Anti-biotech movement moving statewide from Mendocino (7/30/2004) A radical environmental group based in Minnesota and linked to the destruction of student project crops several years ago on the University of California, Davis campus has succeeded in getting initiatives to ban genetically modified crops on the November ballots in at least four California counties.
Going Up In The Country, But Keeping All Your Toys (7/18/2004) LAWRE STONE remembers the moment as vaguely profound. She was driving her 8-year-old son, Sam, and a couple of his friends home from school when the children started talking excitedly about McDonald's. Ms. Stone, formerly a schoolteacher in Queens, was no stranger to this impulse in children. The difference was that these children didn't actually want to go to McDonald's. Rather, they were obsessed with how artificial and preprocessed the food was.
Menace in the minutiae (7/14/2004) I am well aware that promoting public debate about nanotechnology is an uncertain business. My first gentle attempt to draw the subject to wider attention resulted in "Prince fears grey goo nightmare" headlines. So, for the record, I have never used that expression and I do not believe that self-replicating robots, smaller than viruses, will one day multiply uncontrollably and devour our planet. Such beliefs should be left where they belong, in the realms of science fiction. The important thing is to get on with the sensible debate that should accompany the introduction of such technologies which work at the level of the basic building blocks of life itself.
October
