Talking Biotech 039 - What a Plant Knows

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Your questions and concerns are addressed using a science-based approach with the goal of driving discovery to application with communication. Now here's your host, Welcome to the Talking Biotech Podcast, the podcast where we take innovation to application with communication. My name is Kevin Folta, and we're back on this weekly podcast series. This week, number 39, asking the question, what does a plant really know? And to those of us who understand anatomy and physiology and things like cognition, I guess you would say not much. But if you think about this in its intended context, what does a plant know? Meaning, how does it sense its environment? How does it understand where it is in time and space and the prevailing conditions and prevailing challenges? And this is a question that's really important for us to understand the fundamentals of plant biology as well as start to understand how we can better breed or engineer plants to adapt to environmental stresses. So today our guest is the author of the book What Does a Plant Know? Or no, What a Plant Knows. It doesn't ask the question, it tells you. And so what, um, we'll talk today with Professor Danny Shamovitz from Tel Aviv University. Um, he's, uh, someone I've known for a long time, at least from the literature, and it's always a pleasure when you can You know, in quotes, know somebody from their body of work, you do kind of develop a kind of a funny friendship with people as authors that you read their work, you understand the way they think, you understand the things that get them excited about science. And so when you finally get to engage them from behind the microphone, it's always a pleasure, and this was no exception. So today's interview, I think you'll really enjoy. And follow up at the end, we'll talk a little bit about a comic book that deals with issues in science, and that's up at the end. So Talking Biotech number 39 with Professor Danny Chamovitz. So today on Talking Biotech podcast, it's really exciting to be able to talk to, for I think the first time in person— well, not in person, but even talk to— someone I've known for a long time, from the literature. And we really— we welcome Professor Danny Chamowitz from Tel Aviv University. He's a professor there but also the Dean of the George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences. So welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Kevin.

It's really nice to talk to you about this, and I'd like to talk to you for lots of reasons, but let's focus first on the book that you produced back in, I think, 2012, What a Plant Knows. And it was a lot, it was a very interesting read and something that I would recommend to people who are thinking about plant biology and maybe thinking about it at another level. What is the general theme?

Well, the general idea of the book is that plants are cool, that plants are interesting. And I was actually looking for a hook that would get people to realize that plant biology is every bit at least as interesting as human biology. And so the idea was sort of this question of, we see plants as these static, maybe moving in the wind organisms, but that really are just sort of there to make our lives pretty. But most people don't realize what an actually complex sensory world a plant has. Plants are every bit as complex and interesting as animals. And so that's why I used the idea of, well, what does a plant know? What does it What are the senses of a plant? Can we understand plant biology through plant senses? And I realize I'm using a lot of anthropomorphic language, but through using anthropomorphic language, then get us to really think, what do we mean by all of these terms? And even if we come to the conclusion that plants know nothing, we've learned a lot about what they really do understand.

And then I think that's a really important distinction, that it's not a question of what they know, but what they can interpret from their environment. And that they're really this elaborate set of sensor collections that because you're rooted in one place, you have to constantly be monitoring your environment and all of the variables and stresses and potential pressures. And what's a good example in terms of the way plants see their environment?

Yeah, you know, when we use the word see is actually a great place to start, especially considering that both you and I started our research with how plants respond to light waves. But when I use the word see, we usually think about seeing in pictures. But if we first could come to the idea that even for us, seeing is not only seeing in pictures. For example, if there's someone who's blind and through some surgical intervention you enable this person to differentiate between light and dark and gray, Then I'm sure everyone would say that this person has had some rudimentary sight returned to him. And so if we can accept the fact that sight for people is not only seeing pictures, then we could start talking about then, well, what do plants see? Now, most of us have noticed that our plants on a windowsill will bend towards the light. What most people probably didn't know is that when plants bend to the light, they're actually bending towards the blue light, so that if you give a plant a blue light on one side and a red light on the other, they'll always bend to the blue. So in other words, that not only that plants respond to light, they differentiate between colors or they differentiate between wavelengths. And this is a, you know, for people who know nothing about plant biology, this is actually a pretty bizarre undertaking to realize this.

I think that's really surprising to a lot of people that especially when you start looking at the spectra of something like a fluorescent bulb, which is made to accommodate the human eye and the human perception of light. That really all we're, all we're seeing is a combination of blue, red, and kind of green, yellow that causes us to think that it's white. Yet a plant sitting under that same light is seeing red light, and it's seeing some blue light, and it's seeing some green in the middle. It's getting this weird kind of mixture that's giving information that that plant is interpreting that says this is really different than my complete solar spectrum.

