Free Republic

Local doctors are in the eye of a storm swirling for the past three years over whether corn that’s been genetically modified to resist pesticides is a source of prosperity, as companies claim, or of birth defects and illnesses Pediatrician Carla Nelson remembers catching sight of the unusually pale newborn, then hearing an abnormal heartbeat through the stethoscope and thinking that something was terribly wrong. The baby was born minutes before with a severe heart malformation that would require complex surgery. What worried her as she waited for the ambulance plane to take the infant from Waimea, on the island...

Just a little more than a year after it opened, the Moreland Farmers Pantry is closing. Residents of Portland's Westmoreland neighborhood were originally excited for the arrival of a 5,000-square-foot store stocked -- as it advertised -- with non-genetically modified products. But excitement turned to anger for some after comments on the owner's personal Facebook page were made public. In a 2013 post by owner Chauncy Childs, operating under a pseudonym, she said that although she doesn't judge gay people or their desire to be married, and it isn't her place to form opinions about their lifestyle, she thought gay...

The first clue that Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t know what she was talking about on Capitol Hill earlier this month came with the first words she spoke: “I’m here as a mother.” Apparently, the actress thinks that any mom can show up in Washington and hold a press conference that attracts lawmakers and the media. Memo to Ms. Paltrow: The rest of us moms don’t have that celebrity power. We haven’t won Oscar awards, assumed glamorous roles in the “Iron Man” movies, or married (let alone divorced) rock stars. But Ms. Paltrow has done all of these things so, of course,...

If you think that sugar is the unhealthiest thing you can eat, you're wrong. Apparently, the Worst Food on the Planet Award should actually go to soybean oil, suggests new findings published in the journal PLoS One. Setting up a sort of dietary cage match, researchers fed mice a series of diets each containing 40% fat. The fat in the first diet was primarily saturated and came from coconut oil, while the fat in the second diet was primarily unsaturated and came mostly from soybean oil. The researchers also fed mice two altered versions of the high-fat diets that also...

Chipotle claims they have stopped serving food from genetically modified organisms (GMOs). What are the health risks from eating genetically modified food? There aren’t any. Twenty-five years of scientific studies have shown no evidence of harm from the use of GM crops. A recent report from the European Union found that ‘the main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not more risky to consume than conventional plant...

DARPA Wants to Create Synthetic Organisms to Terraform and Change the Atmosphere of Mars Biotech, Space, Synthetic Biology June 25, 2015 by Giulio Prisco 435SHARES TwitterLinkedinFacebook The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) believes that it's on the way to creating synthetic organisms capable of terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth, Motherboard reports.Speaking at a recent biotech conference hosted by DARPA, Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) said: For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not...

Would take away a state's rights once and for all to require labeling of GMO foods. 70 bills have been introduced in over 30 states to require some sort of labeling of genetically engineered (GE) or genetically modified organisms (GMO).1)http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/976/ge-food-labeling/state-labeling-initiatives#  Although very few of these bills or initiatives have passed into actual law, and many have been challenged in court, a new congressional bill would take away the state’s rights once and for all to require labeling of GMO foods.H.R.1599 2)https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1599/text, ironically labeled the  Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015 has been renamed the DARK (Deny Americans the Right...

More than half the Canadian population regularly uses vitamins and minerals in order to stay healthy, according to Health Canada. Yet most are likely not aware that high doses of many common vitamins can increase the risk of cancer or death. “Vitamins have become synonymous with health, but there’s this false idea that, if a little bit is good, a lot has to be better,” says Dr. Tim Byers, associate dean at the Colorado School of Public Health. Byers challenged this idea recently at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting. “We now have direct evidence that a lot...

It took just a few days after the stunning defeat of Obama's attempt to fast-track the Trans Pacific Partnership bill in the Senate at the hands of his own Democratic party, before everything returned back to normal and the TPP fast-track was promptly passed. Why? The simple answer: money. Or rather, even more money. Because while the actual contents of the TPP may be highly confidential, and their public dissemination may lead to prison time for the "perpetrator" of such illegal transparency .... fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments,...

In an interview... former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney contended that vaccines give children autism. Not only that, but she believes that it is knowingly being given to black children by the government despite the fact, she says, that they are more susceptible to getting it. "It’s reminiscent of eugenics," she explained. ...Citing a "whistleblower," Ms. McKinney explained, "The omitted data suggested," she said, "that African American males who received the MMR (that’s mumps, measles and rubella) vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Now, the risk was like 300 percent, I mean it was like, as he...

