Science
Dickson Despommier, Who Championed Farming in Skyscrapers, Dies at 84
Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist who proposed that cities should grow food in high-rises, popularizing the term “vertical farming” — an idea that crossed over from the realm of the purely fanciful to become a reality around the globe — died on Feb. 7 in Manhattan. He was 84.
His wife, Marlene Bloom, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He lived in Fort Lee, N.J.
Dr. Despommier (pronounced de-POM-ee-yay), who was a professor for 38 years at Columbia’s School of Public Health, specialized in parasitic diseases, but he gained far wider influence as a guru of vertical farming.
In 2001, he and students in a medical ecology class designed a 30-story building that theoretically could grow food for 50,000 people. Some 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables would be grown on upper floors, with chickens housed lower down. Fish would feed on plant waste.
Dr. Despommier argued that vertical farms would use 70 to 90 percent less water than traditional farms, allowing agricultural land to return to a natural state and helping to remediate climate change. He evangelized at TEDx talks and in a book, “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century.”
“When my book came out, in 2010, there were no functioning vertical farms that I was aware of,” he told The New Yorker several years later. “By the time I published a revised edition in 2011, vertical farms had been built in England, Holland, Japan and Korea.”
Tech investors poured money into vertical farming. The operations generally substituted indoor LED lights for sunlight and used watering systems that spritzed plant roots — no soil needed. The farms sprouted in places as varied as downtown Newark and Dubai, on the Persian Gulf.
The Guardian estimated that there were more than 2,000 vertical farms in the U.S. in 2022, raising vegetables and fruits in stacked trays or long columns, some several stories high, some tended by robots. That year, Walmart announced that it would harvest salad greens from a vertical farm in Compton, Calif., to be run by a company named Plenty.
More recently, the industry has stumbled. High interest rates and energy costs have caused many operations to close or declare bankruptcy. They include the one in Compton and the one in Newark, AeroFarms, which The New Yorker featured prominently in its article about Dr. Despommier in 2017. A company with farms in three Eastern states, Bowery Farming, whose investors included Justin Timberlake and Natalie Portman and which was once valued at $2.3 billion, shut down last year.
Critics questioned if vertical farming really lowers carbon emissions and called it a fad. Others said the industry is merely going through a shakeout and will endure.
Dickson Donald Despommier was born on June 5, 1940, in New Orleans to Roland and Beverly (Wood) Despommier. His father was an accountant for a shipping line. His parents divorced when Dickson was young.
He received a B.S. in biology from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1962, an M.S. in medical parasitology from Columbia in 1964 and a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Notre Dame in 1967.
Dr. Despommier joined Columbia’s faculty in 1971 as an assistant professor of microbiology. He taught a required course in parasitic diseases to second-year medical students for three decades. His research focused on tropical diseases; he was co-author of a textbook, “Parasitic Diseases,” and a director of the website “Parasites Without Borders.”
Besides his wife, he is survived by his sister, Duane Despommier Kuykendall; his sons, Bruce and Bradley; a stepdaughter, Molly Bloom; a stepson, Michael Goodwin; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. An earlier marriage, to Judith Forman, ended in divorce.
The idea of vertical farming emerged when students told Dr. Despommier in 2000 that they were bored with his course on medical ecology. He redirected the semester by posing a question, “What will the world be like in 2050?” and a follow-up question, “What would you like the world to be like in 2050?”
The discussion focused on how densely crowded the planet would be in 50 years and how food would have to be grown then with less water and less pollution from chemical fertilizers. Students said New York City should source all its food from close by. They suggested using the city’s rooftops for agriculture. But then they calculated that if every rooftop in all five boroughs were turned into a garden, the growing acreage would feed only about 2 percent of the population.
Dr. Despommier then thought of raising crops in glass and steel skyscrapers, with plants stacked on multiple levels, just like their human inhabitants. He continued to refine designs with each year’s class of ecology students. In 2001, he adopted the term vertical farming.
After he appeared on the Comedy Central late-night show “The Colbert Report” in 2008 to discuss his eggplants-in-the-sky idea, traffic to his website shot up to 400,000 visitors overnight.
Many of the start-ups that turned Dr. Despommier’s vision into a reality built vertical farms that were only two or three stories high, compared with the 30-story behemoths he had proposed. One was attached to a parking garage in Jackson, Wyo. Others were housed in shipping crates.
But the idea traversed the globe, with a nonprofit, the Association for Vertical Farming, starting up in Germany in 2013.
All along, skeptics questioned whether the cost and the carbon footprint of indoor farming was an improvement over the traditional kind practiced by humanity for some 12,000 years.
“It’s such an appealing idea — ‘Press floor 10 for lettuce’ — that people picked up on it right away,” Bruce Bugbee, a professor of crop physiology at Utah State University, told The New York Times in 2016. “The fundamental problem is that plants need a lot of light. It’s free outside. If we’re going to do it inside, it will require the burning of a lot of fossil fuels.”
The industry shakeout has been brutal, with the editor of the news site Vertical Farming Today declaring in 2023 that venture capital investments in vertical farming had fallen by about 90 percent.
Unfazed, Dr. Despommier kept brainstorming about how modern life could thrive in the face of a dangerously changing climate. In his last book, “The New City: How to Build Our Sustainable Urban Future” (2023), he proposed that cities henceforth be built of wood.
The carbon footprint of making concrete and steel, he explained, is enormous, whereas wood is a carbon sink — trees absorb carbon from the air as they grow — and new technologies for engineering timbers allowed very tall buildings to be built.
