Pamela Ronald
Earlier this week at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference about business and the environment, I led a conversation about food and agriculture during which a communications executive named David Kalson asked the question: Can organic food and transgenic food be part of the effort to make agriculture more sustainable? I answered “yes, I think so,” and referred him to an excellent book called Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food (Oxford University Press, 2008) by Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak.
In the preface to the book, Sir Gordon Conway, the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, calls Tomorrow’s Table “a tale of two marriages.” The first is the marriage between Pamela, a scientist whose research focuses on the genetic engineering of plants, notably rice, and Raoul, a teacher and lifelong organic farmer. The second is the potential marriage of two techniques: Genetic engineering and organic agriculture, which now cannot work hand-in-hand because, at least in the U.S., rules governing organic farming prohibit genetic engineering of crops.
The conversation at Brainstorm reminded me to post the edited transcript of a (long-ish) interview that I recently conducted with Pamela Ronald, who is a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis. We talked about the book, her work on rice and what her family eats for dinner.
Marc: How and why did you get involved in the genetic engineering of crops?
Pamela: Genetic engineering is not really a discipline. It’s just a tool. I’m a research scientist. I do plant genetics. I became interested in genetics in college. I had a fantastic teacher and I got very interested in understanding how plants and microbes could communicate.
Gunther: Where was this?
Ronald: Reed College. I had spent a lot of time backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains as I was growing up. I’ve always been interested in plant biology. My mother and grandparents were excellent gardeners and small-scale farmers.
Gunther: Well, then, how did your interest evolve into using, as you say, the tool of genetic engineering as opposed to conventional plant breeding? [click to continue…]
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