When you do cross-breeding of plants, you're doing this blind experiment where you're just mixing DNA of different types of cells and just seeing what comes out of it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Pretty much every plant and animal alive today is the result of eons of natural cross-breeding.
Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.
The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.
So that's when I saw the DNA model for the first time, in the Cavendish, and that's when I saw that this was it. And in a flash you just knew that this was very fundamental.
Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.
One of the central mysteries of biology is why the genome is largely identical from cell to cell, even though cells do different things.
A practical botanist will distinguish at the first glance the plant of the different quarters of the globe and yet will be at a loss to tell by what marks he detects them.
Exchange of breeding individuals between two populations tends to homogenize their gene pools.
A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.
I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.