Agricultural Sciences: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Charles Valentine Memorial Lecture, 20 Nov. 2024 (C.S. Prakash, Lisa Ainsworth, Anastasia Bodnar, and Kate Tully)

I want to highlight a lecture recently given by one of the most influential scientists in the international debate on GMOs and gene editing in agriculture. Born in India, C. S. Prakash lives and works in the U.S. and has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His lecture, delivered at the AAAS Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues, traces the progress made over the past sixty years in the field of global food security—i.e., meeting the growing demand for food from the world’s population.

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Why AI + CRISPR Will Define 2025

Image Credit Karen Arnott/EMBL-EBI

Have you read Jennifer Doudna’s article in Wired? She discusses how the combination of CRISPR and artificial intelligence could be transformational. In her lab, researchers recently used AI tools to help find “small gene-editing proteins that had been sitting undiscovered in public genome databases because we simply didn’t have the ability to crunch all of the data that we’ve collected”.

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