India has the opportunity to be a leader in genetic engineering, It has institutions that no other country has.

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.

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

As people around the world become more affluent, they are demanding diets richer in animal protein, which will require ever more robust feed crop yields to sustain.

We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century', and yet that's what we're demanding in food production.

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 agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can't be eaten by people - and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that's because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes.