About 1 percent of the world’s population lives with the mental condition called bipolar disorder, characterized by swings between elevated and depressed moods. In most cases, timely interaction with psychotherapists, family and friends can alleviate the symptoms. Researchers in Denmark say modern technology can help by keeping track of a patient’s symptoms and summoning help quickly when needed. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Facebook’s acknowledgement that the personal data of most of its 2.2 billion members has probably been scraped by “malicious actors” is the latest example of the social network’s failure to protect its users’ data.

Not to mention its seeming inability to even identify the problem until the company was embroiled in scandal.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Wednesday that Facebook is shutting down a feature that let people search for Facebook users by phone number or email address. Although that was useful for people who wanted to find others on Facebook, it turns out that unscrupulous types also figured out years ago that they could use it identify individuals and collect data off their profiles.

The scrapers were at it long enough, Zuckerberg said, that “at some point during the last several years, someone has probably accessed your public information in this way.”

The only way to be safe would have been for users to deliberately turn off that search feature several years ago. Facebook had it turned on by default.

Several investigations

“I think Facebook has not been clear enough with how to use its privacy settings,” said Jamie Winterton, director of strategy for Arizona State University’s Global Security Initiative. “That, to me, was the failure.”

The breach was a stunning admission for a company already reeling from allegations that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica inappropriately accessed data on as many as 87 million Facebook users to influence elections.

Over the past few weeks, the scandal has mushroomed into investigations across continents, including a probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Zuckerberg himself will be questioned by Congress for the first time Tuesday.

“The FTC looked the other way for years when consumer groups told them Facebook was violating its 2011 deal to better protect its users. But now the Cambridge Analytica scandal has awoken the FTC from its long digital privacy slumber,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director for the Washington-based privacy nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy.

Problem found after Cambridge Analytica

Neither Zuckerberg nor his company has identified those who carried out the data scraping. Outside experts believe they could have been identity thieves, scam artists or shady data brokers assembling marketing profiles.

Zuckerberg said the company detected the problem in a data-privacy audit started after the Cambridge Analytica disclosures, but didn’t say why the company hadn’t noticed it — or fixed it — earlier.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday on when it discovered the data scraping.

In his call with reporters Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the company had tried “rate limiting” the searches. This restricted how many searches someone can conduct at one time from a particular IP address, a numeric designation that identifies a device’s location on the internet. But Zuckerberg said the scrapers circumvented that defense by cycling through multiple IP addresses.

Public information useful 

The scraped information was limited to what a user had chosen to make public — which, depending on a person’s privacy settings, could be a lot — as well as what Facebook requires people to share. That includes full name, profile picture and listings of school or workplace networks.

But hackers and scam artists could then use that information, and combine it with other data in circulation, to pull hoaxes on people, plant malware on their computers or commit other mischief.

Having access to such a massive amount of data could also pose national security risks, Winterton said.

A foreign entity could conceivably use such information to influence elections or stir up discord, exactly what Russia is alleged to have done, using Facebook and other social media, in the 2016 presidential elections.

Oversharing

Privacy advocates have long been critical of Facebook’s penchant for pushing people to share more and more information, often through pro-sharing default options.

While the company offers detailed privacy controls — users can turn off ad targeting, for example, or face recognition, and post updates that no one else sees — many people never change their settings, and often don’t even know how to.

The company has tried to simplify its settings multiple times over the years, most recently this week.

Winterton said that for individual Facebook users, worrying about this data scraping won’t do much good, after all, the data is already out there. But she said it might be a good time to “reflect on what we are sharing and how we are sharing it and whether we need to.”

“Just because someone asks us information, it doesn’t mean we have to give it to them if we are not comfortable,” she said.

She added that while she no longer has a Facebook account, when she did she put her birth year as 1912 and her hometown as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Neither is true.

This story was written by the Associated Press
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A Brazilian judge has ordered that Facebook Inc pay 111.7 million reais ($33.4 million) for failing to cooperate with a corruption investigation, federal prosecutors said on Thursday, prompting Facebook to say it was exploring “all legal options.”

