Uterine stem cells used to treat diabetes in mice

Researchers have converted stem cells from the human uterus into insulin-producing cells and transplanted them into mice to control their diabetes.

US National Institutes of Health: 30 August 2011

Can our cities ever be self-sustaining?

The humble backyard vegie patch is back in vogue. But can growing spuds and greens in the cities really avert a coming food crisis?

ABC New Features: 30 August 2011

OK, so it isn’t  a emerging tech story, but one of relevance to a lot of what we do discuss at TechNyou – food security

Pause… stem cell therapy dogged by insufficient research

Recent reports of animals almost crippled from arthritis or joint damage recovering their function after stem cell therapy must be viewed with caution.

The Conversation: 31 August 2011 Graham Jenkin

Deputy Director, The Ritchie Centre at Monash University

GM crops acceptable, debate has shifted

By Jason Major

TechNyou

GM crops and food seems to be taking up all my time of late and there has been some interesting trends coming from all the public engagement we have done, especially the two events in and around the public forum we held, GM food: a dinner discussion.  These trends back up what I have been suggesting for sometime now that the debate/discussion has moved away from health and human safety concerns about the technology to concerns that are more steeped in our personal values or ethics. That is, concerns about the science itself, while not entirely eliminated from the conversation, no longer dominate.

The two events I attended before and after GM food: a dinner discussion were Science Alive in Adelaide and the Gold Coast Science Fair, in …ummm, oh yeh, the Gold Coast, QLD, though it was inland and I didn’t see the coast. It was bucketing rain anyway, so I would have got drenched had I wanted to go for a surf.

Each event was an interactive science-based entertainment fest involving science theatre, explosions, demonstrations and interactive booths from groups such as TechNyou, CSIRO, and the universities.  Science Alive had about 30,000 people go through over the three-day event. Gold Coast was a smaller version of that.

One of the activities TechNyou had at both events was a voting poster that asked people to vote on the acceptability of four GM crops. In Adelaide we did this in collaboration with the Australian Centre of Plant Functional Genomics (Uni Adelaide) and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Wall Biology.

The results and comments from members of the public are posted below. The comments are all from Science Alive.

Context and caveats

Before each person voted they were asked if they had heard of GM crops and what they knew about them. Students had rarely heard of GM crops or food, and effectively none of them knew anything about the science behind them. Unsurprisingly, the general public (ie anyone older than secondary school age) had at least heard of GM crops, though most knew nothing about the science behind them. Doing weird things with genes in plants was about as close as it got to an understanding, with the exception of a handful that actually did have a reasonable understanding. All (students and general public) had some understanding of what DNA and genes were.

For those that didn’t know what we meant by a GM crop, they were given a two sentence explanation along the lines of it involving taking a copy of a gene responsible for a trait or characteristic from one species and inserting it into the genome of your crop plant so that your crop plant now had that trait or characteristic. Alternatively, it could mean switching an existing gene in a plant on or off.

So, obviously the students were voting with essentially no knowledge of the arguments and issues surrounding GM crops. The general public were voting with a knowledge of the arguments and issues largely gleaned from the media and public commentary (sources unknown to us), but with our two sentences worth of understanding about how scientists make a GM crop.

At Science Alive, one important caveat is that there were at least eight different people over the three days helping with the voting board, many of these were researchers and PhD students from ACPFG and the ARC Plant Cell Wall group. We each would have given our explanations differently, each answered people’s questions from a different perspective, and attempt as we did to avoid this, injected our own personal biases into the conversations. All this could have, and most likely did to some extent, influence how some people voted. At the Gold Coast Science fair, I was on my own.

The comments generally came after people voted when we queried why people voted the way they did: why did you voted 0 for all; why did you vote 5 for all; why did you vote differently for each, etc? This was an attempt to understand the rationale behind their vote, what was driving their perceptions… and so on. The list of comments is not everyone’s comments, but it does reflect reasonably well the rationale behind the votes overall.

Finally, not everybody voted for all four crops. Some didn’t realise they had to and then couldn’t be bothered to complete it or were distracted by children running amok, some couldn’t decide where to vote for some examples, and some I have no idea about as I didn’t get an opportunity to ask.

Why the term ‘acceptability’?

If you ask the question, are you in favour of a particular GM crop or do you have concerns about a GM crop, you will get different response than if you ask how acceptable is this GM crop? For example, people who have concerns about a GM crops may still find it acceptable, depending on the circumstances in which it is being used? So we are purposely trying to find out how acceptable people find particular GM crops. The crop examples we use are all part of active research programs at the ACPFG and ARC Plant Cell Wall group, which are based at the universities of Adelaide, Melbourne and Queensland.

