There are many potential benefits from the use of agricultural biotechnology for society. While we have not yet realized all these benefits, I think some of the immediate ones we are experiencing today are environmental benefits. The crops that we have, in terms of corn and soybeans, where soybeans for instance, about seven percent of soy in the U.S. is produced using biotechnology, and this has led to some real concrete reductions in the use of herbicides in growing these crops, and even the herbicides we are using now are more beneficial to the environment. Also, we are going to move in the future to the promise of the technology offering nutritional benefits, either enhanced nutritional profiles, such as adding vitamins, antioxidants, phytochemicals, to the products, and also we are going to start to see a combination of traits, where a plant won't just have one improvement, we may see these stacked traits that may include a series of environmental benefits. So over time, the potential is limitless, but through research we will be carefully implementing all of these benefits.

Well, I think overall, with biotechnology that we have found through our consumer research, that among the most compelling benefits of this technology is the ability to feed hungry people around the world. While we can certainly argue that we night not need to increase yields in the U.S., certainly around the world, our population in increasing exponentially, and we're going to have to feed a population that may grow to 13 billion by the year 2050. So, we need technologies like biotechnology, not only to increase the quantity of the food, but to help the farmers grow food in places where it is not possible now because of high salt or dry conditions. So, we really need to keep exploring the potentials and apply the technology where it can be beneficial.

Carl Winter

In products from biotechnology, we have the potential for greater production, which could lead to lower consumer cost, we have, in many cases the potential for reduced input of agricultural chemicals, such as insecticides and fungicides, so there are some benefits there.

There is a lot of concern in society about the use of pesticides in foods that allow us to control things like insects and plant disease and weeds. We have developed techniques in which we can incorporate new genes into plants that might confer some resistance to things like insects and viruses. We may also be able to develop products with increased nutritional content- so there are some potential benefits there- we need to consider these benefits in addition to the theoretical risks that those products may pose.

Janine Sherrier

By far the greatest advantage of these tools is that we can get our work done much faster than any other traditional method. But also, biotechnology really expands the range of questions that we can ask. There are some things, some problems in science that we could not address using traditional methods. And biotechnology is just another tool for us to effectively address plant development. Currently we think of plants as only sources of food and fiber production, but in reality plants are really amazing factories which can harvest the energy from sunshine and use that energy to produce an array of products. So in the future we will be able to use plants to produce oil as substitutes for petroleum and also as a production platform for pharmaceuticals.

Joan Burnside

A bacteria harboring a transgene expressing bovine growth hormone, also known as bovine somatotropin was produced and this bacteria was used to make a large amount of bovine growth hormone and this growth hormone was then administered to cows to improve their milk production. And it worked quite satisfactorily. There was increased milk yield from dairy cows and the milk appeared to be of exactly the same consistency as milk from untreated dairy cows. And it appeared to be a very safe application of recombinant DNA technology and transgenic technology. There's been some reports that cows that are treated with growth hormone and have an increase in milk production have an increase in mastitis. If we accept that the milk is safe and that the mastitis is not a serious problem in the cows or that it can be managed safely we still have a problem in terms of economic impact. This is a technology that can be handled best on an economy of scale. So what happens to a smaller producer who can't afford to buy into this technology? What happens if the public sort of turns its eye against this kind of a product with some suspicion towards its safety? Then those of us who are lucky enough to live in a rich country can afford to buy the other product because it's more expensive than the recombinant generated milk. But what about the people in the poorer country who can't afford to do it. The price becomes the driving issue. So it's not only the science of transgenesis, it's the economics of the impact of transgenic animals that have to be considered in dealing with this kind of issue. There's also some issues with the impact on the environment, maybe less so with production animals such as cows. But you could conceive of releasing this transgene into the natural population. And if it has a selected advantage then you have reduced speciation of species in the wild. So say if an animal that has been treated with growth hormone or is harboring a growth hormone transgene grows bigger, has a reproductive advantage, consumes much more of the food you could see how that could logically take over a large component of the environment that it's released in. So animal breeding has been very closely monitored for many, many years. It's not likely to be a problem with cows or sheep or pigs or chicken because of the way that they are raised for production. But this could conceivably be a problem with aqua culture where the fish are actually raised in close quarters, but they're in their natural environment and they could escape and they could begin breeding with other animals in the wild. So in considering transgenics, it's not only a scientific issue, "Can we do this very very safely?" "Yes, we probably can.". But we have a lot of environmental impact issues and economic impact issues that have to be considered. So it becomes a very cross-disciplinary study to try and determine whether or not this is safe for consumers.