In the 1950s, the global infestation of bed bugs was nearly eradicated, thanks to the pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, popularly known as DDT.
Due to outcry from environmentalists and concern about Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring(1), and
over the objections of scientists, the attorney who had been appointed to run the new Environmental Protection Agency created by President Nixon, William Ruckelshaus,
banned it.(2)
Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” He got his Ph.D. in physics at 21 under Enrico Fermi – a Nobel Prize winner and friend of Einstein’s – who called Garwin “the only true genius” he’d ever met.
Over the last decade, there has been growing international focus on the role of food in conflict, particularly in Africa. The continent has seen an increase in jihadist terrorism in several regions.
Violence, like that exercised by terrorist organisations, is linked with food security conditions, causing a vicious circle of hunger and conflict.
Terrorism generates food disruptions. It undermines production systems and supply routes.
Though organic™ farmers sell bucolic imagery of hoeing by hand and sunsets over fields of corn, it is just marketing to the gullible. All farmers who make more than enough money to pay their real estate taxes(1) are high-tech gurus. They use real-time data on the health of their land and their crops, they want to use just enough product to get the most food with the least environmental strain.
It's a long way from the $3 billion environmental imagery of farmers with leaky backpacks drenching plants in science and cackling like Scrooge McDuck on a pile of coins about it.
With former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dictating a lot of science policy for the Trump administration, anti-science activists have been quietly cheering even though they uniformly voted for his opposition.
They need a win. Claims that bees are dying off have been met with a resounding thud, we have more bees than at any time since records have been kept. Concerns about GMOs have fared as poorly. Trillions of animals have been fed using GMOs and neither any of them or the billions of people who ate food grown using them have gotten so much as a stomachache. Food activism likes to gloss over how often organic lettuce gives consumers E. coli.
In wealthy countries, the richest and the aspirational well-off can afford to pay extra for food only grown using toxic pesticides they are assured are healthy for the planet, but the 99.99999% have to think about affordability.
Every time a chemical is removed due to manufactured outrage by environmental groups and the fifth columnists they get implanted inside presidential administrations, it is the poor that pay the price. Cereal crops are a staple for those worried about food security, and are the earliest victims of pathogens and pests. And then the first target for activists in a $3 billion industry devoted to scaring people about science solutions.
In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration an Alzheimer’s therapy shown in clinical trials to modestly slow disease progression but side effects, brain swelling and bleeding, occurred in some.
Though clinical trials have taken twice as long and cost twice as much due to government regulations, they can't cover everything and a successful doesn't mean broader demographics won't show different effects. Lawyers are gleeful at the opportunity to sue but they will be disappointed in the latest results for lecanemab. Adverse events associated with lecanemab treatment in clinic patients were rare and manageable.
You've heard that you should get eight hours of sleep per night, a whole industry has built up trying to help people who can't do that, but like BMI, organic food, and 'alcohol in moderation is okay', there is no science to it.
The human race has made huge progress in the past few thousand years, gradually improving the living condition of human beings by learning how to cure illness; improving farming; harvesting, storing, and using energy in several forms; and countless other activities.
Progress is measured over long time scales, and on metrics related to the access to innovations by all, as Ford once noted. So it is natural for us to consider ourselves lucky to have lived "in the best of times".
Why, if you were born 400 years ago, e.g., you would probably never even learn what a hot shower is! And even only 100 years ago you could have been watching powerless as your children died of diseases that today elicit little worry.
Almost 2,000 years ago in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, India, someone deposited a cache of gems inside a reliquary (a container for holy relics), along with some bone fragments and ash. The gems were precious, but the bones and ash even more so, for according to an inscription on the reliquary, they belonged to Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.