Plant/Animal Biotechnology

Over the past decade, issues such as fast food and obesity, organics and pesticides, genetic engineering, and factory farming have each captured their share of attention from engaged citizens and advocacy groups. Focusing events, such as the 2008 factory farming ballot initiative in California or the 2000 Starlink GM corn episode have generated spikes in news coverage. Popular books such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, and Pollan's NY Times article "Farmer in Chief" have reinforced concerns among an attentive public and generated reactions from…

Oxford University Press has published a new edited volume featuring research on public opinion and media coverage of the plant biotech debate in the US, Europe, Africa, India,and Brazil. The volume is edited by Dominique Brossard and James Shanahan, professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cornell University respectively, along with Clint Nesbitt, a scientist at USDA. Below is a table of contents. I contributed the chapter on "Where Do Science Debates Come From?," co-authored with Mike Huge, a graduate student I worked with at Ohio State. Table of Contents -Perspectives on…

Last week was the ten year anniversary of the birth of the cloned sheep Dolly. Looking around for good examples of visual framing for a course I teach in Political Communication, I came across this classic comparison between the cover stories that ran at Scientific American and the German weekly Der Spiegel. Playing to audiences with a different set of interests, and to political cultures with very different histories when it comes to genetic engineering, the magazines take the same event, and visually accent dimensions that lead to competing interpretations of the announcement.…

Today marks the ten year anniversary of the birth of the cloned sheep Dolly, and the anniversary comes as Congress debates various bills impacting funding for embryonic stem cell research (NPR files two reports today, here and here.) Despite ten years of debate over therapeutic and reproductive cloning, Congress has yet to pass legislation providing clear guidelines for research. According to polls, the public still has reservations about animal cloning, and remains unclear about the differences between reproductive and therapeutic cloning. Though answers are susceptible to question…