This week, The Hilltop Monitor had the opportunity to sit down with William Jewell College’s Assistant Professor of Biology Dr. Joseph Shih to discuss all things biology, from graduate careers in biomedical sciences to second generation biotech to his patent.

Dr. Shih was moved to a tenure-track position at Jewell last year. This, combined with the departure of Dr. Rose Reynolds from the biology department, means that Dr. Shih took on a heavier course load than in past years. One of his favorite courses to teach is BIO 234: Genetics. Dr. Shih said he enjoys teaching the course because “genetics is all biology and constantly [an area of focus in biology] because it ranges from the central dogma of transcription and translation… to the organismal [level].” It serves as a constant language across multiple levels of analysis, from “the micro of micro levels” to an entire organism. He said he “loves the intersection between science, genetics [and] culture.”

Dr. Shih is also co-owner of a U.S. patent. During his time at Stanford University, he advised a team of students in creating systems to protect infants in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). When infants are in the NICU, the easiest way to take samples and give nutrients is through the umbilical cord. When designing the device, Dr. Shih and his team sought to “standardize care, make it faster and easier for nurses, and protect the umbilical cord from…getting a bacterial infection

Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Shih stressed the importance of human factors – collaboration and improvement – in science and research. When he applied to both graduate school and medical school, a process he “would not recommend to anybody,” he chose to attend graduate school because of how competitive medical schools were at the time. Dr. Shih said he thinks that there’s still a competitive atmosphere at the top medical schools, but “medicine is getting around to the fact that it needs to be collaborative and not as competitive…it’s always a team to treat a patient.”

This philosophy of collaboration and improvement has had a significant impact on the way that Dr. Shih does research. He collaborates with his wife, Biology Chair Dr. Lilah Rahn-Lee, on second-generation biotech. This second-generation biotech focuses on introducing, rather than making, the desired product; “the idea is [to] make a transgenic organism that will do [a] natural process, just better.”

Outside the classroom and the lab, Dr. Shih enjoys the company of Dr. Lilah Rahn-Lee and their 2- and 4-year-old boys. His hobbies include surfing (he’s even surfed the day before a hurricane), swimming and camping.

A great deal of myths and misconceptions surround so-called “Genetically Modified Organisms.” From health influencers advising consumers to stay away from them to pictures of fruits stabbed with syringes, these misconceptions have led to very negative views about GMOs amongst the general population. As such, it is an ongoing project in science communication to clarify these misconceptions.

Before it is possible to understand both the benefits and flaws of GMOs, it is important to understand what GMOs are. In a sense, humanity has been genetically modifying its crops since the dawn of agriculture. Modern corn is derived from a grass called teosinte that grows only a small number of small green kernels. Compared to its wild counterparts, even corn listed as non-GMO has a horrifying level of genetic modification. 

Rather than a biological definition, GMOs have a legal distinction. The term mandated by the Food and Drug Administration is “bioengineered.” Bioengineered organisms are defined as organisms that contain DNA that they could not have received from conventional plant breeding. For example, crops such as BT corn are made through a process called transgenesis, the introduction of genes from other organisms into a desired host. Transgenesis is the only way by which any FDA approved GMOs have been made. Due to the specificity of this definition, other methods of genetic modification are often able to use non-GMO labels.

There are many such methods that are used. Selective breeding has been used for most of human history to produce and amplify crops with more beneficial traits. With enough patience and thoughtfulness, humanity has been able to achieve some truly incredible effects. Brassica oleracea is a plant that has been bred into many different cultivars, with broccoli and kale being just two of the dozens of cultivars listed by the North Carolina State University’s plant atlas. There are two large inefficiencies with this method. Due to its reliance on natural mutations in plants, certain plants are not able to be modified this way. It can also take a long time for the required mutations to appear.

In an attempt to speed up this process, humans have been using mutagens to induce mutation for the last century. This process, known as mutation breeding, allows for the large-scale introduction of new genetic material into a crop population. This increase in variance allows conventional breeding methods to push crops to have both higher productivity and higher tolerances to stress. Despite this being a very human endeavor to modify the genetics of a plant, all genes present in the final crop could have been obtained by conventional breeding techniques. As such, mutagenic crops do not have to disclose this fact to the consumer.

