The fact that plant science would be very important was evident to me and a few other people in the 1970s. What you could see was the great genetic cell biology and molecular biology coming out of the biomedical sciences would be applicable to plants, and it would be important to the world to apply this, and that St. Louis was the place to do it.
New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods.
Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.
Molecular gastronomy is not bad... but without sound, basic culinary technique, it is useless.
Give us detailed, testable, mechanistic accounts for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous bio macromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and intelligent design will die a quick and painless death.
I had D minuses in chemistry and all of the sciences, and now I'm known as a molecular gastronomist.
The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon to the equilibrium of the species and ecological whole, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.
Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.
Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms.
To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.