Nobel Winners Endorse Ag Biotechnology

February 8, 2000

Nobel Prize winners James Watson and Norman Borlaug are among more than 1,000 scientists worldwide who endorse a declaration in support of agricultural biotechnology. The declaration calls biotechnology a "powerful and safe means for the modification of organisms."

The declaration was drafted by C.S. Prakash of Tuskegee University and says biotechnology "can contribute substantially in enhancing quality of life by improving agriculture, health care and the environment." Prakash adds that "despite the nonsense being spread by anti-biotech activists, this technology can actually improve environmental conditions while helping to boost world food production."

Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA and shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology. Borlaug developed many of the hybrid wheat varieties used to increase food production in Mexico during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and helped spread the "Green Revolution" to South America and Asia.

"There is no scientific reason to believe that genetically-engineered foods are any less afe than the foods we’ve been eating for centuries," says Prakash, "so we members of the scientific community felt it necessary to counter the unfounded attacks that anti-biotech activists are spreading about these products."