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Weekend Roundup: Present at the Unraveling
"Present at the Creation" was the title Dean Acheson, the famed American secretary of state from 1949-1953, gave to his memoir, which recounts the vision and construction of the post-World War II institutions of global order such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the trade-opening precursor to the World Trade Organization, and NATO that followed on the heels of the United Nations. In that same era, French diplomat Robert Schuman, considered "the father of Europe," planted the seeds of European integration that have grown for the last several decades into a club of 28 countries with a population of 500 million. Both efforts, aimed at extinguishing the nationalism and protectionism seen as the root cause of world war, fostered the era of globalization now coming to an end. Brexit, like the Trump campaign in the U.S. and the rise of the anti-European Union right on the European continent, marks an historic turn of the tide. Today, we are present at the unraveling of those grand institutions that have outlived their capacity to deliver inclusively and lost the allegiance of their publics.

"Brexit is another demonstration," Craig Calhoun, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "that the big global institutions built in the wake of World War II are no longer able to maintain global order." Popular anger targeted distant and seemingly unaccountable cosmopolitan elites in charge of those institutions for failing to address pressing concerns over immigration and economic dislocation that are part and parcel of interdependence. "Brexit is a rejection of 'Cool Britannia,' the 1990s branding of a cosmopolitan, creative and united Britain as a part of a happy vision of globalization," Calhoun cuttingly quips.

The global order now waning has been the springboard for China's dramatic rise in recent decades. Writing from Beijing, He Yafei worries now that Brexit is only "the first wave of deglobalization" that will "rebalance in the domestic and EU-wide political landscape in favor of those anti-globalization and anti-EU forces." He might add the U.S. as well where Donald Trump this week lashed out at China and trade deals as the cause of America's woes.

The great historical question is what comes next -- a return to nationalism or a leap forward toward responsive new institutions with the capacity and competence to forge a deeper, more inclusive integration that can actually solve the problems at hand? Perpetual suspension in the purgatory between these historic options only fuels highly polarized discontent.

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer puts his finger squarely on the key contradiction behind chaos in Europe: for all the populist anger against "Brussels," the reality is that nation-states still run the show -- not least his own country whose insistence on protracted austerity policies in financially troubled southern Europe has destabilized politics there. "The EU institutions are blamed for all kinds of problems: globalization, immigration, welfare cuts and Thatcherism, youth unemployment, lack of democracy, and much more," he writes from Berlin. "In fact, by preventing the EU from addressing these issues, the national governments -- helpless to tackle them effectively on their own -- have made these problems worse." Also writing from Germany, Green activist Sven Giegold emphasizes Fischer's point. "Like the amputations practiced in medieval medicine," he says, "Brexit is not a cure. In the face of global challenges, European nation-states cannot secure self-determination and stability on their own. Cooperation with the European Union would make nation-states less vulnerable."

Writing from the dispassionate distance of New Delhi, Dhruva Jaishankar views Brexit as "the first major casualty of digital democracy." "Social media, rather than creating connections with people who possess differing points of view and ideologies," he observes, "tends to reinforce prejudice." Rather than being a force for consensus, the widespread use of social media during the Brexit debate spread misinformation and myths, feeding "polarization and gridlock." Writing from Paris, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, too, sees Brexit as a victory "not of democracy[,] but of demagogy."

This week's horrific suicide attack at Atatürk Airport in Istanbul is yet another indication of how post-World War II institutions have outlived their purpose in the face of new realities. NATO, the defense alliance rooted in the Cold War that ties together Turkey with European states that have also recently been subject to terrorism, is a complete mismatch with the security challenges confronting these countries today. Writing from Istanbul, Behlül Özkan sees the main target of the so-called Islamic State as Turkey's secular democracy because it is the opposite of its idea of a caliphate. Turkish novelist Kaya Genc relates the enveloping mood after the series of recent attacks. "Istanbul as a bridge of cultures belonged to the noughties: the 2010s is the decade of ruptures."

WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports personal stories from on the ground in Istanbul about how local residents are reaching out to help the victims and follows the investigation by authorities into Islamic State suspects from post-Soviet states. Dean Obeidallah is upset that the American media does not give the same attention to terror attacks in Muslim-majority places like Istanbul as it does to similar attacks in Paris or Brussels.

"india

Digging for water in India's devastating drought. © Vivek Singh

While headlines from London and Istanbul grip the global attention, a drought in India affecting a staggering 330 million barely registers. Reporting exclusively for The WorldPost from Bundelkhand, a vast rural landscape in north-central India, photojournalist Vivek Singh chronicles the life and death struggle for drops of water in striking black and white images that convey the desperation leading to farmer suicide and mass migration in the country. "As the crisis deepens," Singh says, "the country that celebrated the 1960s agricultural revolution and a resulting boom in production of food grains is now seeing its farmers dying in debt and despair."

In our continuing series on Africa and China presented by Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden, a Nigerian living in Guangzhou asks, "why are Chinese people so racist towards black people?" The two also look at how Chinese ivory smugglers in Namibia are affecting that southern African nation's efforts to curb the illegal trade.

In a thoughtful riposte to a recent interview with "Sapiens" author Yuval Harari in The WorldPost, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains why we creative humans can't accept an algorithmic account of human life based only in intellectual processes. "The history of human cultures," he writes, "is in good part a narrative of our resistance to native algorithms by means of inventions not predicted by those algorithms." No algorithm could have designed the cultivated beauty of these Japanese gardens and landscapes captured by the sensitive aesthetic of photographer Hidenobu Suzuki. Finally, our Singularity series this week profiles a robot that can wash your dishes.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.

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Juno Is Arriving At Jupiter On July 4
The national fireworks on July 4 this year will be joined by celestial fireworks as NASA's Juno mission arrives at Jupiter after five years of travel from Earth. Principals of the mission and its scientific experiments discussed the plans for the orbital insertion at a press conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, today, as Juno reached Jupiter's doorstep. Juno, in Roman mythology, was the wife of the king of the gods, Jupiter.

Juno's path is to thread a needle between Jupiter's radiation belts and its atmosphere. Starting at 11:18 pm EDT (8:18 pm PDT) on July 4's evening, the spacecraft will burn its main engine to slow it from its 165,000 mph speed with respect to Earth, one of the highest speeds ever reached. The burn should last 35 minutes, until 11:53 pm EDT (8:53 pm PDT). Eager scientists and engineers, joined by journalists and those watching on NASA TV around the world, will listen for a beep at the beginning of the engine burn and another beep at the end of the burn, hoping that the exact timing indicates a successful insertion into a polar orbit around Jupiter. All action actually took place 48 minutes earlier, since the radio signals from Jupiter currently take 48 minutes to travel to Earth at the speed of light. The last commands to Juno are being sent today; the spacecraft will then be on its own for a few days, though, of course, it will be monitored.

It will then take a couple of days before the instruments are turned on. The spacecraft has been made to spin faster than previously, 5 rpm, to improve its stabilization before the burn; it will be slowed to 2 rpm for its science observations. Not since the Pioneer spacecraft has rotation been used for stabilization, but this spacecraft is in one of NASA's smaller (and less expensive) spacecraft series, following on the very successful New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto last year.

Most of the instruments deal with Jupiter's particles and magnetic field, which is 20,000 times more powerful than Earth's. The main instruments, to protect them, are in a vault made of 400 pounds of titanium to protect them from high radiation. The Junocam, its imaging camera, is outside that protection, and may not last as long as other instruments; further, it will give images as it rotates that will have to be transformed to the equivalent of steady views.

Juno's instruments will be powered by huge solar panels; end to end, the spacecraft would fill a basketball court from hoop to hoop. A boom at the end of one arm extends even further, to put the magnetic-field measuring equipment as far from the metal at the spacecraft's center as possible, to minimize distortions.

When the planets of our solar system formed about 5 billion years ago, Jupiter took up about half the leftover material besides the Sun. Juno's main goals include discovering what the inside of Jupiter is like, as part of understanding how the planets formed. One specific goal is to discover whether Jupiter has a rocky or ice core of elements heavier than helium. It has been estimated as being 10 to 20 times the Earth's mass; though dense, it is not necessarily solid, even under the huge pressure near Jupiter's center.

Juno will be in an extended elliptical orbit, coming as close as only 5000 miles above the cloudtops at its lowest point. Its 14-day elliptical orbit will be timed so that each time it comes close it passes a few degrees in longitude around the planet, so that by the time it completes three dozen orbits after about a year, it will have mapped the planet at high accuracy completely. But unlike previous spacecraft to Jupiter, it is concentrating on a layer under the visible cloud deck, where the magnetic field is apparently formed. That layer stays much steadier than does Jupiter's atmosphere above it.

