King Charles III Speaks One Day After Queen Elizabeth’s Death | LIVE

Sep 9, 2022

King Charles III, who ascended the British throne on Thursday, will address the nation from Buckingham Palace for the first time following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.

Watch Live: King Charles III delivers address to the nation for first time as sovereign | DW News

Sep 9, 2022

King Charles III is set to address the nation for the first time as sovereign, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

Sheldon Krimsky, Who Warned of Profit Motive in Science, Dies at 80 – The New York Times

He delved into numerous scientific fields — stem-cell research, genetic modification of food and DNA privacy among them — and sought to pinpoint the dangers.

Sheldon Krimsky in 2018. He was a leading scholar of environmental ethics who focused on the conflicts of interest between private companies and universities.Credit…Alonso Nichols/Tufts University

By Katharine Q. Seelye

Published May 5, 2022Updated May 8, 2022

Sheldon Krimsky, a leading scholar of environmental ethics who explored issues at the nexus of science, ethics and biotechnology, and who warned of the perils of private companies underwriting and influencing academic research, died on April 23 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 80.

His family said that he was at a hospital for tests when he died, and that they did not know the cause.

Dr. Krimsky, who taught at Tufts University in Massachusetts for 47 years, warned in a comprehensive way about the increasing conflicts of interest that universities faced as their academic researchers accepted millions of dollars in grants from corporate entities like pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

In his book “Science in the Private Interest” (2003), he argued that the lure of profits was potentially corrupting research and in the process undermining the integrity and independence of universities.

But his wide-ranging public policy work went way beyond flagging the dangers inherent in the commercialization of science. The author, co-author or editor of 17 books and more than 200 journal articles, he delved into numerous scientific fields — stem-cell research, genetic modification of food and DNA privacy among them — and sought to pinpoint potential problems.

“He was the Ralph Nader of bioethics,” Jonathan Garlick, a stem-cell researcher at Tufts and a friend of Dr. Krimsky, said in a phone interview, referring to the longtime consumer advocate.

“He was saying, if we didn’t slow down and pay attention to important check points, once you let the genie out of the bottle there might be irreversible harm that could persist across many generations,” Dr. Garlick added. “He wanted to protect us from irreversible harm.”

In “Genetic Justice” (2012), Dr. Krimsky wrote that DNA evidence is not always reliable, and that government agencies had created large DNA databases that posed a threat to civil liberties. In “The GMO Deception” (2014), which he edited with Jeremy Gruber, he criticized the agriculture and food industries for changing the genetic makeup of foods.

His last book, published in 2021, was “Understanding DNA Ancestry,” in which he explained the complications of ancestry research and said that results from different genetic ancestry testing companies could vary in their conclusions. Most recently, he was starting to explore the emerging subject of stem-cell meat — meat made from animal cells that can be grown in a lab.

Mr. Nader, in fact, had a long association with Dr. Krimsky and wrote the introduction to some of his books.

“There was really no one like him: rigorous, courageous, and prolific,” Mr. Nader said in an email. “He tried to convey the importance of democratic processes in open scientific decision making in many areas. He criticized scientific dogmas, saying that science must always leave open options for revision.”

In “Science in the Private Interest” (2003), Dr. Krimsky argued that the lure of profits had the potential to corrupt academic scientists’ research.

Sheldon Krimsky was born on June 26, 1941, in Brooklyn. His father, Alex, was a house painter. His mother, Rose (Skolnick) Krimsky, was a garment worker.

Sheldon, known as Shelly, majored in physics and math at Brooklyn College and graduated in 1963. He earned a Master of Science degree in physics at Purdue University in 1965. At Boston University, he earned a Master of Arts degree in philosophy in 1968 and a doctorate in the philosophy of science in 1970.

He is survived by his wife, Carolyn Boriss-Krimsky, a playwright, artist and author, whom he married in 1970; a daughter, Alyssa Krimsky Clossey; a son, Eliot; three grandchildren; and a brother, Sidney.

