That's an excellent point. Food insecurity is caused by a wealth of factors including social, logistic and agricultural. In addition to the problems you highlig

That's an excellent point. Food insecurity is caused by a wealth of factors including social, logistic and agricultural. In addition to the problems you highlighted, were are currently approaching the maximum yield capacity for many crops, and are pushing the maximum land under cultivation for some. There are huge problems to solve in all those areas. The biological problems are made more important by the lack of progress in solving the world equality problems. By 2050, when the world population is something in the region of 9-12 billion, either billions will be starving or we will have solved one or more of those problems. The science problems are tractable, while the others are ill defined and involve many factors we cannot control, so I think there's a stronger moral imperative to work on the science. The other consideration is that working in a job that, by chance, invokes positive social results is not equivalent to working directly on trying to solve a problem. Progress in science suffers because there aren't enough good people working on these problems, because so many of them are seduced by industry. I don't work for Monsanto; that's a straw man. We're talking about academic computational biology jobs. The answer to your last question is: both. I couldn't do a job where I didn't satisfy my curiosity. But I know working in tech would do that just fine - there are hard problems in many fields. I chose science because I want to use whatever skills I have to try to solve the problems I see.