The votes

Science Alive

Votes: Level of acceptability. 0 = No never;       5 = Yes definitely.

(Applies for Science Alive and Gold Coast Science Fair)

Table 1. Combined data for 3 days. Secondary students

Table 2. Combined data for 3 days. General public

The graphical version

Gold Coast Science Fair

I’m getting lazy now and clumping students and general public together

Table 3. Combined voting data for 2 days. Students and general public

The graphical version

GM food: a dinner discussion

Data and some discussion from this event can be found here

Analysis

Science Alive

The most obvious point to make is the difference between students and the general public. Students tended to be in favour of the GM crops examples we had and exhibited no real polarisation in acceptability. The fascinating anomaly for the students was their dislike for the high fibre cereals. For most of them the reason for the dislike is reflected in the comments below which is along the lines of, I hate cereal or don’t eat brekky.

Students voting 0 for the high fibre cereal generally voted between 4 and 5 for the other examples.  General comments by the students and the fact they had never really heard of GM food suggested their votes were purely on how the technology was being applied rather than anything ralating to the technology itself.

The general public, in contrast, have a somewhat polarised vote: a significant proportion at the ‘No-never’ end and a significant, but somewhat larger proportion, at the ‘yes-definitely’ end. The balance are somewhere between two and four. Despite this seemingly polarised position, however, a lot of people did not actually vote all 0 or all 5. Many had different votes for different crops which shows people may or may not have concerns about the technology itself, but are also voting on how acceptable it is to use the technology for this purpose.

Gold Coast Science Fair

A similar trend, though the general public were far more accepting of the four GM crop examples than the students. The polarisation in opinion for the adults is till evident, and similar to Adelaide, absent for the students.

Shifting debate

Look at the comments below and count how many actually relate to fears of the technology itself, specifically to health and human safety.  There is only one, and possibly one other, but that relates more to a distrust of the technology being in the hands of a multi-national.

The most common issues raised relate to corporate ownership and control of our food. If I was to speculate, I would suggest that this concern exists because of our strong cultural links to food and because we have traditionally had a degree of empowerment over what we eat. This empowerment, we now feel, is being wrenched from our control.

Concerns about corporate control extend to equity of access. For example, will those in developing countries be vulnerable to exploitation by the powerful multi-nationals?

One other strong emotion that came through, and does so in many similar engagement activities I run, is that we are tinkering with nature, playing with God, and messing with things that might have unintended consequences down the track.

Comments from Science Alive 2011

Adults general comments

Don’t believe in feeding GM to people. Shouldn’t touch crops we eat. Biofuel crops are OK

[Technology] goes against nature

[I’m] not so keen on eating it, but happy for poor people to eat it.

Nitrogen use efficiency not as important. GM is not adding anything synthetic. It already exists in nature.

Genetic modification is what breeders essentially do, but with different technologies.

Drought tolerance, NUE are great. Not sure about the high fibre. Not sure if fibre is good for you.

Positive things about GM outweigh negative perception

Female. voted 0, 1, 2.5 and 0. Would have voted same if crops were bred via embryo rescue or mutagenesis. [She questioned why they were considered different from GM and thought it a good idea if foods bred via these techniques were labeled as such]

Female. Voted 0 for all. Was concerned about terminator genes and thought all GM crops were made sterile. GM was unnatural. [She was a vegan, grew her own veggies.]

Female. Concerned that GM crops were linked to increase in monocultures

Female, farmer. Worried about cross contamination between GM and non-GM crops

Male. Worried about Monsanto

Male. Monsanto are greedy, Concerned about control of food; the ability to feed ourselves is in the hands of a few corporate people who are motivated by profit. With technology: to many unknowns, so a bad idea. Grows and eats heirloom vegetables only.

Male. Voted 4 for all except high fibre cereal. Low vote for cereal because concerned about ownership of the crop and therefore its safety. [A discussion was had that those same concerns could equally apply to the other examples]

Votes about 3.5 because although has no problem with the regulatory standards and research quality in Australia was unsure if the same would apply in other countries

Students:

Rationale for voting 0 for cereals with dietary fibre

• Fat people can deal with it by themselves
• Don’t eat breakfast cereal.
• It may change the flavor
• Don’t eat brekky. I don’t like cereal. (A number of students made comments along these lines, including: “I don’t like porridge.” (We had a picture of porridge next to the example.)