The judge fined Facebook for failing to give access in 2016 to WhatsApp messages exchanged by individuals under investigation for defrauding the healthcare system of Brazil’s Amazonas state, the prosecutors said in a statement. In an emailed comment sent to Reuters, Facebook called the fine groundless.

“Facebook cooperates with law enforcement. In this particular case we have disclosed the data required by applicable law,” the statement said. “We understand this fine lacks grounds, and are exploring all legal options at our disposal.”

According to federal police, a Brazilian judge ordered in April 2016 that Facebook give authorities access to the WhatsApp messages in question.

The fine amounted to 1 million reais plus interest for every day Facebook did not comply with the order, beginning when it took effect in mid-June 2016, and ending when the corruption investigation was made public that September, police said.

Through the probe known as “Operacao Maus Caminhos,” or “Operation Bad Paths,” federal police exposed the embezzlement of tens of millions of reais of public funds.

This story was written by VOA News
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Australia’s Privacy Commissioner said on Thursday she had opened a formal investigation into social media giant Facebook Inc after the company confirmed data from 300,000 Australian users may have been used without authorization.

The investigation will consider whether Facebook has breached Australia’s privacy laws, Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk said in a statement.

Facebook said on Wednesday that the personal information of up to 87 million users, mostly in the United States, may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million.
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Police say a woman shooter entered YouTube headquarters in California Tuesday and wounded at least three people before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Mike O’Sullivan reports, the shooter’s motive is unknown.
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A woman who believed she was being suppressed by YouTube and told her family members she “hated” the company opened fire at YouTube’s headquarters in California, wounding three people before taking her own life, police said.

Investigators do not believe Nasim Aghdam specifically targeted the three victims when she pulled out a handgun and fired off several rounds in a courtyard at the company’s headquarters south of San Francisco on Tuesday, police said.

But a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press that Aghdam had a longstanding dispute with the company. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said Aghdam used the name “Nasime Sabz” online.

A website in that name decried YouTube’s policies and said the company was trying to “suppress” content creators.

“Youtube filtered my channels to keep them from getting views!” one of the messages on the site said. “There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!”

Aghdam “hated” YouTube and was angry that the company stopped paying her for videos she posted on the platform, her father, Ismail Aghdam, told the Bay Area News Group.

On Monday, he called police to report his daughter missing after she didn’t answer the phone for two days and warned officers that she might go to YouTube, he said.

Officers in Mountain View — about 30 miles (48 kilometers) from YouTube’s headquarters — found her sleeping in her car in a parking lot around 2 a.m. Tuesday but let her go after she refused to answer their questions. Aghdam didn’t appear to be a threat to herself or others, police spokeswoman Katie Nelson said.

Nelson would not say whether officers had been warned that Aghdam might have been headed to YouTube headquarters.

Earlier Tuesday, law enforcement said the shooting was being investigated as a domestic dispute but did not elaborate. It was not immediately clear why police later said the people shot were not specifically targeted.

One of the victims — a 36-year-old man — was in critical condition, a spokesman for San Francisco General Hospital said. A 32-year-old woman was in serious condition and a 27-year-old woman in fair condition, the spokesman said.

YouTube employee Dianna Arnspiger said she was on the building’s second floor when she heard gunshots, ran to a window and saw the shooter on a patio outside.

“It was a woman and she was firing her gun. And I just said, `Shooter,’ and everybody started running,” Arnspiger said.

She and others hid in a conference room for an hour while another employee repeatedly called 911 for updates.

The world’s biggest online video website is owned by Silicon Valley giant Google, but company officials said it’s a tight-knit community. The headquarters has more than a thousand engineers and other employees in several buildings. Originally built in the late 1990s for the clothing retailer Gap, the campus south of San Francisco is known for its sloped green roof of native grasses.

Inside, Google several years ago famously outfitted the office with a 3-lane red slide for workers to zoom from one story to another.

“Today it feels like the entire community of YouTube, all of the employees, were victims of this crime,” said Chris Dale, a spokesman for YouTube.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said in a tweet the company would “come together to heal as a family.”

