Global Food Fight
Every issue explores cutting-edge developments in technology, medicine, education, climate change, and much more. Articles provide in-depth analyses of science and technology’s impact on public policy, the economy, and society—bringing today’s best minds to bear on tomorrow’s most critical topics.
Editor's Journal
What’s Food Got to Do with It?
Displacement is the common psychological practice of redirecting an emotional response from the original person or event to a different person or event that an individual believes is a more acceptable object… Read More
From the Hill
From the Hill – Summer 2001
DOD, NIH big winners in Bush R&D budget; other agencies face cuts On April 9, the Bush administration released details of its fiscal year (FY) 2002 budget request, which contains an overall… Read More
Perspectives
Redesigning Food Safety
Controversy over genetically modified foods has helped put food safety in the headlines, but that issue, like others we read about–mad cow disease, Listeria and Salmonella outbreaks, chemical contamination–needs to be understood… Read More
Features
Archives – Summer 2001
Photo: National Academy Archives Airship Safety One of the first studies undertaken on behalf of the government by the newly established National Research Council was a 1917 investigation into the problem of… Read MorePatenting Agriculture
More than one million children die each year because of a chronic lack of vitamin A. Millions more suffer disease. Many of these children live in developing nations where rice is the… Read MoreEuropean Responses to Biotechnology: Research, Regulation, and Dialogue
Modern biotechnology is the fruit of a massive surge of knowledge about the structure and functioning of living entities that has taken place over the past few decades. The surge continues unabated… Read MoreThe Wild Card in the Climate Change Debate
The debate on global warming, framed on one side by those who see a long-term gradual warming of global surface temperatures and on the other side by those who see only small… Read MoreMore than a Food Fight
From some perspectives, the news for agricultural biotechnology boosters seems good. Latest figures show farmers sowing genetically modified (GM) crops with a vengeance. Over half of the U.S. soybean crop, 25 percent… Read MoreNeeded: A National Center for Biological Invasions
Introduced organisms are the second greatest cause, after habitat destruction, of species endangerment and extinction worldwide. In the United States, nonindigenous species do more than $130 billion a year in damage to… Read MoreRetooling Farm Policy
In 2000, federal direct payments to U.S. farmers exceeded $22 billion. Farm groups contend that as much as an extra $117 billion will be needed over the next 10 years to expand… Read MoreBush Versus the Defense Establishment?
In a major speech on defense policy at the Citadel military academy in South Carolina during the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush advocated taking advantage of today’s relatively benign international environment… Read More
Book Reviews
Drug use and Control
Forces of Habit offers an ambitious interpretation of a challenging topic: the evolution of drug use and drug policy through time and across continents. Happily, it does this with no axe to… Read More
Western lands
It is a rare event to have one’s mind fundamentally changed by a single book. It is also uncommon to find a work of true political originality, one that cuts through the… Read More
Human spaceflight
The scope of this book befits its subject. It ranges from the mechanics of human spaceflight to the prospects for colonizing the solar system. At one end of that spectrum are chapters… Read More