Hi everyone, I’m out in San Diego to attend BIO 2008, the Bio International Convention which runs Tuesday-Friday.  This is the world’s largest biotech conference and more than 20,000 people from around the globe will be here.  The attendees are executives, scientists and researchers who are working, as BIO says, to “feed, fuel and heal” the world.  That’s because biotech applications are used for human health (know anyone who uses insulin?  or is treated for MS?  Those are biotech drugs); used to produce biofuels which will be a hot topic here, and used to modify crops grown for food (corn, soy, cotton, squash, canola to name the most common).

So I’m really excited to be here and learn and mingle.  I was thrilled this morning, when on my way to the gym, I ran into Dr. Florence Wambugu and her associate Daniel Kamanga.  You may recall I’ve written about Florence before.  She’s CEO of Africa Harvest and is based in Nairobi and Johannesburg.  She has a grant from the Gates Foundation to improve the solubility of sorghum which is a food staple in Africa.  Anyway, we had a lovely reunion on the street and will be seeing each other again this week.  Maybe I can even get her to do a guest blog post for us.  In any event, if you have any questions about biotech and agriculture, send them to me and I’ll try to find someone here who can answer them — I mean with 20,000+ experts, it should be easy, right?  I’ll be blogging from here all week — so check back often  to see what’s new.  You can also go to the BIO web site to see the type of programming available in the food and ag track