Thank you. I am deeply grateful to be given the chance to take part this evening in this dialogue. I've been asked to speak on a controversial subject. It's a subject in which I am an active participant, not an objective scholar. And, obviously, the perspective I represent ought to be - and I'm sure will be - taken into account in considering my remarks. There are many people here and elsewhere who have deep and important concerns about the applications of biotechnology. Those are concerns that must be addressed. They must be addressed adequately and they must be addressed respectfully. And my hope this evening is to begin that process.

In a very important sense, biotechnology is sub-set of the information technology. It does not deal with information that's encoded electronically in silicon. It deals with information that's encoded chemically in living cells. It's information that is not used for purposes of e-mail or "Amazon.com" or spreadsheets. It's information that tells cells what proteins to make, when to make them, and how to make them. And, therefore, it's information that defines what living organisms do and what they are. For the first time, over the last three decades, we have begun to gain access to that information. We are beginning to understand how genes work, individually and together. The rate of increase in knowledge in this field is absolutely phenomenal. It puts Moore's Law to shame. We will map the entire human genome sometime early in the next decade and will understand the functionality of most of that genome within the first decade of the next century. And many other genomes of animals, plants, other species will also be mapped in roughly that time period.

Perhaps the most important - and to some degree the most troubling - aspect of this is we have not only developed this knowledge base - or are developing it - but we are also developing tools that enable us, not only to decode the information that's encoded in DNA, but also how to change it. This is something fundamentally new in the world, new in history. It is - if I may be so presumptuous - it is something like that moment in pre-history in which consciousness became aware of itself. It is the moment when life begins to understand what it is. If used well, I will suggest, the application of that understanding creates wholly new, wholly unprecedented hope for addressing some of the most difficult and intractable problems that have confronted humanity over the generations and that remain part of the human condition. Issues like how to feed people without damaging and, indeed, destroying land and forests and water. How to prevent human and animal disease, rather than intervene after it strikes. And how to offer to people around the world the prospect of healthy aging as a normal, expected part of life. The demographics provide the context for assessing the potentials of the technology and the issues that it will confront.

The demographics are well known. Five point eight billion people in the world today, about one and a half billion of them in abject poverty. About one person in seven, about eight hundred million people in the world, so malnourished that they cannot participate in work life or in family life, living on the edge of starvation. The rate of growth in population is, to some degree, still controversial, but all demographers, I think, would accept that somewhere within the next thirty to fifty years , we will have a world population of somewhere between eight and twelve billion people. There is no more land. The land has been used.

There are at least three distinct challenges that the demographics suggest - and undoubtedly many more, but let me highlight three of them.

First, most of the additional people who are going to be joining us on this planet over the next thirty or forty years will be born in the poorest places. They are not willingly going to forego food. They will do as people always have done, what they need to do in order to try to feed themselves and their children. They will slash and burn to grow crops. They will migrate. They will find themselves moving into cities that are increasingly violent and unlivable.

Second, in developing countries where the key issue is how can one create development on some sort of sustainable basis, people are not going to forego the opportunity to lead a better life, regardless of its externalities, regardless of its impacts on the environment around them.

The question - and, incidentally, in the course of doing that, they begin to move up on what is generally called the protein ladder. That is to say, they change their diets in ways that call for even more land to be devoted to agriculture to support them because they're no longer living at the lowest end of the food chain, at grains. They are now living at the level of animal agriculture, which requires more grain and more land. If the only model for development in those developing countries - representing at this point, say, three billion people in the world - if the only model for development is the recapitulation of the industrial revolution, with all its horrific waste and pollution, there simply is no way that development can occur without doing permanent, irreversible damage to the systems on which life depends.

I want to point out that the industrial revolution, taking place as it has over the last two hundred or so years, has in many ways been a phenomenal success for about one billion of the planet's five point eight billion people, the people essentially of Europe, of North America, of Japan, a few other places. It operates on a basis of colossal wastefulness, moving around vast quantities of stuff in order to provide a decent life for those one billion people. To try to extend that same set of methods, that same set of technologies to three, four, five billion additional people is simply and arithmetically unsustainable and brings about ecological crisis within the next century.

The third demographic issue is in the richest countries of the world - who, by the way, are unlikely themselves to want to forego their so-called standard of living. They are democracies, by and large, and none has yet, as far as I am aware, willingly chosen a government whose fundamental basis is the diminution of the standard of living that those countries enjoy. The demographic issue for the richest countries is the issue of aging. And today, most of us age unhealthily. As you all know, almost all of the health care costs over a person's life is spent in the last months of that life. It is creating in those countries of the world - the richest countries, where people expect to be taken care of medically by their governments in their old age, to receive the medical care, the best medical care, that science can make available - it is creating, as I said, fiscal strains and economic strains, and indeed, potentially, intergenerational conflict around the question, "Who is going to pay for this?" Because, by definition, the older the consumers of medical services, the funding comes from the relatively young, who are working and paying taxes.

My principal point this evening is simply this. None of the issues that I have just quickly raced through can be addressed in the context of the existing technologies by which the world today earns its living. It is not only an issue of fairer distribution - and it certainly is that - it is more fundamentally that current technologies - whether they apply to agriculture, to industry, or to transportation, or to anything else humans do in order to sustain their standard of living - those technologies are simply not sustainable. They lead to destructive subsistence, destructive development, and destructive affluence. Today, there is no such thing as sustainable agriculture. There is no such thing today as sustainable industry. There is no such thing today as sustainable development. And the reasons for that are that we do not have, today, the underlying technologies that could support those concepts.