Officers and federal agents responding to multiple 911 calls swarmed the company’s campus sandwiched between two interstates in the San Francisco Bay Area city of San Bruno.

Zach Vorhies, 37, a senior software engineer at YouTube, said he was at his desk working on the second floor of one of the buildings on the campus when the fire alarm went off.

He got on his skateboard and approached a courtyard, where he saw the shooter yelling, “Come get me.” He said the public can access the courtyard where he saw the shooter without any security check during working hours.

There was somebody lying nearby on his back with a red stain on his stomach that appeared to be from a bullet wound.

He said he realized it was an active shooter incident when a police officer with an assault rifle came through a security door. He jumped on his skateboard and took off.

Officers discovered one victim with a gunshot wound when they arrived and then found the shooter with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound several minutes later, San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini said. He said two additional gunshot victims were later located at an adjacent business.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a congressional committee about the privacy scandal that has rocked the social media company.

The House and Energy and Commerce Committee announced Wednesday Zuckerberg will testify on April 11 about the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users that could be used to influence voters in U.S. elections. The firm was hired by U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, which paid the firm nearly $6 million.

Committee chairman Greg Walden and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone said the hearing hopes to “shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens to their personal information online.” The panel is the first of three congressional committees that have asked Zuckerberg to testify.

Zuckerberg’s upcoming testimony comes after senior Facebook officials failed to answer questions during a private meeting with congressional staffers about how the company and third-party software developers use and protect consumer data.

It remains unclear if Congress or the administration will take any action against Facebook, but the company is well-positioned to counter any efforts to regulate it.

The social media giant has a large lobbying operation to advance its interests in Washington. Documents filed with the House and Senate shows Facebook spent more than $17 million in2017, much of it on an in-house lobbying team that is comprised of former Republican and Democratic political aides. The company lobbied on a variety of issues, including potential changes to government surveillance programs and on corporate tax issues.
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It’s been 45 years since men last set foot on the Moon. The year was 1972. Back then, the fastest commercially available microprocessor could handle a maximum of 16 kilobytes of memory. Today the average smartphone can crunch several millions of kilobytes. But huge leaps in computing power have not been matched by similar advances in space travel. The prospects for returning to the moon were the focus of a recent symposium, organized by the Universities Space Research Association and the Space Policy Institute. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Several Silicon Valley leaders called for increased gun control on Tuesday afternoon after a woman at the headquarters of YouTube shot and wounded three people before taking her own life.

Tech companies have largely avoided the topic of gun control in the United States, but they have previously pushed for progressive stances on other hot-topic issues, ranging from climate change to same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform. At least three major chief executives took up gun control after the shooting.

“We can’t keep being reactive to this, thinking and praying it won’t happen again at our schools, jobs, or our community spots,” tweeted Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey. “It’s beyond time to evolve our policies.”

Joining Dorsey were Uber Technologies CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Box CEO Aaron Levie, who respectively sent tweets on Tuesday saying #EndGunViolence and #NeverAgain, two Twitter hashtags commonly used by proponents of gun control.

“On behalf of the team at @Uber, sending support to everyone @YouTube and @Google, and gratitude to the heroic first responders,” Khosrowshahi tweeted. “Another tragedy that should push us again to #EndGunViolence”

Emergency calls reporting gunfire in San Bruno, California, at the headquarters of Alphabet’s YouTube began to pour in early Tuesday afternoon, according to the city of San Bruno. Authorities have not released the identities of the suspected shooter or the victims.

The tweets on Thursday could be an indication that Silicon Valley may soon weigh in on the epidemic of mass killings by firearms in the United States.

“Incredibly sad to see the YouTube shooting today,” Levie tweeted. “Our thoughts are with our Google friends and their families. #NeverAgain”

Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki, the CEOs of Google and YouTube respectively, also issued statements on Tuesday while avoiding the topic of gun control.

“There are no words to describe how horrible it was to have an active shooter @YouTube today,” Wojcicki said. “Our deepest gratitude to law enforcement & first responders for their rapid response. 

Our hearts go out to all those injured & impacted today. We will come together to heal as a family.”

