought seeds for those apples and plant them you're not allowed to extract the seeds from the apples that you plant and grow new seeds grow new plants LA but yeah it is sort of you couldn't apples are tart apples are propagated by the cuttings rather than seeds because every seat is a genetic mess you wouldn't you can plant an Apple Beats by an apple red delicious apple you can plant the 20 seeds inside and you're going to get 20 plants that are nothing alike and none of them will have decent fruit none of them the ones that have the the Blockbuster trades and this is why there has to be protection for us at University of Florida to grow a new orange variety might take 30 years it might take acres and Acres that cause

stop the university hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to borrow or to lease the best treatments the fertilizer the water the labor it cost hundreds of thousands maybe a million dollars to bring that new variety to Market and to have to just give it away is it ends a breeding program so it wouldn't the solution be to publicly found the research so that the people benefit from it so instead of a large corporation being able to lock down this perfect orange that you developed the University of Florida instead the taxpayers dollars which goes towards the research creates this beautiful plant that everyone is allowed to benefit from well that's what that's what happens is that the public good for the public research publicly-funded says you get a little dribble of dollars but are breeding programs are very much self-sustaining in many cases that you need to commercialize Your Vessel

directions for your best fruit in order to be able to keep the breeding program going so the university has to generate money through its breeding program and then it has to protect that money to ensure they will continue to receive money from all the different things that develop in the lab which will justify the amount of money that you spend on your research and it's not much individual in the percentage it's not much at all but most of it goes to the breeding programs that allow them to continue to be leading breeding programs and hire people and leased land and produce the next varieties for the public and the only way to do that is to make sure that people don't take your orange and take the seeds and plant new oranges at end cuz if people do illegally propagate this and compete against the nurseries that are doing it legally and selling at the farmers you have a couple problems one is you lose control of the the product quality is it really true to type what people say it is

in fart with the really the beneficiary is the farmer we make something that the farmer wants and that the farmer is desperate for our Farmers needed we have a orange problem right now in Florida that's coming here we have 60 million citrus trees that are dying and we're doing everything we can to identify resistant material not GMO Family Guy from something called Citrus Greening disease Long Long Bang it's a disease that's a tall is Bruce Lee movies at the Citrus Greening disease is a disease or the bacteria or bacterium blocks vasculature of the orange tree and it spread from tree to tree with something called a seal it and some insect and there's Chileans up and this thing bites one infected tree goes to another and now spreads that bacterium that can live in that tree for five years before there's any symptoms and then the tree just get sick and starts to die we've got an orange industry that is half as big as it used to be

we need a solution and that's why were in so if parts are breeders are making everything they can to to generate Nutrisse accelerating the process everything they can and if they can get that new tree after they spent millions of dollars some of the USDA to identify a solution there has to be a way for some of that funding to come back to the program to invent the Next Generation so that now we're ready when the next threat comes so what would be the solution like say if you have some sort of bacterial that's infecting these these plants and killing these oranges what could be a potential solution to that and will be the ramifications of you didn't come up with a solution where I am at the University and I'm the chairman of a department that does everything from organic and sustainable biology all the way through space biology you see people attacking us for so many ways we're changing the plants nutrition or changing just the rootstock so citrus trees are

bunch of roots in a in a science you glue together Grafton together talk about a frankenfood we're building rootstocks that can generate resistance to the bacterium so that now when you graft on a Scion maybe it will be resisted we're doing everything from insect control we're doing everything from essential oil treatment novel drugs that are used in humans and approved for humans being applied to see if they can kill the siletz Oregon antibiotic or something it's hard to do antibiotics because of the resistance factor that people are resistant to using antibiotics or countries because they're afraid they'll get this is the defensive Weird Science environment that we have to work in at Publix scientist we're trying to identify compounds that are approved for use in humans were approved for use on food that might have a shot at it and we're trying everything the one things some of the things that have worked very well are GMOs Solutions

and so it was a company in Florida that is looking to commercialize a spinach Gene in Orange that solves the problem we have a couple of them at the University of Florida for at our Lake Alfred facility wear their jeans that directly affect the bacterial growth and they work well and they're not harmful to humans and the trees are now 5 years old with no symptoms so here's an example of a GMO solution it's not Monsanto we can't solve this problem with breeding not easily anyway and here's something that we can solve this in 5 years thousands of families thousands of Florida families of thousands of California families are watching they're watching their Groves waiting for the yellow symptoms to appear and we have Solutions but people will fight us tooth and nail from applying them and that's where izo pablic scientist that's why I want to be here to talk to you because I'm looking to appeal to people's intellect to divorce the Techno

from Monsanto divorced this technology that that you have in the public sector that can be used to solve public problems that are important so this is a tremendous amount of fear that's attached to the subjects and with that fear is often very little investigation which is unfortunate but it's also very rare to get a person like you to sit down and talk to them and explain that said it takes a long time and that's all I really appreciate you being here for this but there's there's a lot of fears of people have that are founded in fact and found it in the actual consequences like MRSA what is MRSA come from it did some medication resistant strain of this horrible staph infection that people get it but it's sad that I've had staff it's horrible it's nasty and of the antibiotics you take a ruthless and they leave you like a zombie that I had a headache I feel terrible news I was really weak I can barely open up a jar of pickles you know the feeling the

the medication has created a resistance to this medication at a bacteria that have survived the the medication and they have grown stronger because of that and that is a fear the people are worried about that there's a balance to Nature and that when you screw around with that balance there's unintended consequences and often times they can be deadly like MRSA and this is something that I think people are I mean it makes it gives them claws to worry about someone putting antibiotics in their food whether it's in their chickens or whether it's in there which they've started the do lasts and lasts all but I think was Tyson Foods that publicly stated that they were going to significantly decrease their use of antibiotics and try to cut it out entirely because of public concern was Tyson Food see if that's true but

this is real concern right mind does not make sense that people worry about that oh absolutely I think that I'm not so worried about the the meat industry and antibiotics of MRSA and all of our resistant bacterial strains that comes because of an overuse of a silver bullet technology these things come about because the mom has a screaming kid who says You must have an ear infection so I'm going to demand for my doctor that I can get the antibiotics it comes from those of us not taking them correctly and I'm taking her for a few days and then not taking the whole bottle eyes were supposed to buy see I've been told recently that that's not the case that was what they had discussed that they believe that for a certain amount of time but now they no longer believe that it's necessary to take a full adult doesn't do anything bad to create a day or two while take a shorter dose of it okay I don't know the literature on that so I'll have to unless we get back to you I try to shoot from

solid but the story short is that came up a lot online before we talk a lot of concerns about the superweeds issue and it's the same idea that because the roundup-resistant technology has been so successful at for Farmers that it's what they over you or they constantly use now you see resistant weeds that invade those fields that are resistant to the to the compound just like in Mersa and it's from using a silver bullet technology the reason that that's a problem is because the process to come up with the next generation of of solution is so arduous and so expensive that we stick with the old technology and we can't come up with something new fast enough so the Silver Bullet technology this end up like that was created to deal with first Pacific & tract infection it works it's very effective so people use too much of it and because of that then it creates this medication resistant strain of this

does not have research done to fight off that medication resistant strain of it because it's so cost prohibitive to do the work to create a medical solution in the first place I think you're right I think because the main issue member go back to this idea that DNA has natural mutation and natural problems and its replication that give new information in a cell and when you get that merca infection those cells are dividing every 20 minutes and you have millions of them and so the chance of one gaining the ability to metabolize your antibiotics is actually pretty good and when you're talking about billions of cells over many generations that's where these things come from and it's kind of funny because actually I have an appointment on Wednesday morning because something out of my lab I have something that looks like it would be a potential ability to make the next generation of nurseries we're actually going to test it on MRSA in something that I came up with implants that that work process were patenting that makes new compounds that could be very helpful

against other creatures outside of plants okay one of the things that troubles people the most about genetically modified things whether it's Foods or whether it's a animals are in anything they were messing around with is the potential health risks for the people that consume them that is the biggest problem probably the biggest concern people worried about cancer and I've seen people tweet this you're a scientist but you're not an oncologist you're not a cancer expert you're not dealing with people to get sick from certain things what evidence is Annie is there that medication or rather that I'm Jackie modified foods cause disease in people cause sickness in people look at that backwards we've been growing these things and eating them now for 18 years and studying them a lot longer 30 in terms of feeding them to animals and everything else there has not been one case of one single Health effect that's been attributed to this I'm so it looks like it's any of my purse

actor this is got Addie's are some of the safest products in the history of humans that there's and so we haven't seen anything come out on the other side of this these are some of the most extensively tested crops in the world they started on the drawing board when you say you're going to take a gene that from bacillus thuringiensis btg the thing that we use in it's actually called cry one day or whatever it's called cry is the acronym we will look into detail you take this Gene from the bacterium a bacterium that used to protect organic produce works fine there and you take that Gene which includes the protein so it's the information from the cell that allows the cell to create this protein that targets the gut of a lepidoptera and insects of the caterpillar of certain birds and a bunch of butterflies and moths and now the plant makes this protein

you can do the test in vitro you can say does this protein affect cells does this protein affect animals when you feed it it doesn't affect animals that you feed it a tremendously high levels all those tests are done an ad nauseam this is a natural protein that's digested just like any other protein so is there any risk at all of messing with food and introducing antibiotics and food whatever it's in the tree of a orange and the Lionel is it is there any risk for humans that consume that absolutely absolutely answer it like a scientist okay I appreciate that you can never say there's no risk and what we have to say is is that there's risking anything we do what you next but we live in a time where we have this unbelievable sensitivity to detect something in a plant we can look at the metabolites that are we can change take a plant as it is a tagine and see what changes with unbelievable

resolution we can look at every single protein we can look at every single Gene that's turned on or turned off we can look at where the genus added is integrated we can understand metabolites profiles are screen for specific carcinogen it is so easy right now to be able to do a very careful assessment you know I'm not in this ball game to hurt people and farmers are neither I mean they're there they want to produce wholesome Food for People my job is a public scientist is to use my ability to dream and think of ideas and solutions for public benefit you've got tens of thousands of me out there are the person who found something wrong would win a Nobel Prize for this if it's that much of a big deal if there was something wrong but to play Devil's Advocate if there was some sort of a reaction in 1% of the people or less than what will take one tenth of 1% of people that was deadly but the company were there it's the big a more you know so

the company is making a billion dollars a year off of this there would be a tremendous amount of pressure to continue that money flowing whether it's through I'm not saying it's through scientist I certainly wouldn't think would be through people like you but I would think that somewhere locked away and some office High and a gun turret is some evil asshole who owns a giant stick of the corporation and he seems like they would hide it like you know the story of GM and the ignition ignition switches think they hit the fact that their ignition switches were faulty and people died and now they're being sued and it's horrible and that's GM I mean they made the Corvette they made the Bel Air I mean this is it this house is possible that people that make Cadillac would be evil the first two letters of GMO

