John C. Sanford’s work is part of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History: Bioloistic Particle Gun Gene guns were the brainchild of plant geneticist Dr. John C. Sanford, who spent much of the early 1980s looking for a way to insert foreign DNA into plant cells in order to create transgenic plants. At the time, the most successful process for doing this relied on a species of bacteria. The method, however, only worked for certain plant species and was not successful with important crops like wheat, rice, or corn. Sanford considered a variety of techniques, including piercing cell walls with a laser, but it was not until he teamed up with Dr. Edward Wolf of the Cornell engineering labs, … Continue reading YEC John Sanford — featured in Smithsonian National Museum of American History