Student general comment:

If you make better food, I don’t need to worry about a balanced diet.

Why make better cereals? Just eat better

And as a comparison, some comments from GM food: a dinner discussion

Comments were written on the voting slips. Votes for this are in previous TechNyou blog post

“Concerns lie in whether we should modify to adapt or solve the underlying problem, eg dryland salinity due to farming techniques. Also control over the exact uptake regarding nutrients, CO2 generating more problems.”

Vote: 2.5 for all

“Acceptable is different to capacity. Capacity to achieve these things is a score of 4.5. But the wider question of trust and unintentional consequences is a score of 2.”

“[re: eg1] For countries outside 1^st world would be higher, but unnecessary in Aust.”

“[re: eg2] Fertiliser is not sustainable resource, this is a potential solution”

“[re: eg3] We really didn’t discuss the effects of royalties of GM crops; if the seed is infertile it creates a dependence on the crops and the company potentially limiting economic benefits.”

“The acceptability of the technology is dependent on the regulation of corporate behavior in its application and commercialization.”

Vote: 4 for all

“The examples are good. But it’s problematic as GM technology is so diverse, that it’s more to do with social, political and commercial issues, not just the science.”

“Like all things in life, as you age your hair greys and nothing is black n white.”

“The technology will not work for multigenic traits and is dangerous to the environment and health. It’s also a mechanism for corporate control of the food supply. Look at the farmer to farmer film on YouTube that shows the plight of US growers now locked into GM crops.”

This final comment is one of the few exceptions where people express concerns about effects of GM crops on human health

“… Before GM crops are released they should be proven safe and necessary and currently they are not. They should not be grown now.”

Persistent misunderstandings

Terminator

There are still a lot of people that think that all or some GM crops are deliberately made sterile to stop farmers saving seed. This wrong, especially as it is going to harm traditional seed saving practices in developing nations. I am sure if this technology commonly referred to as ‘Terminator technology’ really did exist there would be more than a couple of Mum’s running around CSIRO with whipper snippers.

I only eat natural

There is still some thought that either GM technology is just an extension of what happens ‘naturally’, or that we are just speeding up evolution. In some cases where gene silencing is used this may be the case, but it is hard to predict if such a mutation would occur naturally. But creating a whole new metabolic pathway, such as what happened with the Golden rice, this is possibly beyond what can occur naturally, at least in the terms of human life spans. But then the concept of GM technology being ‘unnatural’ and tinkering with nature is also weird because hybridisation, mutagenesis and embryo rescue are also producing new crops that would be unlikely to occur naturally. In conversation with a couple of people who wanted their food to be the way nature intended, it was difficult for them to grasp (possibly didn’t want to know) that event their organic food varieties had been bred via these modern plant breeding technologies.

It was interesting to note that with at least three people who I engaged in conversation with about this, when discussing the use of mutagenesis and embryo rescue all would have voted in a similar fashion for the crop (which tended to be about 2.5 or lower) had they been bred using these technologies. They also commented that they thought food bred this way should be labelled as such.

Monoculture

The concept of monoculture came up at Science Alive and in GM food: a dinner discussion – and for that matter in many other public engagement activities on this topic. This is a real issue and a well recognised one, but it is not a GM issue. The person raising the question in GM food: a dinner discussion at least acknowledged this, but most people who do raise it as a concern think that all the world’s soybean crops, for example, are on variety, Monsanto’s. They do not realise that it is many varieties developed by different plant breeding companies that get a licence from Monsanto (or whoever) to use their technology in their specific variety. For example, if I have a nice barley crop that I have bred for a specific malting company and I want to make it resistant to a particular rust disease. Say Company X has the GM technology (ie gene construct) to enable me to do that. I would pay Company X a royalty fee or for a licence to use that technology in my barley cultivar.

Monsatan

By far the biggest concern for all three events, even for some who voted toward the acceptable end, was having such crops owned by a few multinationals, with once again Monsanto being the whipping boy. Rational or irrational, such people did not want their food controlled by large multi-national corporations. For many, this concern was not always a personal one, but one for those in developing nations who they thought were vulnerable to exploitation by such companies.

In conclusion

People definitely find the GM crop examples we had more acceptable than unacceptable

The concerns about human health no longer dominate, which suggests that research groups involved in GM crop development that think they need to better explain the science, they might want to re-think their communication strategy. That doesn’t mean don’t explain the science, just be aware that it is likely to play only a minor role in whether people find what you are doing is acceptable or not.

