Jonathan Jones is a plant scientist who is passionate about wise deployment of modern genetic methods to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture. Born in London and with degrees from Cambridge, he returned to the UK in 1988 after 8 years in the US to lead a research group at the Sainsbury Laboratory on the Norwich Research Park. He is a leading researcher on how plants resist disease and has developed potato varieties that resist the late blight pathogen (which led to the Irish potato famine in the 1840s) and that also resist potato viruses and bacterial wilt.