Secrets Part 2

Frontier of the Future

The world today is made, is powered, is penetrated through and through with science.  Let us look into the face of the future.  We see the long shadows of problems that already extend across the land today.  Increasing populations, diminishing resources, pollution of sea and air.  Is this the prospect we face?  Or through knowledge and understanding can we shape our future into one more befitting the human dignity and spirit.

We look to the frontiers of the future with confidence that man will master nature through understanding.  And it is to this end of understanding that we scientists labor today.

19 years ago, in 1943, Mexico faced droughts that threatened millions with starvation because of a virus; stem rust.  My mentor, Norman Balroug, plant geneticist and pathologist, arrived with radical ideas straight from the laboratories of Dupont.  Immediately, he setup a facility financed by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.  Under his hand we developed a wheat variety resistant to stem rust using multiple pure lines as parents.  This alone saved thousands of acres of crops.  But Norman did not stop there.

He began breeding varieties that absorb more nitrogen and so grow more grains.  He introduced nitrogen fertilizers that doubled the yield on a single stalk.  But these plants bent and broke under their productive weight.  Field after field toppled over as if a hurricane had swept through.  I had the great opportunity of witnessing his most brilliant moment.  He brought over Japanese dwarf wheat with a thicker stem, the Daruma, and melded that wheat variety into the population.  The result, a sturdy, productive plant.

Doctor Balroug created the first high-yield variety plant, resistant to disease, responsive to fertilizers, accepting of pesticides, and thus began the Green Revolution.  Today, Mexico exports wheat to the rest of the world.

We have isolated the beneficial genes of wheat, corn, and rice and cloned them.  GA 20 increases oxygen intake.  Rht reduces height.  Sd1 dwarfs the rice plant. The earth is a machine.  It can be improved as any other machine provided you have the right tools.  We have developed these tools, and they promise a wealth of results.

Tests have begun in India in the Punjab province that will triple food production there.  In Southeast Asia the new rice strain, IR8, has left our laboratory and entered the farmer’s field.  Beginning this year, Standard Oil of New Jersey will supply the farmers of the Philippines with seed packets complete with individually developed pesticides and nitrogen pellets.  In the same packet.  Imagine.

There is an old Byzantine proverb that says, “He who has bread has many problems.  He who has no bread has only one problem.”

Human ingenuity has taken the head seat at the table and presented us with a new range of tools so that we need not worry about that one problem.  We can alter the very structure of life to suit our needs.  This is opportunity, plain and simple, to save our tomorrow. We have created answers to our challenges.  We have created a global agriculture industry the world will never forget.

Thank you.