I think it's like oil companies - everyone loves to hate them but fundamentally our society can't exist without them without making wholesale changes to our lifestyle we are unwilling to stomach. At least we can play oil companies off each other by boycotting whichever one is the naughtiest - imagine how much worse it would be if there were only *one* global oil company. But they are not going anywhere anytime soon no matter how much we dislike them.

It's not that farmers are so enamored with doing business with Monsanto - it's that they find they have no choice in an age where pesticides and herbicides are progressively more expensive and less effective (and I should add more environmentally damaging than roundup even with it's multiple bugaboos). Currently only 1% of the US works on a farm, a figure that dwindles every year, and unless we can convince 20% of our population to become organic farmers like in Cuba we cannot be self sufficient without GMOs.

So I think the conversation that is going on about yes/no to GMO's is misplaced, and that's severely to Monsanto's advantage because the need for their product will only increase with time. The conversation we SHOULD be having is about whether foodstuff GMOs should enjoy patent protection at all (for all the claims that this is just like selective breeding on steroids, those aren't patentable and somehow GMOs are), what type of environmental oversight should be required (did you know that only the USDA has authority to regulate GMO crops, not the EPA?) and whether Monsanto should be broken up Baby Bell style for anti-trust issues. The longer we fret about frankenfoods and avoid talking about the issues at hand, the stronger Monsanto's hand gets and the closer that market share gets to 100%. At which point history of monopolies tells us we are really in for a *** storm, and that's not something that has anything to do with the morality of your average Monsanto employee, it's just inevitable in our free market system.
   

BT crops were first introduced in 1995 and there has been a steady stream of resistance reports since the early 2000's so it's just been a matter of time before the worms got it. There's even a paper here from 2003 where it was empirically determined that approx 1 in 1000 insects already carried a resistance gene in the wild before any selection pressure.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~fgould/pdfs/Burd2003.pdf

Really, the crux of the problem is that Monsanto has an effective monopoly on GM crops (~90% market share last I checked), and it's operating with as much scruples as any other company in the same position (i.e. Ma Bell, US. Steel, Standard Oil, Microsoft back in the early 90's . . ). As much as I hate people who claim "the free market" will cure all our woes, if we just had 2 or 3 equally powerful GM companies they would actually have to compete with each other on price and features and licensing terms (for example, allowing farmers to save seeds for replanting).

The sad state of things as they are now are the end result of the effective monopoly combined with the unprecedented patent protection that GM crops have been afforded compared to other types of plant breed protection - this
guarantees that every new innovation will be overproduced and overused to maximize profits up until they are completely useless. I mean, we are talking about 15 year-old technology in a field where you have trouble giving away last year's gene sequencers on craiglist because they are so outdated.

This is incorrect, my biochem prof many moons ago consulted for Monsanto and gave us a nice lecture on how this was accomplished. Basically, Roundup (glyphosphate) inhibits an enzyme in most plants that is required to synthesize essential amino acids from glycine. It turns out certain insects have an orthologous enzyme that is not inhibited by glyphosphate - this was spliced into the "roundup ready" seeds. This is how the engineered strains can also have high yield; if you simply tried to randomly mutate glyphosphate resistance, chances are you'd also reduce the efficiency of the enzyme itself and produce a pretty sickly crop with poor yields. The problem with weeds is that even a sickly growing weed can mess up your crop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_(herbicide)#Genetic_engineering

Genetic engineering is certainly not elegant, it's mostly cut-and-paste jobs, but you only use directed evolution to fine tune things as it justs gets stuck in a local evolutionary minimum.

Completely agreed. What makes this a real dilemma from a policy perspective is that since the threat of mutations arising that cause a naturally occurring pandemic are real, knowing the intermediate steps means that you can monitor local outbreaks via the virus sequence and know whether this calls for a "we can weather this" response or a invoke our doomsday quarantine everything response or something inbetween. The stakes are pretty high.

The authors note that they estimate at least 100 public health agencies, maybe 1,000 experts, would then need to know the exact sequence to look for in order to coordinate an effective global response, and that at that point it would be pointless to treat it as classified as few of these people operate in organizations that are capable of that level of secrecy.

So we have a catch-22. Everyone agrees that giving a detailed recipe, although unlikely to be feasible for a non-state actor to implement, is probably a bad idea. But the value of this research to protect global public health is nil if every country in the world with a public health infrastructure is not allowed to know the sequence to look for in infected patients (after all, once a virus goes pandemic there's very little we can do to stop it from crossing borders). It's clear cut how to dial "11" or "0" on the secrecy meter - classify it and tell no-one, or tell everyone, but is there a "medium" setting that doesn't effectively result in being "0"??

