Unit 5: Hopeful Future of Food

The advent of CRISPR-based technologies has revolutionized our ability to manipulate the genomes of virtually every entity across the tree of life. Besides the medical applications of CRISPR technologies, there are opportunities to exploit genome editing for food and agriculture.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is emerging as a set of principles and practices whose aim is to give greater voice and choice to the interested and affected public well before innovations enter the marketplace or environment.

In this talk, Katie Barnhill-Dilling, Ph.D., explores the history of chestnut’s importance to native people and to European settlers and the impact on the population and ecosystem of its functional extinction.

In this podcast Kirsten Paige, Ph.D., tells the story of the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, who sing “up, over and with the forest as they harvest crops.”

Kofi Boone explains how the design of landscapes has the ability to harm, or to heal. He reflects on the environment in which he grew up in Detroit, and shares the work he and his students have done in Ghana.

Nancy Strickland Fields shares how down-time during the pandemic inspired the urge to try Carolina Gold Rice. While visiting the Anson Mills website, she unexpectedly discovered ancestral corn thought to be lost to time.