The FDA approved the J.R. Simplot Company's Innate potatoes a few months ago, and now it is marketing them for fresh retail and potato chips. The feeling is bittersweet. Their biggest customer, McDonalds, had already rejected the idea of using them just after the USDA approval of Innate potatoes eight months ago. Because they were genetically modified. Even though the they only took genes from potatoes and not other species. That was their whole thing. That's why they were named that.

It took fifteen years for them to be created. He wasn't there for the whole of it, but he was there for a decade of it. To have his life's work be invalidated like that...well, not totally. They're still going to be brought to market. But he still feels that sense of loss and longing about it. The wastefulness of it. Why won't other people understand that the potatoes are fine? That genetically modified crops are fine. That we've been genetically modifying crops since the dawn of human history where selective breeding turned ancestral crops into unrecognizable versions of themselves.

How do you make them understand? Can you make them understand? Well, at the end of the day, he works in research and not marketing. It's not his job.