Jim team does just a time to see the big deal is you can look at many examples throughout history whether you're talking cigarettes you're talkin were you see examples where money is bought influence and sure what the beautiful part of this is that science always wins and that you do find out the truth comes out eventually and for these companies that are producing these products in my opinion and I'm not with these companies I can't tell you how they think they stand to make a lot more money by making a product that's thoroughly tested and being Queen with anything they would find that would be problematic the other thing that's really important here is that we know so when you say you're going to move let's say now we're going to move talk about rice that you can add jeans to to make it. I have high beta carotene content higher vitamin a golden rice

you know what those jeans do cuz we study Diamond carats we understand the products they produce so there's a possibility aspect of this to that when we take this from carrot and put it in rice what's the difference maybe there are some differences and we can test for those but it starts out with the plausibility this isn't Magic and Voodoo and weird backroom you let's let's see what this lever does to the ideas that if you eat carrots and rice together as food that's not much different than splicing carrots and rice together and likely if you're not allergic to either one of those things you're not going to be allergic to this rice that you create even if you are allergic to carrots taking one gene out of it that doesn't have a human illogical footprint on. Antigenic footprint in Inhumans like the jeans so she would beta carotene production don't have you be able to move those in the rice and have no problem that's a good point. The point of allergic because biodiversity is is is a huge issue when

talking about food in general that some people have extremely different reactions with her it's to peanuts or to shellfish or do a variety of things that most of us enjoy but there's a few people that have severe reactions is very same thing and this is natural completely totally natural this is the question when it comes to certain types of medication if you're dealing with these outliers if you dealing with this one tenth of 1% of the population where this this chemical reaction happens inside their body completely natural we should we stop the production of peanuts should we stop at directions to shellfish I say fuck know I love peanuts and I love shrimp but if you're dealing with a medication that does the exact same thing and reacts with the biodiversity of the exact same percent of the population in could potentially be fatal like shellfish can should like peanuts can be fatal people have died from them what do we do

about that and this is this is actually kind of transgenic or GMO technology food allergy proteins are very well now you know that the protein in peanuts the proteins in soy the proteins in wheat that cause that cause allergies and you can turn those off and make them go away using transgenic technology and it's been done we have allergy free peanuts in the lab so this peanuts that people are there other of commercially available now because people are afraid of this stuff this is what kills me here we are making Solutions we have theirs wheat that still makes decent bread where the gluten and glad are the glutens are the Gladden in the other one Lieutenant have been shut off it still makes decent bread you have soy that you can decreased specific allergens we know what the allergens are in food and can turn them off and and sometimes it makes the plant the Little Dipper

makes the product that you like the Tweet when you take out the major glutens it could change the bread structure but it still seems that the other one's kind of ramp-up to to compensate so we can make a better product using this technology but we didn't exist I mean he seems exist yo they're not they're not some wild fantasy of the future it's just that they would never be deregulated because of the cost in because the industry's associated with them the peanut industry says no way we don't want people boycotting peanut butter just so just have a few kids you know have problems with the allergy instead to me that's a total Injustice that drives me crazy so you feel like this could all be eradicated but in nature these things are Raticate in a much more disturbing way in nature that people that are allergic to peanuts eat them and I buy in it's no longer expressed in in the genetics that's that's the natural method of doing it that their concern with any of these Vermont genetic modifications to the labors and which I am most

anyway is that you are creating something that shouldn't be there that you were creating something you don't the consequences of this like the wings of the butterfly the crate the hurricane in that stupid fuck that shit drives me crazy that's not how I just dumped it has to do with the planet that has to do with the atmosphere that's do with Magnetic so that's still a lot of different shit don't have to do with butterflies and we can sit around all day and talk about what are the unintended consequences in the get this all the time what if what if what if I can tell you that today on June 4th 2015 20,000 people are going to die because of insufficient nutrition that's a problem that I can tell you exist I can tell you that kids will have allergic reactions to peanuts here I can tell you that there are 60 million citrus trees dying and these are problems

I was going to fix these are problems that I need to fix that guys like people like we need to fix and we're being handcuffed by an irrational fear of a good technology and you think of this irrational fear of a good technology comes about because of what they consider to be a greedy corporations this fear of greedy corporations cuz we'd be like we talked about GM and then we can talk about we can talk about other corporations that have moved into countries that are poverty-stricken and taking over an abused their natural environment and that we associate money with especially corporate entities with this idea of constantly need to make more money every year to justify what they're doing to their shareholders me this is the reality of these businesses infant growth businesses and we associate them with callousness we so she ate them with not caring about the people who work for them or the people that they affect in the environments that they build their plants

one of the main concerns that people have is the diffusion of responsibility that comes with being a part a single piece of a large entity that is ultimately doing at least some bad right now I understand that you noticed in the old punk rock guy and he says that you don't you were no punk rock yeah I played in Seymour tomatoes in say War Tomatoes did you send me sing me a little insane more Tomatoes how do they look like to wear a giant Dancing Dead Elvis would come out on stage and not and where to get the name I don't know but then someone already had that so we it was it's kind of spinal tap e so we were in sing work to me as we were the coolest band that no one ever knew of

I'm sure that's I live in an asshole I like how you didn't say the word cuz you respectable now Professor I know what you do in this band I played guitar for the first few years and then switch over to base did you sing it all you can hear me coming up right here right I do have a little finger

coming up in a second

kind of Motorhead eat before but not bad it's good workout music

this is me here in there and then here

that's you that it was me 48 sweet that we played all over the place we did a lot in in Wisconsin we are real big and we have the costumes we had a guy out of Gene Simmons outfit that I wore with gigantic High shoes and the guy who is the singer dressed as a tomato and let himself on fire and it was before great white wow homemade gas pyrotechnics show was fantastic and in the eight people that came to see us loved it

in the best part was we would pounder audience with produce at the end to throw tomatoes at him this will you involved in agriculture back then not really I was I said I haven't even been until very recently I was a basic scientist I study the nuts and bolts a DNA and nuts and bolts of plant physiology and this time if your 22 back then you presumably had gone to college already and will you studying agriculture like what was the connection to tomatoes and people throwing vegetables at you what was that just luck and I was involved in a circle I didn't have an egg that's a coincidence because it's a funny one isn't it what's a good thing I didn't want to study reproductive physiology I guess you in the ovaries but I would be the best thing

but if it going back to answer your question but who doesn't he who hates his people selling gas all the time I look at companies like Monsanto and others as being the way that farmers who are my real clients are enabled and so whether or not I like who they're buying it from there the folks who are the beneficiaries of the technology and the other thing that's really you in so the other exciting thing for me is when the small companies can use something like GMO technology to gain a unique Market Niche like a Okanagan specialty fruits they make this apple that doesn't turn brown when you cut it and they have for full-time employees are they from Oregon they're not there from that Washington spanada is that what is Okanagan mean is that a location or in in December which is a great trait

is an apple Gene to turn off an apple jean and in other words the GMO modification puts this Gene in backwards so it shuts off the Indian in Aitkin, it turns off. Gene and then the Apple doesn't Brown when you cut it which is a great rate if you want to have apples and processed products or apples as sliced apples in bags or whatever for full-time employees so my whole thing is go ahead and hate your Monsanto March against them whatever I don't care but do you realize that when you dress like Abby and lay on the ground and go into convulsions and say that this is biotechnology that's bad that now you're affecting the people who would buy that Apple the people who I would come up with a solution for for the people who need bananas and Uganda for the people who eat rice and Southeast Asia that needed more nutritious rice that by mixing together biotechnology in agriculture and conflating that with companies and things companies did or didn't do You Oughta

ugly take technology out of the hands of the people who in the people in the solutions that we care about things like the environment things like Farmers things like the needy we have those Solutions and that's the thing that just by the by the Monsanto phobia is dangerous a good part of what the problem is it can be attributed to the the idea of people not being responsible for actions because they're part of a collective group being completely unnatural and I think that if people had actual proof the idea of a corporation was was not that that Corporation would be immune to the actual people being involved in a corporation wouldn't be immune to responsibility for everything that Corporation does that's one of the reasons why businesses get an LLC write a limited whatever-it-is Corporation the ideas of protect you somehow or another create some sort of legal

definition of you that's different than you outside of a corporation which is weird you know it's like people eat your a fucking dude okay if you're a dude if you call yourself Kevin folta LLC I'm still talking to you man you're right here sitting in the same guy but if you do something under the guise of your corporation there's a completely different legal ramifications and if you do something on your own like bankruptcy things on those on your not as responsible for debts I think that might be the problem there's a problem might be I know that you're a decent person and nice person and I know that what you're trying to do is noble and just and true in the vein of science I 100% believe that I think that would people worried about is when someone like you gets to working Ford some big giant group this is why people keep saying that you're some sort of a shell or the other foot equation but the other folks that are working for Monsanto they're doing in there making money with the corporation's give a fuck about people that's what we have to stop we have to stop this idea

did a bunch of people together collectively can do something it's really unethical and they can do it and ruin natural environment and not be responsible like the BP oil spill in everybody knows it was all kinds of fucker in shenanigans that went on to protect the people that were involved from that BP Oil Scandal those people that have been profiting in insane sacrilegious amount of money for a long period of time when it came time to Pony up that money and clean up fucking mess up boy did things get weird things get legal and complicated and disclosures to sign to make you money for cleanup and people are paid off and there's a lot of fuckery involved that is what people worry about when it comes to genetically modified foods what we're worried about is the the method of action that corporations have been proven to take that is to protect the corporation as a it as a unit and to do so and act collectively in a way that you would never act as an

individual I agree but I guarantee you that 90% of the people that went to March against Monsanto drove a car that used oil that may have came out of a BP well sure and so he go ahead and eat a corporation but they're still using the products and and no one's trying to shut off no one's going to the gas station and knocking the pump out of my hand when I go to stick it in my car yet there are people who would feel very comfortable depriving farmers of the right to buy the seeds that they choose and foot so far to me again it's a if there's a social business issue here that needs to be remedied there's got to be another mechanism to do that and I'm fine with that go ahead hate any company you want all I'm saying is let's not talk about that's not put out the bullshit that says that GMOs cause cancer GMOs are causing autism that the the herbicides associated with it cause autism all of that is crazy talk that takes us out of our problem solving mode it distracts from what

good things that we can do a technology what is collective evolution.com is that a reputable website not so much excited about biotechnology and other corporate stuff I mean like nation of change there's a whole bunch of them and I read those things and I would say 50 to 60% of the stuff I'm right there with you you know I'm politically a lefty I'm a college professor you know I love seeing social justice I love seeing social progress I love those kind of mean it's stuff that I fight for but these are examples where I see that technology that can actually enhance those things and that we can wrestle it away from the big corporations if we only stopped making a fabricating information about them yet wise this is never even do a social justice for anything, but did but they're this this study linking GMOs to cancer liver kidney damage and severe hormonal destruction destruction

rats right that was one of the Lucian head story about everyone else did and what is it was a sudden what what's wrong with the setting different studies there but with the main one was one done by seralini in 2012 and they used a limited number of rats which are called Sprague dawley Rats the rats that are good cancer models because they're prone to cancer and so is your testing different compounds against them you'll have a model which is at least susceptible to developing tumors and so if you're testing the the toxicity of different compound compound you would use this red string the problem is that by two years into the study 75% of the rats have her 77% have tumors so seralini chose this to do it to your study he showed that the Bratz got tumors and in in the paper they even showing the table 2 in the control I'll that even the controls got tumors have the same amount as well they is statistically yes

I mean that they showed fewer but you and they talked about like you know they talk about 5 vs 8 vs 9 statistically the numbers were too small to say that that was a significant difference so when you say five 8 or 9 you mean percent or being number number out of how many 20 okay so that could be just an issue with the particular group of rats you had as opposed to you have to do a much larger study to get a good Baseline that would it would be nice to testicle noise number to test things what was 200 overall but it was a group spell quits that's really it for me I don't know the other picture on your screen picture of the real ugly rats note that the author show three rats one that got GMO food one that got Roundup one that got GMO food plus round up and they call it GMO by the way which scientist would never do

put in the transgene name the neglect to show you the control rat

edge control record fucked up to a significant number of them did but if you show it but how do they how do they what do they do you know how did they show that picture of these rats that are grotesquely malformed which if my lab rats go to that yeah they are if my lab let rats get to that stage or any lab in the United States let their rats get the stage that be shut down that's an animal abuse it's inhumane treatment of animals that's something that I feel pretty strongly against really severely dislike the idea of testing things on animals in the first place but it seems that that's where a lot of the big improvements in Medicine of come from that's a real moral dilemma I mean I think using animals especially intelligent animals I saw a fucking SeaWorld commercial this morning maybe want to throw a mug at my TV they were talking about how happy these whales are in a fucking swimming

this guy's a car wheels are happy and we love them and fuck you you do we haven't stolen a whale from its family in over 30 years it's like a slave Colony telling you how these people been born slaves don't worry about their happy being slaves we love them here if you had that exact same goddamn SeaWorld commercial you had it about human beings you would think those people would be thought of as some of the most evil Fox on the planet but they don't think of orcas is human being even though you have a cerebral cortex of 40% larger than a human beings even though they have dialect have a bunch of different words for all sorts of things we don't even understand what they're saying they're super complex methods of communication there very human-like don't alter their environment so because they don't all turn their environment and they can't smile at us in my attic deleting lips we choose to think of them as being inferior to us and it's acceptable to have them in a fucking swimming pool you know and I think that's dark and I think that's really evil and I think one day when we

figure out a way to interpret what they're saying and have like a Google Translate for killer whales it's going to be a mess and didn't see where they're going to go to jail immediately I don't want to watch A Match fucking horrible we love them fuck you you do I don't love them if you love them and they were people you'd let them go I got to wait to let him go you fux even look at zoos when I go to zoos and you see that cheat on this damn thing is supposed to be running 75 miles an hour after an antelope and it's sitting there laying on a shelf exactly and all its reward system its genetic reward systems are there they're not satisfied like a like a lion kill the woman at the woman who is a Game of Thrones Editor to hear about this she was at a safari park in the irony of it is she's a conservationist she loves these animals and she she wanted to take photos of them and she wants to protect them from poachers and she left the window open the fucking lion Connor jumped in the cage I jumped into the car and pulled her out and killed her

fun of everybody and it's it it's a it's a horrible terrible horrible thing but that's what Lions do I mean that is the reward system that's why they're here in 2015 they have a predator-prey reward system that reward system isn't being recognized at all in zoos that's one thing one aspect of their life it is probably as satisfying and is Primal is in courses to them and they're not being allowed to express it and that's a fucked-up thing mean zuser don't care what anybody says they're doing all this great work to do all this great work to do it the wrong way to do it the wrong way and it's just you can't like a monkey in a fucking Cajun people just stare at it that's got to be torture for that little thing there's a monkey at the Colorado zoo the one I think it was Colorado I forgot what you might have been the one in Griffith Park what are the fuck it is there's a monkey that was howling like a madman he was just holding on to his cage

