27 Jun 2011From Calestous Juma’s testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee on Rural Development, Research, Biotechnology and Foreign Agriculture.
Juma is professor of the Practice of International Development at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University:
Writing exactly 130 years ago, Robert Louis Stevenson acknowledged in A Plea for Gas Lamps that “Cities given, the problem was to light them.” Then he proceeded with his indictment of electricity saying the “urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror.” Today we acknowledge that given growing human numbers, the problem is to feed them. However, we also cast dark shadow over the prospects of using biotechnology to address the global food crisis.
http://greenbio.checkbiotech.org/news/promise_agricultural_biotechnology
