Esta es la historia sobre nuestro programa, Cornell Alliance for Science, y sobre la noche de nuestra graduación, en noviembre del 2016. Me siento muy honrado y humildemente agradecido por haber tenido esta oportunidad: Global Leadership fellows: passion to improve the planet
2016 Alliance for Science Global Leadership Fellows on graduation night.
Tanto la página del programa del programa Cornell Alliance for Science como el artículo están en inglés
We are almost done with the filming. I wanted to share with you this picture. We have 66 gigabytes of video. I do not even have access to it, as the Venezuelan internet speed is so slow.
I has taken a long time, a lot more than we thought, but it is a much larger project than we thought it’d be. It is a better documentary, longer and more complex, with more people.
I am humbled, it has been a long road, but we are almost at the end. I just hope that the long night that my people are going through ends soon and we can see the dawn.
The Venezuelan Government is promoting the Orinoco Mining Arch as an exit to the current Venezeulan crisis. Some people say it will give us 20 billion dollars of income.
A herd of 5000 to 10000 GM goats that make lactoferrin on their milk would igve us the same income, but since we spent the last 17 years demonising genetic engineering while not investing in research and development. We bought tons of arms and and Russian planes, so no GM goats, we’ll suck the mercury.
That’s Chávez legacy.
We could have been Singapore, but the majority chose Zimbabwe.
Recently I was able to show for the first time this trailer of Silenced Crops. This is what I said, roughly, as I didn’t write my speech, I said it as it came out, spontaneously:
Sixteen years ago we had advanced biotechnology in Venezuela. Today, we are starving.
More than 60% of Venezuelans cannot eat three times a day. I am not telling you this because I read the statistics, I am telling you this because some friends and relatives are going through this right now.
16 years ago, a group of zealots destroyed a field of transgenic papayas and managed to make fierce opposition to GMOs part of the government policy.
Now, I won’t tell you that we are starving because we don’t use GMOs. That would not be true. But there is a connection between the food crisis and the GMO rejection. Hunger is what happens when your agricultural and economic policies are not based on facts, science and evidence. It’s what happens when your policies are based on rumors, lies, dogma and blind ideology.
I am making this documentary not only to tell you what happened 16 years ago, but to show that hunger is the price that people pay for the irrationality of their rulers.
Sorry for the delay, but here’s the first sneak peek of Silenced Crops with subtitles!
We are still filming, this is just a very rough, very preliminary sample of the documentary, but I am very happy about it and I want to show it to you. I am proud of this work and I want to tell the story of how the promising Venezuelan biotech was destroyed by fanaticism and the wrong decisions, by policy making based on ideology and not facts.
Silenced Crops Preview
I managed to track one of the main activists anti GM papaya, but she refuses to talk to us. I want her side of the story too, but nothing I can do if she refuses to be interviewed.
Why La Tigresa del Oriente is the future of Biotech.
First, I need to explain to most of you, readers, who is La Tigresa del Oriente, or, The Eastern Tiger Lady. She is a Peruvian singer, a YouTube celebrity, by now in her 70s. She became famous with a music video that turned viral. 10 years after her debut, she has millions of views of her videos, recorded several albums and even has had naked pictures taken and appeared in our local equivalents of Playboy, Revista SoHo. Impressive for a grandma, right? But that’s the world we live in.
30 or 40 years ago, it was very difficult, almost impossible, for a new band or an emerging artist to record a video and make themselves known without the collaboration of the music industry. The equipment that you needed to record a song and the access to the people controlling the radio playlists was hard to get. It was very expensive to buy the tools that you needed for professional recording, and making a video, nearly impossible. This changed when cellphones with cameras and sound recording were released, we were finally able to record our creations. Later, when YouTube was released, anyone could upload his or her video and make it available to the whole web. What used to be thousands of dollars and needed very specific social connections , now can be made with a cellphone and an Internet connection. The creation of content has been democratized.
I am hopeful that the same will happen with biotechnology. That in a few decades, or earlier, we’ll have simpler and cheaper methods to change organisms, to develop and improve better crops and fruits, to create enhanced foods and new combinations that don’t exist yet. To broaden the things that we eat and how we dress. I hope that in a a future not so far, the regulatory framework is changed , so it is accessible to small companies, not only to Monsanto-like giants, that their monopoly of market access ends, just like it ended for the record companies.
We are already heading in that direction. The development of new genetic modification systems that are easier to use, that might not subjected to current regulation, as they do not have genes of other species, could decrease the costs and the barriers to market access. My old company, LavaAmp, aimed to decrease the cost, speed and complexity of a common lab technique. Step by step, we are going to a world in which biology will make possible tastier food, more sustainable and nutritious. Where Monsanto is just another big company, competing with a lot small ones. We’ll see a New and Brighter Day for humanity!
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