Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer behind the revolutionary CRISPR technology, believes that its applications will empower humanity to tackle the escalating threats of climate change by cultivating crops and breeding animals better equipped to thrive in an increasingly unpredictable environment characterized by temperature fluctuations, altered precipitation patterns, and unforeseen weather events.
The revolutionary potential of CRISPR technology lies in its ability to precisely edit specific genetic components within existing crop and animal genomes, thereby circumventing many of the pitfalls associated with traditional breeding approaches. Despite these efforts, however, significant hurdles remain.
Final month, Doudna sat down with MIT Expertise Assessment on the sidelines of the Local weather & Agriculture Summit on the College of California, Berkeley. .
As Martin Roth embarked on his career as a forest ranger in the 1980s, his primary objective was to manage the forest sustainably, ensuring its preservation for generations to come. As unpredictable weather patterns emerge, so does the imperative to plan for a potentially uncertain future.
In Germany, Roth leverages 3,000 acres of forest along the northeastern shore of Lake Constance as a proving ground for innovative technologies that protect nature and generate income, earning him the nickname “digital forest ranger” within the German forestry community (). .
