Genetic Engineering News Reports on Bill Clinton's Biofuel Focus

Business Wire, May 2, 2006

NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. -- Bullish on biofuels, former President Bill Clinton has challenged the bioindustry to give the world a different energy future, reports Genetic Engineering News (GEN); (www.genengnews.com).

"The first obligation of society is to feed its people," said Mr. Clinton. "Biotechnology can help us feed more people while addressing environmental concerns, such as global climate change."

The former president further tied the issues of food production and global warming together by pointing out that advances in agbiotech will be important, because if the climate continues to change, there will be an ongoing erosion of top soil, more dust storms, and agricultural production will be pushed further North in the Northern Hemisphere and further South in the Southern Hemisphere.

"When GEN's publisher, Mary Ann Liebert, interviewed President Clinton, we were delighted to see how involved he was in biotechnology through his Clinton Foundation's AIDS Initiative," says John Sterling, editor-in-chief of GEN. "We are extremely impressed with his knowledge of biotechnology, and he is right on top of the issues of global warming and worldwide food production."

At a national biotechnology gathering, Mr. Clinton stressed that it was important for biotech to develop a wide range of alternatives to both reduce the rate of global warming, as well as to cut the human contribution to it by restricting greenhouse gas emissions. The former president believes biofuels are the way to go.

"We need to move to a biofuel future based more on cellulistic fuels than corn, which is a principal contributor to ethanol now. Why? Because the conversion ratio is better," he said.

He also maintained that the move to a clean energy future would reverse the declining wages trend in America because it would be driven by high job growth in private businesses. "Ninety-two percent of the new jobs that came into being in the United States when I was president came in the private sector," he stated.

Mr. Clinton maintains that biotechnology can replace energy as the main source of new jobs because he thinks it will take us about a decade to reach the full implications of the sequencing of the human genome. Only then will scientists and doctors be able to fully apply genomic information to all kinds of diseases and conditions, develop vaccines, and produce products and services unimagined even a decade or so before, he predicted.

"But first we've got to get the energy thing right," he told the biotech audience.

For a copy of the May issue, please call 914-740-2122, or email: ebicovny@liebertpub.com.

Genetic Engineering News, which is published 21 times a year by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., is the most widely read and influential worldwide biotechnology news magazine. The publication was recently redesigned to include sections on OMICS, Drug Discovery, Bioprocessing, Translational Medicine, and Biobusiness.

Mary Ann Liebert Inc. also publishes Industrial Biotechnology (www.indbiotech.com), an authoritative and peer-reviewed news journal dedicated to the emerging field of industrial biotechnology. Regular topics covered by the journal are energy and biofuels, biomass and biorefineries, biodefense, nanotechnology, and bioremediation, among others.