Mary-Dell Chilton, mother of genetically modified crops, dies at 87

July 23, 2026

Wall Street Journal: “I just absolutely did not believe it,” Chilton recalled. In the 2018 book “Seeds of Science,” journalist Mark Lynas writes that Chilton even cold-called the paper’s lead author in Belgium, Marc Van Montagu, just to tell him she thought his results—this idea that a bacteria was going around smuggling its DNA into a plant—were “nonsense, total nonsense.”…