I just screaming into the night and you like tell me that's any different in some kind of Psych Ward who's trapped in aliens with giant fucking watermelon sized eyes are staring at him all day how is that any different it's not not not I agree I have a hard time with this like I can't I choose not to get involved in that I know there's educational aspects of turtles maybe I don't freak out so much about it and get it at Champs and should you can big cats you just see those things at Bears I had a joke about it though that some animals that they the zoo doesn't seem to bother like giraffes giraffes don't seem to mind at all like they let him feed babies cuz the joke was that their draft like another day with no liens and like it's only came out to a giraffe and said listen man I'm going to give you free food there's going to be no Predators whatsoever

you can't walk as far as really like San Diego which has an awesome Wildlife Park it's huge like as far as soon as girl that plays top of the food chain because that place gives them in normous spaces but again the Predators aren't allowed to express being a predator in a zoo footage see if you can find that they Let it Goat loose and Iraqi zoo and this is how they feed their lions and soldiers this is how Soldiers film this at the beginning of the war and they just they just have a goat and it go it's fucking Jurassic Park the goat is just a let out of this gate and the Goat walks up and the Lions realize that the goat is there and then when they're all on him and they tear this fuck her apart then supposed to be

Portugal. My wife and I were there a few years ago I was there for a conference and we went to the zoo it's really nice zoo in Lisbon and one of the monkeys another pig cage full of monkeys like a million of them in there was like 30 or 40 and then one of them comes out Between the Bars and starts walking around they just came out of the cage water walking around it's pretty funny because all the parents are letting their kids touch it and speak right it's dead primate decision. Open the door open this gate and the lines just come to charge and then cuz they know exactly what the fuck is going on and you know I remember people watching it saying it that it's cruel this the reason why you think it's cruel is because we have been sheltered in some weird way to think that our way of living should be imposed on animals and that's crazy that's crazy thinking the idea that you should give

the lions jump out and boom they take these goats down and they all jump and they all know what they're doing this is what they do every day and this is how they eat but the idea that this is somehow brutal God damn it this is what it's called being a cat this is what cats do what you're doing is Brutal by giving them precooked meat you're not allowing him to express this charge they must get the bond and community that they generate together because of killing and surviving off that killed together human beings have it and I guarantee that Lions have that as well you're not allowing them to bond the same way is a part of establishing the pecking order in the communities as wow who's the better Hunter learn from that Hunter look how he bites that neck you know they all do elves learn from each other is teach the babies how to fight the teach them at a trip things and Chase things. At least they play with each other you know they big trip each other just like they want to trip game and we don't we don't allow that it's fucked the nature

cool I mean it's the way I did way it works and it's more cruel to not let them Express their nature decided that you feeding them an animal that somebody killed nowhere near the cat somewhere another more ethical than the animal kill the cat of the cat kill the animal is preposterous it's just fucking Avec

it's a crazy picture this video rather it's just that's what they do man. Don't say the Iraq he's never gave us anything and it's there give us a little bit of that but do you think that there is there's an ethical way to do tests on animals that would satisfy everybody Almost Is there a way I mean what what ethical way would even be I think we have to go back and this isn't my my area by any stretch but animal testing is a really important part of biology really important part of pharmacology when you look at how animals are you this is drug models like right right now we have we have animals like mice that Express or don't express a gene associated with the brain function that we know is impaired say with ALS in humans so essentially we have these mice that will develop ALS so now you can use compounds to see what solves that problem you can build these models are cancer models are men and animals where you have these animals that are free

dispose the specific kinds of cancers are ailments that now allow us to do test to find them and I think that's a really important role for this that that animals can help us identify problems that help The Human Condition which then can help us help animals is there a way to do it though that's going to make everybody happy I don't think there is I think it's one of those things we have to say we're better than you did that we have to say that these are at this is it it's just like when we raise animals to eat them I guess I mean work it it's there's a purpose for these animals that we bring them into our provision we raise them humanely and we are very animals that are in these drug experiments by definition have to be very carefully they have to be happy they have to be as happy as you can be in a is a rat in a cage around as happy as well because there's physiology that's involved and if you start seeing if you have rats that are living in conditions that are subpar or animals that are mistreated they won't give you adequate results

experiments you need to have incredible control with animals that are well cared for and can give you a solid physiological Baseline where the only the only information being introduced is through your treatment do you know what being a species list is of your been accused of being a species just I got a feeling I will be shortly this is speciesist thinking the thinking that you and human life is more important than other animals I don't know if that's necessarily the case that were more important but we certainly have more faculties to be able to control the outcomes of certain situations by bit of rats were smarter than us and decide to do tests on humans it would really suck wouldn't it so screw them or not very smart in terms of there's a lot of shit that uman beings do that we probably shouldn't do collectively like pollution destruction the environment so on so forth the liberation of nuclear weapons that that's not smart

a lot of stupid shit that we do so I think they were incredibly smart for being an animal or not necessarily Smart in terms of the universal potential of intelligent life we're not we're idiots that's why I mean is like there's a million fucking argument you can make all day long the gay marriage thing the marijuana thing the war stupid contradictions the way human beings exist in the Villi if there was something that was far more intelligent than not slick as intelligent as we are two pigs or as we are two things that we think you're smart like dogs are really smart it would come test with a dude us you know everything of that I never really think about that very much about me is that we've we've evolved is a species for a long time away from our common ancestors in other primate ancestors because of our ability to control situations and because we make decisions

and did more favorable outcomes whatever reason those are for us and so even though we're not even though we do a lot of dumb stuff and I'm with you on that I think we do an awful lot of smart stuff too and I think they human capacity to create change that's favorable for humans is is a mess maybe you can do your own documentary you know Al Gore had that one the Inconvenient Truth About the uncomfortable truth the uncomfortable truth being you got a crack some eggs to make an omelet and there's a lot there's a lot going on try to keep you in Bing's alive and sometimes you have to make a decision I forgot Nick depalo on my buddies hilarious stand-up comedian had some joke I don't want to fuck the joke. But it was about doing test on a monkey to find you know the cure AIDS and was fucking hilarious but I don't remember how the joke why but if something about battery cables and was very funny but the idea yeah yeah I'm saying I'm more important a monkey I'm saying my mom it was good dying of cancer is more important than a rabbit

I'm saying that I'm saying that all right is not as important as my children I said it sorry I'm a species list of the other way and I'll we can think of it sure as soon as again as soon as you look at instead of whether it's money or the results being more important than the actions of the individual the accident of the individual not being ethical not that's not being important support news results that's when we run into problems but that's it and so even Circle it back then you know this is why it's being a scientist is so cool is because I'm Bound by data and I'm Bound by a hypothesis that I test using the best available tools and being a public scientist which is really cool that the people who choose to do this like me and there's a lot of them in this country we are really operating in the Public's trust in the Public's best interest and I think that when we see an ethical behavior when we see

what's a interpretations of data I would suggest that maybe we're going the wrong way these things are caught in the peer-review process these things are caught when are grants re-evaluated and they're debated in the scientific literature and so when we making steps in progress these are very careful guarded reviewed reviewed steps and that were doing is puzzle public science Enterprise and this is what's why I wish we had more support I'm not here to complain about that I wish we in that the only people say that you don't know you're from Monsanto are we getting nothing compared to what they have and where is University we get something like 3% of our support for corporate entities everything else comes from the grants that we go out and get and so this is what's so important about having an active public science Enterprises to keep all that other stuff in check I think it's also important to try to understand the whole process

that's involved in in science that the average person who doesn't have background in at the average person who didn't take science other than the classes we dissected frog in high school it's the process of the process that creates its data and they don't understand where where where we come from and what we go through if you talk to anybody they'll tell you well you're universities are just paid off by the companies in the companies that sometimes that's the case right like to have contracts frequently with companies it happens all the time but that's because we're the experts and in other fields it's a much bigger issue financially like it's been a big issue in the setting of regulations for the stock market and things like that the people did at University you know I'm talking about those economics professors who made recommendations and then wind up getting chewed jobs of the banks after was over for millions of dollars

cuz you are the experts you're the ones who know this we trust you and if it doesn't work you better tell us no one's giving us money to make them happy no one's telling me in this if this phone pisses me off all the time because out of everybody you meet in science you know there's so many of us that really do claim to have integrity is a first-level I would never do something because of company told me to do it or because our company paid me to do it the punk rock and you would not that's right fight that power fight the power of the day you know I'm not a religious guy I'm not I don't believe that there's some great reward for me you know what I'm leaving here is is legacy and I like a product of my work and my record and I don't want that tarnish I believe you 100% certainly not question that I want to tell everybody if you that the thing I was saying about mathematics professors you should watch a documentary called inside job or an inside job it's all about the financial crashed fantastic

it's really really really really well done if you documents. But people are worried about people like you you would seem to be a great guy but they're worried about his evil scientists that's what sucks up every science fiction movie did you see 28 Days Later zombie Universe starts out because of medication that was created something called rage I forget what why they created it for soldiers or something like that affects these Champs and then these chips getaway by people to people get it and then the zombie outbreak takes over the world kills everybody except for a few cool human caterpillar will this that's different but this I think you mean centipede don't watch that don't that's different though this is this is a fucking awesome movie Human Centipede was a goof but the 28 Days Later was about a medication that they intended for you

beings in a one terribly wrong

that's that's the kind of scientist of people worried about people worried about the evil people that are creating mean look there been scientist that have created weaponized drugs or weaponized a biological weapons rather than they can use on people snap that in certain gases me filter created by scientists have killed Untold numbers people are also created by scientists absolutely just guys like you were worried people are worried about people that have wave Falcon smarter than them that might be plotting some evil shit discussion orange herbicide called 2 for D & A number of herbicides were combined and there was this whole rainbow of herbicides o'clock agent blue agent free agent orange was just 2 4D stuff to for 5T there there was a call synthetic auctions they make plants grow to death basically and the government was able to weaponize a legitimate product for a wharf

had nothing to do with an evil scientist necessarily but it was implementation potentially by people who had an agenda to be able to expose an enemy in a jungle atmosphere along with the purification of those products 245 T was the main one was dioxin which is what kid which would kill people in her arms arm car and our own soldiers that is one of the scariest things about human beings that were willing to kill your whole Forest to find you stop going to kill every fucking tree every Bush Everything went to kill the whole forest and flush them out of the daisy cutter you know basically you know the chemical daisy-cutter so crazy that someone judging ruin the entire ecosystem and kill everything that moves so that our boys can go in there and kill the people that are hiding in it but this was