Jupiter's magnetosphere is huge; if we could see it, it would appear as big as our Moon appears in our sky. We know from measuring radio signals from Jupiter that the magnetic field rotates like clockwork, even though the cloud deck rotates at different speeds at different latitudes. The magnetic field generates a huge, fairly steady aurora, over twice as large as Earth. The spacecraft has been traveling within Jupiter's magnetosphere, where the magnetic field dominates, for about a week.

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Yes, Benzos Are Bad For You
WARNING: I will be saying very negative things about benzodiazepines in an effort to force doctors to think twice before prescribing them and to discourage patients from ever using them. However, because withdrawal symptoms can be severe and dangerous, individuals already taking benzos in significant doses on a regular basis should not try to stop or reduce their dose without careful medical supervision. More on this later.

Most new wonder drugs turn out to be not so wonderful once we get to know them better. The family of drugs known as benzodiazepines (commonly called "benzos" for short) were wonder drugs of the 1960s. I and many others welcomed their introduction and began prescribing Valium or Librium not just for anxiety, but also for all sorts of other clinical problems beyond this primary indication -- for instance, to soothe psychotic patients' symptoms, to help people with alcohol use disorders quit drinking, to take the edge off agitation in depression and dementia, and to aid sleep. Benzos were reputed to be safe, and initially we were pretty oblivious to the risk of addiction. Before long, benzos became among the most frequently prescribed medications in America.

A second benzo craze began in the1980s when Xanax became the new wonder drug. Its maker, Upjohn (then run by a former head of the NIH), fashioned a brilliant marketing strategy -- hiding the company's wolfish greed for profit under the sheep's clothing of research sponsorship. Upjohn was able to co-opt the top academic psychiatrists from all around the world by organizing the first large-scale international clinical trial of any psychiatric drug. The results were disturbing to me as an outside observer. By then I had wised up to the great risk of benzos and was not surprised to discover that the dose of Xanax needed to treat panic disorder was dangerously close to the dose needed to result in addiction. This should have scared off everyone from using Xanax, but it didn't. Xanax quickly became, and remains, a best seller.

The real wonder of the benzos is that sales continue to boom, despite their having so little utility and no push from pharma marketeering (because patents have run out - thereby decreasing costs and profits.) Between 1996 and 2013, the percentage of people in the U.S. using benzos jumped more than one-third from an already remarkable 4.1 to 5.6 percent. Especially troubling is that benzo use is ridiculously high (nearly one out of ten) in the elderly, the group most likely to be harmed by them. (See below.) And women are twice as likely as men to be given a prescription.

You would expect such a ubiquitous drug to have many clinical uses but you would be wrong -- the psychiatric indications for benzos can be counted on the fingers of one hand. While benzos do wonders for patients with catatonia, this disorder is rarely encountered. Benzos are also useful short-term for severe agitation in psychosis, mania, and depression. And they are sometimes helpful for patients with severe panic disorder who need instant relief in the several weeks before SSRI's kick in. Benzos would be fine for occasional "as needed" use in times of special stress or insomnia. But since you can't predict who will get hooked, it is wise not to try them at all for this purpose. In my opinion, all of the legitimate indications for benzos are very short term. However, in real life most people take them long term, in doses high enough to be addicting, and for the wrong reasons.

Benzo popularity derives from their ability to quickly relieve anxiety, reduce worry, help people relax, and lubricate social anxiety -- kind of like drinking alcohol but in a convenient pill form. Doctors love prescribing benzos because it's the most efficient way to get a complaining patient out of the office in the shortest possible time. The patient is very satisfied at the moment, but may go on to develop a devastating addiction. People love taking them but once hooked can't stop. In short, benzos are very easy to get on, almost impossible to get off.

Benzos harm in three ways -- most dramatic dangers are deadly overdoses. Between 1996 and 2013, the death rate from benzo overdoses exploded by more than 500 percent, from 0.58 per 100,000 people to 3 per 100,000. Benzos are now involved in more than 30 per cent of all overdose deaths, usually in combination with opioids or alcohol.

Second on the list of harms come the painful and dangerous withdrawal symptoms that foster addiction. Benzo withdrawal is a beast- often terrifying, sometimes dangerous, and almost always drawn out over a very long period of time. The anxiety and panic experienced by people stopping benzos is usually much worse than the anxiety and panic that initially led to their use. Other common symptoms are irritability, insomnia, tremors, distractibility, sweating, and confusion. At the extreme, if doses were high and discontinuation is quick, the symptoms resemble alcoholic delirium tremens with hallucinations, psychosis, seizures, and the risk of death. Withdrawal is made even more difficult if, as is common, benzo dependence is complicated by concomitant abuse of alcohol and/or opioids or other drugs. Most people fail in their first attempts at withdrawal. Success rates increase if the withdrawal is done very gradually over a period of many months. Careful medical supervision is always a must.