Smoldering nanoparticles cook cancer

Magnetic particles exposed to electromagnetic waves produce heat which, if great enough, can kill cancer cells deep inside the body.

Nanowerk: 29 August 2011

Published in Nature Nanotechnology

Gene-therapy successes spur hope for embattled field

Long-term survival data are giving researchers hope that gene therapy might still fulfil its potential.

Nature News: 24 August 2011

GM food: a dinner discussion. The votes are in

By Jason Major

TechNyou

It has been two weeks since our GM food: a dinner discussion event – which is now up on our YouTube channel– so I have been tardy in getting some of the evaluation and voting data posted up.

But it is done and here it is – see below, though more thoughtful commentary will have to wait. Just before GM food: a dinner discussion, I was at Science Alive in Adelaide, and just after it I was at the Gold Coast Science Fair, where we had a voting board where people voted on similar crops discussed in the GM food: a dinner discussion event. I will pool all the data and commentary from all three events and post some thoughts next week.

The questions asked on the voting slip, which were part of the discussion on the night, were: “How acceptable is the use of GM technology to generate crops that

1. Benefit human health? Example: Rice enriched with iron

2. Benefit the environment? Example: Cereal crops that use less nitrogen fertiliser

3. Benefit the Australian economy? Example: Cereal crops that can tolerate salt

They  voted on a  scale of 0-5

Audience votes on acceptability of 3 GM crops.  0 = no never; 5 = yes definitely

The graphical version

Who are they?

Without doubt there is overwhelming support for these three crops, at least. But who is our audience? What demographic slice decided to come to our event and how representative of society as a whole is this data. Without pestering those who came to answer more questions or participate in a focus group it will be difficult to know, though I can tell you some basic stuff.

The event was fully booked (100) registrants, but just over 80 turned up on the night. Apologies for those who wanted to come, but were told they couldn’t. We could have squeezed a couple more in.

Ages

47% were between 19 and 35 years of age

14% were between 55 and 64 years of age

26% were 65+  – An interesting number of retirees, but then I had sent invitations to all of the University of Third Age groups I had done presentations with and I know a few people from them came.

male-female ratio was roughly equal

Occupation

25% were full-time tertiary students

All the 65+ people were retired

Most of the rest were in full-time employment

40 % of those working or students were in the field of Science/Technology. Another 25% said they were in the agriculture sector.  Evenly spread amojng the rest were those in hospitality, art/design, education, finance/accounting and government.

What does it all mean?

The voting slip used to judge the acceptability of the crops was different from those determining demographic factors – an oversight on our part. Otherwise we would be able to say if occupation, age etc, had any influence on GM crop acceptability. For example, there were a large proportion of people in the Science/Tech sector. How did they vote? Is their greater knowledge of scientific methodology or the actual science behind a GM crop making any difference to their vote? Does having this background simply make them more trusting of the scientific process or of the scientists themselves, regardless of the science itself?

Values before science

In the past I have said that the actual science has only minimal influence on the judgements people make about this plant breeding technology. Most are values-based. For example, who owns the patents to the technology; will it lead to greater corporate control of my food; who will get access to the technology; will their be equitable distribution; how will it affect those in developing nations/small farmers/etc. None of this has anything to do with the science and many of the questions and discussion at the event itself reflect this. Short of having individual chats with each audience member it is hard to know just how influence science or values was having in their voting. This values-based judgement, however, was more evident at the two other events I mentioned above, and which will be discussed in more detail in the next post.

But it is all food for thought.

There was more discussion happening on the discussion board on the event website

Wolbachia bacterium field trial success offers dengue hope

Field trials of a new technique to stop mosquitoes passing the dangerous and painful dengue virusto humans have been declared a success.

The Conversation: 25 August 2011

More info

See previous TechNyou blog post on this research

Xenotransplantation trial for diabetes starts in Argentina

Living Cell Technologies has begun a third trial of its DIABECELL treatment that uses insulin-producing cells from pigs to treat Type 1 diabetes.

Australian Life Scientist: 22 August 2011

Image from Australian Life Scientist at above link

GM food: a dinner discussion. The video

They are up, all seven videos of the public forum held on 10 August, GM food: a dinner discussion. Should GM crops play a role in global food security?

Check them out on TechNyou’s YouTube channel TechNyou vids  You can also find further discussion on the discussion board on the the event’s web site.

Here is Part 2, which is effectively the start of the discussion.