Dr. Krimsky began his association with Tufts in what is now called the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning in 1974 and helped build it up over the decades. He also taught ethics at the Tufts University School of Medicine and was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, the New School and New York University.

He began to explore the conflicts of interest in academic research in the late 1970s, when he led a team of students on an investigation into whether the chemical company W.R. Grace had contaminated drinking wells in Acton, Mass.

Dr. Krimsky has said that when the company learned that he would be releasing a negative report — the wells were later designated a Superfund site — one of its top executives asked the president of Tufts to bury the study and fire him. The president refused. But Dr. Krimsky was disturbed that the company had tried to interfere, and it prompted him to begin studying how corporations, whether or not they had made financial contributions, sought to manipulate science.

“He spoke truth to power,” Dr. Garlick said. “He wanted to give voice to skepticism and give voice to the skeptics.”

Dr. Krimsky was a longtime proponent of what he called “organized skepticism.”

“When claims are made, you have to start with skepticism until the evidence is so strong that your skepticism disappears,” he told The Boston Globe in 2014. “You don’t in science start by saying, ‘Yes, I like this hypothesis, and it must be true.’”

He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and headed its committee on scientific freedom and responsibility from 1988 to 1992. He was also a fellow of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y., and served on the editorial boards of seven scientific journals.

When he wasn’t working, he liked to play the guitar and harmonica. He divided his time between Cambridge and New York City.

“Shelly never gave up hope of a better world,” Julian Agyeman, a professor in Dr. Krimsky’s department and its interim chairman, was quoted as saying in a Tufts obituary. “He was the consummate activist-advocate-scholar.”

Katharine Q. “Kit” Seelye is a Times obituary writer. She was previously the paper’s New England bureau chief, based in Boston. She worked in The Times’s Washington bureau for 12 years, has covered six presidential campaigns and pioneered The Times’s online coverage of politics. @kseelye

A version of this article appears in print on May 6, 2022, Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Sheldon Krimsky, 80, Who Warned That Money Was Corrupting Research.

See related:

• PDF of NYT Obituary
• “Remembering Sheldon Krimsky, Longtime Tufts Professor,” Tufts Now
• Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research? Sheldon Krimsky
• GMOs Decoded: A Skeptic’s View of Genetically Modified Foods (Food, Health, and the Environment): Sheldon Krimsky, Marion Nestie

…(read more).

The James Ford Lectures 2022 – Dogsbodies and Dogs’ Bodies: A Social and Cultural History of Roman Britain’s Dogs and People | Faculty of History

These lectures explore the social, cultural, and ritual histories of Roman-Britain’s people through an investigation of their entanglements with dogs. In the highly anthrozootic world of Roman Britain, dogs and humans together shaped mutual ecologies and life-ways. Dogs also served as metaphorical and ritual agents, and they were central in the production of both social difference and lived religion under Rome. By following the trail left by dogs, we can recover something of the lifeways and experience of the people with whom they shared the world, and we can identify and characterize some of the mechanisms through which a Roman provincial society was created.

See particularly:

Lecture Three: Dogs as Metaphorical Agents: Hierarchy, Inequality, Enslavement (4 February 2022)

In the absence of a well-developed social history for Roman Britain, little has been written on the lived experience of the bottom eighty-five percent of its population, but looking at dogs and humans together helps us recuperate something of both species’ experience under Rome. This lecture considers, on the one hand, the lives of pampered and self-feeding dogs; and on the other, low-status and enslaved humans. A shared constellation of images, prejudices, and metaphors emerged in the period which explained the moral shortcomings of both canines and the poor and justified their terrible treatment.

