Molecular biologist Rebecca Nelson, a 1998 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur "genius" fellowship, will discuss biotechnology and food production in developing nations Thursday, Jan. 18, at the University of California, Davis. Her public talk on "Gene Flow and Information Flow: On Biotechnology and Sustainable Food Production in Poor Countries," will be presented at 7:30 p.m. in the campus's Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center on Old Davis Road. Nelson's research at the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru, is aimed at preventing crop losses due to plant diseases in developing countries. Her primary interest is in controlling late blight, a fast-mutating fungal disease that each year causes billions of dollars in crop losses in many of the world's poorest nations. She is working to develop new disease-resistant lines of potatoes and to disseminate the results of her studies to farmers in the developing world. Before coming to Peru she conducted research on rice-blast disease at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and worked through the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to teach Vietnamese farmers the fundamentals of disease prevention and helping reduce their pesticide use. Three more lectures will follow Nelson's in the "Biotechnology, Policy, and Society Lecture Series," held on selected Thursday evenings until early March. The series is sponsored by the campus's Center for History, Society, and Culture in an effort to present a broad range of thought on biotechnology and its social implications.