My name is Manish Raizada and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Plant Agriculture, and I'm also the international relations officer.
I was told in the early to mid-1990s that I might have been the first graduate student in the world to make GMO corn, and I'm a molecular geneticist. Before that, however, I was actually an employee of Greenpeace, so I consider myself also an environmentalist. So I'm going to try to bring in both perspectives here, as well as the perspective from developing nations.
I often get asked, are GMOs good or bad? My response is, well, are drugs good or bad?
Some drugs are great. If I have a cold, Aspirin and Tylenol are great. Cocaine is not so great. Maybe some drugs are good at low levels and not so good at high levels, so it depends.
There are lots of genes out there. It depends on the gene, it depends where you turn that gene on or off, and to me, it's all about relative risk and benefit for any particular gene, and that's what has to be assessed. And I think on both sides, on the risk and on the benefit—