This is the classical dual-use dilemma. It should be pointed out all the scientists involved are public health researchers and not military trying to make a weapon. Knowing exactly what mutations cause the virus to go airborne and become human to human transmissible would provide a very accurate and effective way for public health workers on the ground to assess in-real time via some sort of PCR diagnostic that could be done in any reasonably equipped hospital lab whether a local outbreak is about to go pandemic or not, and react accordingly.

Interview of the lead scientist in the NYtimes indicates that even if the complete recipe were revealed, it would be difficult to replicate without very sophisticated equipment. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to spell out exactly what you need to do, especially as there are probably analagous things that can be done with other viruses that don't require such a sophisticated setup.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/health/security-in-h5n1-bird-flu-study-was-paramount-scientist-says.html?pagewanted=2&hp

Not too off the mark. Prior trials on HIV prevention have been done on high risk populations in Thailand and Botswana. And these are studies sponsored by the CDC, not a rogue evil scientist as with the Guatemala experiments (whom, it should be noted, had absolutely no oversight even though he was using US tax dollars as these checks weren't required back then).

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/prep/resources/factsheets/pdf/prep.pdf

Overseas trials do bring up a whole host of ethical concerns (especially when dealing with populations that have little or no access to healthcare - making participation in a trial perhaps the only way to see a real doctor). This is a real issue because usually the control population gets "standard of care" which is very different in the US vs the developing world. What's even shadier is that there have been allegations of drug companies secretly hiring shady doctors in the third world to enroll patients in highly risky studies that would never be approved in the US, and the patients often don't even know they were in an experimental study, they thought they were getting a proven treatment.

At least, with the CDC trials, one can be assured that the participants are actually volunteers who gave explicit consent and had the risks explained to them (unlike those Guatemalan prisoners who had no choice), that the trial protocol passed review by external ethics boards both in the US and by the local governmental authority (again, unlike Guatemala where outside of a few prison officials the local gov't had no idea what was going on). Not that these are fool-proof checks in countries with unstable or nonexistent public health infrastructures and highly corrupt officials, but at least it's something.

Yes, that would be the standard operating procedure for an organism with a rapid generation time (20 minutes for e. coli) and culturable in a lab (so you can control the nutrient conditions and do your selective breeding). I can't find any information on the generation time of Xenophyophores, in fact it may not be known, but I would be shocked if it was quicker than months to years per generation. And something that only lives on the sea floor is probably the hardest conditions I can think of (until aliens are discovered) to try and replicate in a lab. So double icksnay on the selective breeding.

It would be easier to sequence its genome and try to reverse engineer the biochemical pathway that is responsible for sequestering the radioactive substances. If it were a small, standalone pathway with just a handful of genes that are not hopelessly interwoven with weird deep-sea biological processes we have no clue about, you might have a shot transplanting it into something that is easier to manipulate like algae or tobacco plants.

Now, when I say easier, I mean "free trip to Stockholm" easier, not "high school science project" easier. Remember the early 90's when photoshop came out and everyone thought it was sooo clever to cut out someone's head and put it on a supermodel's body? That's about how sophisticated genetic engineering is right now.

There are actually lots of microbes that metabolize and break down toxic wastes. Typically they are found simply by digging into a pile of hazardous waste and seeing what is growing there. The problem is that these organisms don't have to be particularly fast or efficient to defend their niche, they just need to survive where other's can't, so in their natural state they will not make a significant difference on the timescales convenient to us (i.e. a 1,000 year cleanup). So we need to at least understand enough to genetically engineer a yugo into a porche, and that isn't exactly easy.

The second catch here is that deep sea life also typically has extremely slow metabolisms to begin with compared to terrestrial organisms. You can't spend energy faster than you take it in, and that's very slow indeed on the ocean floor. Fish down there are adapted to months inbetween feedings and can live for many decades, I can only imagine how slowly these 10 cm blobs eat and reproduce.

Yes, but this was already well known in the late 1980's when type II superconductors hit center stage in the solid-state physics world. And 30 seconds later every single person in the field thought "hey, we could SOOO build a sweet maglev train with this". But it's still not practical by any stretch of the imagination except as a neat toy.

So /. is only 20+ years late instead of ~80 years with the Meissner effect.

