For stretched public health budgets, high-tech treatments are hard to afford but some pre-emptive measures can prove good value

Traditional crop breeding can be time-consuming and laborious. Brad Ringeisen, the executive director of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at the University of California (Berkeley and San Francisco), believes that gene editing using tools like Crispr-Cas9 is the most impactful way of ensuring that crops can withstand disasters.

New A.I. technology can generate blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit DNA, pointing to a future where science can battle diseases faster and better.