Healthy Transgenic Foods

[Editor’s note: We asked a group of Xconomists to answer the following question: “If you could patent one thing, what would it be?”]

Transgenic foods that are programmed and cultivated not so much to lower costs at the risk of ruining health and the environment, but the opposite—like a tomato that produces lots of Omega3 EFAs.

Author: Ramesh Rao

Ramesh Rao is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, and director of the San Diego Division of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. Rao earned his BE degree with honors in electronics and communications in 1980 from the University of Madras in Tiruchirapalli, India. He received his MS degree in 1982 and Ph. D. degree in 1984, both at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since then he has been on the faculty of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is currently Professor and Director of the San Diego Division of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. In April 2004, he was named Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technology. His research interests include architectures, protocols and performance analysis of computer and communication networks. He has authored over 100 technical papers, contributed two book chapters, and led many major interdisciplinary and collaborative projects as principal investigator. He was the Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and was a member of the Editorial Board of the ACM/Baltzer Wireless Network Journal as well as IEEE Network magazine. He has been twice elected to serve on the Information Theory Society Board of Governors ('97 to '99 and '00 to '02).