Fossil Fuel Divest Welcome & Strategy Meeting 9/10

See related:

• Harvard’s Divest Fest — Tuesday, May 3rd 2022
• Divest Harvard – The Back Story
  and
• Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard

Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – AGRA

See related:

• The “Green Revolution:” Its Essence, Achievements & Aftermath
• Some Troubling Chapters in The Political Ecology & History of West African Agriculture
• Richard Manning – Interview
  Interview of Richard Manning for the documentary “What a way to go – life at the end of empire” from Timothy S. Bennett. Mr. Manning’s account of the context and outcome of Dr. Borlaug’s work raises some very disturbing problems about the long-term impact of the “Green Revolution.”
• Jeffrey Sachs’ speech at the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit (full speech)
• “Just take the case of agriculture…”
• “No Soil. No Growing Seasons. Just Add Water and Technology:” The Recent Evolution & Tragic Trajectory of the World Food System
• “The Truth about the Green Revolution,” contribution to GTI Forum “Technology and the Future,” Great Transition Initiative (February 2022).
• Billionaire Hydroponics, Expanding World Hunger & The Tragic Future Trajectory of Global Food System
• Ignorance, Arrogance, Overshoot & Collapse: The Destructive Power of Enduing Myths In Collapsing Civilizations
  and
• Overcoming the Multiple Legacies of European Colonialism: Can The West Survive Its Most Cherished Historical Myths?
• Misplaced Metaphors in the Anthropocene: Beware of the Devastating Power of Cultural Clichés & Misconstrued Metaphors on a Small Planet
• The Vulnerability of the Global Food System and the Strategies Needed for a Sustainable “Recovery”

Food-matters,

Patrice Loch Otieno Lumumba speaks to AGRA staff and partners in Nairobi

Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – AGRA– Aug 10, 2016

Patrice Loch Otieno Lumumba is a Kenyan who served as the Director of Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission from September 2010 to August 2011 and is currently the Director of The Kenya School of Laws since the year 2014.

See related:

• The “Green Revolution:” Its Essence, Achievements & Aftermath
• The Agribusiness Alliance for a Green Revolution Failed Africa – Tim Wise (GDAE-Tufts University & IATP)
• Reversing the AGRA “meta-narrative” about Africa and the ‘Green Revolution’ – A conversation…
• Failing Africa’s Farmers: An Impact Assessment of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Timothy A. Wise
• Beyond the ‘Green Revolution:’ The Current Paradigm Shift in Global Agricultural Science
• Africa’s land use problem: Is Green Revolution agriculture a solution or a cause? | IATP
• African civil society publicly challenges Green Revolution backers | IATP
• Beyond Africa’s Green Revolution: Time for donors to shift funding to agroecology | IATP
• Soils, Agriculture, Carbon Sequestration and Human Survival
• The mistake of petro-intensive agriculture
• Why Bill Gates is Now the Biggest US Farmland Owner
• Bill Gates: How Gene Editing, AI Can Benefit World’s Poorest – AAAS, 2020
• Why I love fertilizer
• Bill Gates is the biggest private owner of farmland in the United States. Why? | Bill Gates | The Guardian
• ‘Bill Gates is continuing the work of Monsanto’, Vandana Shiva tells FRANCE 24
• Who Really Feeds the World?: The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology: Vandana Shiva
• Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom: Vandana Shiva, Kartikey Shiva
• Vandana Shiva on the Taking Down of Bill Gates’ Empires

As well as:

• How Could Something So Right Turn Out Wrong? How Could Something So Good Go Bad? The Tragic Story of the Modern World’s Love Affair with The “Green Revolution” – Part 1
• The Rise and Forthcoming Demise of Petro-Intensive Agriculture – Some Elements of The Scientific Critique – Part 2
• The Mythology of the Green Revolution – Part 3
• Alternatives to “Green Revolution” Technology for Long-Term Agricultural Sustainability & Survival – Part 4
• The “Green Revolution,” AGRA & the African Agricultural Narrative – Part 5
• A New ‘Scramble for Africa:’ The Resistance to Corporate ‘Landgrabbing’ & the AGRA ‘Meta-Narrative’ – Part 6
• After the “Green Revolution” Who “Owns” Global Agriculture? The Fatal Mistake of Misplaced Metaphors in Our Globalized Agro-ecosystem – Part 7
• Some Troubling Chapters in The Political Ecology & History of West African Agriculture
• The Oakland Institute | The Land Rights Issue

Food-matters,