Profile of Robert B. Goldberg

Abstract

Over the next 50 years, as Earth's population races toward 9 billion inhabitants, we will need to produce more food than we have produced since the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago (1). This challenge, warns National Academy of Sciences member Robert Goldberg, is particularly daunting given the finite and shrinking amount of arable land on which food crops can be grown. Increasing the yields of crop plants is therefore critical. With that goal in mind, Goldberg, a professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at the University of California at Los Angeles, has devoted his career to understanding the processes that program the life cycle of plants, with a particular focus on the genes required to make a seed. He envisions harvesting this information to engineer crops that produce more seeds, bigger seeds, and seeds with enhanced nutritional content, which could significantly enhance our food supply because the majority of the calories that people consume worldwide are either directly or indirectly obtained from seeds. Bob Goldberg in his office. Bob Goldberg in the classroom teaching his class “Genetic Engineering in Medicine, Agriculture, and Law”. Since the early 1970s, Goldberg has kept pace with the rapid discovery, development, and application of plant genetic engineering technologies. His pioneering work may lead to solutions to some of the most pressing problems that our society faces. His findings have changed the face of agriculture by enabling the production of new hybrids, such as the widely grown canola plants that produce at least 30% more oil than their conventional inbred parents. And Ceres—the plant biotech company that Goldberg cofounded—promises to change the way we produce fuel and electricity. A career in science was not on the horizon for the young Goldberg, born in 1944 and raised in an idyllic suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. “I …