MIT Scientist Exposes Monsanto

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Bioinformatics and computational biology are huge areas of study now.

In both chemistry and neuroscience areas that I have worked in, there is a lot of collaboration between chemists or neuroscientists and computer scientists. Often, computer scientists develop new methods of analyzing data and use these methods to analyze large, complex sets of chemical or brain data.

Thank you, that link demonstrates my point excellently. It says that ingesting more than 85mL of glyphosate can cause significant toxicity, and that most cases of glyphosate poisoning are due to deliberate ingestion. That's completely consistent with the notion backed up in the rest of the literature that glyphosate is not causing health effects in the general population.

Exposure to insecticides can also be harmless, one simply avoids an overdose... All chemicals have dose-response reactions and a small exposure won't hurt you. Exactly what constitutes a "small exposure" is what varies.


I think this misjudges the context in which those analogies were made - explaining dose-response theory, and debunking the idea that something must be bad because it is "chemical". Nobody was suggesting we shouldn't evaluate the effects of glyphosate because we know how deadly water can be.


An awful lot has changed since Da Vinci's time. All subjects are now much more complex and splintered, and becoming an expert in multiple disciplines is very difficult. We'll never have another Aristotle.

Bioinformatics are a huge area of study that will provide us with a lot of insights in the future, but this is not bioinformatic research. It isn't even original research. It is somebody with no background in biology making biological claims in journals of ill-repute.

What is a "small exposure" for parathion that won't hurt you?

I think that's a ridiculous statement to suggest that hyper-specialization is the only way possible in modern times. People can and do learn and do multiple things in their lifetimes. I know I have, and I know many others have and do, too. Your statement makes me wonder if your claims are such due to having one narrow special interest yourself - well, that combined with your age.. perhaps you haven't had a 2nd interest yet that you've become a bit of an expert in and can only think of things in the context of your own singular interest? Regardless of the reason for your statement, I think it's ridiculous. The world of information is now at our fingertips w/ everything being online and people can learn and do all sorts of things much easier and faster than ever before. I expect we'll see a lot more people with multiple areas of expertise & a lot more people who cross them into one another with research or engineering or art projects etc combining things that would have been completely separate disciplines in generations past.

It is very difficult to really learn a subject in depth and become a true expert in the subject. Usually, true experts are only expert in a limited area of specialization, not in general.

You don't get to be a real expert by reading about something. You become an expert by spending a great deal of time reading and understanding the entire literature about the subject as well as by doing original research into the subject.

Now that is for real experts, not what the general population thinks of experts which is essentially someone in the room who knows more about the subject than anyone else in the room. In reality, those kind of experts aren't experts at all and probably aren't experts at anything.

Crossing into different areas is common in research.
The true eggsperts on an area are still the people in that area driving theoretical developments in that area, not the people crossing into that area to use some technique.

Maybe for closely related areas. A mathematician doing research in geometry might be able to become productive in topology without many problems. Crossing over to organic chemistry would basically mean starting over.

That said, there are some issues in other areas that a person with expertise might be useful. For example, protein folding has aspects that could be appropriately tackled by mathematicians, computer scientists, physics, ... ..

And, for what it's worth, the vast majority of academic types that I have known are not much interested in other fields outside of their own. Many are barely even interested in other areas of their own branch of science.

Most of the researchers I know like collaborating with others outside their own area or field.
I like it too, it is verry merry berry interesting to learn and use new techniques and try to put together some ideas using knowledge from different areas.