Genetic engineering topic of Spanier's call-in show

The controversial topic of genetic engineering will be discussed at 7 p.m. today during "To the Best of My Knowledge," Penn State President Graham Spanier's monthly radio call-in show.

Nina Fedoroff, professor of life sciences at Penn State, will be one of the guests on the WPSU-FM show. Ganesh Kishore, director of biotechnology at the Monsanto Company, will be the other guest. Listeners can voice their opinions by calling (800) 543-8242.

Fedoroff, who also is director of the Life Sciences Consortium and Biotechnology Institute at the university, said genetic engineering is a subject about which many people are misinformed.

"(Genetic engineering) has come to be viewed as something we've never done before, but we actually have been making genetic changes in crop plants for thousands of years," Fedoroff said.

Through various breeding techniques and agricultural processes, she said, humans have tried constantly to better crop yields and strains. Fedoroff explained advanced technology allows for improvements to be made with greater accuracy by just adding or changing one or a few genes at a time. And now research has moved into human genetics.

-- by Jennifer Nejman