Today here at the United States Department of Agriculture Cereal Crops Research Unit in Madison, Wisconsin they are trying a new method which makes use of a gene gun.
Gene guns are one of the newest technologies in the exploding field of genetic engineering.
Let's take a look at one specific example of gene gun use and see how it illustrates the power and the promise that will make the coming 21st century the century of biotechnology. To understand how a gene gun works you need to know a little about genes. All living organisms, plant and animal, need a program of instructions to tell them how to grow and how to behave. That program is coded in chemical form on a long twisting molecule called DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. Most of the DNA in living cells is in the nucleus on structures called chromosomes.