Biotech in the Blogosphere

This week BIO’s own Farmer Gene writes about a Marketplace interview with Stuart Brand, original founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, which offered readers a vision of returning to the land in order to live sustainably.

Farmer Gene writes,
“Brand has recently published a new book, The Whole Earth Discipline, which tackles climate change using a somewhat different tone, and gives eloquent praise to biotech agriculture.

According to Brand, a lifelong environmentalist who sees everything in terms of solvable design problems, three profound transformations are under way on Earth right now:

1. Climate change is real and is pushing us toward managing the planet as a whole.
2. Urbanization: Half the world’s population now lives in cities, and eighty percent will by midcentury-is altering humanity’s land impact and wealth.
3. Biotechnology is becoming the world’s dominant engineering tool.

In light of these changes, Brand suggests that environmentalists are going to have to reverse some longheld opinions and embrace tools that they have traditionally distrusted.”

Wow, could this be a turning point in the environmental movement.

On other fronts, the FDA approved biotech soybean oil. This was covered by a number of media outlets, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The announcement of biotech soybean oil didn’t escape the notice of the blogger community. The blog, Nutra Ingredients USA wrote about the new soybeans, citing the following advantages:

“Firstly, soy omega-3 is likely to be cheaper and easier to incorporate into food products than standard fish and algal oil omega-3. Gallegos said it performs well nutritionally and has a no adverse effect on taste.
Secondly, the new plant-source omega-3 provides a means for the food industry to meet increasing demand for the nutrient in a sustainable way, without endangering fish stocks.”

Omega-3 fatty acids have been estimated to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke by up to 26 percent, and of sudden cardiac death by 45 percent. Earlier this year, a study by the Harvard School of Public Health concluded that a lack of omega-3 in the diet is the sixth leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States.

The stearidonic acid (SDA), omega-3 soybean oil is the first Monsanto-developed product genetically modified for specific properties known to improve human health, though officials say there are others in the pipeline.

It will likely be years before consumers can buy any products containing the bioengineered SDA omega-3 oil. Food companies will have to test it to see how they can use it in their formulations, a process that can take years.

This week in the blogosphere in Industrial & Environmental Technology we start off with NASCAR. Yes that’s right NASCAR . Domestic Fuel.com quotes an article in USA Today about NASCAR,

“The concept might seem incongruous in a sport inherently tied to an internal combustion engine that many find synonymous with global warming, but NASCAR, despite cars with an eye-popping 5 mpg, is trying to embrace its eco-conscious side as the federal government has begun prodding the racing industry to become leaders in efficiency…

On the competition side, NASCAR is exploring the replacement of its carburetors with more efficient fuel injection (perhaps as early as 2011) and the use of alternative fuels in at least one of its national series…”

Remarkable, but it just shows that biofuels are catching on everywhere.

Joshua Kagan wrote on GOOD.is/BLOGS a piece that mainly discusses the cons of corn ethanol and concludes that,

“There are non-food crops that can be used for biofuel. The federal government has awoken to this and is heavily promoting “second generation” cellulosic biofuels. Cellulosic refers to the “non-food” component of a plant or tree—like the husk of the corn or tree trimmings—that contain lots of energy in the form of carbohydrates called polysaccharides that can, in turn, be processed into biofuels. The next installment in this series discusses what is cellulosic ethanol, why you need to know about it, why you are not wrong if you find it ironic that cutting down trees is a carbon mitigation strategy, and how algae are really the future of biofuels.”

Now, I’m aware that different people have different opinions about which line of biofuels research we should pursue, but it’s important to remember that to ensure our energy security we must pursue all avenues of research. Advances in medicine didn’t come about from restricting areas of research, and the same will be true here. Diversity in energy research will ultimately lead to the most sustainable and energy efficient solution.