Third and most insidious, but still very damaging, are the day-to-day impacts on brain functioning. On-going benzo use can be devastating, especially in the elderly, who (bizarrely) are the group most likely to receive a benzo prescription. If you meet an elderly patient who seems dopey, confused, has memory loss, slurred speech, and poor balance, your first thought should be benzo side effects -- not Alzheimer's disease or dementia. Many elders begin their downward spiral to disability and death after a benzo-induced fall that results in broken hips, concussions, or subdural hematomas (a collection of blood outside the brain.) Benzos are also a major risk factor for car and machine accidents.

Easier said than done. Along with opioids and methamphetamine, benzos are the most seductive of drugs. The combination of benzos and opioids is especially seductive and especially deadly. In my book, no one with any history of substance abuse should ever be prescribed a benzo. It will most likely just get added to the mix.

Benzos should never be used as they are most typically used. While safe and effective in low doses for just a few days, they are ineffective and unsafe when taken, as they usually are, in increasing doses over a long period of time. If prescribed at all in someone who has never used them before, it should be cautiously and with warnings. The time period should be short, the dose low, and quantity very limited at any one time. Real world practice flagrantly violates all these concerns - 90 percent of benzo prescriptions are written, often carelessly, by primary care doctors, who can spend only seven minutes with the patient without giving serious thought to the considerable risk of addiction.

The bottom line is that there is only one way to confidently avoid addiction to benzodiazepines: never start taking them. Since we can't predict who will eventually get hooked, the short term gains are rarely worth the long term risks.

It has been more than 30 years since I last prescribed a benzo for anxiety. In my view, the only legitimate uses in psychiatry now are very short-term relief of catatonia, for severe agitation, and for detox from benzos. For everyone else, risk of addiction outweighs the potential benefit of use.

The tough question is what to recommend for those many unfortunates already suffering the tyranny of benzo addiction. Should they stay the course to avoid the rigors and risks of withdrawal or should they make the great effort to detox? This is an individual decision that can't be forced on someone. But the longer you are on them, the harder it gets to stop, and the cognitive side effects of benzos create more and more dysfunction as your brain ages. The best bet is to stick with a determined effort to detox, however long and difficult, under close medical supervision. On a hopeful note, some of the happiest people I have known are those who have overcome their dependence on benzos.

This article was originally published on Recovery Brands' Pro Talk/Pro Corner
http://www.rehabs.com/pro-talk-articles/yes-benzos-are-bad-for-you/

Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.

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Empty Seats as Zoologists Hog Royal Society Stage

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Six months after announcing the November 2016 Royal Society evolution meeting on this page and a half dozen or so stories later, over one-third of the seats for the event still remain vacant -- and the tickets are free! But that's easily explained, because the zoologists ultimately decided to "hog" the show.

It didn't have to be so. A lineup of speakers who truly represent the paradigm shift underway in evolution science would have quickly filled up the house. Instead, organizers went with essentially an evo-devo reunion on plasticity and niche construction -- rehashed themes of Altenberg! from eight years ago minus most of the stars of that conference. And they made sure to exclude, for instance, experts on viruses -- the largest part of the biosphere -- at a time when Zika continues to prove it can downsize the human brain in a flash and could have done the reverse at some point in evolutionary time. So how can the November proceedings possibly be considered a credible meeting on the latest "trends" in evolutionary science?

Aside from some of the organizers and Jim Shapiro and Doug Futuyma -- there's no big-name recognition. A number of prominent scientists I've spoken with who have not been asked to present but hope to get a word in edgewise have told me they nevertheless still plan to attend.

Other irritations are that the meeting is largely another Anglo-Amercian affair and there's an absence of women who are stars in science, aside from Eva Jablonka and she's considered somewhat at the conservative end of the discussion.

I expected Evelyn Fox Keller to be the key dissector of gene jargon, however organizers have chosen to showcase lesser known female academics. There are altogether six women presenting.

Also, the hand of Templeton is all over the November event with many of the participants part of the $11M Extended Synthesis grant.

It's interesting that Massimo Pigliucci, one of the organizers of the Altenberg 16 conference -- who is not speaking at the Royal Society event -- recently gave a talk on science and fantasy at the UK philosophy & music festival at Hay. I'm beginning to wonder whether Pigliucci may finally be on to something.

