Better Living Through Ancient Etruscan Grammar

I don't know exactly when it started - I guess I've had some creeping doubts all along - but over the past two weeks or so I've been fostering this growing pit of worry and self doubt about whether I will be miserable spending the next several years in school. The worst of it was yesterday, when a bleak feeling of being mistaken and misguided dominated my perspective. Rosa Nilpferd helped me through as per usual, and I decided to go to bed early. Well, I woke up with a weirdly positive attitude - everything that had seemed impossible the evening before suddenly seemed well within my grasp. To top it all off, today's Ancient Etruscan Grammar lecture was about the amazing and life-giving topic of entropy! It was beautiful and inspiring - why doesn't all the air in the room just zoom over to the corner and leave us to suffocate? Why don't the oceans just evaporate into the atmosphere? We have Disorder to thank for our circumstances. As Joanna said, "life is thundering blissful toward death in a stampede". And all caught up in the stampede are countless moments of conception, the products viable or not, where particles communicate with each other to harness some of the available energy in the Universe and divert it toward providing a temporary structure for themselves. The structure is always growing, learning, adapting, fading, and dying - it is our lives!

This afternoon Siyavash, Allison, and I went to a lecture by a Biotechnologist here at B.U. The title was "Feeding the World: Are Transgenic Plants Part of the Solution?" Well, this is an issue of great concern to me, surrounded by many misconceptions (please see previous paragraph) on "both sides of the aisle", as they say. This professor has done extensive research and is very excited about the contribution GM crops can make to improving nutrition throughout the world. Her talk was very interesting, and there were many areas in which I disagreed with her. During the Q&A, I told her about my concerns about environmental contamination and the disturbing trend of farmers becoming dependent on corporations to buy seeds every year, which goes against the goals of sustainability and self-sufficiency that she stated are important to her. She gave my question a nod and said we should speak during the reception. So, during the reception she said that in her lab they call Monsanto "Mon-satan" because such corporations actually make their work more difficult. The reason for this is that they push GM crops unethically and without sound scientific risk assessment, thereby undermining the concept that agricultural biotechnology can be used responsibly as one tool for decreasing poverty and improving nutrition. Well, I'm not saying I think it can or will be used that way, but it was fascinating to hear a scientist who works in this field criticize Monsanto that way.

Another interesting element of her talk was her work with a group called Harvest Plus, which is funded by the Gates Foundation. This group focuses on improving nutrition by promoting traditional breeding techniques. During the reception, she told me that the group sees biotechnology only as a last resort when traditional breeding techniques fail. I am impressed by this working philosophy and once again it seems like the Gates Foundation really did its homework.