Fresh Canadian produce year-round? Gene editing could make it possible
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
National Observer
2 days ago
- National Observer
Is Suzuki right that it's 'too late'? We are in an era of simultaneous wins and losses
I didn't mean for it to happen. I was watching a Disney show on my laptop with my 10-year-old son. But when the show ended, and I closed the tab, the next open tab filled my screen. It was an article from iPolitics with the neck-throttling headline: ''It's too late': David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost.' 'What?' cried my son. 'David Suzuki said that!' I was caught off-guard. 'It's complicated,' I stammered, that last refuge of scoundrels. 'He is wrestling with some despair after trying for so many years.' He's in good company. Truth is, the article caught many of us off-guard, if my social network is any indication. Some of its readers concur, while others were angry. 'I'm really annoyed about that Suzuki thing. It's irresponsible,' a colleague texted me. 'He is saying out loud the private thoughts that many of us have all the time,' wrote Devika Shah, executive director of Environment Funders Canada on LinkedIn. 'It was a tough read, but we humans are where we are. For my fellow climate peeps who think he is wrong to say this — please recognize that he's earned the right.' All of us who work on climate have long walked a razor's edge between hope and despair, and the last few months (or years) have made it near impossible to keep one's balance. But I would put the current predicament differently. While we all know Suzuki as a communicator, he is firstly a scientist and is speaking some basic scientific truths. He's also trying to sound an alarm and rouse us out of a collective stupor, and he's not wrong to want to do that — while polling indicates Canadians are worried about climate change, we are clearly not as scared as we should be. The scientific community as a whole is worried. The situation is grim — temperature increases are happening faster than predicted, extreme weather events are escalating, planetary boundaries are being breached. The assaults on the people and places we love aren't a distant threat somewhere else, sometime in the future — they are here and now. Governments throw in the towel I, too, am losing faith. All of us who work on climate have long walked a razor's edge between hope and despair, and the last few months (or years) have made it near impossible to keep one's balance. We are all wrestling with the jarring and growing disconnect between climate events and our politics. President Trump's brutal roll-back of climate actions south of the border is throwing us all for a loop. But even in our own country, our federal and provincial governments are acting like a bunch of surrender monkeys, walking away from their climate commitments. Our official climate plans are in a shambles and riddled with incoherence, as governments continue to approve new fossil fuel infrastructure while abandoning carbon pricing, emission caps and, potentially, vehicle mandates. The defeatism is hard to take. The complicated psychology of now All that said, I would put the current predicament differently than saying it's 'too late.' More accurately, it both is and isn't too late. Those of us trying to move the public to action must hold with care the collective psychology of the moment, and engage in responsible truth-telling. For example, the leaders we most remember from the Second World War were outstanding communicators who managed to walk a difficult line — they were forthright with the public about the severity of the threat, while still managing to impart hope. That's what this moment requires. We are motivated by a complicated and highly personal mix of hope and fear, love and anger. All of which needs to be tapped to win this fight. There is no place for false optimism. But as the climate scientist Kate Marvel says, this battle for our lives doesn't need optimists, it needs heroes — people of courage, which she defines as, 'the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.' Ten years ago, the countries of the world signed the Paris Agreement and committed to do what they could to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Sadly, on that score, it is indeed too late. Admitting this defeat is not something that should be done nonchalantly; it is a brutal indictment of us all. In Paris, the rallying cry of Pacific Island nations and others from the Global South was '1.5 to stay alive.' That threshold is indeed existential for them, and we have failed them. But the climate fight is not something we either win or lose. As the saying goes, it functions as a 'matter of degrees.' Each incremental increase in temperature comes with devastating losses to the people and places we love. But it is also the case that each incremental increase we prevent saves millions. While we are already witnessing the death and destruction that comes with 1.5 degrees, a 2-degree world — which can still be prevented — will be that much worse, while a 3-degree world is unimaginable, and a 4-degree world is not one any of us would want our children and grandchildren to inhabit. To not continue to do everything we can to avoid that next incremental increase is obscene. The awkwardness of the current period is that, for the next many years, we are going to experience both losses and wins simultaneously. Yes, we need to be eyes wide open to the devastating extreme events now underway. But we also need to be alive to the hopeful trends: China looks to have peaked its GHG emissions, years ahead of schedule; Europe is driving down emissions much faster than Canada; in Norway, 97 per cent of new vehicle sales are now zero-emission; in the UK, emissions are now lower than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution in the late 1800's; and around the world, the adoption of renewable energy is exploding. The point being, the struggle to tackle the climate emergency is a steep climb down, not a cliff. This September, the global climate movement will be trying to recapture some of the lost momentum of recent post-pandemic years. At rallies across Canada and around the world, under the banner ' Draw the Line,' people are being invited to shake off their feelings of isolation and join this call: 'Floods, droughts, storms and heatwaves are getting worse. Food and energy costs are going up while a few billionaires profit and prop up the industries that harm people and pollute our lands, air and waters. Indigenous leaders from the Amazon to the Pacific have spoken out: our future is at stake. To solve this crisis, the answer is us — the people… This September we will come together to draw the line against injustice, pollution, and violence — and for a future built on peace, clean energy and fairness. This world is ours. This is our line to draw.'