Agreed. IANASH (I am not a science historian) but the impression I get from the book is that it was this initial success that spawned all the other fields to try and have a "me too" moment which led to the bubble. So although I'm pretty sure the book does mention this as an event that happened, the science itself was certainly not presented with the same clarity and poignancy that the author details early developments in the mathematics of logarithms and wacky precursors to the telegraph. If you can recommend an accessible history of psychophysics, I'd be all ears :-)

I did not mean that information theory was ill-fated, but right after it's publication there was an irrational jubilation that all of science was going to be solved in an "information theory" framework that led to failed journals, societies, and hundreds of really poorly thought out papers all entitled "An information theory approach to ____(insert longstanding scientific problem here)". Generally these papers took the log of some important measurement, calculated an "effective bandwidth", and maintained that this was somehow a more profound way to understand the problem (the significance of which was left to the reader's imagination).

Shannon himself complained in a 1956 editorial that "Information theory has become something of scientific bandwagon. . . .A few first-rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half finished. The latter are not a credit to the writers and a waster of time to their readers."

We are way past the "information theory" bubble nowadays and the practitioners are quite mature by comparison, so it's hard to imagine the time described by these historical anecdotes. My best mental approximation would be if Craig Venter, Stephen Hawkings, and Bill Gates simultaneously held a press conference announcing that some "new kind of science" (*cough cough Wolfram*) was going to unify gene therapy research, cosmology, and social welfare in sub-saharan Africa all at once.. That's how ridiculous it got.

Perhaps that is the most useful thing I got from this book, that history shows us that scientific fads can even be based on real, ultimately transformative breakthroughs. But they will still walk and feel like a fad when people, especially out-of-field scientists, are irrationally exuberant about it.

Neither, and therein lies the weakness of this book. This review is spot on. The beginning chapters are all these interesting historical anecdotes that do a pretty good job of contextualizing the disjointed and awkward methods of transmitting and thinking about information in the pre-Shannon era. As a series of lesser-known historical anecdotes, it's quite fascinating to know that Babbage like to crack codes as a hobby and that Shannon and Turing directly influenced each other's work as they had regular lunchtime discussions at Bell labs. That is interesting thread that got me to read the book, it felt like a great set-up to a really interesting and accessible primer to information theory.

But then, once Shannon is introduced, the author seems at a loss to explain what information theory is actually used for other than a vague sentiment that it's "useful everywhere, like in the internets and satellites and stuff". In fact, the narrative seems to fall into the same trap that is described wherein a bunch of non-mathematically inclined "visionaries" from psychologists to linguists and architects all jump on an ill-fated "information theory can explain everything" bandwagon without really understanding what it is that information theory can and can't do, leading to quasi-celebrity status for a (very bewildered) Shannon. This then devolves into an extended discussion of memes from the early work of Dawkins which met a similar fate (the "journal of mimetics" was short-lived due to a complete inability of it's founders to agree on exactly what belonged in it). The treatment of biological information is amazingly scant beyond some re-hashing of Dawkins and Gould, given how fundamental information theory is to the modern field of bioinformatics and the like. It then wraps up with with obligatory creation stories of wikipedia, google and discussions of information glut, the likes of which a slashdot audience would already know by heart and therefore find unenlightening.

The actual information theory examples explained in the book do not go beyond the toy examples from Shannon's paper, which is itself very well written and eminently accessible if you have a little statistics and math background. So if you are looking for that, go straight to the source instead instead of reading this book. If you are looking for some neat historical anecdotes about what people used to do to save money on telegraph messages and dreams that Ada Loveless had about being able to see a new world in her head where algorithm developers would someday rule the world, by all means enjoy the first 5 chapters, but the remainder is quite forgettable I'm afraid.

Link to Shannon's 1948 paper. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf

Right on!

My grandparents had everything their family owned in China robbed by bandits, then the Marxists came and forcibly confiscated everything else and said "this belongs to the people now, you'll leave and never come back if you know what's good for you". They fled with nothing more than the shirts on their back. THAT is "redistribution of wealth". Decades later, my remaining foreign-educated relatives were stripped of their professorships and forced to work in rice paddies during the Cultural Revolution. THAT is "class warfare". I demand the next politician who uses either of these phrases either retroactively get flunked in history 101, or be willing to explain to my grandparents how adjusting the marginal tax rate by from 15 to 25% for the top 10% of earners is in any way similar to either of these.

Someone with mod points please bump the parent up.

I read the entire transcript and failed to see that any of the points in the summary were actually key points in this sordid story. This transcript clearly shows that using criminal investigators to investigate scientific misconduct is usually a bad idea, but without any context on what decisions the OIG actually took either using or ignoring this interview (as opposed to those taken by Monett's own agency), it's hard to accuse them of anything in particular other than wasting alot of time.