Yeah, exactly. But I think from a plant's point of view You know, we're actually visually challenged. You know, that, you know, the human— humans can, you know, we have photoreceptors, proteins that respond to different wavelengths of light in our retina, basically 4 different types that sense a very tight, tight part of the spectrum. We call it the visual spectrum since we can see it. You know, that's basically the violets, red, blue, green, you know, maybe a little bit really at the far end of the spectrum towards like what we see at sunset. But plants have upwards of 13 different proteins, photoreceptors, that respond to everything we see plus things that we're blind to like ultraviolet light.

Yeah, they can see all the way down to— well, I think there's been reports where you can cause changes in, let's say, the phosphorylation state of phototropin. So you can change molecules associated with light sensing going all the way down to the 260—

Exactly.

UVC range. And then you can see plants can sense all the way out past What we can see in the red. But there's even a report that came from some NASA scientists of plants being able to respond to near-infrared out in the 900-nanometer range, out where you're talking about huge wavelengths that are, um, kind of in the neighborhood of the kinds that come from your remote control of your TV. Makes you really wonder.

So they're incredibly complex. And the question is, you know, why? And, and you touched on this in, in your opening. It's because, you know, they're rooted You know, a plant needs to know where the light is because it's the energy for photosynthesis. It's the energy that allows it to make sugar in the end. You know, it's the energy that allows a plant— I mean, if I'm going to be really air quote-y and, you know, very simplifying— it allows it to eat. And so being root— you know, what do you do when you're hungry? You know, you stand up, go to the refrigerator, walk out to your garden, maybe pull something from the ground, or go to the local Stop and Shop. But a plant has to know where the light is in order to get its energy to do photosynthesis. And it has to do that by growing towards the light. So it has to know where the light is the strongest, where, you know, the exact wavelengths that it needs. You know, is it being shaded by another plant? Is there too much light? Maybe I need to shut down, because we know that too much light is also dangerous for photosynthesis. So it's incredibly attuned, much more attuned to its light, again, environment, or the, you know, spectral environment, than we are.

And that's, you know, we could go on light probably all day.

All day, yeah, sure. But it's important to remember, you know, Well, we've been studying this for maybe 20 years, you and I. One of the first people to publish on this was Darwin in the mid-19th century. So, you know, these questions of how a plant responds to light, you know, how it sees in air quotes, you know, this is over 150 years old, this question.

Yeah, I was leafing through that book yesterday, which is really kind of strange. Just the Power of Movement in Plants.

You know, it's bizarre that we still— I still use the Power of Movement in Plants, I think published in 1880.

Yes.

To teach my first-year students.

And just the impeccable detail that Darwin had in his measurements and the way that he did his experiments, just, it stands up to today's resolution and confirms in many ways the same suspicions we have today that we learned through much more sophisticated means.

Yeah, I think the take-home— the other take-home message from Darwin's work is that technology is secondary. The most important thing is having an excellent question, a clear hypothesis, and excellent experimental design. Now, if you can use technology to make your experimental design even better, that's great. But wonderful technology without an incredible experimental design and a great hypothesis won't get you anywhere.

Well, let's spend a few minutes on this idea of plants communicating with molecules through the air. So what a plant smells, And this is another chapter in your book that when you, when I really learned about this first, I was really surprised. But now that whole field has just exploded with examples of how plants can communicate with each other through the emission of volatile molecules. Well, what's going on there?

Well, first of all, you know, someone else said, what does a plant smell? Well, they smell good.

Though the Amorphophallus titanum is not a good example.

Yeah, actually, maybe. Well, yeah, exactly. And it smells not so good. You're right. But again, you know, when you use the word smell, I'm talking about, you know, a chemical in the air, a volatile chemical that is sensed by an organism and causes some type of physiological response. You know, sort of like on the 4th of July, whether you're a vegan or meat eater and you smell a barbecue of either real hamburgers or vegan burgers, you know, you start salivating. It's not because you decided to start salivating, it's a physiological response to the, to the smells in the air. And what's been known now for about the past 35, 38 years is that plants communicate by volatile chemicals. They actually— it's been known a lot longer that plants respond to volatile chemicals. All the fruit ripening is because of plants sensing ethylene in the air and the fruits ripening. I think that was actually discovered in the citrus groves in Florida at the beginning of the 20th century, if I'm not mistaken. But what's been found out again about the past 30 years is that plants can share molecules through the air. For example, when a plant is attacked by a predator or by a bacteria, it releases a volatile chemical in the air such as methyl jasmonate or methyl salicylic acid, and that's picked up by the neighboring tree, which then induces that tree to make chemicals which will help it to fight off either the pathogen or the herbivore that's coming to attack it. You know, these first were first published in the beginning of the 1980s, and when they were first published, a lot of plant biologists thought it was just baloney. They thought it was overinterpretation of the results, but now it's really become a whole new paradigm in plant biology, this idea of exchange of information between plants through volatile chemicals.

