A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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I'm going to be that guy about GMO crops. If we were modifying them to be drought resistant or need less water, I'd be all for it. Instead, what we modify them for is to be "roundup ready" meaning that glyphosate can be sprayed liberally on it without killing it making weeding the field much easier. I am not concerned about the GMO crop, but I am concerned with all my food being covered in Roundup.
As someone who's graduating in biotechnology, we want and we do, but there are a few things that make this not reach the market.
Round-up ready plants are incredibly easy to make, you insert only one gene (effectively, there are some little extra things but details) and now your plant can resist glyphosate, which means you can make many different species resistant to it much more easily, or make all of the different lines of whatever crop you sell also be restaurant to it.
For making drought resistant plants, there isn't exactly one gene that makes the plant resistant. Just one example would be root length. If a plant has longer roots it can access moist soil for longer periods of time and thus making it more resilient against droughts, but to make the roots grow longer you have several genes that interact and changing one might not result in deeper roots in a drought environment since that gene is activated by a phytohormone that is upregulated during long days (summer time) but this location only encounters droughts during early spring when the days are still short, and for you to regulate that gene to change when the phytohormone is upregulated you'd need to change a BUNCH of other things on the plant that would result in a complete mess of how the plant develops as now it acts like summer during spring but only for the roots and the roots send signals that the leafs must ignore until the correct time of the year and that changes when the seeds are going to be released because the plant is now blooming at a completely different time and oh fuck we've developed the equivalent of ancient Egyptian inbreed pharaohs but for plants, which is horrible but incredibly impressive given that most plants can self fertilize... This is one route of trying to just make longer roots, if we go through giving the root growth gene sensibility to another phytohormone that is upregulated on short days, the roots now will release other phytohormones in higher levels than the plant is used to (more length = more roots = more cells making said phytohormones) and since plants develop through gradients of hormones and the proportion of one vs another, the amount of work to make it so that the plant actually develops correctly will also be huge! And this is just for one single characteristic that we think would help in many cases but wouldn't actually make plants fully resistant to droughts, just able to get a few extra days of water, unlike how roundup ready is still just add this gene that allows the plant to break down glyphosate fast enough that it doesn't die.
Now the other side of the issue is funding. Yeah, droughts are a really bad problem for farms, but the BUG farms are either in places that they don't suffer from droughts that much, in places that they can buy a lot of water cheaply (government subsidies) or can produce a lot of crops even when there's a drought vs what they'd loose against weeds competing with their crops for water, nutrients and diseases spread by those weeds
In the end, we have the same reasons that tuberculosis and malaria are not funded and researched flash much as they should, it just doesn't make sense (commercially) to do so for big corporations like monsanto/bayer and the subject is complex enough that several universities having small teams researching it will tackle it from so many different angles and have such a difficult time with it that progress is really slow. The researchers want to work on cures for malaria, tuberculosis and to make plants resistant to droughts, soil acidification, nutrient content of the final produce and much much more, but we're fighting against capitalism and spaghetti code with no annotations written by thousands of not millions of different coders that didn't talk with each other through the millions of years of development of said code
Unfortunately you don't really have a choice. Organic and GMO free doesn't mean herbicide free, and plants with natural tolerance to herbicides either have genes to detoxify or sequester them in their cell walls. If the sequester them, then you get to eat nice bioaccumulation of herbicide. Glyphosate itself is pretty safe mechanistically, however everyone forgets about the adjuvants its formulation.
You're absolutely not alone with GMO concerns.
Celiac enters the chat.
Also all of the insects covered in Roundup, making ecosystems collapse
And somebody's gotta spray that RoundUp... hasn't there been numerous class actions about the effects of that stuff on people who had to use it? 😬
Sounds right
Naw. High School Science does jack shit to prevent this, unless it actually teaches scientific theory and also explains how modern science is organized. I unfortunately mever encountered epistemology or the like in my high school science classes.
'Leave no child behind' was/is a bad policy. You can't call yourself a major league player when you're still hitting from the tee.
