Sad news - Kevin M. Folta is no longer going to be doing public science outreach due to the relentless harassment from the anti-GMO crowd. The folks in the know seem to believe that his employer has asked him to stop.
Folta announced yesterday on Facebook, "Hi Everybody. I'll keep it short. The attacks are relentless, I'm under a lot of pressure on many fronts. I'm taking the opportunity to disappear from public visibility and focus on my lab and my students. It has been a challenging time. I appreciate the support, I'm grateful for your wishes, but this battle is vicious and one-sided, and I think I'm well served bowing out of the public science conversation for the foreseeable future. Thank you."
Just to re-cap, Folta is a professor in biotechnology at the University of Florida. As part of his work, he conducts (or, rather, conducted) public outreach to explain advanced in biotech, including genetic modification. The anti-GMO crowd, fans of global starvation and malnutrition that they are, realized that U. of Florida is a public university, which means that Folta is technically an employee, which means that they can use the Freedom of Information Act to dig up dirt on him. And so they filed an FOIA request for all of his e-mails.
The only "juicy" tidbit they found was that he that he was repaid by a biotech firm for expenses incurred in coming to speak at an event. This is hardly shocking. Public university's like Folta's were founded under the 1865 Merrill Act for the express purpose of conducting agricultural research and educating the country's farmers in order to improve the American economy. So not only did Folta not actually earn any money from speaking, but coming to speak was part of his freaking job.
Folta announced yesterday on Facebook, "Hi Everybody. I'll keep it short. The attacks are relentless, I'm under a lot of pressure on many fronts. I'm taking the opportunity to disappear from public visibility and focus on my lab and my students. It has been a challenging time. I appreciate the support, I'm grateful for your wishes, but this battle is vicious and one-sided, and I think I'm well served bowing out of the public science conversation for the foreseeable future. Thank you."
Just to re-cap, Folta is a professor in biotechnology at the University of Florida. As part of his work, he conducts (or, rather, conducted) public outreach to explain advanced in biotech, including genetic modification. The anti-GMO crowd, fans of global starvation and malnutrition that they are, realized that U. of Florida is a public university, which means that Folta is technically an employee, which means that they can use the Freedom of Information Act to dig up dirt on him. And so they filed an FOIA request for all of his e-mails.
The only "juicy" tidbit they found was that he that he was repaid by a biotech firm for expenses incurred in coming to speak at an event. This is hardly shocking. Public university's like Folta's were founded under the 1865 Merrill Act for the express purpose of conducting agricultural research and educating the country's farmers in order to improve the American economy. So not only did Folta not actually earn any money from speaking, but coming to speak was part of his freaking job.
The truly chilling part is that Folta's entire e-mail correspondence - conversations with students, chitchat with family, all of it - is now in the hands of people who believe he's the devil incarnate because he's doing science they don't like. Ironically, this are the same kinds of people who freely invoke Galileo when they want to defend the fact that everything they say is in complete contradiction to the scientific consensus.
Folta is the main target, but no academic at a public institution is immune. In agricultural science, that's quite a lot of them. No wonder U of Florida is feeling touchy. Of course, this model can be expanded to any field. Want to get women or minorities out of the public sphere? Just issue an FOIA request against them. Think that the bias in academia against conservatives hasn't done a good enough job in ensuring ideological purity? FOIA any conservative professor who says things you don't like.
Of course, let us not forget the main losers in the entire debacle - the rhetorical starving children in Africa.
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