And some of the really interesting ones are where you even have examples where plants will, when under attack by an insect, will emit volatile compounds that call in the predators of the ones that are attacking it.

Yeah. Well, yeah, well in these ones, like for the classic one in corn when they call wasps to eat I don't remember what insects that they eat. The question, you know, the problem we have both as plant biologists and as people trying to communicate plant biology is not to over-anthropomorphize. It'd be really easy to say the plant is calling the wasp, come help me. But it's just as easy to interpret this saying as, well, the plant gives off this chemical because it's been damaged and the wasp has learned to identify this. Oh, there's a damaged plant. There's probably going to be a whole Uh, uh, a smorgasbord of, of mites for me to eat.

Exactly.

So we have to be really careful in our interpretation of these results or how we communicate them. So for example, when we talked about trees responding to their neighbors being eaten, you know, that's one interpretation that one tree is, is signaling to its neighboring tree to protect itself. And of course there are lots of evolutionary models which could predict this and justify it. But on the other hand, it's even— it's just as possible that one branch of a tree is trying to help its neighboring branch, its brother branch, so to speak, and the neighboring tree is just sort of like eavesdropping.

So what about the idea of plants responding to touch or being able— I think you even call it hearing— with the idea that responding to touch and vibration?

Well, we got to differentiate between touch and hearing. Plants definitely respond to touch. You can see it. I mean, the most obvious, of course, is the is the Venus flytrap, which will only close when a bug has been on it for a certain amount, you know, has gone around it a certain amount of time. Or any tree that you've noticed on the top of a hill, which is always short and stunted, whereas the same species in a valley will be tall and majestic. You know, they're feeling the wind. Plants, again, being rooted, they can't escape bad conditions. And so if they're feeling too much wind, I mean, really, you know, they're they're aware that their branches are being shook, they change their physiology, they change their whole developmental pattern to make smaller branches and a thicker trunk so that it doesn't get blown over. But when we talk about hearing, that's something completely different. While there's literally thousands of articles that report plants' responses to visual spectra, hundreds of articles talking about plants responding to volatile chemicals or plants responding to To being— to touch. There's, to my knowledge, no true article that shows that plants really have any response to sound waves or anything that's been repeated by a second lab. And anything that has been published, for some reason, the plants grow better in the music that the scientists prefer.

It's kind of funny that, uh, The only time I thought I was going to read about this was plants responding to heavy metal stress, but that wasn't what it was about.

Well, there actually is a study in one of our textbooks that shows that plants grow better listening to Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell.

And it opens up a world of hypotheses with things like Pandora. You could test quite a bit. And one of the— well, there was a— I do have an article from the 1960s where a guy named Richard Klein, who was a did a lot of work in plant light signaling, light physiology. He actually did some tests with beetles versus something else. I can't remember.

Yeah, exactly. That's a great article.

And it's interesting to see that old stuff. I actually got it out of— it was one of the files from when Folke Skoog died. They had his files and file cabinets that they were going to try to archive but had nowhere to do that. And they, you know, there was some good stuff in there from Klein, and so I made copies of all of that. So But really neat old articles like that sometimes can be fun. And they did talk about— the best part was the record player, which right now your materials and methods would be very difficult to recreate.

Yeah, Klein played to his plants Three to Get Ready by Dave Brubeck, The Stripper, and I Want to Hold Your Hand, and I Saw Her Standing There. But the great was, you know, how he reported his results. He said There was no leaf abscission traceable to the influence of the stripper, nor could we observe any stem mutation to plants exposed to the beetles.

Very good. Yeah, well, that's good. I'm glad you have that, you're able to pull that up because that's pretty good. So what was the take-home message when you think about, you know, plants as these collections of sensors and, you know, maybe anthropomorphizing this a bit? What was the real take-home message that we should have as plant biologists and as communicators about plant biology?

