The notochord

the paper, I immediately understood that it was going to be possible to use Agrobacterium to make transgenic plants and that would, in turn, create many new opportunities. I concluded that plant molecular genetics was poised to take off and that insight, plus some nudging from Shauna, tipped me over the edge. What is your greatest frustration? I am frustrated by the influence of political organizations such as Greenpeace on public perception and acceptance of agricultural biotechnology. Although I think political confrontation as practiced by Greenpeace and others can be a useful activity in general, I think that they made a costly mistake in deciding to oppose biotechnology. I think agricultural biotechnology offers the best hope for addressing many of the most pressing environmental problems. It is challenging to carry out food policy debates in the media, when half of the consumers in the developed world are not sure whether a tomato normally has DNA. It is also unfortunate that the technology was developed by large chemical companies who had a poor record of environmental stewardship. This prevented a public debate in which biotechnology could be weighed against current practices, such as the use of chemicals, and also inevitably pitted environmental organizations against the technology for historical reasons. Unfortunately, the people who are paying the price for the political antics of organizations such as Greenpeace are the subsistence farmers of the developing world. What do you think is scientifically exciting? I am excited about finally being able to see all the genes required to make my favorite organism. I am also excited by the power of the tools we have — the genome sequence, indexed insertions, whole genome chips, tiling chips, chemical libraries, robust mass spectrometers and so forth. I want to know what all the genes do and how they work together to make and operate the organism. We have about 12,000 people working on Arabidopsis now, and if we could somehow distribute the work in an efficient way, we could discover the function of the roughly 26,000 genes in one or two grant cycles. There is not a shortage of people or tools — the problem is cultural. We need to use new ways of thinking about scientific goals to get the community to work on the genes of unknown function rather than on incremental studies of known processes. What is your main technical problem right now? Most …