Biotechnology Quotes (6 quotes)
Developing countries can leapfrog several stages in the development process through the application of bio-technology in agriculture.
In Arbind Prasad and Jagdish Prasad, Development Planning for Agriculture: Policies, Economic Implications, Inputs, Production and Marketing (1994), 93.
Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures … New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora.
In 'Our Biotech Future', The New York Review of Books (2007). As quoted and cited in Kenneth Brower, 'The Danger of Cosmic Genius', The Atlantic (Dec 2010).
Producing food for 6.2 billion people, adding a population of 80 million more a year, is not simple. We better develop an ever improved science and technology, including the new biotechnology, to produce the food that’s needed for the world today. In response to the fraction of the world population that could be fed if current farmland was convered to organic-only crops: “We are 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don’t see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.” In response to extreme critics: “These are utopian people that live on Cloud 9 and come into the third world and cause all kinds of confusion and negative impacts on the developing countries.”
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We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes.
In 'Our Biotech Future', The New York Review of Books (2007). As quoted and cited in Kenneth Brower, 'The Danger of Cosmic Genius', The Atlantic (Dec 2010).
We believe that biotechnology has a critical role to play in increasing agricultural productivity, particularly in light of climate change. We also believe it can help to improve the nutritional value of staple foods.
U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee. Hearing on the President’s FY2009 War Supplemental Request. (30 Apr 2009).
Yeast is a machine.
Beginning of an 1884 lecture, quoted in Robert Bud, The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology (1993), 28.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
