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Israel's Volcani Institute of Agricultural Research

(Ha'aretz) Yigal Mashiach - Prof. Yedidya Gafni, director of genetic engineering at Israel's Volcani Institute of Agricultural Research, explains: "We can get along without high tech...but we can't get along without eating.... Farmland is diminishing, the amount of available water is decreasing, but people are living longer and have to be fed. Without agricultural research we will not survive as a country." "We learned and taught others how to get more from a dunam [a quarter of an acre] of land and we developed techniques of crossbreeding and genetic engineering to protect plants from dozens of pests....The same piece of land now yields three to five times what it did in the past." The institute has developed a plant that produces high-quality medical insulin and is working on vitamin-enriched chewing gum for children. It is studying herbs that could prevent, treat or slow the development of degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. There is a project to create diesel fuel from the seeds of castor oil plants.
2011-10-21 00:00:00
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