Emily Monosson

Emily Monosson is a toxicologist and author, a member of the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship, and holds an adjunct faculty position in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In recent years, her focus has turned toward the impact of industrial age chemicals and technology on food and medicine. Her most recent books are Natural Defense: Enlisting Bugs and Germs to Save Our Food and Medicine, Unnatural Selection: How We Are Changing Life Gene by Gene, and Evolution in a Toxic World: How Life Responds to Chemical Threats. She has published in The Scientist, Aeon, LA Times, American Scientist, and Whole Terrain in addition to academic journals and blogs somewhat regularly at toxicevolution.wordpress.com.

HOPE THROUGH SCIENCE: AN ANTIBIOTIC ALTERNATIVE?

By Emily Monosson / On November 29th, 2016

A toddler suddenly becomes deathly ill. In the ER she is diagnosed with dysentery, caused by a rare but particularly aggressive form of Salmonella. One antibiotic after another fails because the strain, picked up when her family was traveling across parts of Asia, resists multiple antibiotics; but there is an alternative new drug.

GMO: The Times, They Are Misleading

By Emily Monosson / On November 8th, 2016

The New York Times article, Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops rightly argues that herbicide resistant GMOs haven’t reduced the use of chemicals on the farm. But by equating genetic modification with herbicide resistant plants, this article is misleading.

Access Denied

By Emily Monosson / On October 11th, 2016

The access issue touches all of us. From the cancer patient wanting to read up on her disease to the community organizers whose groundwater is tainted with solvents, the seaside city planner wanting the latest climate change models, and the high school student looking up at the stars.

Raisin Hell (And Dogs)

By Emily Monosson / On May 2nd, 2016

We were closing in on the end of a glorious spring weekend when my husband discovered the bag.

Anti-Vaxxed?

By Emily Monosson / On April 18th, 2016

In light of the fuss over Robert Di Niro and the movie Vaxxed; if anyone needs reminding of the value of vaccines, take a look at this diagram of 20th Century Death. These are estimates as they say but even so the numbers are humbling. I won’t go into the story behind the movie and its writer, director and one-time (now unlicensed) doc, that has been covered plenty (instead here is an interesting NYT article about the developer of the measles vaccine, Dr. Maurice Hilleman.

#ForewordFriday: Unnatural Selection Edition

By Katharine Sucher / On April 1st, 2016

Gonorrhea. Bed bugs. Weeds. Salamanders. People. All are evolving, some surprisingly rapidly, in response to our chemical age. In Unnatural Selection, newly available in paperback, Emily Monosson shows how our drugs, pesticides, and pollution are exerting intense selection pressure on all manner of species. And we humans might not like the result.