India, Jan. 10 -- It is one of mankind's oldest questions: How can we grow enough food?

Indian-American plant biologists Venkatesan Sundaresan, 73, and Imtiyaz Khanday, 40, weren't even looking to answer it, really.

In 2015, they were studying exactly how plant embryos work at the cellular level, when they identified a set of genes in rice flowers that appeared to kickstart it all. Used right, they realised, these genes could help rice become the world's first engineered self-cloning plant.

While certain fruits, berries and weeds (such as the blackberry and dandelion) do reproduce asexually (or clone themselves) in the wild, the world's major food crops are inherently sexual. For more than 30 years, efforts to get them to clone themsel...