rather buy really great scientist came up with the Arthur Golston came up with two for five thirty to forty to control plant growth and control weeds and it's a relatively useful compound that we've had for 70 years but you have people will say you're using agent orange on corn you know we're not using Agent Orange it's a growth regulator that was part of Agent Orange that humans decided to weaponize against other humans so that that was that was created first and then human beings took this and said well there is some sort of a weaponize application of this very beneficial Discover right now and then and then I are compound that can be used safely in an agricultural contacts and has been since the 1940s see you again stop people wearing about the scientist worried about the evil people that control the scientist take that stuff and turned it in and then sprayed in Vietnam about the small number of evil people that might be out there cuz they're going to do it you know there's always going to be some

who finds a way to to sew a bomb in his underwear but that doesn't mean we Outlaw Underpants you know we have to we could but but the idea is that we need to think about what the science allows us to do and not worry about the I mean certainly be aware of malevolent uses on people could genetically engineered viruses and I thought I believe I've heard about the Russians doing this it back in the during the Cold War days to say engineer a antibody that would attack human myelin which is the stuff that covers your nerves so that you could essentially infect people with a virus that would kill them because of paralyze them these kind of things were discussed and biological agents in biological Weaponry is there but as it has power in that to mention I think that the main conversation here is really how do we take the same technology and use it for good talking about is is really what I was saying before is it. I think a lot of your hate comes from people that are terrified that they don't understand what's going on

you know and that's me. Didn't do that but I ask about questions and I trust you so I go and I'll write it seems to make sense but realistically when you're talking to me about the expressions of genes my brain is just gone there's a bunch of noises that represents things I don't totally understand what was wrong with it I guess I'm kind of giving you an opportunity to say what are things that you care about that I could fix or scientist could fix like what are some what are some concerns about food that you it's the interviewee becomes the interviewer what are some things that you would worry about in terms of food or maybe food abundance or you know what would you like an abundance is always a big concern for everybody especially when you look at parts of the world where you see these like I have a good friend and Justin Randy comes on the podcast and he used to fight in the UFC and now he works in the Congo building Wells

amazing God and he does this thing called fight for the Forgotten and he goes to the Congo and he did it with some money that viewers generator to they build a bunch of Wells that our listeners of the podcast generated through Bitcoin and I master donation abilities well he just did these guys dedicating this whole time to doing that to give these people clean water like that I think the Simon scientific other than the ability to correctly somebody obviously had to invent these water pumps and filters and figure out how to make these these Wells portable and functional

that's really what needs to be. We need to figure out a way to take the worst parts of the world and bring them to a higher standard of living and give people the opportunity to not live on dirt floors with a drinking muddy puddle water you know me and the fact that that it takes a guy like Justin to go down to the Congo and dedicate his life to that and a bunch of other brave people that are doing the exact same thing but that countries never talk about it we'll talk about all sorts of issues that are going on in the environment all sorts of things about the what happens if the ocean Rises and we lose Malibu no one's freaking out about these poor babies with distended bellies because they're filled with parasites is a huge human issue and if they were white people that live but look like they're from Norway and this is their problem if they're all beautiful people over there from The Game of Thrones now I distended bellies everybody be freaking out they want to go over there and say those folks and it's it's it's one of the more disturbing Saturn aspects of humanity I don't know

science can help certainly with medication with antibiotics and antiviral drugs healthy people to spend have all these parasitic infections is incredibly rare candies tropical Rich jungle environment you know that's I think what would be the thing that I would look forward to the most to fix the world and stop this whole killing other people shit this is really good perfect example I'm glad you brought that up. Especially with you was Congo because Uganda is one who I just met a scientist this weekend and he's a plant breeder by trade who he said here in the United States everybody is screaming that they want choice they want GMO vs. non-GMO he says over by us we just want food

and a very sincere man who is desperate for solutions for his country and I'm going to work with him and there's three things I could really help Uganda right now and that they are actively on the ground there three solutions for problems they have they have something like 70% of their calories come from or carbohydrate calories come from bananas and are not like bananas we have but African bananas and bananas get to have two problems one of them all to bacterial to pathogen problems I get missed call. Xanthomonas I get my top drawer there are genetic engineering solutions that are in place that can sell both of those problems there's also an issue that people there have vitamin A deficiency so they're going blind as long as cold and rice line I'm you're looking at 250 million to 500 million blindness is a year most of it and kids and half of them died within a year and it's all because of a vitamin deficiencies of vitamin A deficiency and now they have bananas that have the genes from a banana that produces vitamin A

kind of agricultural useless but they move those into the production banana from the Congo and being from Uganda and this is a Gates Foundation sponsored stuff and other people have done this so now they have a banana that produces vitamin A beta-carotene which is converted to vitamin A and then resistant to the two main diseases

and it can't be used and you've got green peas and other activist organizations on the ground they're fighting it and they're telling people that this is just the westerners coming in to take over and give you the food in the technology they reject saying it'll cause sterility these are very wealthy Western funded organizations that are posed to genetic modification they know that if you Ganda develops these products in is allowed to give them to their people and they solve a problem that now the house of cards in the Western World falls down so you really believe that there's a conspiracy to keep these bananas out because if the bananas go through and do good with they think would you think they will for sure the science says they will and that these people think it will as well and will open the door genetic modified foods so because of that they're willing to sacrifice his people getting this vitamin A rich banana Italy it it's not a conspiracy it's it's it's it's clear as day

in China they tell people that it'll cause infertility that is a consideration when you agree well I guess it's a conspiracy that is and it's but it's it's very transparent is what I guess I'm going for this isn't some secret clandestine operation this is something that is very well understood that this is what they're doing but to play Devil's Advocate isn't possible that they really truly are concerned that a company like Monsanto would get their monetary hooks into a country and start fucking around there and doing a bunch of unethical shit sure that's what they're worried about that they would be worried about but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater let's not let's not accept Phantom fears for real fears we got our problems and let's not say well maybe Monsanto be involved so let's not allow it let's let them use the best technology and whatsoever trend of licenses acknowledging profit from their use of it and it's so funny about this is that

Laboratories there that said we want biotechnology and they're developing their own labs in their own stuff this professor I met this weekend I'm going to go there next year to help him set up a lab to grow coffee in in the culture I'm not GMO coffee which is an interesting idea but their issue is is that they can make a tremendous amount of money by growing coffee for Farmers farmers can grow coffee and have a very profitable operation but you can't grow enough plants of the types that are resistant to the diseases and so we're going to help them do that in in tissue culture or we can propagate tens of thousands of plants very quickly in a jar rather than by seed he's actually going to sponsor a student to come to my lab to do that and I'm going to go there and help him but this is the kind of place where we can where you can solve a problem with this kind of technology and where were being blocked and to me as a scientist I think of the 20,000 people who died I talk about it when I get toxin

I can't help it get tears in my eyes when you think about the male nurse people I've met in my travels who who changed me you meet them one time and it especially when you shake their hand and feel how weak and small they are and you dedicate yourself to how you're going to fix it and they have people say well it's all Monsanto it's going to give you cancer all the stuff that's not true you block the investment in technology and the application of technology that can help and so when when we have this kind of conversation

I think about the allergy free peanuts I think about the golden bananas too cold and rice the all the application and we can't use them because of a fear of the technology Can You Feel It Just An ignorance with technology and biology and genetics also think that this may have to be aware of this to do in order to get to make this grant conspiracy to try to keep this illegal to keep this out of this country they eat they have to be aware that they are preventing good they have to be aware so that's that's kind of fucked-up yes and I and I am going to be on the good side and I supposedly the progressive sign the rifle side of the side that it did everybody wants to support and anti-gmo causes everybody's terrified of GMOs and then that's in there in the reason for this has been so the only thing you talk about the companies that that do it they totally failed when they rolled out this technology they didn't say

here's how it works and let's let's let's take care of your fears they rolled it out and said here's what you get and people created this with Frankenstein and and you know evil scientist we didn't get good education up front then over the years there's been a machine of documentaries books are the people who sell the books and documentaries about the dangers of this they're the ones who are making the prophets their the shields they're the ones that if they can make a Dollar by scaring you with their product and so they've been running free scientist like me have totally screwed this up to because the first time I talked to a public audience about GMOs 15 years ago I sat down and I am done with science

and I told him about how it's done and details that they didn't need I turned off more people tonight then I converted and only in the last 3 years really have a scientist got together and said this is a crisis that our technology can't reach those who need it and we need to rethink the way that we talk to them about science and it's not about beating people to death with the science Hammer it's about sharing ideas and things that we all really want and are solutions that we can use and and really separating a technology that's very good from companies that you know good good bad or whatever we need to know the technology is good

yeah what do you think initially caused the fear of GMOs do you think it was there any particular story that came out that Miss representative that became viral or what what was it that started off this big fear of this aspect of science I think there's always been an environmental movement that has decried the use of any kind of chemicals and farming and reason and I understand that she got DDT and all these great examples back to know a guy who's got bone cancer and all these kids who grew up with had cancer as well because they all live near a golf course yeah and this shit that they used to the you spray on the golf course got into the well water and cancer was rampant in their small community these examples are in In-N-Out to Hawaii to talk to them and they all talked about you know back in the day when you know they would they would be a grow the cane and they would use all these chemicals whether the stories are true or not I think there's a certain level of understanding that we did things differently back then and we weren't

places like South America they still do this you know if a little bit Works more is better hear the regulations are really tight and how you can use a compound and how it's allowed to be you and the residues that are present are all very well monitored and I think that's times are changed but going back to your question of where did this come from I think people does an environmental movement that was certainly on guard and I'm glad they're they're very happy about that the problem is now that anything that any of their former foes in the environmental movement would produce you know Monsanto could have came out with us another joke that makes gold the golden eggs and they would have said that gold is poised anything that comes from that company is going to be tainted just by name and and and that's why I think a lot of this comes from and that when they came out with no tomato and back when it was on the market or any of the products that they made it hasn't been let's think of what we can do with this

but here just another way that this company is rolling out of product to gain world domination of a food supply and make money off chemicals it's because of what we discussed earlier there's or I should say could be because of what we discussed earlier because the people have an inherent distrust in folks that are willing to copyright life the idea that you own the copyright to some corn and I know that you genetically modify that I know that you changed it but what it is now it's life and if you do that to a pig what happens then if you do it to a pig why can't you do it to artificial liver so you know why can't you do it all sorts of things you could put you could all the sudden copywriting entire human body and own a trademark on human bodies you can specifically design a type of human that the only way you can get your kid to be Alpha Beta 16 is you got to get the alpha beta 16 months I mean that this is not outside the realm of possibility this is within a hundred years from now they will be doing shit like that

freaks people out of Corporation get on human life kid you know where they mix the mitochondrial in the actual is going to happen with that kid that comes out of evil then what the Antichrist you know if I should buy more presents at Christmas for your viewing multiple parents or when the kid will not a burden on the kid if the parents disagree with the way they raise the child do you have to agree like it's hard for a husband and wife to agree on specifics as far as language to be used how to handle certain situations you got three people forget everything is child support to be half the price cuz there's a mother that provided provided the rest of the cell do

good luck with all that that guy's a pimp by the way but the whole idea of things that have been done that are really positive and then it went up cat to technology so you got a pig that was made that has a better ability it has a gene that it makes saliva that breaks down phosphorus better in its food and phosphates what allows the pig to do is have less toxic waste they called it the Enviro Pig and it has his pigs you know they're there effluent is is a problem and tell keep it out of the environments a good thing and so they made the Enviro Pig and the Enviro pig is a disa crushed idea now they're they're only a few embryo is left in the tank of liquid nitrogen

they made this week I heard of salmon that they put a salmon gene into a salmon to make it grow twice as fast it was originally developed in 1989 and that the company that's been trying to get it approved has been at it since the 90s and they've got all the approval but it's never been finalized in the beauty of this fish is it grows to harvestable size as I farmed fish in half the time so you're using half the stuff half the food have the resources to eat make the equivalent amount of protein but one of these fuckers get out into the wild yeah they thought of that spawn the trout while they're all females and damn if it doesn't is however bad horror movie star capsule that one of those things that you can also do becomes like a crocodile man that's like the Creature from the Black Lagoon

cuz we always spin off into this and you especially where they should we going to this idea that this is being an eternal optimist I think of what are the good things we could do with this why I expect no less from a guy who had a song called I live in an asshole, Terry, you don't need it. I'm just texting probably asleep by now but it is the kind of thing where my job is to sit around and figure out how to sell problem right and so when you can come up with a fish that gets to eat in size and half the time which could end Theory really relieve pressure on wild salmon fishing and put a put food into that a high protein and good food into the hands of people who don't normally afford fish like me I don't buy the cereal a logical stuff like that scares the shit out of people it's like you know what a liger is right you just saw Napoleon Dynamite

that's what you going to line it a tiger sand in Norman and Norma scat it's the biggest cat we know of right I mean to think something happened in the jeans I believe it's a male lion and female tiger I might have it backwards but the the the gene is the for regulating the size of the growth is not it's not the same so something happens in the cross where it becomes infertile because it's a hybrid but they grow do enormous eyes it's like look at the size of that goddamn thing it's some weird genetic modification but you know not through a scientist in a lab through just crossed for ya that's a hybrid Vigor yeah it's it's a case that when you mix up genomes that don't normally match be grabbing it like that what it what is she handling it beat on a stick some like really really really fed

