Agricultural Science Prize Awarded for Research Improving Yields

WASHINGTON, DC – The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has awarded the 2020 Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences to Dr. Zachary Lippman of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for his work to accelerate crop improvement. The NAS Prize, endowed by the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is awarded annually to a scientist who has made an extraordinary contribution to agriculture or to the understanding of the biology of a species fundamentally important to agriculture or food production. The Prize includes $100,000 and a medal of recognition. Lippman’s research has shown that yields can be increased, and new crops can be created and adapted to new environments using the genes that determine when, where and how many flowers are produced on a plant. In the last several years, Lippman discovered timing mechanisms that control how many flowers a plant will produce, which meant that he could develop approaches to control how much fruit and how many seeds a plant would make. When combined with known hormones that control flowering and the powerful tools of gene editing, this new knowledge allowed Lippman and his team to embark on a new frontier of quantitatively fine-tuning traits in ways that were never before possible.