But he doesn't expect agronomists to abandon traditional plant breeding any time soon. Instead, he expects researchers to use biotechnology to add more desirable single traits such as insect resistance to varieties bred with conventional methods. Using biotechnology to solve those problems could bring those high-yield seeds to market, he said. Dislikes the term GMO Borlaug dislikes the term, genetically modified organism, because that really describes all plant breeding, even the unscientific selection of higher yielding food plants by ancient peasant farmers. Wheat, for example, is a cross of three different species of wild grasses, he said.
Wheat is a very complex plant compared to corn.
Scientific understanding of inheritance and how genetic traits are passed down through generations of plants didn't start until 1865, when the Austrian priest and botanist Gregor Mendel published the results of his breeding experiments with peas. That became the foundation of modern genetics, which wasn't applied to plant breeding until the turn of the 20th century, Borlaug says. Borlaug's own work represented some of the most dramatic application of Mendel's theories. In 1954 he crossed a Japanese dwarf wheat strain with a new disease-resistant Mexican strain he had developed. The result was a higher-yield strain with a shorter stem.