I don't even think about eating you but it goes back to our corn wouldn't normally get together that humans put together seedless bananas all the ones we have are have an extra set of chromosomes your sealed seedless watermelon hasn't separate set of chromosomes mixing together plant chromosomes and waves nature could never intend for decades and here you add a great Precision one gene that we know what it does to a salmon we can monitor it we understand it and has a beneficial product that can help humans and they grow these things in tanks in Panama they can escape their Inland one of them was going to get super smart and figure out how to evolve stuff that's the there's all these precautions that are put in place to make sure that these things can't happen and of course you know we can always think of the example

you can always think of examples where it didn't work but we tended this Miss are the hundreds of thousands a chance of things that worked better than expected you know the the thing that makes your computer grow better that you can have the equivalent of the Apollo Landers of Firepower in terms of computational ability on your wrist in a fever more than that for granted and we can we ignore I always week we have to stop worrying about the what ifs and start worrying about the what cams and that's where I really want to try to get people to refocus does GMO discussion what are your pressing problems what are the things that science can do for you today and I think that that's where this gets super exciting but you can understand why people write people who don't understand the science or it's never been explained to them so I really don't know anybody like you they can sit down with if we do this for 3 hours enough for me and is not really like you can probably explain this shit to me from

and I would just be to be slowly working its way into my understanding but people worry about what they don't understand and they really worried about human beings quote unquote playing God and manipulating genetics and manipulating life even though that's kind of what we always have done yes and there's a great Radio Lab podcast on the Galapagos Islands through fantastic one of the things about it is their attempts to keep invasive species from entering the Galapagos Islands and did the plant species were going there from the bottom of people's feet but it's stepped and seeds and then they stepped on the grass and he's new species of grass is growing Pirates and left goats on the land so that they can come back and have a food source when they would land on the island again so they had it at these invasive goat species that were living somewhere else and then made its way across

we start monkey in with those everything that's when people are worried because of certain outlier example when you forget about all the crops that we plant all natural that should just doesn't exist you you're never going to walk through the Wilds of some Uncharted land and find a fucking wine vineyard doesn't exist make that a part of the environment but sometimes it goes terribly wrong like they introduce rabbits in Australia and they don't have predators so the radishes fucking went crazy and ran through the entire country huge rabbit problem so then they brought over foxes foxes and cats will kill the rabbit foxes and cats don't just killed

boxes that can only look at a rabbit is a predator rather extinctions in the entire country of Australia is fucked foxes run Rogers killing everything so that they there so bad that they have a problem with their sheep for The Foxes are grabbing the baby sheep as they're coming out which is apparently like standard Predator Behavior this is freaking people out because they ate this is all because schumann's metal introduced an animal to a place where it didn't belong then you tried to introduce a predator to compensate for it and you see this chain of events that it's really a problem and a managerial nightmare for people that are there have to Manitou Wildlife down there examples happen and certainly things do sneak out here in there you got to go with that but when we want to talk about releasing a new plant variety and we're not talking GM out we're saying let's say a new Elite strawberry that we know or sore gum or whatever that comes to our University what's a sorghum

it's a kind of green crop that is indigenous for Africa they use it for a biofuel now already but strawberries or whatever we have the evaluation it has to go through you have to grow it for many seasons multiple locations evaluate is it invasive or doesn't have the potential to be invasive and if it does we can't release it we have to evaluate all the different metrics and these are not GMO crops these are just regular crops to these are just selectively bred crop likely bread so you would establish that the seeds will grow this big fat juicy Apple size strawberry they're super Juicy and Delicious and you have to do it consistently and continuously and isolated and have it down to one see that you could give them they could test themselves essentially wheat level or 1 plant example where you can't take strawberry seeds from a strawberry and plant them and get any two plants to look alike that's so crazy so you guys how do you get those seeds then you every every plant comes from other plants they make a little Runners and so

one plant is that the strawberries that you get the strawberry plants you buy they're all clones just like the bananas just like a blueberries so they're not grown with seeds they're grown with a segment of the plant that you then replant that you replant so they're vegetative so it's unable to vegetatively say say propagate these things but all of the stuff is so carefully evaluated and with GMO it goes through FDA to make sure you can eat it then it goes to EPA to make sure that it's safe for the environment and they look at how does it affect insect population for pollinators or whatever and then that goes to USDA who then test for Farm application and invasiveness and Far So these things are crazy tested and all the what apps are really well-established because if there wasn't and I always have kind of the way I think about this is if we do want to assume companies are

scrubbing in horrible if something were to go wrong would be the end of the company in gigantic lawsuits and Son self-preservation let alone profit to make a decent product these things are extensively tested so what what do you think is what are the top unwarranted concerns that people have over genetically modified foods I'm glad you asked that because I don't mean to be just dumb I hate when I come off as being just too excited and ambitious about the technology Sears downsides to everything but you have to weigh the risks versus limitations or versus benefits and some of the things that we seen is this resistance to weed herbicide so one of the most useful GMO crops is this Roundup Ready or really what it is is glyphosate-resistant glyphosate is the chemical Roundup is the brand name it's off patent now so many companies make glyphosate so I tend to go with glyphosate when we discuss the trait what it allows a farmer to do is play

say soy beans to plant soybeans and then as the store even start to grow and the weed start to grow the farmer goes over the top with a with an application of the stuff called glyphosate that kills the weeds but the crop keep scrolling through it and as a crop grows its Shades out the weeds so then the crop is the only dominant thing they're the amount of glyphosate that supplied is about about the mug worth per acre in terms of active ingredient it's a very potent chemical that disrupts a very specific part of the plant biochemistry you can't make me no ass at so can't make proteins specific proteins and the chemistry's well-known we understand what it effects and you don't have that pathway so it's a very safe chemical for humans lately it's come under a lot of fire I'm actually now that people are attacking the gene insertion process or the or trade some cells are going after the chemicals used

in the process of using just that chemical over and over again on on land we talked about this idea with MRSA and limitations and with the one that happens to figure it out surviving there are weeds that can grow through glyphosate and when that one weed can grow through because of a mutation now it drops at seeds and pretty soon you got a major problem because all the rest of the competitors are gone and these weeds take over and now you have to come up with other methods such as plowing or other herbicides to get rid of them

so this is still confusing to me the plants are all coming from clones but you sell people seeds so where do the seeds come from why am I dumb literally talking apples and oranges about clones were talking about things like strawberries oranges if somebody buys all those strawberries yes if you like you make this Mega strawberry how does someone get a seed to plant for those Mega strawberries if it's all clones do clone seeds or they just take the clonal plant strawberries make Runners so you have a plant that then makes a little daughter plant that comes off at work and then you just get those daughter plants and plant those in your field so don't sell them some plants we sell them well not we not me but but are nurseries so if University of Florida comes up with a new strawberry that's fantastic they'll take that foundational plant too many years of testing to make sure

it's good inconsistent many different places and then that plant will go to a nursery where it's propagated by a by experts who make billions of plants in a couple years and then they sell those plants back to our Farmers but when a person would go to the store and they would buy seeds x a heirloom tomato seeds how would they make those seeds from heirloom tomatoes Single Seed to set another word you have a tomato that has some good qualities than its seeds also have the similar qualities they've been in bread so that essentially there's no genetic diversity within that fruit that every Jean rather than having a copy from Mom and a copy from Dad that are different they're all the same or at least very narrow and so this way you can have seeds from that same parental plant that look very so that what you plan will come out to be very similar to the parent that it came from this is where it gets confusing to me because you were telling me that if someone took like one of those tomatoes and Grill

I took the seats from it and try to grow tomato plants they would not be similar to the initial tomato all the heirlooms probably would be because they're so well in bread okay so but regular tomato a Monsanto grown regular tomato hybrid tomato that came from two very distinct parents that thing's going to be a genetic mix of many different traits and that thing will give rise to many different progeny so if you got a tomato from the grocery store one of those pale funky Tomatoes they cut up in like Carl's jr. and you getting your burger it just looks sad if you took the seats were in that you could possibly grow different kinds of tomatoes yes and so it could be any chances are no because they've been breeding out all that stuff we do have tomato plants at home yes I do yeah I'll send you some seeds from

a guy at my at my University named Harry cleat he they did sensory test on hundreds of people and they ask them what do you like about a tomato what and they tested all the heirlooms on them and they tested what heirlooms they like in which ones they didn't then they took apart chemically what's in each one of those kinds of tomatoes and they analyze them by like maybe what the consumers were tasting in the volatile components in the acid balanced in the sugars and they were able to come up with a recipe for the perfect tomato and then they made hybrids that would fit that expectation and they came out with two new tomatoes called Garden jam and garden treasure which are just going to be used in whole Market but their tomatoes that have exceptionally High flavor and it's one of these heirlooms bread against the University of Florida production tomato so one of them or regular tomatoes and the result is outstanding it grows in Florida where nothing everything wants to die in Florida a really harsh environment

but Daddy's are tomatoes are fantastic and we do really well out here and how do they establish those seeds then they just do it enough generations of very specific Tomatoes were there confident that the seats will yield the same type of tomato for the two parents are very well very very standard genetically and then those two parents gets sent to a place like I don't know where they did these but it was someplace like Costa Rica or something where you can generate huge amounts of hybrid 3 of people who will hand pollinate flowers with the one calling from the other and then generate the seeds and so that's how hybrid seeds are made so they're making these seeds by hand germinating Impala hand pollinating with rather and the result is fantastic because it's a combination of the best of the heirlooms versus the best of the production traits and this is what's exciting for me as a scientist is that we understand more about what the consumer wants now and we also are understanding more about the chemistry of fruits and vegetables so

even without GMO we can understand the genes that cause people to like tomatoes like what are the components of a tomato or a strawberry that people just love and then identify those compounds and breed them back in just a traditional greeting what is the pollination process like because I watch this thing about in China they had areas where they had decimated the bee population so badly that they had a hand pollinate a lot of their plants and by the sheer luck they found out that hand pollination is far more effective and if they paid people whatever the hour hourly wages it's actually more cost effective to fucking care of the bees which is horrible to find out but these people that was way better so probably be easier just kind of random you know they're not they don't do the best job but they don't know what they're doing they don't know the dakereon pollen on them you know they just kind of doing it it's not like a very specific goal for them but when it's a specific goal artistic paint brushes and brushing

the effectiveness is like way way better than just allowing nature to run its course I may have been the case and try. It depends on the crop to because a lot of things are wind-pollinated so if you emasculate all of the plants that you plan to be the female parent if you cut out all the little stamens and answers the male part so you know you had to take out all the rude yeah I know you have to be careful when you look online how to do this and you sure look up pictures of Bruce Jenner pop-up you pull out all the stamens and then now this plant can only be fertilized by what comes from being you plan to Jason rose on the pollen donor and now bees and wind and everything else to take care of that so these people hand-pollinate these plants then grow tomato specifically from those plants and then sell those seeds or use those seeds to grow more me how many generations they do it for the confident that they can get a seed that if you get it it will grow that same spot

