the decade when plant biotechnology emerged with a vision on how agriculture might be
revolutionized. Although farming dates back some 10,000 years, the greatest production
advances occurred during the past century. The question remains whether in the next 40
years, agriculture can continue to advance sufficiently to meet the world’s projected
needs. Most prognosticators have assumed that biotechnology must play a crucial role,
wherein advances will be a combination of gene discovery that provides opportunities
for genetic improvements, and new technologies for making engineering tasks more effi-
cient and precise. That’s the way the story is supposed to end, anyway.
In many ways, the appropriate ending to this book and answer to the question of the
future of plant biotechnology is to heave a sigh, flip a coin, and declare emphatically,
“Who knows?” Who knows, because the voices of skeptics and naysayers continue to
grow louder with more respectability as the public grows increasingly careful about the
adoption of technologies of all sorts. The fact remains that there are merits to biotechnology
opponent’s arguments; for instance, about transgene integration being imprecise, that we do
not know everything about how genes are expressed and repressed, that there is absence of
data about long-term risks, and that nature is a big place where ecological interactions are
not completely characterized. Fair enough. Maybe plant biotechnology is doomed as too
expensive to develop and deploy, rendering it unsustainable, especially if any of the pre-
dicted hazards are realized and the public finally makes up its collective mind that the tech-
nology is simply too risky to be sustained. Placed in the context of burgeoning organic
agriculture markets that necessarily shun biotechnology, perhaps the transgenic plant move-
ment in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was a “one-trick pony.” Maybe it
is like putting a man on the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s—cool for then but passe ́
now. But on the other hand, given that transgenic plants have been adopted faster and on a
more widespread scale than any prior agricultural innovation, and that the benefits of
growing them clearly outweigh the seemingly minimum risks, it appears to have a
future, and one that will likely be “transformed” from current plant biotechnology to some-
thing more precise and efficient. The future of biotechnology will certainly be driven by
innovations and new applications. Although this chapter will not delve deeply into new
uses, future applications of transgenes in crops and plants to realize explicit environmental
benefits will likely be more compelling than will transgenically encoded herbicide resist-
ance in row crops and other input traits. In that light, the future of transgenic plants
looks rosy. However, the plant biotechnologist must resist the urge to put on the rose-
colored glasses as has been done time and time again; transgenic plants will never be
grown as a cure-all for everything. Conventional breeding, agricultural chemicals,
process technology, and mechanization all have their places in feeding the world.
So, if we assume that plant biotechnology will follow the path of other successful tech-
nologies, what might we expect to happen next in technology development and deploy-
ment? When this book is published, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the production of the
first stably transgenic plant will be history.Agrobacterium-mediated transformation and
particle bombardment, the technologies used to produce plants that have now covered
over 1 billion acres, are older than the Macintosh computer, the compact disk, and
Kevlar. If we look at another transformative technology as an example—air travel—what
might we expect to be the next step? Even though the Wright brothers first flew in a
heavier-than-air machine in 1903, the first aerodynamically stable airplanes were not pro-
duced until 1910 or so. This timeline roughly parallels first technology developments
leading to stable transgenic events; it took a few years of trial and error to render decent
transformatation efficiencies. Air travel did not become a commercially reality until the
358 THE FUTURE OF PLANT BIOTECHNOLOGY