GMOs gain a great deal of precision over these conventional methods. Where mutation breeding uses random mutations, biological engineering inserts specific genes into a crop. There are three primary uses of GMOs: resistance to pests, resistance to herbicides and increased yield. When, in the 1990s, papaya ringspot virus (PRSV) nearly destroyed the Hawaiian papaya industry, a genetically engineered papaya known as the Rainbow papaya was engineered with resistance to PRSV. This additional resistance allowed the papaya industry to recover, and only minor differences in their nutritional values have been found. Roundup Ready (RR) sugar beets have added genes which give them increased resistance to glyphosate, a common herbicide. This herbicide resistance allows for farmers to plant crops closer together, reducing both land and herbicide usage. AquAdvantage salmon have been modified to include a growth hormone promoter from a faster growing fish called an ocean pout. The additional active growth hormone allows for AquAdvantage salmon to grow faster, requiring less total feed and land usage. 

These positives shouldn’t imply that GMOs are without their issues, though. Due to the risk of crossbreeding with both wild and conventionally grown crops, the FDA has put large restrictions on the growing of genetically modified crops. In addition, due to the technological nature of these crops, they are eligible for patents. This means that biotechnology companies such as Monsanto are able to require very specific practices from farmers growing their crops. Farmers who choose to grow RR sugar beets are required by contract to remove any beets that flower. This can both reduce yield and increase costs for the farmer. Despite these restrictions on farmers, many farmers choose time and time again to grow genetically modified crops rather than conventional crops.

While there are valid reasons to be concerned about the biotechnological industry, most of the concerns raised about GMOs lack a scientific basis. Humans have been changing the genetic content of the plants and animals they cultivate since the beginning of agriculture. Every study on the nutritive quality of GMOs has shown that their nutritive value is well within the normal differences between different lines of traditionally grown crops. Ultimately, GMOs are a powerful tool to prevent food shortages.

It is 3 a.m. Dutifully, my phone replays “Questions In a World of Blue” by Julee Cruise for what seems like the millionth time. My headphones have long since broken, so Cruise’s soothing, yet haunting, voice now just sounds tinny. 

I think that everyone has gone through a sort of mental funk this past year. It’s probably inevitable, what with the backdrop of a pandemic and the bleak reality of fascism. I’d like to think that I’ve handled it better, but then I would be shoving the record of my horrendous lack of self-care under my bed. 

I would not say that I’ve had the typical life experiences. You could probably put me in a room with a psychiatrist and they would be able to get a couple of pages of interesting notes – something to pore over on a dull night, at the very least (and haven’t we had a surplus of dull nights during the pandemic?). But the crux of the matter is that I feel like I’ve lost the thread. 

What do I mean? Well, certainly the aforementioned pandemic-fascism backdrop has not helped, but I think I have found myself floundering in terms of the meaning of life. Specifically, my life. In general, most people would say that they want their lives to have meaning. In order for lives to have meaning, they have to be somewhat cohesive. Imagine that our lives are like stories. We don’t understand stories, or at least, we have trouble understanding stories when they seem to have no clear plotline. 

So when I say that I feel as though I have lost the thread, I mean that I feel as if the story arc of my life has disappeared – although, maybe it was never there to begin with. Instead, I am left with a jarring sense of disembodied memories and of voices with no clear speaker. It is all very Proustian, but instead of biting into a madeline and thinking of my mother fondly, I look out the window at the snow and am filled with the sense that my life has fallen apart. 

Obviously, one might imagine that this is a rather untenable condition. Something must be done to alleviate it – something meaningful must be found. Still, it was not evidently clear what I should do. How does one find a story arc in a 19 year-long, confused story? And, why should there be such clear parallelism between my life and a story – why should there be unifying themes whatsoever? Maybe things really were meaningless. 

Such were my thoughts as I wandered from my campus and, as Edgar Allen Poe wrote, “Back into my chamber turning, all my soul within me burning.” I should know better though than to hopelessly despair as if I had no philosophy professors who end up counseling me, even if rather indirectly. 

I am currently taking Philosophy of Science with Dr. Sperry. One of the essential issues we are tackling in the class is how to demarcate science and non-science. In other words, how can we distinguish science from other non-scientific fields of inquiry? What is science? 

One of the most compelling ways to speak of science is through a framework proposed by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. He described his “paradigmatic normal science” as the way of understanding science as a field of inquiry in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” one of the required readings for the class.

I will not go into excruciating detail about the arguments presented in the book, but I will touch upon the major conclusions because they unexpectedly led me to a potential resolution to my own personal crisis.

