Growing demand for shrinking resources is raising alarm bells in the scientific community and beyond. The world’s leading minds are struggling to feed burgeoning populations while reducing our environmental footprint, but Dr. Don Smith insists that intelligent agriculture holds the solution to both problems. If he’s right, farmers could soon be reaping a lot more than they sow.
“We just need to increase plant productivity,” insists Smith, a James McGill Professor and Chair of the Department of Plant Science. “We need to know how to grow things better.”
The question, of course, is how, but he believes he has at least part of the answer. In his lab on McGill’s Macdonald Campus, he and his team discovered that a certain bacteria’s chemical signals work wonders for plant growth. They also learned that when the chemical was added artificially, plants grew better even in frigid conditions – findings that could have enormous implications for farmers in cold countries like Canada. If that weren’t enough, Smith’s team later found that another unknown factor was boosting growth in their plants. When they investigated, they stumbled upon something astounding.
“It turned out to be a small protein which surprised us enormously,” he says. “We had discovered a new class of bacteriocins that kills bacteria but also stimulates plant growth. They even potentially have antibiotic properties in medicine. I never imagined that these things would be antibiotics.”
Passionate as he is about boosting food crop yields, he’s just as excited about developing biofuels – the plant-derived, low-pollution fuels that may power your car in the not too distant future. When he’s not busy in the lab or the classroom, he’s hunting for new CO2-reducing crops and renewable fuel sources as head of the Green Crop Network, a research group of 50 scientists at 14 Canadian universities, and the McGill Network for Innovation in Biofuels and Bioproducts.
“The best thing about biofuels,” he says, “is that they’re the nexus of two of the great challenges for humanity in the 21st century: global energy supplies on the one hand and climate change on the other. We spent most of the 20th century making our culture almost completely dependent on fossil fuels for energy, and we have to spend the 21st century getting off them.”