The issues of better social and economic systems, of fairer distribution, of better environmental regulation are, of course, not only relevant, but critical. But they are secondary to the need for new technologies in the sense that the provision of new technologies is the precondition for beginning to address those other issues.

The most essential task, I believe, that we as a species confront today is the requirement that we reinvent the technologies by which we feed, clothe, and house ourselves and generate such wealth as humanity enjoys. The fundamental problem is that the technologies we have today require us to use enormous quantities of stuff in order to create modest economic value. And there are thousands of examples of that in your daily life. The notion of automobiles, the notion of moving two tons of iron and steel around in order to move a person is inherently an unsustainable notion, and yet our economies are based on concepts like that.

The trick is going to be to multiply value to people to enable them to lead better lives, without multiplying stuff. And there are principally three technologies , three families of technology, that hold the promise of being able to do that. One is information technology. The substitution of information for stuff is one potentially winning strategy for creating more value, while at the same time not putting impermissible burdens on underlying natural systems. The second is biotechnology, for the same reason, and the third is nanotechnology, the emerging science of radical miniaturization. Example: if you compare sending an e-mail with sending a letter. A letter requires not only you to cut down trees, and type a physical object called a letter, which you then in some way transport to someone who drives a car, and puts it in a plane, and puts in a railroad car, and delivers the letter to its intended recipient. A lot of stuff has to happen in order for a letter to work. E-mail just moves electrons. Electrons are cheap, renewable, sustainable.

In biotechnology, products like cotton which appeared on the market the last couple years. Cotton, which repels insects, resists insects, has reduced pesticide usage in the cotton fields by about sixty or seventy percent in just a couple of years. It is the substitution of information encoded in a gene in a cotton plant for airplanes flying over cotton fields and spraying toxic chemicals on them. Biotechnology provides a basis, again in agriculture, for practices like conservation tillage. Conservation tillage is required because we lose about twenty-five billion tons of topsoil annually. If you go out to the Gulf of Mexico, you can see much of Iowa floating in the surf, in the waters there. In the Ceratos [spelled phonetically] region of Brazil, in order to produce one ton of soybeans, you lose five tons of topsoil each year. Topsoil is not being created at anything like the rate at which it is being destroyed. The notions of creating higher yields, drought resistance, ability to grow crops in saline and mineralized soils are going to be critically important in a world in which you are going to have to feed more people and you're not going to be able to find more land to do it. Or at least the only land that is findable today is land which is, for example, rain forest and other unused parts of the earth.

It should be pointed out that biotechnology is scale neutral. It does not require you to have a large farm in order to justify the economics of it, the way, for example, tractors are not scale neutral. Tractors favor large farming. Seed, which is where biotechnology is delivered, is scale neutral. It works as well, and at the same cost, for small farmers as it does for large farmers.

There are a set of applications in biotechnology for nutrition that are just beginning to become apparent. One example: an issue in many parts of the world is vitamin A deficiencies. People try to get vitamin A in the form of supplements to remote rural populations and fail to do so. The consequence is a disease called night blindness, which often degenerates into literal total blindness. We're working on a project in which you put in a gene that creates pro-vitamin A, beta-carotene in, for example, oil seed crops like Canola. The oil gets used for cooking, and vitamin A is part of that process. It's simply a more efficient and, I would submit, a more natural delivery system. It certainly is more effective and lower cost for everyone involved.

So, what's the catch? Why is this as controversial as it is? I don't mean to speak for anyone else, but I will give you my impressions. The first catch is that, like information technology, it is new and it is potentially very large in its impacts. Second, it is seen as unnatural. Now, almost all agriculture and almost all medicine, as it exists in the world today, would be hard to justify as natural. Almost everything we grow, everything we eat is the root result of human intervention, human breeding and so on. But this is unnatural in a different sort of way from the kinds of breeding programs that have characterized humanity for ten thousand years.

Third, it is largely being developed by private firms for profit, which gives rise to suspicion as to the trustworthiness and motivations of those who are advancing this technology, companies like mine. So the question which people have, I believe, not only a right but a duty to ask, is how wisely will we use these unprecedented new powers? What are the risks associated with doing something this new and this profound at the very wellsprings of life? How are they going to be managed? How will we have credible oversight? How will we have credible and effective monitoring of the introduction of this technology?

Certainly, humanity's record for using technology wisely, sensitive to its potential effects on society, on people, on environment is, at best, mixed and hardly encouraging. These are public questions. These are not questions that ought to be decided simply by the private sector. These are questions that people and their institutions have to debate, discuss, and strike an appropriate balance between hope and concern, between the promise of the technology and the risks associated with it. We have not yet identified, yet alone cloned, the gene for wisdom, and some skepticism about our ability to manage powerful new technologies is appropriate. It avoids the sin of hubris and helps us operate within our limitations as humans. But it is not beyond our best potentials to use these technologies wisely. And I believe that the state of the world in the next century will be more hopeful for more people as a result of the wise application of biological knowledge. Thank you very much.