Here is the lineup for the November Royal Society event, at the moment still over 100 seats left. . .

Denis Noble -- Oxford University

Nancy Cartwright -- University of Durham, UK and University of California, San Diego

Patrick Bateson -- University of Cambridge

John Dupré -- University of Exeter

Kevin Laland -- University of St. Andrews

Gerd Müller -- University of Vienna

Douglas Futuyma -- Stony Brook University

Sonia Sultan -- Wesleyan University

Russell Lande -- Center for Biodiversity Dynamics, NTNU

Tobias Uller -- Lund University

Paul Brakefield -- University of Cambridge

James Shapiro -- University of Chicago

Paul Griffiths -- University of Sydney

Eva Jablonka -- Tel-Aviv University

Greg Hurst -- University of Liverpool

Andy Gardner -- University of St. Andrews

Karola Stotz -- Macquarie University

Tim Lewens -- University of Cambridge

Agustin Fuentes -- University of Notre Dame

Andrew Whiten -- University of St. Andrews

Suzan Anton -- New York University

Melinda Zeder -- Smithsonian Institution

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Monsanto Fingerprints Found All Over Attack On Organic Food
When a reputable-sounding nonprofit organization released a report attacking the organic food industry in April 2014, the group went to great lengths to tout its independence.

The 30-page report by Academics Review, described as "a non-profit led by independent academic experts in agriculture and food sciences," found that consumers were being duped into spending more money for organic food because of deceptive marketing practices by the organic industry.

Trade press headlines blared: "Organics exposed!" (Brownfield News) and "Organic Industry Booming by Deceiving Consumers" (Food Safety Tech News), touting the findings by supposedly independent experts.

The findings were "endorsed by an international panel of independent agricultural science, food science, economic and legal experts from respected international institutions," according to the group's press release.

In case the point about independence wasn't clear, the press release ends on this note: "Academics Review has no conflicts-of-interest associated with this publication, and all associated costs for which were paid for using our general funds without any specific donor' influence or direction."

What was not mentioned in the report, the news release or on the website: Executives for Monsanto Co., the world's leading purveyor of agrichemicals and genetically engineered seeds, along with key Monsanto allies, engaged in fund raising for Academics Review, collaborated on strategy and even discussed plans to hide industry funding, according to emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know via state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Monsanto's motives in attacking the organic industry are obvious: Monsanto's seeds and chemicals are banned from use in organic farming, and a large part of Monsanto's messaging is that its products are superior to organics as tools to boost global food production.

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Academics Carry Monsanto's Message

Academics Review was co-founded by "two independent professors ... on opposite ends of the planet," Bruce Chassy, Ph.D., professor emeritus at University of Illinois, and David Tribe, Ph.D., senior lecturer at University of Melbourne. They claim the group "only accepts unrestricted donations from non-corporate sources."

Yet two email exchanges in 2010 reveal plans to find corporate funding for Academics Review while keeping corporate fingerprints hidden.

In a March 11, 2010 email exchange with Chassy, Jay Byrne, former head of communications at Monsanto who now runs a PR and market research firm, offered to act as a "commercial vehicle" to help find corporate funding for Academics Review.

Chassy discussed his interest in attacking the organic industry in the emails. "I would love to have a prime name in the middle of the organic aura from which to launch ballistic missiles..." he wrote, "I sure don't have the money."

Byrne replied,

"Well, I suggest we work on the money (for all of us) first and quickly! I've proposed to Val [Giddings, former vice president of BIO, the biotech industry trade association] that he and I meet while I'm in DC next week so we can (not via e-mail) get a clear picture of options for taking the Academic Review project and other opportunities forward. The "Center for Consumer Freedom" (ActivistCash.com) has cashed in on this to the extreme."

The Center for Consumer Freedom is directed by Rick Berman, a lobbyist who has been called "Dr. Evil" and the "king of corporate front groups and propaganda" for his work to promote the tobacco industry and other corporate interests under the cover of neutral-sounding groups.

"I think we have a much better concept," Byrne told Chassy.

Byrne shared an "opportunities" list of targets comprised of people, groups and content critical of GMOs and Monsanto: Vandana Shiva, Andrew Kimbrell, Ronnie Cummins, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Michael Pollan's book "In Defense of Food," the movies "Food, Inc" and "The World According to Monsanto," and "topic cross-over on all the risk areas of ag-biotech (out crossing/ contamination, bees, butterflies, human safety, etc...)."