Other tech leaders expressed sympathy for the employees of YouTube on social media on Tuesday without referencing gun control. Those included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

“From everyone at Apple, we send our sympathy and support to the team at YouTube and Google, especially the victims and their families,” Cook said in a tweet.
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Facebook, expanding its response to people using the platform improperly, said Tuesday that it had deleted hundreds of Russian accounts and pages associated with a “troll factory” indicted by U.S. prosecutors for fake activist and political posts in the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

Facebook said many of the deleted articles and pages came from Russia-based Federal News Agency, known as FAN, and that the social media company’s security team had concluded that the agency was technologically and structurally intertwined with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency.

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told Reuters in an exclusive interview that the agency “has repeatedly acted to deceive people and manipulate people around the world, and we don’t want them on Facebook anywhere.”

Massive data collection

The world’s largest social media company is under pressure to improve its handling of data after disclosing that information about 50 million Facebook users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked on then-Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

The removed accounts and pages were mainly in Russian, and many had little political import, the company said. Previously Facebook focused on taking down fake accounts and accounts spreading fake news. The new policy will include otherwise legitimate content spread by those same actors, Zuckerberg said.

“It is clear from the evidence that we’ve collected that those organizations are controlled and operated by” the Internet Research Agency, he added.

In February, the agency known as IRA was among three firms and 13 Russians indicted by U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller on charges they conspired to tamper in the presidential campaign and support Trump while disparaging Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Russian media organization RBC last year reported that FAN and IRA once shared the same street address and had other connections. One of the people that it said made decisions at FAN was indicted by Mueller’s office, which is investigating U.S. intelligence agency conclusions that Moscow tried to undermine the democratic process. Russia denies interfering in the elections.

Ban accounts

Facebook disclosed in September that Russians used Facebook to meddle in U.S. politics, posting on the social network under false names in the months before and after the 2016 elections.

Zuckerberg said Tuesday that improved machine learning had helped find connections between the latest posts and IRA. He and Facebook security officials said the company would do the same when they find more legitimate content being pushed out by groups exposed as manipulators.

“We’re going to execute and operate under our principles,” Zuckerberg said. “We don’t allow people to have fake accounts, and if you repeatedly try to set up fake accounts to manipulate things, then our policy is to ban all of your accounts.”

Zuckerberg said that the standard is high for such retribution toward news organizations and that state-owned media by itself was fine.

The company decided to root out as much as it can of IRA, which was involved with posts including sponsoring fake pages that were pro-Trump, pro-border security and protesting police violence against minorities, among other topics.

The expanded response could provoke a backlash from Russian internet regulators.

Last October, Google followed up on reported connections between FAN and IRA by removing FAN stories from its search index. Media regulator Roskomnadzor asked Google for an explanation, saying that it needed to protect free speech.

Google then reinstated FAN, according to reports at the time. Facebook officials said its accounts and pages in question had 1 million unique followers on Facebook and 500,000 on Instagram, mainly in Russia, Ukraine, and nearby countries such as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his college dorm room in 2004, personally kept quiet about the Cambridge Analytica data leak for four days before apologizing and outlining steps that he said would help protect personal data.

The 33-year-old billionaire plans to testify before U.S. lawmakers to explain Facebook’s privacy policies, a first for him, a source said last week, although he has so far not committed to doing the same for U.K. lawmakers.

Multiple investigations

Britain’s data protection authority, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 37 U.S. state attorneys general are investigating Facebook’s handling of personal data.

Zuckerberg initially downplayed Facebook’s ability to sway voters, saying days after the U.S. elections that it was a “pretty crazy idea” that fake news stories had an influence.

Eventually, though, Facebook’s security staff concluded that the social network was being used by spies and other government agents to covertly spread disinformation among rivals and enemies.

Critics including U.S. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have complained Facebook moved too slowly to investigate and counter information warfare. 

Facebook stepped up efforts to shutter fake accounts before a national election last year in France, and has said it will work with election authorities around the world to try to prevent meddling in politics.

The company, which is now one of the main ways politicians advertise to voters, plans to start a public archive showing all election-related ads, how much money was spent on each one, the number of impressions each receives and the demographics of the audience reached.

