In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can't be eaten by people - and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that's because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes.

Nina Fedoroff

Categorized in : People Taken Agriculture

We are sliding back into a dark era, and there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.

Nina Fedoroff

issues climate dark

We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century', and yet that's what we're demanding in food production.

Nina Fedoroff

doctors people thinking

We've gotten so good at growing food that we've gone, in a few generations, from nearly half of Americans living on farms to 2 percent. We no longer think about how the wonderful things in the grocery store got there, and we'd like to go back to what we think is a more natural way.

Nina Fedoroff

generations gone thinking

We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven. We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops.

Nina Fedoroff

water people needs

Myths about the dire effects of genetically modified foods on health and the environment abound, but they have not held up to scientific scrutiny. And, although many concerns have been expressed about the potential for unexpected consequences, the unexpected effects that have been observed so far have been benign.

Nina Fedoroff

benign unexpected environment

New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods.

Nina Fedoroff

pests disease add

Weeds do become resistant to herbicides, and it needs to be managed with multiple herbicides.

Nina Fedoroff

multiple weed needs

If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn't support the earth's current population - maybe half.

Nina Fedoroff

population support half

There are probably already too many people on the planet.

Nina Fedoroff

global-warming climate-change people

The influence of a science adviser is only as good as ears open to that science advice.

Nina Fedoroff

influence ears advice

For me science is not different from art, except in the one small, crucial detail that experiments speak their own truths, not ours.

Nina Fedoroff

details different art

India has the opportunity to be a leader in genetic engineering, It has institutions that no other country has.

Nina Fedoroff

engineering opportunity country

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.

Nina Fedoroff

support growth people

The more we can grow on already cultivated land, the better.

Nina Fedoroff

grows land

We have domesticated crops over a very long period of time, like tens of thousands of years. And crops get - seeds get carried. Sometimes, if they're very small seeds, they get scattered off trucks. Pollen travels.

Nina Fedoroff

sometimes long years

If there are more and more environmental refugees, they are going to end up on your doorstep too.

Nina Fedoroff

refugee environmental ends

There's almost no food that isn't genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution. Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.

Nina Fedoroff

agriculture dna people

One of the really remarkably beneficial aspects of genetic engineering is that much of the previous methodology for controlling pests and so forth is through chemicals that affect a very broad spectrum of insects, for example, or fungicides that control fungi.

Nina Fedoroff

engineering pests example

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.

Nina Fedoroff

thanks technology civilization

I don't know how you overcome the dearth of scientists in the government positions.

Nina Fedoroff

scientist government overcoming