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."

"'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

"Rob Horsch [...] has to be persuaded to speak in religious terms about his work [...] Was he 'playing God' in coaxing plants to grow from a genetically transformed lump of tissue? No, he says. 'If you want to use that language, God gave plants these properties. And he gave us the intellect to plant and harvest, and cook, and select, and breed[...]; and do tissue culture. All we're doing is harnessing those gifts.'"