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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution. Nina Fedoroff Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture – from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding. Nina Fedoroff Read Quote
