Arran Frood
Science Writer & Film Maker
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Swindon, UK
Blink and the
future has arrived. Many modern inventions, from huge and mighty stealth
bombers to electric-hybrid vehicles and touchscreen smartphones seem to arrive
in an instant. But their presence defines where we are now and where we may be going.
The same could
be said of the new multi-million pound National Plant Phenomics Centre (NPPC),
the technological scale and capability of which provokes a similar “wow!”
factor. ‘Phenomics’ is the large-scale study of physical characteristics and the
NPPC is unique within the UK. It is the future of agricultural and
horticultural science, where thousands of plant traits are automatically
measured on a cyber-industrial scale and recorded digitally: a true monument to
the information age.
