FORBES - 3.5 billion people. That’s how many of us are alive today thanks to an innovation many people have probably never heard of: the Haber-Bosch process.
Invented back in the early twentieth century, the chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to cheaply turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, a nitrogen-rich compound that plants can use to grow, unlocking a powerful new way to help crops reach their maximum potential yield.
The profound impact of this single technology cannot be overstated. Farms in the year 1900 required nearly four times as much land as in the year 2000 to grow the same average crop yield. This dramatic gain in efficiency over the last decades, as illustrated below, rank as one of the greatest breakthrough stories of the modern era.
“CRISPR-Cas 9 is something that’s really changed that way plant biologists have been able to approach engineering crops because now you can do things that were essentially impossible previously or very difficult,” says Robert Jinkerson, an assistant professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. “So the timelines to create new traits or new varieties is rapidly decreasing and this allows us to imagine new traits and also to stack new traits that are known from other varieties into more commercially relevant varieties.”