Farmscape for April 14, 2015

A chemistry professor with McGill University says we need to cultivate an understanding of chemistry, biology, and physics among students at the elementary level and then follow up in high school.
"Pigging Out on Science" will be among the keynote presentations tomorrow afternoon in Winnipeg as part of Manitoba Pork's 2015 Annual General Meeting.
Dr. Joe Schwarcz, a professor of chemistry and director of the Office for Science and Society with McGill University, says one of the key myths is the synonymous association between chemical and toxin.

Clip-Dr. Joe Schwarcz-McGill University:
Chemicals are just the building blocks of all matter.
They don't make any decisions.
People make decisions.
Chemicals are not good or bad, they have no morality but unfortunately the word chemical has become associated in so many people's minds with poison and toxin.
The world is of course composed of millions and millions of chemicals and they're not to be feared, neither are they to be worshipped, they are to be understood.
Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot of understanding these days and what ever knowledge they have is not necessarily scientific because these days so many people get their information from the University of Google and not everything in Google is scientifically sound.
The long answer is that we need to educate students earlier and better.
We need to get them to be knowledgeable with chemistry, biology and physics in elementary school.
We need to build upon that in high school because today life really revolves around an understanding of science and there's no short cut to that.
It's certainly possible to give one talk as I plan to do to clarify some of the issues but in order to have a culture that really is based upon science we need to get at basic education.

Dr. Schwarcz says these days it's important to be able to separate the myths from the facts.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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