Facebook is on track to bring that data to U.S. voters before congressional elections in November, Zuckerberg said Tuesday. Facebook plans to send postcards by U.S. mail to verify the identities and location of people who want to purchase U.S. election-related advertising.
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Autonomous cars should be required to meet standards on their ability to detect potential hazards, and better ways are needed to keep their human drivers ready to assume control, U.S. auto safety and technology experts said after fatal crashes involving Uber Technologies and Tesla vehicles.

Automakers and tech companies rely on human drivers to step in when necessary with self-driving technology. But in the two recent crashes, which involved vehicles using different kinds of technologies, neither of the human drivers took any action before the accidents.

Driverless cars rely on lidar, which uses laser light pulses to detect road hazards, as well as sensors such as radar and cameras. There are not, however, any standards on the systems, nor do all companies use the same combination of sensors, and some vehicles may have blind spots.

Queue the music for the human driver — music that drivers often find difficult to hear.

“Humans don’t have the ability to take over the vehicle as quickly as may be expected” in those situations, said self-driving expert and investor Evangelos Simoudis.

In the Uber crash last month, the ride-services company was testing a fully driverless system intended for commercial use when the prototype vehicle struck and killed a woman walking across an Arizona road. Video of the crash, taken from inside the vehicle, shows the driver at the wheel, seemingly looking down and not at the road. Just before the video stops, the driver looks upward toward the road and suddenly looks shocked.

In the Tesla incident last month, which involved a car that any consumer can buy, a Model X vehicle was in semi-autonomous Autopilot mode when it crashed, killing its driver. The driver had received earlier warnings to put his hands on the wheel, Tesla said.

Some semi-automated cars, like the Tesla, employ different technologies to help drivers stay in their lane or maintain a certain distance behind the vehicle in front. Those systems rely on alerts — beeping noises or a vibrating steering wheel — to get drivers’ attention.

‘Immature technology’

Duke University mechanical engineering professor Missy Cummings said the recent Uber and Tesla crashes show the “technology they are using is immature.”

Tesla says its technology is statistically proven to save lives through better driving. In a response to Reuters on Tuesday, Tesla said drivers have a “responsibility to maintain control of the car” whenever they enable Autopilot and need to be ready to respond to “audible and visual cues.”

An Uber spokesperson said, “safety is our primary concern every step of the way.”

A consumer group, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, says a bill on self-driving cars now stalled in the U.S. Senate is an opportunity to improve safety, quite different from the bill’s original intent to quickly allow testing of self-driving cars without human controls on public roads. The group has proposed amending the bill, the AV START Act, to set standards for those vehicles — for instance, requiring a “vision test” for automated vehicles to test what their different sensors actually see.

The group believes the bill should also cover semi-automated systems like Tesla’s Autopilot — a lower level of technology than what is included in the current proposed legislation.

Other groups have also put forth proposals on self-driving cars, including requiring the vehicles and even semi-automated systems to meet performance targets, greater transparency and data from makers and operators of the vehicles, increased regulatory oversight, and better monitoring of and engagement with human drivers.

Role of drivers

Others want to focus on the human driver. In November, Consumer Reports magazine called on automakers for responsible labeling “to help consumers fully understand” their vehicles’ autonomous functions.

Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ head of automotive testing, said human drivers “are bad at paying attention to automation and this technology is not capable of reacting to all types of emergencies.

“It’s like being a passenger with a toddler driving the car,” he said.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is doing tests using semi-automated vehicles including models from Tesla, Volvo, Jaguar Land Rover and General Motors Co. The aim is to see how drivers use semi-autonomous technology — some watch the road with their hands above the wheel, others do not — and which warnings get their attention.

“We just don’t know enough about how drivers use any of these systems in the wild,” said MIT research scientist Bryan Reimer.

Timothy Carone, an autonomous systems expert and professor at Notre Dame University’s Mendoza College of Business, said autonomous technology’s proponents must “find the right balance so the technology is tested right, but it isn’t hampered or halted.”