"All of these individuals, organizations, content items and topic areas mean money for a range of well heeled corporations, Byrne wrote, adding:

"I believe Val and I can identify and serve as the appropriate (non-academic) commercial vehicles by which we can connect these entities with the project in a manner which helps to ensure the credibility and independence (and thus value) of the primary contributors/owners... I believe our kitchen cabinet here can serve as gatekeepers (in some cases toll takers) for effective, credible responses, inoculation and proactive activities using this project platform..."

"Sounds good to me," Chassy replied. "I'm sure that you will let me know what you discuss."

In an email exchange with Chassy dated November 30, 2010, Eric Sachs, a senior public relations operative for Monsanto, discussed finding corporate support for Academics Review while "keeping Monsanto in the background."

Sachs wrote to Chassy:

"You and I need to talk more about the "academics review" site and concept. I believe that there is a path to a process that would better respond to scientific concerns and allegations. I shared with Val yesterday. From my perspective the problem is one of expert engagement and that could be solved by paying experts to provide responses. You and I have discussed this in the past. Val explained that step one is establishing 501(c)3 not-for-profit status to facilitate fund raising. That makes sense but there is more. I discussed with Jerry Steiner today (Monsanto Executive Team) and can help motivate CLI/BIO/CBI and other organizations to support. The key will be keeping Monsanto in the background so as not to harm the credibility of the information."

CLI/BIO/CBI refers to three industry trade groups -- Crop Life International, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization and the Council for Biotechnology Information -- that represent agrichemical corporations.

Chassy responded to Sachs, "Yes we should talk about Academics Review. I think we are on the same page."

When asked directly about funding, Chassy replied via email: "Academics Review does not solicit or accept funds from any source for specific research or any other activities associated with any products, services or industry. Academics Review only accepts unrestricted donations from non-corporate sources to support our work."

He said that Academics Review incorporated and reported no income in 2012 and he provided the IRS form 990s for 2013 and 2014 (now also posted on the website). Those documents report $419,830 in revenues but include no information about contributors. Chassy did not respond to requests to provide that information.

Press Covers "Independent" Attack on Organic

Academics Review released its organic marketing study in April 2014 to a robust round of trade press coverage describing the findings of "independent researchers":

• "The Organic Food Industry Has Been Engaged in 'Multi-Decade Public Disinformation Campaign' claims report" (Food Navigator)

• "Report: Organic Industry Achieved 25 Years of Fast Growth Through Fear and Deception" (Food Safety News)

• "A Scathing Indictment of Organic Food Marketing" (Hoard's Dairyman)

• "Using Fear as a Sales Tactic" (Food Business News)

In the New York Post, Naomi Schaffer Riley built a case against "tyranny of the organic mommy mafia" who are duped by disingenuous marketing tactics of the organic industry. Her sources included the Academics Review report and Julie Gunlock, author of a book about the "culture of alarmism."

Riley didn't mention that Gunlock, and also Riley herself, are both senior fellows at the Independent Women's Forum, a group heavily funded by Donors Trust, which has bankrolled corporate attacks on unions, public schools and climate scientists.

In the Des Moines Register, John R. Block, a former U.S. secretary of agriculture who now works for a law firm that lobbies for agribusiness interests, reported on the "blockbuster report" by Academics Review and its findings that the organic industry's secret to success is "black marketing."

The corporate front group American Council on Science and Health, which receives funding from the agrichemical industry and where Chassy serves as a scientific advisor, pushed the "black marketing" theme in articles by ACSH president Hank Campbell and Henry I. Miller, MD, a Hoover Institute fellow who served as the spokesmodel in commercials for the effort to kill GMO labeling in California, for which Monsanto was the lead funder.

Miller, who has a long history of making inaccurate scientific claims in support of corporate interests, also used the Academics Review report as a source for organic attacks in Newsweek and the National Review, and claimed in the Wall Street Journal that organic farming is not sustainable.

Similar anti-organic themes run through other agrichemical industry PR channels.

GMO Answers, a marketing website funded by the Big Six agrichemical companies (and where Chassy and Tribe serve as "independent experts"), promotes the ideas that organics are no healthier, no better for the environment and just a marketing program -- although, ironically, the PR firm that runs GMO Answers has launched a specialty group in San Francisco to try to cash in on the organic market.

Monsanto's top spokesperson, Robb Fraley, also repeatedly trashes the organic industry on his Twitter feed.

Money Flow Goes Public; Academics Review Goes Silent

In March 2016, Monica Eng reported for WBEZ on documents showing that Monsanto paid Professor Bruce Chassy more than $57,000 over a 23-month period to travel, write and speak about GMOs -- money that was not disclosed to the public.

