Question: what made you come up with this idea and how did you formulate your experiment? Which pest were eating the crops?

Hugh Roderick answered on 15 Jun 2010:

I didn’t come up with the idea, my boss did and the government gave him money to be able to do it. He then advertised a job for someone to come and run the project which I applied for and got. My boss got the idea after several decades of research into how nematodes (the little worms that live in the soil and some eat plant roots) find, attack and eat. Nematodes cause a huge problem to farmers across the world, including in the UK, but especially in places like Africa where farmers can’t afford or don’t know how to use the very dangerous chemicals that farmers in the UK use to kill nematodes. Nematodes also make crops more likely to get other problems like disease as the plant is weakened by having its roots eaten. So my boss came up with the idea because he saw that if we can control nematodes without nasty chemicals it would make life a lot easier for a lot of farmers around the world. And now I’m developing the idea from bananas into other African crops.