tific tomato that you guys engineered so the seed that comes from the Tomato that results from that pollination those seeds are hybrids they have the combination of the mothers the mother's traits and the father's traits that seed is the one that would go to use the consumer that now you would grow a tomato plant that would produce outstanding Tomatoes wow after that it's a crapshoot because jeans in cell when you're making your your gametes are male and female reproductive components you're going through homogenisation is that now you lose control of what genes are in the Next Generation so that's the problem I think there's a mind blower for people this one right here it is for me because I never really thought that the Tomato that you got when we got an heirloom tomato wouldn't necessarily grow heirloom tomatoes from seeds because

it is just not the way it works I mean I would have always assumed that you would be able to get it that way but you telling me that you you what you guys at the Pacific Lee. That you had a hand pollinate in order to ensure that that would create those certain types of tomatoes that's fucking nuts that's it's the way it goes now and you make hybrids and end but there's so much more cool stuff in plant genetics that we can do because of this kind of think it's very cool but it it's disturbing again to dummies like me because then all comes out well people are in charge of the process of creating this very specific form of life and that's really what that tomato is it's a living thing as a very specific type of vegetable or it was fruit right technically that's technically a fruit a fruit life human beings are you guys are the mothers of these special Tomatoes me to sensually need people for sure ask me about seedless watermelons I mean is that change the number of chromosomes

cell so now this planet has twice as many chromosomes so now when you cross it against one that has the normal amount of chromosomes the results of the blood safe to the Next Generation you would cross it with something that has the normal set the resulting ones have this weird intermediate set that can't be fertile just like fucking with nature and not knowing the results I mean the world has a biological system and you're just is all sorts of cancer and autism that exist today and a lot of it is because of scientist you're smarter than going to play God with tomatoes I just think that's fucked yeah so what that's my my rule is pretty good right now pretty much

he's he's not in my knot up in my face about anything else he's doing his thing we listen to the same music probably will you know we're both in the worrying about the environment you know we're on the same page with 9% it's just that he worries about this this one aspect of food production that humans have always changed food and we just now learned how to do it with precision and so this is what we're he's got a kind of you know have a little in a come-to-jesus moment here and say this is science working for him I think again it goes to that is a very very complex issue that doesn't have a lot of black and white in it has many many shades of grey and like all things there's pros and cons of the application of it especially really complicated things like anything involving biology this pros and cons of variables that we can control with our consumption of food with the the level of pollution that we allow in the environment means we have like dedicated numbers

or or or but just prescribed numbers that you shouldn't go over like if we go over this when we fucked up that area we got to get out of there I mean is spots that uman beings can't go do right now because of chemicals because of nuclear reactor accident this spot so we totally ruined and this is just a public but we also I fucking power everywhere you know we also look at all the good should have 7 billion people on the planet and those really 7 billion rent responsible for putting together it's amazing Society it's not me but those people that have yeah there's been some mistakes along the way but I think without that innovation in that first for improvement the people seem to just we just have like inherently like a guy like you when you're talking about these the application of these Technologies the app

the science in this work you get all jazzed up I'm a senior you almost started crying when you were talking about these people that you had met that were emaciated you have a deep connection to this or is shit dude when you're more important than Jay-Z I will set it I'll take that God created go on the rice now and he did more than that big one Norman Borlaug was a wonderful simple came from a farm background became a scientist and studied ways that he could try to solve problems on the face of the Earth for the hungry and especially in Indian Mexico and his idea was to take the kind of plants that may never be able to mix naturally and make some crosses dwarfing variety so plants that were lower to the ground I would have fewer problems and he made these crosses that really would go to feed a billion people and you know

scientists like me know I look at him and I did he's like he is the ultimate hero to me he is a guy who should be a household name here I stand on the shoulders of a giant and he passed away in 2009 and are those of us who who heard about him read about him who who had a chance to see him speak it changes us because it was it was his compassion to take care of the knee that drove him it wasn't about making a dollar it wasn't about Monsanto it was about being the guy that when he came to the Village everybody said let's let's take him out to our best restaurant cuz here's a guy we like a she was a guy who insisted if you visited his campus to carry your bags to your car despite the fact that he was a Nobel Laureate that's the kind of role models that we have in science and this is the kind of role model that other people have to be aware of that for every Norman Borlaug it's going to take a few million evil scientist we have to understand that then he made that he made crosses that

amazingly diverse and that brought plants together that couldn't survive that would never happen in the wild and fed people because of it see he's a good scientist you're the good scientist the movie too so when the evil scientist come they try to take over the world we need you to be the one that sound the alarm I can every good movie like the day before tomorrow whatever it is day after tomorrow right you need a good scientist to figure out that it's going wrong there's thousands of me much more now than ever before because of the tools we have and it would be to me it would be a career maker to find something wrong with a Monsanto product and report it in the best journals at all I'd say Bring It On

I going to places and people get in my face and yell at me I'll have people come up in and in Scream in my face about how my company has given their kid cancer well I mean I guess I get some heavy shit and then it happens often but the idea is to get into those rooms and get into those spaces just like we're doing here and have a conversation and introduce people to technology and get them to Demond Santa wise this talk about ways that we can make it work to make a plant products that would require fewer pesticides like the BT has how many people one of the loved one can serve two to one of them was in Hawaii it was a woman beautiful woman from Brazil I think originally who had a child who had who had cancer and she said here's what your company did to my child and I assume the big one of the big companies in the reason I was there

because I was invited by the companies to come to the island to talk to people as a neutral party because they were having a lot of conflicts group of a whole bunch of companies and they said they're not listening to us they don't care what we think what about an independent scientist and when I came there I made it my business to not hang around with the syngenta's months and I didn't want to talk to the other scientists I wanted to talk to the farmers and I want to talk to the people who were afraid in the people who had concerns because I could help them understand and and and that was what my goal is to help them to talk to them in and anyone who is there even people who are adamantly anti-gmo I think many of them would agree that I was I was often very peaceful and very quick to engage them that when I saw people in the audience at Farmer forms where I was speaking on see them shaking their heads and then going no way no way the minute I was done in the applause was over in the questions were answered I chase

I'm out in the parking lot and said I need to talk to you because this is this is where this conversation needs to be it needs to be one-on-one over a pizza and a cup of coffee it can't be the can't be on the internet where there's noise from documentary sellers in in in people with agendas Face to Face In This Woman's yelling at you that you're responsible for yes her child being you look what do you say to someone like that I said I'm really sorry for what's happened and and and I would love to help you solve this problem or not let it happen somebody else and I said if there is something here on the island that cause this we need to understand and we need to get to the bottom of it what is a scientist it's not GMO crops I mean there's nothing that I can think of that's possible or no evidence that I know of that would point that way and then I told her about the state USDA person I gave her the name of the estate USDA person said here's the person you call and tell them where you live in and have them come talk to you about it and analyze patterns and then you know that's the kind of this is from

country yeah that's the allegation a lot of the people I'm just confused cuz she flew from Brazil to talk to you I had a conversation with her and I think I got that information from her at the time cuz she had a very strong accent okay but there's a lot of pretty strong anti-gmo sentiment on the island of Kauai and in Hawaii actually throughout the state how could it not be sure if you look at what they have they have Paradise yes I know like what you going to do to going to fuck with Paradise you can grow three seasons of corn a year so you can use it but they use it for a seed production you generate the see that's planted in Iowa on Kauai that's amazing and so and you can do three seats 3

Seasons a year rather than amazing weather rather than two on the mainland or one and so you're able to sell the farm or cheaper products or keep the cost under control of a product plus the environment's perfect it's dry The Cedars of good quality so they do a lot of seed raising and why and very strong anti sentiment and I understand that it is a beautiful place but it also implies lots of people on the Island's I think one of the things that you you disgusting we talked about earlier than I thought was really fascinating was this idea that planting crops isn't really natural because I was I passed through Alberta this past weekend and I was driving through these Norm is agricultural areas and I was thinking to myself like while this is really crazy like that we do this we just take over the Giants watts of land and fill it with shit we can eat and then we run over it with giant machines collecting it and then bundle it up and sell it throughout the world like this

and it is absolutely on natural absolutely and if you look at where the crops came from that we grow I mean corn doesn't belong in that the North America mean it was well they came from southern Mexico wasn't in the United States and Canada anyway if you look at a map and I'll show you one maybe later if you look up crop domestication or centers of origin of a major food crops you see that there are maps in Google Images that show that you ask you if sunflowers maybe some progenitors to strawberry and blueberry and maybe some kind of brass cuz that might be like canola but for the most part there's nothing that comes from here no tomatoes are from South America potatoes peanuts so citruses from Southeast Asia apples are from Kazakhstan all of our all of our cabbage kale broccoli cauliflower all that's from the Middle East and Mediterranean Aries so nothing's from here is totally natural fuck off

about some of our major crops I'm certainly it's their sorghum and potatoes came from South America peanuts South America wow African rice

this is nuts there's lots of goodies wash squash came from south of el it's also from Mexico along while being close to where I'm amazed was domesticated so there's some kinds of squash are native to North America but not many looking at PE Peppa Peppa Pig like the kind of cucurbits like a pumpkins and like the squash is crookneck squash is like we have to wear when you look for yams I know and some creepy little while in the middle of nowhere but there's something there that come from the date they take it all of the movement from those crops was human mediated that we've done has been human facilitated in the genetics change accordingly also that are also from South America it seems

but this is the beauty of this if you look at strawberry it's a great story because strawberry grows naturally on the fourth floor of North America and also from chilly but the two are two different species so is two different kinds of yams done and it's like you different speeds through different names to different you know it's cool with your fucking name you know that guy what's-his-name 2 Chainz bro that's not your name can't go on to CNN debate Nancy Grace about pot you don't even know my real name. What is it I don't even know what I don't even know what the genus is on on that but I thought I'd try for a lotta and they're just they're just reproductively isolated

essentially the same thing or interchangeable they're probably two species from the same genus so they're related but there's reproductively isolated why do they have rapper names because they can't cross with each other rappers say can't cross with each other why don't they have their name then why did my why did why do we have to dumb it down just call it yam and yam why isn't 1D trifle ecto-1 dealer de Medici M1 and M2 or but nobody thinks about that way you go to supermarket doesn't say that this other thing is probably something doesn't work in production but it is ultimately very fast name to look at this map and think about what it must have been like of course to be people that were traveling all over the world looking for plants and looking for spices when I was like a big part of the whole trade for the way they would get on boats and travel to foreign lands they were trying to find plants and spices and shit

that date the girl in the forest floors in North America like in eastern Seaboard and people were dragging them back to the to the to Europe on Colony ships and 1500 there's lots of going back and you can find accounts in the literature and then in 1714 there was a spy who is going to South America French spy who is going to Chile to look at Spanish for vacations and he found a kind of strawberry that was being grown by indigenous peoples and he brought this thing back to Europe and he wasn't an unfortunately these flowers were only male there was like you got a problem where these plants couldn't self fertilized so these plants South America and these plants from North America made their way to the Botanical Garden in Versailles where a teenager essentially started to identify crosses between these two species that came in different places because of spies and colonist and their the pollen got together to make our modern-day strawberry it's got

Scott for complete sets of chromosomes so it's a genetic mess but it's something that we all love and enjoy and in my lab helping sequencing a genome a few years ago it's this is this is how cool that that plant domestication is there so many stories every one of these plant has a really cool articulate start reticulate story about the way it came to be on a plate I just eat plants are absolutely fast acting like I said I know guys who are grow marijuana and these clones and I had no idea what that even meant until I went to this guy's green room when you take it okay to take a piece of this plant grow more plants so he had got arrested he was on the first guy to get arrested for the medical weed and Tom McCormick and his his set up the way it did charge them for individual plants did says clones were individual plants but if they were like in bulk if there was all on one plant it would be legal or OD less