Well, the real take-home message is that the sessile nature of plants makes them incredibly complex. That's, you know, unmoving means that you have to be much more complex biologically. You know, people or all animals, when we're in a situation in a bad environment, we can escape. Running away, you know, both psychologically and physically is an easy strategy. But when you can't move, you got to be smarter. You got to be more complex in order to survive in the situation that you are. Both as plant biologists, plant communicators trying to get people involved in plant biology, if we think about it, everything that we do is connected to plant biology. You and I are breathing oxygen right now. I drank 2 cups of coffee this morning already. I'm sitting on a wooden chair, my clothes are made of cotton, and I burnt dead millions of old plants in my car on the way to the office this morning. And all of these plants survived because they knew what was good— knew, in air quotes, how to grow well in their environment. So if we're so dependent on plants, and we know that the environment is rapidly changing now, if we don't understand how plants sense their own environment and adapt to the changing environment, we might find ourselves in trouble 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now with the environment so quickly changing that we won't have the plants for our own needs. So it's not only a basic biology question, which is fascinating, it's an essential, uh, knowledge for the survival of the human species. I know that sounds very bombastic, but I really believe that.

I think you're right. I think that in order for us to understand how to maximize plant outputs and plant survival, plant conservation, It really behooves us to understand the mechanisms that control their sensing of the environment. And maybe—

And what we don't know, you know, and maybe that's even more exciting for us as scientists, is, you know, we know that plants, you know, see and respond to light waves, and they respond to volatile chemicals, they respond to touch, and they respond to changes in gravity and the changes in the weather and temperature and the changes of, you know, lots of things in the environment. But how do they integrate it all? You know, there's no brain. How is all this information integrated in such an exquisite system to yield a plant that's, again, exquisitely adapted to its environment? There's got to be integration going on, and we don't know how.

Well, that is kind of a good lead-in to your research. And so let's, let's take a short break here. And then on the other side of the message, We'll come back and talk about what you do in your research program, and then touch on a little bit in what's happening in genetic engineering in Israel, and maybe a little bit of the social climate towards those technologies. So we'll be back with Dr. Danny Shamovitz in just a few minutes.

Grandma, don't touch that radio! Hi, talking biotechers, this is Vern Blazek, and this is the Vern Blazek Science Power Hour! booth announcer for the Talking Biotech podcast. We're moving into our 40-somethingth episode, and we get lots of requests for an interview with Dr. Folta himself. What makes that dude tick? How is that cat wired? We'll explore the deep crevasses of his soul in Talking Biotech episode number 50. So, you might recall that I interviewed him on my podcast, the Vern Blaytheck And our hour, with your host, Vern Blazak. It was considered by some a raging case of non-transparency, by those who wanted to cash a check with a manufactured scandal. It was so much not a story that we're going to do it again, only using your questions. If you have a question you'd like me to ask Dr. Folta, send it to my attention at talkingbiotechpodcast@gmail.com. I'll assemble all of the questions and grill that turkey with my interview for episode 50. He's a scientist, he's a thespian, and I'm a hard-hitting booth announcer that's glad to ask the hard questions. Let me know what you'd like to know. And now back to the Talking Biotech Podcast.

So we're back on the Talking Biotech podcast with Professor Danny Shamovitz, and he comes to us from Tel Aviv University where he is a researcher but also a dean, so wearing the 2 hats, which must drive him crazy and keep him busy.

Well, I'm glad you said researcher first and not dean first. Thank you.

I know. Well, as a guy who describes himself as professor in chair, you know, I do the same thing. You know, the students and the research are my baby. I do the other thing for service, and you know the drill. But one of the exciting things about being able to talk to him today, to talk to Danny today, is that I remember his papers from when I was a graduate student. He was on a lot of very high-profile publications that were occurring around a series of plant mutants that were defective in the way they saw light. So they saw light signals when there was none. And this is important because it helped us understand that circuitry that controlled how a plant integrated signals. And what's the current state of what's happening in the COPs?

