The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is a not-for-profit scientific facility located in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Its main mission point is to "improve the human condition through plant science".

Founded in 1998 by William Henry Danforth, M.D., a cardiologist and the brother of former U.S. Senator and Episcopal priest John Danforth, the Center is the product of an alliance joining the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, Monsanto Company, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Established in 1998, the Danforth Center building opened in October 2001 and houses equipment for protein crystallography, proteomics and mass spectrometry, microscopy and imaging of live cells, cell and tissue culture, and for control and maintenance of plants. Dr. Roger N. Beachy, Ph.D. was named the founding president of the Center in January 1999.

In October 2009, Dr. Beachy stepped down as president of the Center to join the Obama administration as the first director of the new National Institute of Food and Agriculture. He is currently still serving as vice chair of the Center's board of trustees under Dr. Danforth. Dr. Philip Needleman, former senior vice president at Monsanto, served as the acting President until the appointment of Dr. James C. Carrington, 50, the former Director of the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing at Oregon State University. According to the online edition of the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, the extensive search involved seven firms, 18 top plant scientists, and a year of scouting. The center has a $20 million annual operating budget and 200 employees.

A science center (American) or science centre (British) is a science museum that emphasizes a hands-on approach, featuring interactive exhibits that encourage visitors to experiment and explore.

The first science center was Urania founded in Berlin in 1888 [1] [2]. The Academy of Science of Saint Louis (founded in 1856) created the Saint Louis Museum of Science and Natural History in 1959 (Saint Louis Science Center), but generally science centers are a product of the 1960s and later. In the United Kingdom, many of them were founded as Millennium projects, with funding from the National Lotteries Fund.

The first "science center" in the United States was the Science Center of Pinellas County, founded in 1959. The Pacific Science Center (one of the first to call itself a "science center" rather than a museum) opened in a Seattle World's Fair building in 1962. The Smithsonian Institution invited visitors into a new Discovery Room in its National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, where they could touch and handle formerly off-limits specimens. In 1969, Oppenheimer's Exploratorium opened in San Francisco, California, and the Ontario Science Centre opened near Toronto, Canada. By the early 1970s, COSI Columbus, then known as the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio, had run its first "camp-in."

Mark Lynas (born 1973) is a British author, journalist and environmental activist who focuses on climate change. He is a contributor to New Statesman, Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, and The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK; he also worked on the film The Age of Stupid. He holds a degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh. He lives in Oxford, England. He has published several books including Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007) and The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans.

In 2004, Lynas' High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis was published by Macmillan Publishers on its Picador imprint. He has also contributed to a book entitled Fragile Earth: Views of a Changing World published by Collins, which presents before-and-after images of some of the natural changes which have happened to the world in recent years, including the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, alongside a bleak look at the effects of mankind's actions on the planet.