Cultivating Beauty and Good Taste

Imagine a world where desirable traits are easily programmable. Farmers can select to grow plant varieties that both surprise and delight even the most sophisticated taste buds. Nutrient content and crop yields are improved to fight hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable populations. Vibrant floral varieties can be grown in your home garden that not only exhibit optimized fragrance profiles, but also emit their lovely aromas in robust and conveniently timed bursts. With modern plant genomics offering unprecedented access to the genetic basis of phenotypes and with gene editing technologies allowing precision modulation, such a far-fetched, sci-fi reality might actually be within foreseeable reach.