Best of the year: Asya Kazantseva advises popular science book
2015 is coming to an end. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the year turned out to be saturated, including culturally. To dot the “and” and make sure that nothing important had passed by, we asked experts in various fields to tell about the brightest books, films, albums and other cultural events. In the first issue, scientific journalist Asya Kazantseva explains why you can’t miss Alexander Panchin’s book on GMOs.
Asya Kazantseva
scientific journalist
2015 was a tricky year for the scholar: Due to the pressure of the current government, the Dynasty Foundation was closed, which for the last fifteen years has supported the publication of books, science festivals and other important things. But there is good news. First, the founder of "Dynasty" Dmitry Zimin decided to keep the "Educator" award. Secondly, a new foundation “Evolution” has appeared, which will take over the publishing program. And the third event is quite comparable in scale - Alexander Panchin’s book “The Sum of Biotechnology” was published about why one should not be afraid of genetically modified products. For the past ten years, scientific journalists have been writing articles about it all the time, blog posts, making TV plots - but there was no comprehensive text that would simultaneously describe how GMOs are created, how they are tested for safety, would dismantle the myths disseminated by technology opponents etc. Now there is a beautiful book about this, and I hope that it will beat all sales records and radically change the attitude of people to modern technologies.