I think equally important as teaching these things to begin with is letting students know when they're being taught a simplified model, and that serious academic discourse of the subject is still evolving and/or involves much more nuance (which is pretty much always). some people who do pay attention in science classes nonetheless think that what they learned is gospel and never re-examine it, or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge when said nuance is relevant because it seems to contradict the simplified model they've cemented in their brain as the whole truth. the kind of people who say things like "I know there's two genders because I learned it in high school biology" and apparently never considered why there would be collegiate and post-graduate studies on biology and gender (or why those are two entirely different fields of study) if we all already learned everything there is to know in high school.
I think chemistry is APPALLINGLY bad at this to be honest.
The sad thing is those people did take those classes.
that's the same people who later get to helm companies and say "who the fuck needs market research when you have the force of will"
AI is a great idea and everyone in our company must use it!
it's a great idea if all you need to do is to compile the research you already did into variety of content types. my current fave is notebookLM because i'm uploading all the reports from other companies and sift through them somewhat faster. other than that - it is basically a linkedin post generator.
Real talk: those “boring” science classes aren’t about memorizing facts — they teach you how to spot bad claims and check sources. That skill pays off forever.
To be fair, most schools give those classes only out of obligation. Doing dumb calculations of mols and atomic masses in high school is definitely teaching kids to ask "why the fuck am I even doing this?"
Learning some chemistry basics is probably still good though. Not that we're using it daily but just in the "hey mixing this stuff can kill you" or, in the same vein, seeing how it only requires small amounts to make big changes.
We're surrounded by chemicals in our everyday lives, learning a healthy fear of them is probably for the best.
Also high school is meant to prepare you for further education, if you want to pursue that, so it really does cover a lot of ground for basic concepts you need to learn to understand and gain further education in whatever field applies.
Kids are wired to ask that, so what, basic chemistry knowledge is extremely useful.
I had a co-worker who decided to clean his bathroom and decided using a mix of chemicals would be better than just using one! Makes sense right?
He figured putting bleach and vinegar together was a smart move because it meant more cleaning all at once.
Don't worry, he's fine. He had a sore throat for a few weeks and the fumes singed the hairs off his hands when he was mixing it.
The "do your own research" people need to have it explained to them that even experts in their respective fields aren't automatically capable of parsing scientific literature. A family doctor with 50 years experience who prescribes antidepressants every day will have no deep understanding of what any particular scientific peer reviewed study on SSRIs is telling them. They need a grounding in statistics more than anything else, which most people just don't have. So the idea that a non-educated, non-scientist can read peer reviewed studies and come away from them with some sort of understanding of the issue is the thing that needs to be highlighted, preferably in high school science class (earlier, frankly). A willingness to slog through scientific papers in pursuit of deeper knowledge is admirable, but is dangerously misguided without proper training. I don't even mean training in the specific science, but just in how to speak the language of peer reviewed studies more generally. It's very much its own discipline.
I want someone to ask Joe Rogan what 'regression to the mean' means. I want someone to ask him what a 'standard deviation' is and how to apply the concept. I don't want to know what papers he's read, because you could read 50 true scientific papers a day on one topic and still have no idea what the current scientific consensus is on said topic, absent the requisite training. You'll almost certainly come away from it with a very wrong but very confident belief. Dunning-Kruger on steroids.
Hard disagree, if research findings were more accessible, NOT PAYWALLED, and published with some degree of intent for a wide audience then WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY more people would dabble in reading scientific research and the benefit could have potentially saved science from such rapid collapse in my country (the US).
The 'research' that the "do your own research" people are referring to isn't peer reviewed scientific literature.
It's other fools' social media rantings.
Seriously if we just hardcore PSA'd even basic media literacy skills into our culture, MAYBE people would stop thinking that random internet anecdotes (which are likely largely bot-driven these days) constitute "scientific evidence."
As a kid I always thought a lot of stuff taught was like, duh, so obvious. It took being thrown in the adult world to see hmm... I guess... not obvious enough???
And billionaires love people like that because it keeps the most obsessive of us focused away from the greed.