Well, you actually know, it was COPs which actually led to my book in the end, because these COPs, these proteins that really were like the master regulator of how a plant responds to light and dark. The reason I studied it actually was because I was interested in answering a plant-specific question. You know, something that was really unique to plant biology and not found in human biology. But midway through my postdoc, after I cloned some of the COP genes, thanks to the beginning of the Human Genome Project in the mid-1990s, I found out that all of these Arabidopsis genes, all these plant genes that I found that help a plant know if it's in the dark or in the light, are also part of the human genome. And that's actually what sort of got me thinking about what are the parallels between human biology and plant biology, that they're really not as unique as we would like to think a lot of times, that the unity of biology is much stronger than the diversity in a lot of ways. That's a really great— But this led me to a completely different project, which was, why do plants make drugs, to put it bluntly? And I got to this because my brother-in-law, who's a pilot, called me about 7 or 8 years ago and said, "What do you know about indole-3-carbinol?" Now that's not actually a question that you get asked quite often by people, and the reason he had been asked was asking me that question was because his wife, my sister-in-law, had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and she didn't want to take tamoxifen. She had lived for in India for 15 years, but she was told that this. Chemical, indole-3-carbinol, which is made by Brassica, by mustards, could be used in place of tamoxifen. So you've probably heard these stories that if you eat a lot of broccoli or a lot of cauliflower, there's a lot of chemicals that can protect you against cancer. And one of those chemicals is called indole-3-carbinol. So my answer to my brother-in-law was I'd never heard of it. Went into Medline at the time and there was almost nothing about it. So, I did the, of course, the obvious thing. I bought some from Sigma, threw it on Arabidopsis plants, and they stopped growing. Their meristems, all this in the meristems, the stem cells of the plant, all the cells stopped dividing, which is exactly what you would want for an anti-cancer drug. But what I thought was actually even more interesting was why do plants make this? They don't make— plants don't make drugs so that we could get high or that we can— not have cancer or not have a fever like with salicylic acid. Plants make these chemicals because they have some role within the plant metabolism, some role within plant biology. And so what we've been studying recently is what do these chemicals actually do within the plant physiology?

And that's, as I drink my big cup of a plant defense compound that helps me stay awake, you know, it's very true. I mean, once again, you know, these plants, and this kind of even ties in with some of the thoughts that Michael Pollan has expressed about, are we— are plants selecting us or are we selecting them? And, and it's an interesting question because they're making compounds that we find favorable for our health and benefit, and then we're around to select those plants that help us survive. So it's a really interesting kind of synergy there. But what's the— what is the hypothesis with indole-3-carbinol? What—

Well, when it comes to Yeah, so what we are working hypothesis now is that within the plant, this chemical is made upon herbivory when the plant is attacked by an insect, and that it's signaling the plant to stop growing. Well, it does two things. One, it also helps repress the or the well, sorry, I went went to Hebrew for a second. It repels the the insect, but it also then signals to the plant to stop. Cell division so that it can put its resources to defending itself. You know, we've known for decades that when plants are attacked by insects, they stop growing. And what we're considering is that actually maybe this, this stoppage of growth is an active process. It's not a negative process of the damage. It's actually the plant is then reallocating resources to defense. And then once the damage is gone, the chemical is then reabsorbed, goes away, whatever, and then the plant then starts dividing again. But we can also then maybe even think that maybe plants can be used as a model system to help us understand how medicines work and to be used also within the pharmaceutical industry so that plant research not only is helping agriculture, it's also helping pharmaceutical biomedical research.

And are there any hints as to how this compound is functioning? I know there's been some in vitro work on this on, on like cell lines.

Well, I would like to say that we've solved the problem, But what we found so far is something very plant-specific because it inhibits the plant hormone auxin, directly competes with auxin for its binding site in the plant.

Okay.

But we have some unpublished results which might hint at other modes of action that are similar between human cells and plant cells. And actually, we have a collaboration with a lab next to me where they are working on trying to figure out what this chemical does also in human cells.

One of the other areas that I was curious about is, what is the climate like in Israel with respect towards genetic engineering and genetically improved crops that have been, well, let's say transgenic, okay? So, you know, GMO crops.

Right.

Well, we in Israel, we don't grow any crops that are certified genetically modified or that have gone through genetic engineering. We don't grow any crops for commercial purposes, and this is for one simple reason. Our largest trading partner in agriculture is Western Europe. And as long as Western Europe does not allow GMO in, then the Israeli Department of Agriculture won't let Israeli farmers grow GMO plants. There's plenty of GMO plants that are being grown in test fields, that are being grown in academic fields, that are being grown in our, in our own Department of Agriculture test fields. But nothing is commercialized. We're not allowed to grow it for commercial reasons, but only because of the economic implications for trade with Europe. Having absolutely nothing to do with perceived lack of safety or anything like that. It's a complete economic decision, unfortunately. There are plenty of Israeli startups that are dealing with this. There are a lot of Israeli startups dealing with CRISPR-Cas9 modification of plants right now. A lot of work being done on using— I don't call these GMO, but we're doing a lot of molecular breeding using genetic markers for breeding purposes. We actually, in my institute, we just finished sequencing the wild emmer wheat genome a few weeks ago, and this has just yielded a wealth of data for use in breeding strategies. But of course, in our supermarkets, you get these non-GMO sections of the supermarket just like you get in the United States. And again, this is only because of economics.

