Hajime Sakai Ph.D.

Hajime Sakai, Ph.D.

BOARD MEMBER

With extensive experience in agricultural research and development and a background in plant genetics, Hajime Sakai is the CEO and co-founder of Napigen and serves as a founding board member of Grow More Foundation.

“As a scientist with experience in plant genetics and genomics, I would like to comment on genome editing technologies used for agriculture and food.

The recent development of genome editing technologies is stunning. People now can create new crop varieties that are not distinguishable from crop plants that have been produced by classical breeding work. From the regulatory point of view, this probably is not the question of finding any subtle difference among those new crop plants created by genome editing technologies, but the question of what genetic variations have already been produced and can be produced through classical breeding processes. Since those variations are known to be safe and accepted by the public, the understanding of their molecular basis would help draw the line of what should be regulated by the government.”