According to Eng's investigation, the money was part of at least $5.1 million in undisclosed money Monsanto sent through the University of Illinois Foundation to university employees and programs between 2005 and 2015.

"Chassy did not disclose his financial relationship with Monsanto on state or university forms aimed at detecting potential conflicts of interest," Eng reported.

"Documents further show that Chassy and the university directed Monsanto to deposit the payments through the University of Illinois Foundation, a body whose records are shielded from public scrutiny. The foundation also has the ability to take in private money and disburse it to an individual as a 'university payment' -- exempt from disclosure."

In January 2016, Carey Gillam, research director of U.S. Right to Know, reported on emails showing that hundreds of thousands of dollars had flowed from Monsanto to the University of Illinois "as Chassy collaborated on multiple projects with Monsanto to counter public concerns about genetically modified crops (GMOs) - all while representing himself as an independent academic for a public institution."

"What you find when reading through the email chains is an arrangement that allowed industry players to cloak pro-GMO messaging within a veil of independent expertise, and little, if any, public disclosure of the behind-the-scenes connections," Gillam wrote.

The last post on the Academics Review site, dated Sept. 2, 2015, is a blog by Chassy explaining that some of his emails would be made public due to the FOIA requests of U.S. Right to Know, which he characterized as an assault on his 40 years of public science, research and teaching.

Financial support from the private sector for public sector research and outreach is "appropriate, commonplace and needed to further the public interest," Chassy wrote. "Such support should be, and in all my experiences has been, transparent and done under the strict ethical guidelines of the public institutions that are benefiting from private sector or individual financial contributions."

Three days later, some of Chassy's emails were first made public in a front-page New York Times article by two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Eric Lipton. Lipton reported that Monsanto gave Chassy a grant for an undisclosed sum in 2011 for "biotechnology outreach and education activities."

Chassy told Lipton that the money he received from Monsanto "helped to elevate his voice through travel, a website he created and other means."

Still Getting Press as an Independent Source

Despite the revelations in the emails and the disclosure of Chassy's financial ties to Monsanto, the Academics Review website and its report attacking the organic industry are still posted online with all the descriptions claiming independence.

And Chassy still enjoys press coverage as an "independent" expert on GMOs. In May 2016, two separate Associated Press stories quoted Chassy on that topic. Neither story mentioned Chassy's now-public financial ties to Monsanto.

Follow Stacy Malkan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/StacyMalkan

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How Marijuana Can (Potentially) Help Fight Against Alzheimer's
For several years, researchers have been looking for a way to defer the early onset of Alzheimer's. As the only disease in the top 10 causes of death unable to be prevented, cured, or even slowed, Alzheimer's disease is a top priority for many researchers, scientists, and doctors. Several conclusions and proposals have been brought up in the past decades, and several of them slipped out of our reach or are still being tested and evaluated. However, Salk Institute scientists have found preliminary evidence that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and other compounds found in marijuana can promote the cellular removal of amyloid beta (Aβ), which happens to be a toxic protein associated with Alzheimer's disease. THC is the principal psychoactive constituent in marijuana and is the chemical responsible for most of marijuana's psychological effects.

In a news article from Salk Institute, Salk Professor David Schubert, the senior author of the paper, states that their study is the first to be able to demonstrate their conclusion.

"Although other studies have offered evidence that cannabinoids might be neuroprotective against the symptoms of Alzheimer's, we believe our study is the first to demonstrate that cannabinoids affect both inflammation and amyloid beta accumulation in nerve cells,"says Schubert.

Even though the studies were conducted on neurons grown in the laboratory, this discovery nonetheless offers insight on the role of inflammation in Alzheimer's disease and paves a pathway for developing novel therapeutics for the serious disorder.

The disease is induced by amyloid beta proteins that accumulate within nerve cells as the brain ages. The heaping of these toxic proteins leads to the formation of plaque deposits in the brain, which is a large characteristic of Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's disease is a grave progressive brain disorder, destroying nerve connections in the brain, which makes it continuously more difficult to perform simple and basic tasks such as moving around, swallowing, and feeding yourself. Although there are several complications in the brain, this alone does not kill you. What does, is the complications that stem from it -- some common examples being aspiration pneumonia, bedsores, malnutrition, and sepsis infections.

