The influence of a science adviser is only as good as ears open to that science advice.

If there are more and more environmental refugees, they are going to end up on your doorstep too.

Jumping genes are fundamental because they're agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn - called Indian corn - that you buy in the fall.

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

In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We're wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We're now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate.

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.

For me science is not different from art, except in the one small, crucial detail that experiments speak their own truths, not ours.