Kathryn Haydon’s Reviews > Lords Of The Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, And The Future Of Food > Status Update

"Agriculture, for all its charm, is a hostile place for subtle technological improvements. Compare agriculture with pharmaceuticals; any new drug that improves a patient's health, no matter how slight the effect, can be worth billions. In agriculture, a new gene has to have the effect of a sledgehammer or no one will notice."

Bob Meyer: "[P]ut a molecular biologist out on a farm, and he'd starve to death. [The genetic engineers at Calgene] had no concept of what agriculture was like. [...] I'm the guy that puts the plant in and gets the fruit out and gets it shipped. [...] They had no concept of how many varieties it would take. They said: 'So you mean we'll have to put this gene in more than one variety?'"

Pages 117-118: nice and accessible description of plant breeding

The phrasing of this made me lol since posters are so boringly normal to me now: "In the summer of 1982, Rogers summarized his experiment on a large sheet of paper for a so-called 'poster session' at the University of California-Davis."

"Colin Tudge [...] proposes ditching the idea of genetic 'engineering' entirely and using instead the term 'genetic gardening.' A gardener may plant, weed, and water her garden, but the harvest remains uncertain. Like the plant cell, a garden is a complex system that remains just beyond complete human control and outside the predictably of 'engineering.'"

"'During these years, all of us who went into biology were influenced by the wave of environmentalism,' says Willy de Greef [...]. 'The idea was to reduce chemicals with biologicals or with genetics.' Fred Perlak says [...], 'We were all children of the sixties and the seventies. We'd all read Silent Spring*; we knew the connection between 2,4-D and [...] Agent Orange.'"

*incidentally I just started SS today