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Dave Jensen wrote:BMK,
Good post, good questions.
I'm an advocate for plant breeders because every time I do a search in that area, my candidate roster is a bunch of old guys. There are few women, and there are few people coming up in the ranks. I'd love to know where they will come from a few years from now when my age 60's slate of candidates is not interested in working any longer.
No school should ever push plant breeding over other plant sciences disciplines, because they are all important. As already mentioned in this thread, it could be microbiologists who save the day, because the connection between plants and microbes is just becoming established. Perhaps it's a microbial product that gets sprayed on a field of rice that allows it to survive a drought, for example. There are many solutions possible, but the problem is real. Not being an alarmist, just repeating what very level headed people have said before me. (By the way, I don't hear much about hydroponics any longer except at a meeting I went to that had a commercial Marijuana track!).
Dave
BMK wrote:Dave Jensen wrote:BMK,
Good post, good questions.
I'm an advocate for plant breeders because every time I do a search in that area, my candidate roster is a bunch of old guys. There are few women, and there are few people coming up in the ranks. I'd love to know where they will come from a few years from now when my age 60's slate of candidates is not interested in working any longer.
No school should ever push plant breeding over other plant sciences disciplines, because they are all important. As already mentioned in this thread, it could be microbiologists who save the day, because the connection between plants and microbes is just becoming established. Perhaps it's a microbial product that gets sprayed on a field of rice that allows it to survive a drought, for example. There are many solutions possible, but the problem is real. Not being an alarmist, just repeating what very level headed people have said before me. (By the way, I don't hear much about hydroponics any longer except at a meeting I went to that had a commercial Marijuana track!).
Dave
Thanks for the reply, I think I understand the issue a bit better now and appreciate the explanation. Its strange though, if you're finding 60y olds qualified to head an arm of a major international org with a lot of boots on the ground, how do they not have people under them that couldn't also fit the bill with some more experience. I would assume if person X gets the position leading the 400 so breeders, they should have a succession plan to set up N of 400 to be future leaders; and person X's company is going to have to replace him (assuming it IS a 60y old white guy) for the same position right?
Maybe its that only these old 60y men are super sociable/visible?
Again, I may (very likely) be way off base, but it seems like an odd scenario to be in.
Dave Jensen wrote:But those who "lead" are getting older, and they are leading teams of people who are either also older, or who are too young and naive to be the boss.
Dave Jensen wrote:Dick Woodward wrote:Unfortunately, the problem here is how to predict the future - something that mankind has never been particularly good at. Plant breeding may in fact be an important niche in 20 years - IF there really is a food shortage at that time and IF people still have not figured out that plants genetically modified by recombinant means (as opposed to traditional crosses)are not the satanic evil that the alarmists make them out to be and IF we have not come up with yet more effective ways of growing the crops that we already have (and probably a bunch more IF's that I have not thought of yet or that may not yet exist).
For a look into the folly of predicting the future, take a look at "The 7 Worst Tech Predictions of All Time" at http://www.techhive.com/article/155984/worst_tech_predictions.html. I won't spoil it for you except to tell you that the device that you are reading this on does not exist.
Just one man's opinion.
Dick
If you look at the exponential growth of the world population, there's no IF to the coming food shortages. It's a math problem -- you have this number of usable acres, and you produce this amount of food, and there is this large X number of people who need sustenance. So you have to increase the supply somehow -- I don't see how that can be disputed. Well, doing so requires you to do two things. For one, you'd have to find better fertilizers and crop inputs that will improve the output of the field. Biological means are now coming -- new types of microbes that affect the plants positively, adding immune protection or insect/drought resistance.
The other process would be to breed better varieties, which requires a long cycle of plant breeding. Whether it's classical breeding or genomics assisted, it's a long process. Want new crops a decade from now that have the ability to be grown in a saline soil so that the world can start to use acreage that right now is going to waste? Great -- better get started right now.
So whether it's scientists for new types of crop inputs like these new bio-products, or scientists to gear up plant breeding programs and run stations in all geographies of the planet, the call is out for people with a passion to solve this particular world problem. It WILL affect life sciences careers.
Dave
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