Agriculture committee  I learned something very interesting at a meeting at the University of Wisconsin a couple of years ago. They were trying to teach the general public about vitamins and healthy eating back in the 1930s. They hired an artist and a writer at the college level to get that across to t

Agriculture committee  I can give you one more food example. This is very common in the world of legumes. The legume crops that I work with were not very conducive to using the transgenic technologies because of technical difficulties. Our position was therefore to transfer genes from relatives of thos

Agriculture committee  Go ahead. There are vaccines.

Agriculture committee  In my case, we've never been able to attract much money from companies. Because it was a small crop--peas and lentils--nobody was prepared to invest. However, we had some forward-thinking farmers who set up an organization. They taxed themselves and put the checkoff dollars into

Agriculture committee  Yes. If we understand where the gene is, we can then go through the natural process of hybridizing. Without hybridizing, none of us would be here. In that case, what it allows us to do genomically is just to track the fate of the genes. For a very low cost, we can find out which

Agriculture committee  The types of studies you are referring to have been done historically. This is where I go back to square one: understand biology. If the plants are self-pollinated, you're going to have a different buffer zone than if they were cross-pollinated by bees. The zone for alfalfa will

Agriculture committee  Transgenics is basically taking a gene, a piece of DNA, from another organism and then splicing it into the organism that's your target and making sure that the gene is functional. For instance, the herbicide tolerance gene may have originated in a bacterium. That bacterial gen

Agriculture committee  No, because there's a huge amount of biodiversity within the species--

Agriculture committee  My view is that if we take that approach and promote genomics and say we have an alternative for people who don't want to do it that way, it will lend value to the whole concept of preserving biodiversity. Canada has signed on to that treaty. We don't live in a perfect world, an

Agriculture committee  Yes. It may be dandelions.

Agriculture committee  No.

Agriculture committee  I'd say it's all about weeds.

Agriculture committee  I think I said it. You can attribute that to technology changes all over the world. People are trying to maximize--

Agriculture committee  I like his comment. It comes down to identifying the message the public needs to hear about biology. It can be good or it can be bad. Dinosaurs were scary.

Agriculture committee  If you go from 3% to 2.5%, you're still in the ball park, but it's still very low. We're not influential. The technology is going to be focused on the large and large-producing countries, meaning the U.S., China, and India. These are now huge influences in where technology goes.