San Antonio College Library

Overview: Plant molecular biology came to the fore in the early 1980s and there has been tremendous growth in the subject since then. The study of plant genes and genomes and the development of techniques for the incorporation of novel or modified genes into plants eventually led to the commercialization of genetically modified (GM) crops in the mid-1990s. This was seen as the start of a biotechnological revolution in plant breeding. However, plant...

"The food we eat is being transformed before our eyes. Biotech companies are creating designer crops with strange powers - from cholesterol-reducing soybeans to tobacco plants that act as solar-powered pharmaceutical factories. They promise great benefits: better health for consumers and more productive agriculture. But the vision has a dark side, awakening fears of profit-driven tampering with life." "In Lords of the Harvest, Daniel Charles tells...

The global food crisis is a stark reminder of the fragility of the global food system. This volume captures the debate about how to go forward and examines the implications of the crisis for food security in the world's poorest countries, both for the global environment and for the global rules and institutions that govern food and agriculture. Policy-makers and scholars assess the causes and consequences of the most recent food price volatility and...

A group of Utopians, unhappy with dissolute, mid-nineteenth-century America, takes to the pastoral life; but the members find little satisfaction in farmwork and communal life because of competing ambitions and idealism. Instead of changing the world, they pursue self-centered paths that ultimately lead to tragedy. Absorbing 1852 novel about love, idealism, and politics bristles with Hawthorne's perceptive wit and intelligence.

A look at what the Soviet collective farms were like in 1963.

"The bananas we eat today aren't your parents' bananas: We eat a recognizable, consistent breakfast fruit that was standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana. But because of that, the banana we love is dangerously susceptible to a pathogen that might wipe it out. That's the story of our food today: Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance--once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone...

Blithedale romance: A group of Utopians, unhappy with dissolute, mid-nineteenth-century America, takes to the pastoral life; but the members find little satisfaction in farmwork and communal life because of competing ambitions and idealism. Instead of changing the world, they pursue self-centered paths that ultimately lead to tragedy. Absorbing 1852 novel about love, idealism, and politics bristles with Hawthorne's perceptive wit and intelligence. Fanshawe:...