Beekeepers. Physicians. Organic farmers. Preschool teachers. Parents of autistic kids. Those were some of the groups represented Saturday in a march against the controversial biotech and agricultural giant Monsanto, which is often cast as Public Enemy No. 1 by those opposed to genetically modified foods. As many as 500 people — many dressed like bumblebees and butterflies — filled Justin Herman Plaza around noon and then marched down the Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf. Many held signs with slogans like “Evil Seed of Corporate Greed” and “GMOs Cause Autism and Cancer.”

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, you know, as sure as I called it, I'm telling you, remember the story we had yesterday on the Wi-Fi? A supposed doctor -- he's a doctor of environmental science -- has released his results from surveys or research or whatever that 5% of the population is susceptible to Wi-Fi sickness. And if you were here yesterday I spent a little bit of time on this 'cause I saw it was a lead item on Drudge, and I said, "I know what that means. Here we go." A totally manufactured new illness to create panic and...

Researchers have figured out how to get yeast to produce morphine, codeine and other similar drugs and have immediately urged regulators to control these drug-brewing yeasts before people start trying to make them at home. They genetically engineered simple brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and came up with a strain that can make very complicated plant compounds that include opioid drugs such as morphine, as well as some antibiotics and muscle relaxants. It's an important technical step, because now these drugs have to be synthesized directly from plants—an inefficient process. The yeast process isn't that efficient yet, either, but once it's...

Fans of homebrewed beer and backyard distilleries already know how to employ yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. But a research team led by bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, has gone much further by completing key steps needed to turn sugar-fed yeast into a microbial factory for producing morphine and potentially other drugs, including antibiotics and anti-cancer therapeutics. Over the past decade, a handful of synthetic-biology labs have been working on replicating in microbes a complex, 15-step chemical pathway in the poppy plant to enable production of therapeutic drugs. Research teams have independently recreated different sections of the...

In a first for a major restaurant chain, Chipotle Mexican Grill on Monday will begin serving only food that is free of genetically engineered ingredients. “This is another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food,” said Steve Ells, founder and co-chief executive of Chipotle. “Just because food is served fast doesn’t mean it has to be made with cheap raw ingredients, highly processed with preservatives and fillers and stabilizers and artificial colors and flavors.” In 2013, Chipotle was the first restaurant chain to indicate which items contained genetically modified organisms,...

It may be early in the process for 2016 campaigns, but that’s not stopping political operatives from scurrying to suppress promising potential John McCain Senate seat challengers from pressing forward. Cue critics of Arizona State Senator Kelli Ward. “Only the political elite would make listening to voter concerns a bad thing,” Ward told Breitbart News concerning attacks coming against her from political and media sources. Ward recently began an exploratory committee to challenge McCain, now seeking his sixth 6-year term, for election to the U.S. Senate.

Austin Kasso posted on his own Facebook page that he is disgusted that Memories Pizza of Walkerton, Indiana, has raised over $100,000 on a GoFundMe.com pageset up to help the restaurant get over the attacks on it fostered by the militant gay lobby and the media. But Kasso–the founder of Red Giant, a non-GMO food activist group–went further to vent his rage at Christians by going to the GoFundMe page to warn the pizza shop that he intended to rob them of the $100,000. St. Louis radio host Dana Loesch discovered Kasso’s threat and Tweeted it out… -snip Kasso, though, came...

Monsanto Co said on Wednesday it reached a settlement with U.S. wheat farmers who sued the seed company over market disruption after unapproved genetically engineered wheat was discovered growing without oversight in Oregon. Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" wheat, which was never approved by U.S. regulators and which the company said it stopped testing a decade ago, was found growing in an Oregon farmer's field in 2013. The company had said all the experimental grain was destroyed or stored away. South Korea and Japan temporarily halted purchases of U.S. wheat after the announcement on fears the unapproved wheat, engineered to withstand Roundup...

The World Health Organisation’s cancer agency has declared that one of the UK’s most widely used weedkillers is “probably carcinogenic to humans”.Amateur gardeners and professional farmers have been urged to “think very carefully” about using the popular herbicide Roundup, which contains glyphosate. A summary of the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) report, published in The Lancet Oncology, said that the herbicide had been detected “in air during spraying, in water, and in food”.It had also been detected “in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, indicating absorption”....The IARC's report said that its use has increased sharply with the...

One of the world’s most popular weed killers—and the most widely used kind in the U.S.—has been labeled a probable carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The decision was made by IARC, the France-based cancer research arm of the World Health Organization, which considered the status of five insect and weed killers including glyphosate, which is used globally in industrial farming. […] The new classification is aimed mainly at industrial use of glyphosate. Its use by home gardeners is not considered a risk. Glyphosate is in the same category of risk as things like anabolic steroids and...