ANDRZEJ KRAUZEIn his very funny 1973 sci-fi film Sleeper, Woody Allen plays a health-food store owner who is revived after 200 years of cryopreservation. His request for a breakfast of “wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger’s milk” bewilders the doctors who supervised his thawing: “Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties,” says one doctor, to which the other queries, “You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or . . . hot fudge?” “Those were thought to be unhealthy—precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true,” explains the first medic.
Food provides organisms with the vital energy and nutrients they need to survive. But for humans, food is far more than simple sustenance. This issue of The Scientist peels back layers of complexity to report on the science that is revolutionizing nutrition and agriculture from the inside out. What we’ve uncovered is a cornucopia of technical progress in plant breeding spurred by advances in genomics and gene editing—advances that could feed many more people and counter climate-change threats to food crops.
In “Putting Up Resistance,” associate editor Kerry Grens documents crop scientists’ growing worries that a fungal attack on wheat plants could spread around the world, decimating a crop with insufficient defense mechanisms before breeders can develop a more resistant variety. She outlines the progress ...