Wes illegal like to take that plant and clone it that it becomes an unique object in the onto itself cuz that could be used to draw Chrome or illicit drugs right it's an independent entity yeah I thought it was seeds now that that's funny because the so my main research for you to talk about that stuff but I work with identifying genes associated with flavors and in strawberries and things like this using genomics tools but I also do a lot with light and so I do a lot with LED in a lot with how you were able to change plant traits using light so make them taste better or change the way they grow and I've been getting emails I I was kind of one of the first folks in the ocean say that I was in the space early back in the late nineties and I've been getting emails from like a stoner 18 at AOL.com for years and people asking about how do you grow a plant that you would want to grow under what color lights because there's so much of of that production which is been brought into controlled environments I never was able to an

the questions very well because we're forbidden to work on such products do you know what did Art University anyway and but but there's but they using light to control those aspects of plant growth and development is something they're really interested in that's fascinating is there any benefit to growing plants and sunlight is a post artificial light well this is this is actually a really big part of my program is I do what's called plant Whispering that when the power is basically where we use light as you think about a plant plants have a 12 different light sensors at least that listen to different parts of the spectrum so plants can see red blue green even the red light that's off the end of the spectrum that we can't see and they can see UV and so when we give different pulses order

are treatments at different times of the day we can change the way of plant grows what metabolites it accumulates maybe the flavors we can make cilantro taste absolutely horrible if you know if you like it we can make it taste so Salon trolley it's difficult to eat but we can change plant flavors we can change their colors we can change many their attributes and now we're trying to understand how we can give light treatments to plant materials like harvest strawberries treat them with light before they go into the supply chain before they go to the store and through all the refrigeration and have them change their gene expression patterns so they come out the other end better and last longer in your refrigerator or last longer in your countertop sorry idea is this to sensually change the gene expression in fruits and vegetables using the language of light to dictate how they Decay and my feeling is that we've got you know you said 7 billion now we got 10 billion three more billion coming we have to use the same

right now if you buy a tomato at the store so you pick a tomato off the plant in Florida the odds of that tomato being eaten by a person or one and to 50% of our food is wasted and one cuz it goes bad it either goes bad or spoils and in the developing world it is either spoils Argueta infestation and one place where we can really solve the problem for address the problem of the ten billion is in post-harvest technology with the compost harvest in this isn't GMO stuff this is the other thing I do we were really dedicated to the idea of getting more Food for People by having a bite having a more food last longer and using these kind of light treatments and other kinds of made mild chemical treatments are washers or whatever this is one part of it make what we have last longer so would this involve artificially growing these plants and their artificial lights or would it involve like growing the seeds from the plants growing from

right now I would it be done a lot of this online these days there's a lot of companies that are starting in abandoned warehouses and places where they use LED lights to do it called vertical gardening where they grow plants and City centers and where you don't have the transportation cost in the carbon footprint so you can bring plants to Market cheaper and maybe even higher quality products so what I think about it and this is where we think about this vs. GMO GMO we change one gene we know exactly what it is we understand it or environmental modification take a plant with break we're changing lots of jeans and ways we don't necessarily understand but we enjoy the outcomes and people don't really care but that's what freaks people out because people know that like light is not artificial lights not necessarily good for human beings like if you live in a room filled with fluorescent light you'll get vitamin D deficiencies right yes

is there a concern that there's a similar negative reaction somehow or another in those plans with it would be as healthy as they would be in natural sunlight sure that you can have cases where plants metabolism is driven by light the whole Mateus photosynthesis that if you have problems with your light sensing that's why you have 13 different light sensors that control your growth and development is you're paying attention to every aspect the better Ambien environment and making very good let's say predictions or conclusions based upon the information you get from the Spectrum and that's where we've been actually thinking and where we've applied the idea of manipulating the Spectrum to change the way the plant grows ultimately anything that isn't beneficial we're not interested in we want to grow better food that's more nutritious and last longer so that we're able to grow things more sustainable are these lights normal lights or these lights like some very specific growing type lights at the give off a very specific Spectrum it's not like normal

Dior fluorescent lights that is specific combinations of LEDs that are computationally controlled the light what's that media kind of got it it's they're all at different in the light business we call it fluids rate the number of photons that are produced per cubic per square meter the idea is that some of the photons we produce that give plants information you can't see so you can't really call it intensity the stuff that's in UV and off the end of the red part of the spectrum it has information for plants that's really potent but it's not information that you can see but the plant makes if you put a plant under far red light the stuff off the end of the red part of the rainbow plant goes beserk it get start screwing really lanky and long and accumulate specific pigments it allows you to manipulate the plant size and body of the plant and does it have any

Quince on the actual product of the plant produces that's consumed by humans whether it's a tomato or an avocado or whatever is there anything about this light that changes the actual food that you eat what we use it for and we've been most of our experiments on sprouts like kale sprouts we can make kale sprouts change the level of glucose in a light switch are the anti-cancer compounds we can increase that stuff just by using white we can change probably give you cancer will not be ironic attractive colors are purple or green I can make a I'll just kind of lettuce I can grow under eight different light treatments that gives you essentially 8 different kinds of lettuce leaves to taste different look different taste different looked it up and it is it discernible to the naked eye like it would I be able to walk in there and know which one is giving off which thing or is it just the recipe of light that gives us a given I'll put it on saying like if you had four different for different kinds of lettuce would I be able to walk in those rooms and discern that there's any difference

the light of each individual room there's a lot of the stuff you can even if you look at like LED and plant growth you'd see all kinds of different ways that people do that the problem is that most places stick plants under a purple light or under a pink light and they get some affect what we don't want to just grow a plant we want to tell it how to grow and I think the future of growing plants in controlled environments will be deeply rooted in this ability to control how they grow I just seems like that's what the thing that people be worried the most is that there would be some sort of nutritional deficiency and something has grown with artificial light that growing something in the Sun Life is somehow or another better for you does that make any sense at all as I just told him I could be true but that's what we're looking for is again we're not looking for like the the

altierus result but we're trying to do is what is the combination of variables that we can control to make something that's better for people that's that's what I'm dedicated to that's why I want to go so it seems to me the positive aspect West about keeping food for longer feeding more people giving people nutrition in areas where it's unavailable seems to be the massive massive positive benefit of what can we do to mitigate or prevent any negative aspects of it you know they're the negative aspects of it being that somehow or another it could harm people somehow or another the corporation's behind it would act in the greedy way that would be detrimental to the area where the crops are grown or whatever what can be done yeah I think I guess I'm kind of shooting our own horn here by saying we need to support public science you know we've got this group of people like in the land grant University system this was a brilliant idea that came out of the Morrill Act back in the 1860s where they established

first city in every state that job was was to take care of the public need will you train the students you help the farmers you do the research that put you at The Cutting Edge to help the farmers and train the students and that's the model that still here today University of California Davis is the best in the world at this and they're amazing at the things that happen there the problem is is that as a nation we've been less excited to fun science right now if I write a proposal to the USDA or National Science Foundation the odds of it getting funded her between 5 and 10% and if you think that they have these competitions once a year you know you may go 10 years but without getting a research award a lot of labs are closing up or not training students like we used to and it's because of there hasn't been this public demand to fund science and I think a lot of that comes from they go well people are scientist there are just in the pocket of Monsanto anyway why do we care but that's totally not true the bed

defense against an evil empire is your public scientists and where and we're struggling for tools right now how does one get hired like if one is going to college in your graduating you getting your Masters in whenever you're getting it in and you get recruited by a company like monsanto's a good scientist like yourself or an evil scientist even though the most evil will you think the guy who created the atomic bomb but Oppenheimer wasn't evil at all and he was actually really disturbed by the whole event that she was a part of this scientific process that ultimately seem necessary the time being the first person to come up with this bomb so how does one get high but that's very distracting how does one get hired like at a college and how many scientists does meloxicam like Monsanto employees employees but

how many more scientist I don't know I don't know probably a good chunk cuz they're hiring in universities aren't they are and the but just to give you an idea you go through at least four years of undergraduate you require sometimes a master's degree sometimes as a PhD that takes you 4 to 7 years then you're talking about postdoc time where you're looking at between 1 and 6 years so you're 35 36 37 years old before you ever even get a job and that is insane and that's if you can in Academia where I work it's so rare to get a job it's really tough getting academic position but aren't the companies are happy to take these people especially people with good backgrounds in plant breeding because Monsanto at the end of the day they're not a GMO company they're not a chemical company anymore there a plant genetic improvement company and they're working on breeding plants

so that then you can add that Gene to the elite background there's only so much you can do with a GMO transgene the rest of that has to be done by breeding and lots of plant breeders like people come through my lab are the to plant breeders to my lab one of them got snapped up by one company another one got snapped up by another right out of the PHD each one of them into a six-figure + salary plus all kinds of benefits do everything about going over to the dark side I've been recruited many times and it's not my mission neurology my yoda said stay in the University you must thing is I think I like being in the public sector because I don't like to have secrets I don't like to have proprietary information that I can't share from my whole thing is I've been this way my entire career when I got the first little bit of strawberry sequence information with

$1,800 grant that I got from the Florida strawberry Association we got the first little bit of strawberry information we gave it away cuz the idea was to spark more research and more Discovery I we could have sat on it and use it just for our lab Elon musk's of strawberries idea you know you you make it you distribute your work faster Open Access open source as fast as you can and I'm so it but this is the main thing with the company's idea for me it's about it's about that roll and I like to work synergistically with the company's I don't think I have good relationships with Monsanto employees down employees you name any company because we have the same clients you know my job is to make sure Farmers know how to use Monsanto products Monsanto seeds so I need to know what the company's up to

well it just seems so crazy that it's so easy to get hired by a giant Corporation and difficult to get hired by public universities it seems but it's totally illogical obviously it's going to be way more people that are pursuing a degree in science and there are openings so is that difficult to encourage young people to get into science because of that money look at job prospects is that a real issue I think it is I didn't really one of the funny ironies here is that back in 1999 Monsanto actually gave my University some money towards a position so they said you guys are short on the faculty here let's start one there and they hired a guy who's never done anything for Monsanto ever since there's been some beautiful science for the public good and we're always criticize about that people say to me well you've got that position in your department that must mean everything you say has to go tonight it's like totally not that you know I'm grateful that companies do anything for us if if anything you know that give if anybody wanted to build a new building on our camp

I wouldn't say no but that doesn't mean they're going to get any favors so if if you are involved in any sort of project will any sort of a scientific analysis of something are you required to release the results to your superiors before you go public with them or is there no obligation whatsoever you could just tell anybody at any time but what you've discovered obligation beautiful I research what I research and what I can raise money for from USDA NSF my age where I can get money from public sources even strawberry industry I can get some strawberry industry sources that give me some fun but that no one goes there's no filter and sometimes it's good to have people read just to make sure you don't say something dumb but there's nobody whoever says no you can't publish this and if they did I publish it anyway because this is about science in the truth it's not about making anybody happy that's the big conspiracy

in almost anything it's in the public eye when people are allowed to scrutinize something from the outside and guess what the process is I didn't know and that's why I had to ask you you could have easily just said to me I mean as far as I knew you could have easily just said well everything that I do has to go through a board and they have to devote on whether I don't know I have no idea and most people in that same place like I've been accused of like different jobs that have had different shows even work for the UFC of someone telling me what I can and can't say and that's just not the case but I'm older I do is super simple I'll just talking about fights like if someone told me not to talk about something you would be like not much significance okay it's just about a martial arts event with your talking about is these discoveries that could potentially impact Untold thousands of people in a very beneficial or Dove or negative way so everybody's got that worry there are people against

be on the outside but I totally get that because it went and especially when we were in a country where we're all pretty comfortable and we all have plenty of food and we have a few bucks in our wallet to do stuff that we attend the focus on the worries about the what-ifs cuz everything's fine we're afraid of something upsetting the apple cart but I can tell you as a scientist that if I were to find something like just threw some process do some experiment find something wrong with the Monsanto product or a doll product or whatever I want to just pick on the Big M I find something wrong with the product and agriculture that would shift the Paradigm that would change it from something safe and use everywhere to something that we better have some alarming care with that would be something that it when I publish that it would be on the best journal and be in science or nature and then it would be replicated by other labs right away as soon as it was published I would get huge notoriety I'd get grants for ever I wouldn't be in that 5% anymore I'd be getting leading grants because I was the guy who broke the rules

what's the weather broke the peridot and probably get a Nobel Prize out of it so you don't you don't think that they would be any negative repercussions before was clearly established that you're correct like we were talking about before if it's involving a corporation that's profiting in the billion-dollar range and making an insane amount of money and you have some information that would put a monkey wrench in the gears of this incredible money-making Venture you don't think they'd be negative repercussions now I'll tell you exactly what would happen and I'm sure this is what would happen the first people I would let him know would be the company that makes it get your product off the market here's what I got and then your brakes are failing your car and arsenic would show up some tuna fish but it's I think that a company who would make him who was someone were to reveal a mistake they would be the first ones would want to know and then it shows they would have disproved by history and in NH in when you go back

not sure things like about GM right how about this whole fucking ignition thing we talked about earlier today they knew and they should cut their fucking mouth shut dealers in sometimes I think God is going to handle it but at the same time but the other side of the coin is is that if I were to if I was a guy who discovered the ignition issue and I were in I was an investigative reporter and I was able to put together seven or eight cases of this and would tie it to the ignition and did a study that analyze the mechanism of failure and I went to gen-6 rgm and said this is problems doesn't work and they refuse to respond I'd put this in the newspapers that I could I would look at it I put a Blog that everybody would see I'd come here and talk to you about it and I would blow the lid off of that and I get a Pulitzer Prize and you write an awesome book in the book would get publishing you make