Salk researchers had found that high levels of amyloid beta (Aβ ) were heavily associated with cellular inflammation and higher rates of neuron death. They also successfully demonstrated that exposing the cells to THC reduced the amyloid beta protein levels and eradicated the inflammatory response from the nerve cells induced by the protein, allowing the nerve cells to survive.

"Inflammation within the brain is a major component of the damage associated with Alzheimer's disease, but it has always been assumed that this response was coming from immune-like cells in the brain, not the nerve cells themselves," states Antonio Currais, a postdoctoral researcher in Schubert's laboratory and first author of the paper. "When we were able to identify the molecular basis of the inflammatory response to amyloid beta, it became clear that THC-like compounds that the nerve cells make themselves may be involved in protecting the cells from dying."

To add, physical activity results in the production of endocannabinoids and some studies have successfully shown that exercise may slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease. In a separate but relevant research study led by Schubert, his lab had found an Alzheimer's drug candidate called J147 producing similar results. This study had led the scientists to discover the beneficial effect of endocannabinoids like THC.

Although these results are only the beginning to finding a way to successfully fight Alzheimer's, the data from other existing research involving marijuana and Alzheimer's support these findings and make this a plausible treatment in the near future.

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Bioethics after Brexit
It is too soon to know how the crisis that has been created by Britain's vote to leave the European Union will play out. But it is worth considering that the field of bioethics has a grave stake in the outcome. Modern bioethics is to a great extent a product of the liberal international system put in place after World War II.

In 1945 the four Allied states conducted war crimes trials of the Third Reich's surviving political and military leaders. Though some advocated simple executions a decision was made instead to send a message about the post-war rule of law. In spite of widespread doubt that this would be anything but a "show trial" based on victor's justice, several of the defendants were acquitted. Although the other powers did not participate in subsequent trials in Nuremberg, the United States decided it was important to treat other ardent Nazis who were indicted for war crimes in a similar orderly fashion.

The most famous of the other trials was that of 23 Nazi doctors and bureaucrats who were implicated in human experiments in concentration camps. What was expected to be a case that could be completed in a few weeks took months, because the defense argued that there were no internationally recognized rules for the conduct of human experiments. Ultimately the court returned to the grounds for the prosecution case, which was murder and other outrages against human beings, not the violation of research ethics. As a result of the "doctors' case," the judges decided that part of their decision should be a corrective to the apparent absence of international rules. That document has come to be known as the Nuremberg Code.

The Code was only the first in a line of medical ethics documents that have come to be part of the post-war system, including the World Medical Association's code of ethics in 1949 and its Declaration of Helsinki, first promulgated in 1964. The Council on International Organizations of Medical Sciences first adopted its International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects in 1993. In 2005 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. Other international treaties and conventions bear on bioethics, including the Geneva Convention of 1949 and its annexes, the Biologic and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention. The World Trade Organization, whose responsibilities include oversight of intellectual property rights like those involving drugs and devices, is the product of an agreement among 123 countries.

All of these standards and institutions have their faults and limitations. Many ethics-related guidelines are honored more in the breach than the reality and they are liable to be seen as favoring the "haves" over the "have nots." There are no enforcement mechanisms for guidelines like the Declaration of Helsinki and since 2008 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration no longer refers to them. The International Court of Justice in The Hague is plagued by jurisdictional questions and the U.S. has never joined the International Criminal Court. Nonetheless, these arrangements provide some frameworks for questions that involve sovereign states.

The post-war "European project" that is threatened by Brexit, one aimed at preventing repetition of the hundreds of years of bloodshed on the Continent, is of course only one part of the international order. But considering the political, financial, and cultural centrality of Europe it is a critical one. If as appears to be the case, the nationalist and populist sentiments roiling the Northern Hemisphere are implicitly rebellions against not only globalization but also the global elite and "expert" class that have promoted and directed it. That class very much includes the academics, advocates, policy wonks, and regulators who have a hand in bioethics.

One can't say what this all might mean. Over the next months and years the British might find a way to resolve enough of their differences with the EU to remain a quasi-partner and the other members might fend off nationalist movements in their own countries. In that case the crisis might have passed. But if Brexit is the first crack in the liberal international system to be followed by a more general breakdown, some of the central tenets that underlie post-war biomedical ethics might be at risk, including the authority of some of those conventions and institutions and even assumptions about values like universal human equality.

The point is that modern bioethics is very much a creation of the era after World War II, one dominated by the U.S. and Western Europe. As such it is far from immune to the threats to that international system, though the implications may take years to become evident.

(First published on the Hastings Bioethics Forum)

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