Pamela Ronald stands in front of two rows of rice plants, sprouting from black plastic pots, in a stifling greenhouse on the edge of the University of California, Davis, campus.

Researchers in Ronald's plant genetics lab starved the grasses of water for more than a week. The ones on the right, the control in the ongoing experiment, are yellowing and collapsing. The leaves in the adjacent plants, equipped with an added gene, are thick, tall, and green.

The hope is that these or similar genetic alterations could help rice and other crops survive devastating droughts, preventing food shortages in some of the poorest parts of the world. Ronald, a trim scientist with short brown hair, smiles as she looks down at the early results.

She has spent the last three decades working to make rice, a food staple for more than half of the world's population, more resistant to environmental stress. She was a central player in one of the greatest recent success stories in plant genetics, isolating a gene that allows rice to survive extended periods of flooding. It’s a huge challenge in low-lying parts of Asia, wiping out around four million tons of rice each year in India and Bangladesh alone. A decade after her lab’s discovery, more than five million farmers grow rice varieties engineered with the so-called Sub1 gene, covering more than two million hectares across Asia.

The latest research could be even more significant, as climate change ratchets up the frequency and intensity of droughts across large swaths of the Earth, threatening the food security and stability of entire nations. The number of extreme droughts could double by the end of the century, devastating fields and farmers across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Ronald's work provides a powerful statement for the potential of modern genetic tools to preserve livelihoods and lives, offering a counter narrative to the widespread fears and distortions surrounding genetically modified crops (see “Why We Will Need Genetically Modified Foods”). “This focus on genes in our food is a distraction from the really, really important issues,” she says. “How can we reduce the use of toxic inputs? How can we feed the poor and malnourished? How can we be sure that farmers have access to seeds, and that consumers can afford the food that’s produced?”

Pamela Ronald gets hands-on with a rice plant.

Mountain flowers

Ronald grew up San Mateo, California. Her mother was a talented gardener and cook. Her father was a businessman who fled Nazi Germany as a child.

Years after arriving in California, he built a 500-square-foot cabin in south Lake Tahoe, where the family spent summer vacations. One hot day when she was around 15, Ronald and her brothers hiked a steep path into the High Sierra. At the saddle, they happened upon a couple hovered over a book. They were a pair of professional botanists who were cataloguing flowers. She had developed an affection for plants from the time she spent with her mother in the garden and kitchen, but this was the first time she realized you could make a living working with them.

In the late 1980s, during her PhD program at UC Berkeley, Ronald started working with peppers and tomatoes. But as she began her postdoctoral work, she decided to shift her focus to rice, realizing that even small advances in stress tolerance for such a critical crop could help a lot of people. Tomatoes and peppers are “important for salad, but I wanted to work on supper,” she says. “I wanted to work on a staple food crop, I wanted to move to something more important.”

Ronald arrived at UC Davis as an assistant professor in 1992. Her small, square office carries signs of the work she’s done since, including Asian tapestries, illustrations and covers from journal articles, and arrayed copies of "Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food," the 2008 book she co-wrote with her husband, Raoul Adamchak, who teaches organic farming at UC Davis.

Ronald’s work on flood-tolerant rice started in the mid-1990s, as a U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded collaboration with colleagues at UC Davis. Over the course of a decade, the team pinpointed and isolated the Sub1 gene in an ancient but unpopular Indian rice variety, known as landrace, that enables it to survive even when it was submerged under water for more than two weeks. Since then, the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute, backed by more than $70 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has bred that gene into 10 popular Asian rice varieties. In turn, the nonprofit put the seeds into the hands of farmers in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, and other nations.

Rice is a tough crop to grow, requiring a lot of work and a lot of water. Too much all at once kills it, but so does too little. It takes just a week without rain to significantly decrease yields in hilly rice-growing areas.