'Using Nature's Shuttle' is a suspenseful, by turns comic or tragic, but always lively account of how young, idealistic scientists - often the first of their families to go to a university - engaged in basic research that led them to make history in the new fields of plant microbiology and molecular biology. The book passes on the true story of what young scientists in a public Belgian university learned about a million-year-old single cell soil bacterium. This bacterium was able to genetically modify certain plants to produce food that only that bacterium strain could eat. These scientists...