An Analysis of Photosynthesis in Poplar Inoculated with Endophytic Bacteria

Daniel Bornstein

In the summer prior to my sophomore year, I remember reading a Wall Street Journal article titled “Feeding Billions, a Grain at a Time,” discussing how both rising food prices and climate change threatened decades of progress on global agriculture. Then, a few months later, The New York Times launched an article series called “The Food Chain,” highlighting issues in international agriculture. I found it puzzling that while two prominent newspapers were featuring agriculture coverage, very few people in the United States were aware of global food issues. And that’s when I realized an unfortunate reality of the American people: our country is complacent about its food supply. The federal government’s subsidies to large farms guarantee a stable food supply, leading Americans to take their food security for granted. But upon reading those Wall Street Journal and New York Times articles, I began to formulate the vision that agriculture is the fundamental issue in the developing world . . . Competition between food and fuel is a major obstacle to feeding a world whose population, according to the United Nations, is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. That dynamic encouraged me, for my Intel Science Talent Search project, to research how the use of poplar as a biofuel could avoid displacement of food crops by biofuels…