2018 Spring Edibles and Potables Archives

Chancellor’s Letter: Planning for Change

It is a time of great change both at Berkeley and across all of higher education. Many of the parameters that shape colleges and universities are undergoing rapid transformation—funding models, student expectations, demographics, the ways in which we receive and communicate information. In order to thrive in this environment and era of change, I believe […]

The Canna-beat Cub

Everyone’s talking about marijuana—not to mention smoking it, eating it, vaping it, or rubbing it all over their bodies. Just the other day, the San Francisco Chronicle GreenState website announced the winners of its 2018 Cannabis Awards. The Hepburns took the prize for “Best Pre-Rolls” and Kyle Kushman took the honors for “Best Cultivator.” HerbaBuena […]

5 Questions for UC Berkeley’s VC for Research Randy Katz

You’ve said the role of research administration is to support faculty and provide “the best possible environment for pursuing world-changing research.” As the new vice chancellor for research, how do you create that environment and what does it look like? A major part of my job is to oversee Berkeley’s investment in interdisciplinary research, through […]

Berkeley Lab Finds Ingredients for Life—In Meteorites

Twenty years ago, two chunks of rock plummeted from space. One landed in Texas in March, only yards away from a children’s basketball game. The other hit the ground in Morocco five months later. At the time, no one guessed that the meteorites carried some very unique passengers: crystals embedded with clues to the origins […]

Staying Alive: Immunotherapy Offers Hope to Some Cancer Patients

Update 10/1/2018: James Allison has won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Berkeley News Center reports on the announcement here. In 2014, 59-year-old Brian Landers, a fifth-grade teacher in otherwise good health, began bleeding internally. After tests detected something on his small intestine, he was rushed into surgery to have it removed and […]

Funny Girl: Irene Tu Is an Up-and-Comer in Bay Area Comedy

In a career where success often doesn’t come until later in life, if at all, comic Irene Tu has an impressive resume for her mid-20s. Just this past year, the recent Berkeley grad performed her first hour-long comedy show, “Triple Minority,” at the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC) of San Francisco. Tu’s show “Man […]

We’re Not on OxyContin Anymore, Toto

Perry Solomon is used to people extolling the virtues of medical cannabis. Dr. Solomon is the chief medical officer of HelloMD, a website that bills itself as one of the nation’s largest online medical cannabis communities. Over the past five years, the site has issued more than 70,000 recommendations for patient cannabis use in the […]

Physics to Foodstuffs: A Q&A with Nobel Laureate Barry Barish

If Barry Barish ’57, Ph.D. ’63, looks familiar, perhaps it’s because we profiled him in this very same space last issue. In that article, we took pains to explain the nature of Barish’s work as director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, for which he shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Little […]

High Steaks: The Environmentalist Beef with Impossible Burger

In 2010, Patrick O. Brown, then a biochemist at Stanford University, and Michael Eisen, Berkeley professor of genetics, were at a board meeting in Washington, D.C., for PLOS, the Public Library of Science. The two scientists had (with Nobel laureate Harold Varmus) founded the nonprofit nearly a decade earlier. Disturbed by the stranglehold traditional science […]

Vanessa Lavorato’s Cookin’ with Grass

At Cal, Vanessa Lavorato, owner of Marigold Sweets and cohost of the TV show Bong Appétit, was like many another college undergraduate: She had a fondness for both cannabis and chocolate. But her appreciation was from an amateur’s perspective. She hadn’t considered either substance as the foundation for a career until she chatted one day […]

Back to the Land: Richard Sanford and the Tao of Pinot Noir

Richard Sanford graduated from Berkeley in 1965, served a combat tour in Vietnam, and by 1971 found himself working from a mossy old barn near Lompoc with no plumbing or electricity. A geographer by training, the Navy veteran was engaged in an improbable quest—transforming the barn and adjoining bean fields into a classic, Burgundian-style vineyard. […]