“Because in the long run it will save lives,” he said.
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Bread and chocolate are staples of the American diet. And a scientific team in California is working hard to make sure the plants they’re made from are as robust as possible. They’re using a recently discovered bacterial gene-editing tool called CRISPR to create more pest-resistant crops.

CRISPR is a feature of the bacterial defense system. The microbes use it like a molecular pair of scissors, to precisely snip out viral infections in their DNA.

Scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley, California, are using CRISPR to manipulate plant DNA. Managing director, Susan Jenkins, says the technique is so much faster and precise than other plant transformation methods, it will likely increase the speed of creating new plant varieties by years, if not decades. “What CRISPR is going to allow,” she explains, “is for us to go in and make these changes, and then within one generation of the plant actually have the trait we want.”

Rust-resistant wheat

While CRISPR speeds up plant breeding, Jenkins says it’s not a magic wand — changing a plant takes a lot of steps. She points to the Institute’s efforts to develop a wheat variety that resists a fungal rust that can reduce yields by nearly 50 percent.

First, scientists had to figure out just which gene was making the wheat vulnerable to fungal rust. Then they used CRISPR to remove that gene.

“So in this case, we use CRISPR to actually knock out a gene that is in the wheat,” Jenkins says. And because “snipping out” a gene does not add foreign material to a plant, last week, the USDA ruled that gene-changing methods like this do not require special regulatory approval.

Plant transformation expert Myeong-Je Cho says they started with a single gene-edited rust-resistant wheat cell, and grew it in the lab into wheat “clones” for further testing. After just over a year, some clones are now stalks of wheat, and Cho adds, “we have grownup plants in the greenhouse,” complete with normal stalks and robust seed heads.

While the Institute introduced no foreign genetic material into the wheat, CRISPR technology can also be used to introduce genes, even genes from other species, as is done with more traditional GMO crops. However, in standard GMO techniques, scientists use a “shotgun” approach to force new genes into a plant’s DNA in random places. Then, they choose which random change is most likely to grow healthy plants. In contrast, CRISPR is used when scientists want to add a specific gene at a specific location in the DNA. CRISPR offers that level of precision.

Protecting cacao trees

The bacterial gene known as Cas9 evolved to snip viruses out of bacterial DNA. Now Institute scientists want to use it to fight a virus that’s attacking cacao trees in West Africa.

The swollen shoot virus evolved in other plants, then, half a century ago, “jumped species” to cacao trees, which it can kill in just three years. So Jenkins says, the Institute is working to add virus resistance to cacao tree DNA, by inserting the Cas9 resistance gene. After all, she says, “If the bacteria have already evolved this to fight this viral infection, we are just going to take that mechanism and put it directly into the plant.”

The Institute plans to start growing cacao trees resistant to swollen shoot virus within a year. That is fast, according to Institute Science Director, Brian Staskawicz. He points out, “What this technology can do is to allow us work with the elite cultivars of a plant and basically change them for drought resistance and cold tolerance and disease resistance in a more rapid fashion than classical plant breeding.”

Staskawicz says that modifying cacao tree DNA is an exciting project from a technical standpoint, because cacao plants are unusually difficult to clone and genetically transform.

Public attitudes towards genetically modified crops

However, some challenges will go beyond whether the changes are technically possible. Those other challenges become evident at the Diablo Farmer’s market near Berkeley, where vendors like chocolatier Eli Curtis pride themselves on selling craft, organic foods. Curtis suspects we could increase cocoa yields by helping farmers be better stewards of wild cacao trees. He’s not sure consumers will like the idea of gene-edited chocolate, but if CRISPR leads to more pest-resistant crops, he says, “I definitely understand the value. But I also understand consumer apprehension.”

Nevertheless, Staskawicz says we need faster plant-breeding techniques like CRISPR because we are in a race, one we need to win, because there are currently 7.3 billion people on earth.

“By 2050 there are going to be nine billion people, and the estimates are that we actually need to increase food production by 70 percent. So we are going to need a way to actually increase the yield of these plants to feed the population of the world.”

CRISPR can help do that. He and his team hope, within a decade, CRISPR’d crops may be ingredients in many things, including bread and chocolate.
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