Episode
Gene Editing and the Future of Plant Breeding with Tom Adams of Pairwise
- Podcast
- Future of Agriculture
- Published
- Feb 23, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2043
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Summary
Pairwise: https://www.pairwise.com/ FoA 412: 'Biological' Is Not A Category (it's the future of agriculture) I’m excited to share today’s episode with you. I’ve wanted to get Tom Adams back on the show ever since I had the chance to interview him at World Agritech a couple of years ago. That interview was included on episode 412 of this podcast titled “Biological is not a Category”. The work Pairwise is doing is mind boggling to me. Using CRISPR and the latest in gene editing tools, they have built a platform to enable plant breeders to make very precise changes to the genome of a plant to give farmers and consumers more of what they want. Now this is different from genetic modification or GMOs because they are not inserting foreign genes into the plant. In fact, they are doing the exact same thing that plant breeders have done for over a century, they are just able to do it in an extremely precise way. On another podcast that I host, Agriscience Explained, Corteva’s Reza Rasoulpour explained natural breeding as wanting to change one word in a book by just combining all of the pages of two different books and hoping that word changes. Versus gene editing just going in and changing that one word in the book. I thought that was a good comparison. So Tom and his team are bringing this technology to agriculture by working with seed companies and other partners in a variety of use cases, many of which we’ll discuss today. A little background on Tom: Dr. Tom Adams co-founded Pairwise and serves as Chief Executive Officer. Tom has over 25 years of leadership experience heading up biotechnology for global companies, serving most recently as Vice President of Global Biotechnology at Monsanto where he led the team developing a broad range of innovative products. Tom wanted to re…