Right.

The supermarkets realize they can sell bad fruit for more, and so they do it. Like anywhere, you know, we— I've taken— it's a battle, and probably one of the reasons I wrote my book and the reason I'm talking to you now is I think that we as scientists have to be much more active in coming out and clearly stating that there is absolutely, positively no danger in genetic modification of plants. You know, I'm wearing a shirt right now that I— that we're planning a shirt right now that says, I'm a GMO. People did, but part of the problem is that we don't have genetic awareness. People don't understand what that means. What I've seen even here in the past 3 years, that the pendulum has started swinging in the other direction, that people are saying, well, what's the problem? When they don't find the problem, the barriers are starting to come down. What's going on with GMO, it's the same thing. We have a group of people who are stopping to vaccinate their kids. You know, it's the exact same thing. You know, it's lack of science awareness.

And I think one of the big downsides of that is that so many people who work in academic science, and so many in Israel as well as here in the States, we got into this business to try to solve problems for people and the environment and come up with solutions and come up with the next big breakthrough. To think that science progress is being hindered by misinformation and by a campaign that really vilifies not only plant science some sort of, you know, crooked bastardization of nature, but guys like you and me as people who shouldn't be tampering with nature. And it's really sad because I think that we got into this for the right reasons, and maybe we're seeing an unfortunate hindrance. And I don't know, how do you— how do people feel about that over there?

Well, first of all, I think that part of the problem is we plant scientists, or scientists in general, Because we were incredibly naive in thinking that everyone would understand what we were doing and accept it at face value. My PhD research was based on cloning of the genes involved in beta-carotene biosynthesis, which were then used to make golden rice. The fact that it's still not commercialized never even occurred to me 25 years ago, or 30 years ago when I was doing this research. But that was— that's our own problem. I think that we did a really bad job at communicating and working with legislators and working with policy experts around the world. And we sort of left the field open to nuts who have a lot of money to make by working at it. I was talking with this economist from the university, from UC Berkeley, and I said to him, you know, who's funding the anti-GMO movement? in the States? And he said, what, you don't know? And I said, I'm sorry, no, I don't. I really have no idea. Was it organic farmers? He says, oh no, they don't have nearly enough money to do this. He said, see who really has the most to lose by GMO crops, and then you'll see who's funding it. And I said, you mean like the chemical companies whose herbicides or whose pesticides are no longer being used? And he said, bingo. He said, if you follow the money trail, that's where it's going back to. It's so hidden that no one knows about it. It comes out as this wonderful help the Earth movement, but reality, it's actually big business versus big business versus big business, like everything.

I do think that's really what it boils down to. I certainly have heard the stories of chemical companies in the developing world paying farmers to not grow insect-resistant seeds. But that's anecdotal. I wouldn't doubt it. I mean, you're talking about players here who everyone's into protecting a profit. But I think you've got multiple, like you say, multiple industries who everybody is getting a leg up on the competition, not by showing what they can do, but rather showing why the other guy is bad.

Exactly.

And this is the unfortunate term that the internet just helps propagate. And, uh, and so basically you've got everybody pointing a finger at each other saying, you know, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. The general public gets into their tribes and camps, and guys like you and me who are sitting here looking at the evidence and data and making a call, no one listens to us.

But I think what we need to do is, even both at large and small, we need to say, people, you know, don't trust me.

me.

You know, because as soon as you say trust me, then, then you've lost the battle because, you know, no one trusts anyone, um, especially when, you know, science— we're not trusted. I'd say, well, let's look at the data. Show me what you can find. And then they come up with some website that means nothing. I said, yeah, but what does this mean? You know, I always come back— my favorite article over the past few years was that article about, uh, GMO-fed cows, you know, that showed that there was Absolutely no difference in yield and health of GMO-fed cows versus non-GMO-fed cattle. And this is a great study because one, first of all, in cattle there's no subjectivity. Second of all, in industry, you know, again, farmers want to make money. If your cattle are dying, if they're falling around, you know, because of this awful food, you're going to stop feeding it. And what this study showed was that there's absolutely no difference in these cattle. So it's not like asking a person, do you feel good or feel better? Actually, we're actually doing— We're actually doing a study here at Tel Aviv University right now with a colleague of mine who's a neuroscientist. And he's putting people in an MRI and giving them GMO food and non-GMO food and see how it affects their brain activity.