CTV News
2 days ago
- CTV News
Dalhousie professor co-authors gene therapy research, man with rare Fabry disease reports relief
A new gene therapy developed at Dalhousie University is bringing hope for Canadians with a rare gene mutation called Fabry disease. Paul Hollingsworth reports.
National Observer
2 days ago
- National Observer
Canadian universities must do a better job encouraging private sector research
Canada should take advantage of the US-created economic storm to stimulate innovation. Under the Trump administration, constraints put on US universities and cuts to research grants have put US research and innovation at risk. In light of this, Canadian education leaders need to underscore that investing in higher education will yield economic and societal returns. To do so, we need to change how research and education work with innovators. Until recently, university leaders argued that government investments in university research directly lead to innovation and productivity growth. But universities have adopted policies that encourage the sale of Canadian-funded patents to foreign firms without economic benefits to Canada. This needs to change. To feed Canada's innovation capacity and competitiveness, investing in universities is necessary for training skilled workers, developing research assets and creating partnerships between academic institutions, industry and philanthropy. Canadian universities have an excellent track record of creating and preserving knowledge, but a poor one for helping innovators to develop products and services. Universities not only create and preserve knowledge, but make that knowledge available through databases, articles and digital assets. Further, they play an important brokering role between the public and private sectors in developing high-value goods and services. University leaders need to change the way universities interact with industry by prioritizing partnerships over technology transfer; simplifying contractual arrangements with industry around intellectual property; and building knowledge resources to support Canadian innovation. Industry-university partnerships not only contribute to local innovation ecosystems, but bring in approximately 50 times more revenue to universities ($2.7 billion in 2018: $1.2 billion from for-profit and $1.5 billion for not-for-profits) than does the patenting and licensing of inventions ($54.4 million in 2018). Through these partnerships, industry gains insight into cutting-edge technology and companies are better able to anticipate technological problems and opportunities. In the end, the public benefits as these firms not only introduce technology that boosts productivity but pay higher salaries. Canadian examples include partnerships in aerospace, structural genomics, artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted drug development. Canadian universities have an excellent track record of creating and preserving knowledge, but a poor one for helping innovators to develop products and services, write Richard Gold, Marc Fortin, Evan Henry and Martin Bader Canadian universities and industry have been tepid toward partnerships. According to World Bank data, industry-university partnerships in Canada have been declining since 2010. Apart from changing incentives for industry to collaborate, universities and governments need to reward researchers who engage in long-term partnerships with industry. Universities also contribute to Canadian productivity by spinning out companies that draw on research. The process has been overly complicated. Universities can simplify this by adopting standard licensing, such as the Simple Agreement for Innovation Licensing, that reduces negotiation time and provides a sound financial basis for companies. Another approach is to rely on expertise, rather than patents, to spin out a company. This has been successful at the University of Toronto in engineering and is how STEMCELL, now with 1,500 employees worldwide, got its start. Another example is Conscience 's Critical Assessment of Computational Hit-finding Experiments (CACHE) competitions, which are run out of the Structural Genomics Consortium's Toronto labs. CACHE puts all data and test molecules in the public domain to assist firms to better design proprietary AI models. Companies need access to knowledge resources and talent along with access to large datasets, materials and models that universities can provide. According to its curator, approximately two-thirds of the users of the Montreal Neurological Institute's C-BIG repository of cells and data are innovative companies. Artificial Intelligence-Ready CHEmiCal Knowledge base (AIRCHECK) is a Canadian-based dataset on which AI companies can train and validate their models. The Distributed Robot Interaction Dataset (DROID) helps researchers and companies to train AI robots. While these datasets are open to all — subject only to patient privacy — they confer a specific benefit on companies located nearby. With US research funding in disarray, Canadian universities have an opportunity to support Canadian companies to better compete globally by prioritizing partnerships, simplifying arrangements with industry, and by building critical knowledge resources. It is time to embrace a ' dare to change ' ethos. Richard Gold is the director of McGill University's Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and chief policy and partnerships officer at Conscience. Marc Fortin is a Trottier Institute for Science and Public Policy professor of practice at McGill University. Evan Henry is the associate director of the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative and was the co-founder and chief science officer of Nectar Technologies.