“It sounds like we’ll be using up all the wood,” he said last year, “but the fact is that, if vertical farming succeeds, there’ll be a lot more land to grow trees.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services has joined a chorus of California hospitals and health systems lobbying the state for a $500-million emergency payment to public hospitals bracing for massive financial losses.
The California Assn. of Public Hospitals and Health Systems is requesting a one-time general fund payment in the 2026-27 budget to help cover inpatient care for fee-for-service Medi-Cal patients at the state’s 17 public hospitals.
While the exact percentage of the $500 million allocated to each hospital will depend on inpatient claims, the county expects that roughly 25%, or $125 million, will end up at Los Angeles County hospitals, said Dr. Christina Ghaly, director of LA Health Services.
“That’s the money that is really necessary to serve as a stopgap and continue that lifeline that the public hospitals desperately need, particularly with the state’s proposed shift of undocumented individuals from managed care into fee-for-service,” Ghaly said.
Ghaly praised county voters for passing Measure ER, which will provide an estimated $220 million annually for the next five years to the county health system through a new half-cent sales tax, Ghaly said.
But it’s not enough to stanch what the county estimates will be a $700-million annual loss by the 2028-29 fiscal year.
LA Health Services is the largest public health system in the state and second-largest in the nation. It serves as a safety net for the county’s 10 million residents, providing healthcare regardless of an individual’s ability to pay.
More than 80% of the system’s patients rely on Medi-Cal, Los Angeles General Medical Center Chief Executive Jorge Orozco told a state Senate committee in March.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Trump signed into law last summer, alters Medicaid eligibility requirements and includes about $1 trillion in federal Medicaid reductions over 10 years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. As a result, California is expected to lose tens of billions in total funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.
About 660,000 people in Los Angeles County are expected to lose Medi-Cal coverage, “but they will not stop needing healthcare,” Orozco said in March. “They will still come to our emergency rooms for everything from routine illness to life threatening conditions. And safety net hospital systems like ours will be forced to absorb those costs.”
County health officials have enacted hiring freezes, consolidated services, reduced overtime and taken other cost-cutting measures in anticipation of the losses, resulting in about $230 million in savings.
“But we need to be clear: we cannot cut our way out of a funding loss of this magnitude,” the department said in a statement released this week. “Without help from the State, we will be forced to consider options no one wants, reduced patient services, staff layoffs, and potential facility closures.”
The county has not yet identified specific services for closure, Ghaly said.
“Our focus is entirely on preventing the harm that would come before we have to make those tough choices,” she added.
A memo on the department’s fiscal outlook prepared for the Board of Supervisors sounded the alarm in April.
“For the patients we serve, losing Medi-Cal doesn’t mean they stop getting sick — it means losing access to care. Health Services will still be here, but with over 600,000 more uninsured patients in LA County alone, the strain will be felt across our health system and across every emergency room in Los Angeles County,” the memo read.
“Without substantial new revenue sources, Health Services will have no alternative but to consider planning for service curtailments — including possible facility closures and staff layoffs — beginning in early 2027.”
new video loaded: Southern Lights Seen From International Space Station
By Cynthia Silva
June 10, 2026
Science
UC Davis favored less qualified Black, Latino med school applicants, Justice Department claims
The U.S. Justice Department has accused the UC Davis School of Medicine of choosing race “over merit, skill, and competence” in its admissions process, favoring Black and Latino students even when they weren’t as qualified as white and Asian applicants.
The department said its findings, announced Wednesday afternoon, were based on a six-month investigation by its Civil Rights Division. The Justice Department said it found that the Northern California university violated the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-based determinations in admissions. The findings have been contested by the school.
“Davis Med’s actions reflect both unabashed contempt for the rule of law and plain disregard for the potential public health consequences of putting race over merit, skill, and competence,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
“The Department will not allow schools to violate federal law without consequence.”
A spokesperson said the university was “disappointed” with the report and its findings.
“UC Davis School of Medicine strongly disagrees with any characterization of its admissions practices as discriminatory or inconsistent with applicable law,” a school statement read. “The report’s findings do not accurately reflect the school’s rigorous, individualized, and merit-based admissions process and our firm commitment to complying with applicable federal and state antidiscrimination laws.”
The department outlined its case in a 12-page letter to an attorney representing UC Davis, claiming the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.
Title VI prohibits institutions receiving federal funding from discriminating based on race, while the 2023 decision banned affirmative action in higher-education admissions.
The Justice Department said its investigation found the medical school “adopted admissions practices with the express purpose of circumventing” the 2023 ruling.
That method was the “Davis Scale,” the department said. The letter called the scale a “continuous measure of socioeconomic disadvantage” that includes parental income and education, growing up in a medically underserved area and other socioeconomic variables.
The Justice Department included UC Davis literature that said the scale had allowed the school to triple the enrollment of Black and Latino students.
In 2024, Davis’ medical school became the third most racially diverse medical school in the country, the Justice Department claimed.
Conversely, the department said its review of medical school admissions data from 2023 to 2025 found that 93% of white and certain Asian applicants had MCAT scores at or above those of the average Black student.
It also showed that Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted at rates up to six times higher than whites and Asians, despite consistently having, on average, lower academic qualifications, according to the department.
The Justice Department said it is attempting to enter into a voluntary agreement with UC Davis to bring the medical school into compliance. The department would eventually sue the medical school if such a resolution is not found.
UC Davis did not indicate whether it would comply with the Justice Department.
“UC Davis is fully committed to meeting the critical healthcare needs of California, particularly those in underserved and under-resourced areas,” the school said in a statement.
The finding mirrors similar investigations into medical schools at UCLA and UC San Diego.
The Justice Department said last month that UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine intentionally used race for the last three years to discriminate against white and Asian applicants during admissions.
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