Levi Gadye features April 27 2014 at Berkeley Science Review
Agriculture might not strike you as humanity’s first scientific endeavor. Familiar images of farmers tilling their fields or cowboys tending to their cattle evoke a nostalgia at odds with the test tubes and lab coats that have come to signify modern science. Yet agriculture represents one of the first successful applications of science to a problem that has dogged human civilization since its inception: how to feed many people without year-round hunting and gathering.
Just as the practice of agriculture has evolved over thousands of years, so has our understanding of its biological underpinnings. The emergence of modern genetics in the last century has given way to more efficient manipulation of crop traits during selective breeding, spurring the development of everything from the Honeycrisp apple to genetically modified (GM) insect-resistant corn. Largely thanks to the dominance of a handful of GM cash crops on American farms, the public has become increasingly wary of the role of biotechnology in agriculture, putting the long-symbiotic relationship between science and farming up in the air.
Recent discoveries in molecular biology, led by UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna and her team, have the potential to revolutionize agriculture yet again. The Doudna lab’s series of landmark findings about the CRISPR/Cas9 system of bacterial immunity (“Germ Warfare”, BSR Fall 2012) have given way to what has been dubbed by some the “CRISPR craze”–an explosion of scientific projects worldwide that have co-opted this system to precisely manipulate genes in any organism, cheaply and efficiently. The controversy over GM food is not about to disappear, but with CRISPR/Cas9, a new era of genetic engineering, and indeed plant breeding, may now be upon us...
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