Arguably, we have this view of science as a field which progresses linearly and cumulatively. That is to say, the work of previous scientists can be “stacked” on top of each other, and their collective work is a tower of progress reaching further and further until finally, someday, reaching objective truth. And such a view is flawed. Science is neither so cumulative nor so linear in its progression. Instead, Kuhn proposes that most scientists work under the constraints of “normal science,” which is characterized by the fact that a community of scientists are committed to a theoretical framework: to a paradigm. 

In other words, a group of scientists doing research to progress a shared theoretical commitment (a paradigm), and not to make discoveries themselves, per se, is what constitutes scientific inquiry. The scientists work to make the nature of reality conform to a set of theoretical commitments. Normal science under a Newtonian paradigm, for example, would entail a group of scientists working to apply Newtonian principles to the natural world so that the application of these principles could be expanded. 

During scientific revolutions, one paradigm is discarded for another after the other systematically fails to work in terms of applicability and explainability of natural phenomena. The Newtonian paradigm, for example, was discarded for the Einsteinian paradigm – after a period of crisis in the scientific community – because the Newtonian paradigm could no longer be fruitfully expanded upon, elaborated and exploited. And because the Einsteinian paradigm promised greater fruitfulness, among other things. 

To sum it up: there is no “stacking” of scientists’ work. After there is a revolution, there is a major change in theoretical commitments, such that progress from one revolution to another is not linear progress whatsoever. In fact, progress made in the old paradigm – since it was made for the purposes of expanding the theoretical commitments of that paradigm – is no longer useful in a new paradigm with new theoretical commitments. There may be linear and cumulative progress under a paradigm when that paradigm is being elaborated as part of normal science, but when another revolution comes, any semblance of linearity and cumulative-ness gets washed away. 

Perhaps you can see where I am going here. In the same way that there is a tendency to cling to an erroneous view of science as a linear field of inquiry, I am trying to cling to my life as a linear story. I did, after all, ask myself why there should be parallelism between my life and a story. 

Have I not lived through various major crises? Haven’t we all in this past year alone? Why should I try to hold onto a conceptual framework that no longer explains the nature of the phenomena I experience? Shouldn’t I embrace a kind of Kuhnian paradigm shift?

Maybe my life need not be linear nor cumulative, and what I need is a new conceptual framework to begin with – a new way of embedding the symbols which I use to communicate who I am, a new way of understanding the nature of reality. And this new set of theoretical, practical and methodological life commitments need not be building on my past experiences. The measure of a good scientific paradigm is not whether it builds on other paradigms. It is whether or not it is better than other paradigms at explaining natural phenomena and predicting future occurrences. Maybe, the measure of a meaningful framework of life for me is something similar. 

On an afternoon segment of show “Fox and Friends” Feb. 11, televison personality Pete Hegseth announced that he has not washed his hands in ten years.

The commentator proudly announced that he “innoculates [him]self” after explaining that “germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them. Therefore, they’re not real,” Hegseth said in the segment.

Co-hosts of the show expressed their confusion at the declaration and one emitted an audible groan, captured by the audio of the live show.

Scientists refute this strain of thought and maintain that just because things cannot be seen by the human eye does not mean that they are not real. In fact, there are several phenomena which we cannot see yet experience in our day to day lives, including the wind, gravity and oxygen.

Often times we recognize the things we can not see through their effects on things we can see – in the case of germs, we recognize them in the illnesses they cause.

The claim that germs are not real – which Hegseth continues to advocate, sending out a flurry of tweets with the hashtag “#Dontwash”  shortly after the segment aired – places him in the camp of germ-theory denialists, a group denying the existence of microorganisms as cause of disease and popularizing an “alt-med” belief .

Those committed to the theories of alternative medicine tend to prefer natural therapies over prescribed medicines, including osteopath, herbal medicine, massage, acupuncture, homeopath and chiropractic.

Many people use these treatments to supplement – rather than substitute – modern medicine. Yet, as national politics become increasingly polarized, the effects are beginning to show on healthcare and the distribution of medicine.

As William Jewell College’s own professor of microbiology, Dr. Lilah Rahn-Lee, explains, society could face serious consequences if large numbers of people refuse to accept the principles of modern medicine and the existence of germs.

“Bacteria don’t care about us, they’re going to be there whether we think about them or not. Your life is shaped by germs and bacteria whether you want to think about it that way or not,” said Rahn-Lee. “You’re probably going to have a better and more productive way of thinking about and interacting with the world if you choose to accept this evidence.”

Rahn-Lee has office hours Tuesday 10:00-11:30 a.m. and Thursday 11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. in White Science room 139 and would be happy to answer questions about germs and show members of the Jewell community bacteria through a microscope.