Author Archives: Michael Eisen

#GMOFAQ How Bt corn and Roundup Ready soy work, and why they should not scare you

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 12, 2012

Background Last week I wrote about the anti-science campaign being waged by opponents of the use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture. In that post, I promised to address a series of questions/fears about GMOs that seem to underly peoples’ objections to the technology. I’m not going to try to make this a comprehensive reference site about GMOs […]

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#GMOFAQ: Transferring genes from one species to another is neither unnatural nor dangerous

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 9, 2012

Last week I wrote about the anti-science campaign being waged by opponents of the use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture. In that post, I promised to address a series of questions/fears about GMOs that seem to underly peoples’ objections to the technology. I’m not going to try to make this a comprehensive reference site about GMOs […]

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How President Obama could really lead on open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 8, 2012

[The Washington Post ran a nice op-ed today from two student leaders linked to the recent public access petition campaign. I had submitted one that urges the administration to take a more agressive stance, which I am posting here.] Last weekend, a “We the People” petition calling on the Obama administration to provide free access […]

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Blog’s back

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 6, 2012
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The anti-GMO campaign’s dangerous war on science

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 1, 2012

This November, Californians will vote on an initiative that would require any food containing ingredients derived from genetically modified crops to be labeled as such. Backers of the “California Right To Know Genetically Engineered Food Act” are pitching it as a matter of providing information to consumers, who, they argue, “have a right to know […]

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The triumph of fake open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 23, 2012

It’s been a heady day for “open access”. A petition urging the Obama administration to extend the NIH’s public access policy to other government agencies blew past the halfway point in its goal to gather 25,000 signatures. And the faculty senate at UCSF voted to approve an “open access” policy that would “require” its faculty to […]

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What the UC “open access” policy should say

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 3, 2012

The joint faculty senate of the ten campuses of the University of California has floated a trial balloon “open access” policy. I, of course, laud the effort to move the ball forward on open access, but the proposed policy falls short in two key ways. 1) The rights reserved by the University are too limited. […]

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20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 1, 2012

When Harvard University says it can not afford something, people notice. So it was last month when a faculty committee examining the future of the university’s libraries declared that the continued growth of journal subscription fees was unsustainable, even for them. The accompanying calls for faculty action are being hailed as a major challenge to the traditional publishers […]

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The weak prescriptions in Harvard’s open-access letter and how I’d fix them

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 24, 2012

Much is being made of a recent letter from Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council on the Library to the campus community announcing their conclusion that: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable Judging from many of the responses, people seem […]

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MLB’s “Ultimate Father-Son Sweepstakes” made my baseball-loving, Star Wars-obsessed daughter cry

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 23, 2012

My six year old daughter loves baseball (when she was three she invited Manny Ramirez to visit her school). She also loves Star Wars (which she consideres the ultimate princess movies). And she loves video games especially those that involve smashing things). So you can imagine how thrilled she was when, as we checked the […]

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