New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods.

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.

We are sliding back into a dark era, and there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.

Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture - from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding.

We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven. We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops.

In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.