And are they prompting them that it is GMO food or non-GMO food?

That's part of the control.

Yeah, and then you switch it and tell them that the stuff that's non-GMO is GMO.

Of course, exactly.

It's gonna be a great study because we also picked people based on what their prior opinions And I guarantee you that that will show a treatment effect, because there are people who have told me, when I ate GMO wheat, that I was real sick, and then when I switched to non-GMO wheat, the non-GMO verified wheat, then I was fine. So it was— and knowing that there's no GMO wheat that's commercialized, it shows you that the treatment effect—

Wait a second, did I miss something? Has wheat been GMO commercialized?

No, no, not at all. So, that's the problem, is that here's somebody who's responding to what was probably something that she read on a website that, you know, that to her was helping explain her symptoms and helping her rationalize why she was feeling the way she was feeling. And then when she switched, she took control of the situation, she mitigated the risk, In her perception, and felt relief. And so how much of this is— and this is an interesting thing that I think about— is how much of the dystrophy and the nervousness around this, how much pain and hassle that must cause people who live in an eternal state of being afraid of their food.

So, you know, food— I don't think we completely appreciated how primal And it's really stupid that we didn't. How primal food is for us. You know, and that's actually one of the things that we've been doing on a more inclusive level here at the university is that a few, 3 years ago, I founded something that was called the Manna Center Program for Food Safety and Security. And the reason, and the goal of this institute, of course, or the program is, you know, to make sure that we have enough food by 2050, but that's what everyone wants. But the more immediate goal was to get social scientists and laboratory scientists together studying the same classes, doing research together to understand each other. Because any, you know, if we could make the best crop in the world, but if it's not going to be accepted by the small-scale farmer in India, then we've done nothing. If we don't under— you know, if we have farmers, whether it be in Florida or India, who aren't willing to accept our technologies, then we're— or we don't even understand what their real needs are, then we're just working in air. But on the other hand, we need to make sure we have social scientists who are scientifically literate, who actually are— and policy experts who actually know when I say a transgene, what does that mean? We can't just be talking to the biologists anymore. We have to be affecting— you know, at Tel Aviv University, the east side of campus is the science side and the west side of campus is the social science humanities side. We need to have those 2 come together also when it comes to food biology, because only in such a way can we really have a true impact.

I think you hit the nail on the head right there, and you see this trend more and more. And I've been learning so much from social psychologists, from psychologists, from sociologists, from economicists, or whatever those guys are called, economists. I've been learning so much from reading and listening to people from these other disciplines to really help me shape my discussion and my arguments when I come to a concerned public. Our first goal as a scientific community is to wall off and say, listen, You know, follow the data, follow the evidence, here are the statistics, talk to me later. And that approach just doesn't win hearts and minds. So I just think it's super exciting, and I'm going to read more about— it's called the Manna Institute, or Manna Center, M-A-N-N-A Center. Is that the—

Yeah, if I could give ourselves a plug, we have an international summer school where we actually bring a graduate program for graduate courses for both social scientists and laboratory scientists to come study together for 3 weeks. in things like introduction to food security, food security and international development, all types of great things. And people— for last year, we had 130 students from 9 countries, many of them from the developing world. It's really quite fascinating. If I could give one other, you know, even if we're asking a simple question, you know, like Israel is famous for drip irrigation, you know, which can really save a lot of water in the world. You know, how do you get an Indian small-scale farmer to adopt drip irrigation. It's a study we've been involved in, and the Indian government's been doing a huge amount of effort to try to get people to adopt this technology, and it wasn't working. And the study that we did was an impact analysis, actually came to a really simply, simply obvious conclusion, but no one had came to it before. If you want to get a farmer to adopt a new technology, even in the developing world, identify his neighbor who has the most social content Give him the technology for free, and then within a year, all of his neighbors have adopted it.

And, and this is exactly— I think the— I mean, it's such a perfect way to frame this because even with— I sit here in the state of Florida where we're undergoing this tremendous citrus crisis, and I think that if we got transgenic trees into the hands of a couple of growers who made a nutritious product that was looking great, that performed better and had great resistance to disease, I think you would see acceptance from the market. And I think you would see consumers— not— you'd see other growers and all the companies saying, okay, I need it too.

