In "A Million Shades of Green," Anne Osbourn, professor and group leader at the John Innes Centre, will discuss ways to harness metabolic diversity in plants for food and health applications. Professor Osbourn investigates natural product biosynthesis in plants. Her discovery that the genes for many of these pathways are organized in clusters like "beads on a string" in plant genomes has greatly accelerated the ability to find new pathways and chemistries of potential importance for the development of drugs and other useful compounds. The Barbara McClintock Life Sciences Lecture Series at Cornell University brings together colleagues from the natural, physical, and computer sciences and engineering communities in a single forum.