Nina V. Federoff, the science adviser to the U.S. secretary of state, says issues like food production require international cooperation.

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Nina V. Fedoroff, 66, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, did fundamental research on plant transposons, or jumping genes, and was among the first to clone plant DNA. She is science adviser to the secretary of state and administrator of the Agency for International Development.

Q. When you gave a recent speech at Columbia University advocating genetically modified foods, someone sitting near me said, “Oh reat, our State Department is pushing G.M. Food. She’s the ambassador from Monsanto.” What’s your response?
A. How do I answer him- My answer is: 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.
In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.
So a lot of modern plant strains were created by applying chemicals or radiation to cause mutations that improved the crop. That’s how plant breeding was done in the 20th century.
The paradox is that now that we’ve invented techniques that introduce just one gene without disturbing the rest, some people think that’s terrible.

Q. Why do you think there is such fierce opposition to genetically modified foods?
A. This is an unintended consequence of our success.
We’ve gotten so good at growing food that we’ve gone, in a few generations, from nearly half of Americans living on farms to 2 percent. We no longer think about how the wonderful things in the grocery store got there, and we’d like to go back to what we think is a more natural way.
But I’m afraid we can’t, in part, because there are just too many of us in this world. If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population - maybe half.

Q. You believe that environmentalists should be embracing genetically modified foods. What’s your argument?
A. If we put more land under cultivation to feed the world’s growing population, we’re going to pull down the remaining forests.
And if that happens, it will contribute tremendously to desertification. The more we can grow on already cultivated land, the better.
Europe, North America, Australia, Japan - we’ve been extremely successful in applying science to agriculture and we can afford to say, “Let’s go natural.” But there’s collateral damage.

Q. Why does the secretary of state need a science adviser?
A. Because science and technology are the drivers of the 21st century’s most successful economies.
There are more than six billion of us, and the problems of a crowded planet are everyone’s: food, water, energy, climate change, environmental degradation. Other nations, even those that have lost respect for our culture and politics, still welcome collaboration on scientific and technological issues.

Q. Why can science create cooperation in places where everything else fails?
A. Because science is more collaborative than other types of endeavors. It aspires to more democratic principles than many political systems because we have an external reference.
People can have different theories, but we form an experiment to test it. It’s the evidence that matters. So in science, we can have differences of opinion, but we can’t have two sets of facts. There is an in-built process that says, “You and I may have different religions, different politics, but we can talk about science across chasms.
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