It worked for papaya.

Yes, it did. And we're— and so we go about this the wrong way. The industries like to obfuscate and hide their treatments, and the companies involved don't like to let you into the black box. And I think they learn from this. I think they see that it was not just a bad PR move, it also didn't develop trust. And that when you let people see what you're doing, you show them the data, you show them the products, you show them how it's being used, it changes everything.

Exactly. And of course, it has to be a good price. You know, why do people— why are people not against genetic engineering of human growth hormone or of insulin? Because, you know, it has an obvious benefit for the consumer. So far, the consumer hasn't felt that they have anything to gain by it. As soon as they feel that they have something— you know, the farmer has something to gain by it, but as soon as this consumer has something to gain, then it'll be accepted.

Well, and I think that it's important, and what's something that gives me incredible traction, especially when speaking with millennials and that age group, is, is that you haven't felt the pinch, but it ain't about you. And if you think about the people in the developing world and the people here in the United States even who live in cities where you can't get fresh produce because there's either not enough money for it or not demand for it, or that it, you know, it goes bad on the shelf. If we had technology that allowed us to feed people more, you know, then this is— and so this is where I as a scientist come from. And I'm not thinking about this as me, me, me. And I see a need that needs to be filled and a technology that can fill it. So my drive is, is to let's push it that direction.

Yeah, I find it morally reprehensible, completely morally reprehensible, the fact that we are willing to withhold a technology that can save people's lives. The obvious— I mean, the greatest example of this is the use of pesticide resistance in China. Since pesticide-resistant strains were introduced in China, I don't remember the exact statistic about how many million of Chinese farmers were no longer poisoned by pesticides.

Yes. And how many tons of broad-spectrum insecticides did not get introduced to their environment? The numbers from, uh, the book, um, Tomorrow's Table with Pam Ronald was something like on cotton in 2003 alone, it was 300,000 tons of insecticides not used.

Exactly. And withholding This technology from the developing world because of some warm fuzzy-duzy feeling of backyard farmers is truly morally reprehensible. And we need to be saying that out loud.

Well, you just did. And hopefully we'll be able to amplify this message. And as more people begin to step up and talk about this, it empowers all of us as scientists to have the words in our queue. I really appreciate you spending the time with me today on this, and so thank you very much to Dr. Danny Shamovitz from Tel Aviv University in Israel. Thank you so much for joining me today. This was a really nice talk.

Oh, I really enjoyed finally talking with you, Kevin, and keep up your, your great both scientific and public work. We're behind you.

Last part of talking biotech today, we'll talk a little bit about science in an alternative medium, and that's the alternative medium of comics. I received a comic book from Miles Grebb. He puts together something called After the Gold Rush and other ones as well, but After the Gold Rush has a science-based theme. And the idea is, is, well, I won't spoil the story. Never a big fan of comics myself. But I really appreciate the artistic quality and the attention to scientific detail that Miles is working on harvesting, and that's why I'm talking about it today. I would encourage you to check out his work. You can Google his name, Miles Greb, G-R-E-B-M-I-L-E-S. Miles like kilometers in other countries. The comic is called After the Gold Rush. And he also has a Twitter feed which is @GoldRushComic. And Miles is trying to get this off the ground. It's independent for lots of reasons, but that's part of the, the reason I talk about it here is because it's independent work by us, by someone who's attempting to merge art and science, which I always think is great because if it allows us another conduit to get science into the hands of people and maybe even inspire them to think about it or look at it in a different way, that, that's what we need to be doing. And I think Miles does it beautifully here because talks about the, the particular version I saw, the protagonist lands on a different planet and, you know, it talks about what are the things that you may encounter as someone who ends up on an unusual place in terms of changes in the environment and differences in the things you need. And it turned out to be just a good way to think your way through a very compelling, artistically done piece of work. The nice part is Miles has a section in the back called peer review, and it provides an opportunity to— or information of how you can communicate with him and the parts that are not scientifically up to snuff. And this way it kind of vets his work and keeps it real and keeps it consistent with the science. Because if we're trying to get people excited about science, we might as well get them excited about actual science, because that science fiction stuff is cool, but you know, only so many flying turtles, right? Well, thank you very much for joining me with Talking Biotech Podcast. My name is Kevin Folta, and thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you again next week on the Talking Biotech Podcast.

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