Agriculture: Interviews

The cotton bollworm, the world's most economically destructive insect pest, is having its genome sequenced.

Malcolm Walter has moved his collection of rocks from Macquarie University to the University of NSW, where he has joined Brett Neilan and his colleagues in an expanded multidisciplinary team as part of the new Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA).

Cochlear boss Chris Roberts has spent 30 years at Australia's leading device companies -- but that doesn't mean he has stopped learning, as Helen Schuller discovers.

Australian Biotechnology News editor-in-chief Iain Scott spoke with renowned industry analyst Cynthia Robbins-Roth about what it will take to keep biotech alive.

Dr John Raff tells Graeme O'Neill why Australia's agbiotech industry is struggling.

On a wall at CSIRO Plant Industry's Merbein laboratories, is an old photo-micrograph of a grapevine floral bud. Dr Nigel Steele Scott, head of Plant Industry's horticultural research laboratories in Glen Osmond, South Australia, says it's his favourite image -- a portent of a revolution in viticulture that is still having an enormous impact on the Australian wine industry today.

History students and trivia buffs in the distant future time will be grateful for one of history's little coincidences -- the Human Genome Project will be completed this year, 2003, a neat half-century after the elucidation of the structure of DNA.

Nobel Laureate Prof Peter Doherty is lending his name to a new prize to be awarded at Australia's first Commercialisation Forum and Fair of Ideas, which started in Sydney today and runs to March 28.

Phil Batterham is a skilled and meticulous organiser, with an understanding of the value of theatre. When the University of Melbourne geneticist flew to Beijing in 1998 for the 18th International Congress of Genetics, he had already spent two years organising Australia's bid to bring the world's biggest genetics festival to Melbourne in 2003.

The land of the red 'roo is a long hop from just about everywhere else in the world, so travel costs loomed large in Dr Phil Batterham's analysis of the cost of staging the world's largest genefest in Melbourne next year.