Sandra E. Peterson Quotes

It might seem unfair to reward a person for having so much pleasure over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can't be eaten by people - and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that's because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes.

As maize became important for human food worldwide, modern agricultural research on maize breeding continued the corn breeding begun thousands of years ago in the Central American highlands.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

Hybrids have become an important method for improving productivity or yield in many crops including the self-pollinated crop like rice.

In the food case in particular, one of the technologies that could help there - genetic technologies that could create better crops with higher yields and less need for water and fertilizer - is tremendously feared. Very little of that fear is scientifically grounded.

There's almost no food that isn't genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution. Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.

Technology has allowed us to have more drought-resistant crops. The spotty nature of drought, the spotty nature of rains can sometimes result in better yields than anticipated.

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.

I think with the needs to feed the world's population, to end starvation, plant sciences offer great opportunities to do good and also to develop industry in St. Louis.

The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.

The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.

Surely, if we are going to be better at producing food of the right value, then we have to accept that genetic technology... is going to be part of that.

Unless there is one master gene for yield, which I'm guessing there is not, engineering for yield will be very complex. It may happen eventually, but through the coming decades, we must assume that gene engineering will not be the answer to the world's food problems.

When in 1963 we started large-scale research and testing with semi-dwarf varieties of wheat obtained from Mexico through Norman Borlaug, the new plant types attracted media attention immediately.

We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.

Plant breeding has been going on for millennia and it's a gradual process.

I had the privilege of knowing and working with Norman Borlaug - who has been aptly described by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee as the greatest hunger fighter of our time - for nearly 50 years.

If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can spray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn because it's producing a gene that makes it tolerant of the herbicide.

Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture - from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding.

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

I'm from Miami, I love it when we're out in the heat. When it's cold, I'm like, 'I'm never acting again,' because it's too freezing.

Because I am really interested in gardening, I do really interesting plants, not even always flowers. And because I have grown them, I really know them like friends. I paint everything from exotic orchids to rosehips growing wild in a hedge. They just have to speak to me.

When I left Chicago, people said, 'Careful with that Texas heat'. I'm like, 'I'm from Puerto Rico. I know heat.'