Meet the woman who pioneered gmo research

You might not know her name, but Mary-Dell Chilton, a newly anointed National Academy of Inventors Fellow , is at least partially responsible for the way our food system works today. That's because Chilton, now 77 and a scientist at Syngenta, led the team in the early s that produced the world's first transgenic plant — a development that paved the way for the disease and pest-resistant GMO crops that are so prevalent today.

Tech Insider caught up with Chilton to get her thoughts on mentoring other scientists, the controversy over GMOs, and what the future holds. When Chilton was first researching the possibilities of using a type of bacteria called Agrobacterium for DNA transfer in plants, she never imagined that her work would lead to an agricultural revolution — and she certainly didn't think it would be the topic of constant debate.

The problem is that people are creating the illusion of safety issues to make problems for the product.

Pioneered the field of genetic engineering in agriculture.

Louis and continued at the company that would eventually become biotech giant Syngenta. I like to tell people that the technology is safe, that we learned it from a microbe that did it in nature. Although the technology is new in another sense it's really old. Agrobacteria has been doing it for centuries. Chilton, a winner of the World Food Prize, still doesn't think the potential of GMO technology has been realized, even though the vast majority of cotton, soy, canola, corn, and sugar beats in the US are genetically modified.

I think that's going to be the main issue, not the technology. The technology is going to get better and better, and we'll be able to do anything we want," says Chilton. If climate change is really the problem we're afraid it is, we're going to need plant breeding to deal with rapid changes in growth conditions, with pests that attack our plants.

For her part, Chilton still does GMO research at Syngenta, where she works in a building that has a portrait of her on the wall. Chilton's research, which she has been working on for the last half decade, involves gene targeting which scientists use to modify specific parts of a plant's genome. That's the dream.