I'll hopefully and then some but this is how it should work is that we got to have but those are scientific processes that go through a series of steps to develop evidence that's analyze to come to a conclusion and then we can shape policy based on that and that's where I get excited about about what we can do at science but there's reasons people are worried though about information leaking out I could harm companies and Maze reasons why people Shield their identity when they're leaking certain information cuz they get caught and then those bills companies get really pissed off and they even if it's just lawsuits mean any companies like Monsanto could cripple any normal person just with lawsuits you never be able to keep up there just smash you with lawsuits when you are in charge of this kind of information I was going not talking about the conspiratorial stuff we talked about like the nutritional things like the bananas at your passion about that the vitamin A & M what is the feeling like when you use your being ignored or you're being

either it's a conspiracy by these companies that they don't want or these people that they don't want to open up the door for genetically modified foods or it's ignorance to the science involved with these people in there are massive amounts of blindness what does it feel like to be the guy who knows cuz that seems that's got to be a crazy place to be to be the scientist who actually understands the mechanisms involved in the creation of these very organic products that were manipulated by human being and how they could benefit you ain't busy nobody understands you you fucking crazy or you're a shell or you what does that feel like that it's horrible out of this is why I appreciate you so much and letting me do this today and we've been so helpful and talking about the GMO issue it is an opportune time we can talk about this and get people to understand where I'm coming from that there's trust here Joe every night I answer 30 minutes to an hour of emails

from the concern public who ask questions to me about this I was watching your Twitter today your feed between yesterday when I announce you're going to be on in today dude you been Non-Stop and your wireless with this stuff you have a real incredible passion for this I've done Reddit swear I would say I'll come on with an ask me anything for 2 hours and I'll stay on for 6 I'm staying for the Thousand questions every one of them hand done what I mean I'm not cutting and pasting you know I'm addressing that person's concern because this is how we're going to change it it comes from talking to people who have concerns and in people who are worried and help them understand the science because if they get this then they're less likely to worry about the real problems and ever that's why we were the artificial problems and start focusing on the real Pro and how important is it to fund Moore Public science and to try in some way to make more people attracted to what you're doing as opposed to

going over T's universities because if people really are concerned like probably that's the best way to deal with it the best way to deal with Sciences the fun science yes hundred percent it's the fun science and make sure that public scientists have the tools they need to maintain they don't give corrupted the idea of being corrupt and fun individual Laboratories for programs or universities and it doesn't necessarily mean Corruption of course they can be very beneficial and then they can help us a lot and and I would love to have Monsanto hand me a check for 5 million bucks and say have at it do what you want I bet it's on the way right now. I'm the Pimp Like a movie The Other really cool thing that we can do is is I think it kids fired up about science and with kids I find that this idea of genetic engineering isn't a big deal to them that they kind

get it and then it's kind of like molecular Legos they kind of get the idea that you can take something out of one thing and move it to another you Brian traits you can kids have this kind of modular understanding of the world anyway that they're comfortable with bits and pieces coming together in different ways to make different products and when we talk I spend about maybe two or three mornings a month with 3rd to 5th graders 7th graders mostly 3rd and 5th that's there's a lot of fun third graders are the best and we talked about how to solve the Citrus problem and I told her how do you say magic even crazier stuff that moves a bacterium to a tree that gets sick in it dies from Bad nutrition and I'll say what are those in the show them all that and I'll say okay stop now you guys are the scientist give me a solution

and hands go up and one of them will say give it better nutrition and then another one I'll say maybe you could cross it with a tree that doesn't get sick and they get that you know they weren't they've got sex figured out well by then then you talk about then one of my say the funny one was build them in a dome Under the Sea where the bug can't get to him you know in the challenge for me is that was awesome I told the teacher to keep an eye on drug test as a teacher in that scenario when I'm interrogating their interest in science is the somehow never tell one of them that they're crazy but I have to take whatever answer they give me and somehow loopback tool here's how you're right and how it just might work I sent you your hundred percent attempting encouragement of curiosity I am getting kids to creatively solve a problem and a dome under the ocean

you know what an end when you do that but then when you die do that then I go forward into the slides about how we are solving a problem I can say you know Dave if you raise your hand and said you was better nutrition look at how they're using nutrients to make it better someone else said you control the insect here's five ways are controlling the inside it shows these kids they validate that their suspicions about science and that their creative juices that solve the problem were correct so how do you address the kid with the Dome under the ocean what do you cuz there's so many fucking problems in school but there's a whole photosynthesis is oxygen and things in the world needs artists and I kinda can steer in that direction so what do you guys this time back in but I think the whole idea is that they're so used to their teacher saying wrong that hears a case where I set up a situation around a real problem that's in their state maybe in their yard that allows them to

do actually exercise their science muscles as little kids and I think that's a big way we change this a really important point when it comes to human beings little children is figuring out a way to not make their curiosity and negative and I don't scold them for having a ridiculous imagination let you know Express the issue with it or how it could be right and why it's probably wrong you know but you got to figure out a way to reward them for taking that chance to come up with this Delmont of the ocean cuz who knows that kid might have three of those that suck but one of those that everybody goes hey wait a minute that's the Paradigm Shift Alison gopnik and Allison I forget where she's at Berkeley she is a scientist who studies the white kids think and she shows that children when they're born into the next few months are actually the smartest they've ever going to be in terms of their ability to test hypotheses and synthesize information and she's

it was awake kids do this and so that maybe I don't want to be like in the ointment of the way we train people but there's certain amount of curiosity and exploration that we tend to break out a kids and I think as as an educator is someone who's really committed to to education that getting two kids is the most important way to get signs to improve get them so excited about cool things we can do and it breaks my heart when I have a kid show up at the March against Monsanto who's holding a sign saying your science causes autism doesn't and here's a kid is going to now go through life thinking science is evil and done by evil people with evil intentions when

when really we're trying to get that kid May hold the solution to the next big Citrus crisis it's it's unbelievably ironic that so many anti-science websites are online I mean just the idea how the fuck do you think that Computer Guy Phillips on all natural all natural computer it's all yeah I I I think it's really important that people recognize that science has brought us virtually every single thing that you enjoyed it at outside of the natural world outside of coconuts falling and you eat them now there's so much that we have a relied on science about the way we should stay warm the way we keep things cool the way you know we communicate with each other and this fear that people have about Foods being modified I think is it's it's a big one and it's one of the biggest ones in this country and so to have a guy like you come on and express why we should

concerned and why we shouldn't be concerned and why what would the positive aspects of our I think I think it's really really important man I think a lot of people need to hear what you have to say and they need to be able to listen to it from an objective standpoint and understand that this is a very complex issue very complex and it's very important I appreciate that we'd have time to talk about it because it is something that I really encourage people there's places where you can get great resources there's a Blog called biofortified. Org which is written by scientist who are independent scientist and it really is just an information Hub about this particular topic and some of the articles are in articles are clever they're all written very softly there nothing is you know I'd damn and I gym it's all really about the science and its independence not funded by any other companies have you ever thought about doing a podcast cuz you'd be excellent at it I would love to do it there's some funny things about that I can't talk about anti podcast Claus near University contract or something no I have a podcast I do but I don't do it

you son of a bitch I do it as I do it as a character and it looks like they're going to find it I guess the problem is is that why I know what the cats out of the bag okay but still secret what's it about science and your character on a science podcast yeah I'm a moderator people going to matter what that line it's very much longer it's it's it it's a lot of fun talking about me or smart guy a dumb smart guy correct people or they have correct use I would happen if something like that and so they come along and then they have to eat

use you as a tool to get to the root of the problem the ignorant people I would sign some stuff that's completely off-the-wall some fun as a as a character that I couldn't have as a establish professor in Sherman of a of a of a department totally understood late to a great song online what you need is a rapper named you know how yams have their own separate name do you need a rapper named dude write it down not going to say it is if it's one of them look it up online here sometime I just I think it's good because the thing is is that I do want to talk to people who don't agree with technology why don't you have a podcast where people instead of a

have you seen you I've seen rather you spend so much time typing I'm sure you can type or you can talk rather quicker than you can type all that shit out so why don't you just take those questions and have people send them to you every week and if you're not redundant just that way you can choose you know what you've already dressed or can you could say hey we covered that in podcast two or three you would have a kick-ass podcast man I'll be happy to support it to me when we talked about that talk about that was so easy to do the one I wanted to do was talk about each one of their stories and how they came to be and interview the experts and great idea around the problem is I have three full-time jobs I mean I'm an administrator for Department of 59 faculty I'm a full-time research scientist and I'm a full-time science communicator and so I literally do work 6 a.m. to midnight 7 days a week 2

set for exercise time in the stuff I do there I am I'm in this what are you hiding from what are you running from running from something I don't know from is I'm running from I'm waiting for one of these things to wear out where I can just cut it back to 2 that's an amazing work I think that you have and I can understand why you wouldn't have enough time but if you have enough time to do all these tweets I'm saying even if you just had a half an hour once a week for half an hour once a week just got a collection of maybe you can get an intern to collect some of the best questions I'm sure some will be happy to do that you press record on an iPhone that's all you need to do I mean that links the quality of the recording you get from regular iPhone is pretty much worth it you can hold up your mouth and just go over the piece of people can hear you turn the paper okay what we got here this one is important and just ramble into the microphone I'm telling you it would be popular spot yet and you be able to quit your other jobs that works great my character

and I and I got a nice mixer at home I punch punch you through the mixer I was so when this kind of Media stuff it would be a really easy thing for me to do it's just a question of where to wedged into a full schedule you really got to try it you really I think you'd be excellent on it like moving out of Florida cuz it's too stupid to know I never planned on being there I always am when I had the opportunity to apply there I applied and thinking there's no way I'll ever get the call and I got the interview and then I interviewed and I thought there's no way I'll ever get the job and then they called me for

job and I showed up and I I've always felt like the the guy on the All-Star team just gets put on the team because he's in his team didn't have anybody else I'm so sorry people I always feel very dwarf their butt or 10 years later they put me in charge of it so I must be doing something right but it was you obviously have a real passion for it and like you said you're in Florida you got to be the smartest guy in Florida by far that we would Billy Corben she get together you would dominate Florida I know he is no no no no breaks about you know that the guy having relations with a sandwich or burrito at an appointment I go home please don't be here please don't be there if you ever seen the Florida man Twitter account Twitter

morons are on Florida I have a great relationship with the growers in our state and the people who are doing the farming and the people in those Industries and I don't know I'm not call absolutely California you develop relationships with these people who are who are seriously struggling and you look at the Citrus industry strawberry industry with a competition there getting is unprecedented and these are folks down the highway who are farming to feed us good food and doing everything they can to stay afloat and I am so glad that to be able to work with them but thank you very much and please do a goddamn podcast today you were fantastic I appreciate the hell out of man thank you very very much. I'm his que falta at blogspot

call illumination beautiful is there a link to that from your Twitter feed okay alright that's a good bye bye bye big kiss

thank you everybody for tuning in to the podcast. thanks to our sponsors thanks squarespace.com go to squarespace.com music offer code Joe to get 10% off your first purchase thank you Squarespace for your support of The Joe Rogan Experience

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