apparently.
this is the only one that is copy-pastable, the others are scanned books:
IT’S EASY TO RECOGNIZE INGO POTRYKUS AT
the train station in Basel, Switzerland. Quietly waiting while hurried travelers zip by, he is holding, as he promised, the framed and slightly yellowed cover of the 31 July
2000 issue of Time magazine. It features Potrykus’s bearded face flanked by some
bright green stalks and a bold headline: “This Rice Could Save A Million Kids A Year.”
The story ran at a time when Potrykus, a German plant biotechnologist who has long
lived in Switzerland, was on a roll. In 1999, just as he was about to retire, Potrykus and his colleagues had stunned plant scientists and biotechnology opponents alike by creating a rice variety that produced a group of molecules called
pro-vitamin A in its seeds. The researchers thought this “golden rice”—named for the
yellow hue imparted by the compounds—held a revolutionary promise to fight vitamin A deficiency, which blinds or kills thousands of children in developing countries every year.
Almost a decade later, golden rice is still just that: a promise. Well-organized
opposition and a thicket of regulations on transgenic crops have prevented the
plant from appearing on Asian farms within 2 to 3 years, as Potrykus and his colleagues once predicted. In fact, the first field trial of golden rice in Asia
started only this month. Its potential to prevent the ravages of vitamin A deficiency has
yet to be tested, and even by the most optimistic projections, no farmer will plant the
rice before 2011.
The delays have made Potrykus, who lives in Magden, a small village in an idyllic
valley near Basel, a frustrated man. For working on what he considers a philanthropic project, he has been ridiculed and vilified as an industry shill. Relating the golden rice saga at his dinner table while his wife serves croissants and strong coffee, he
at times comes off as bitter. There’s more at stake than golden rice and personal vindication, he says. In his view, 2 decades of fear-mongering by organizations such as Greenpeace, his prime nemesis, have created a regulatory climate so burdensome that only big companies with deep pockets can afford to get any genetically modified (GM) product approved. As a result, it has become virtually impossible to use the technology in the service of the poor, Potrykus says.
Not everybody is so gloomy. Potrykus’s
co-inventor and main partner, plant biochemist Peter Beyer of the University
of Freiburg in Germany, agrees that
it’s been a difficult decade. But a
more cheerful character by nature,
Beyer believes rules are just something to be dealt with; complaining
about them does little, he says. A
handful of other researchers working
on GM crops to fight malnutrition
also feel confident that their work
will eventually pay off.
Many scientists agree with
Potrykus, however, that GM technology has become so controversial that
for now, there’s little point in harnessing it for the world’s poorest. HarvestPlus, a
vast global program at public research institutes aimed at creating more nutritious staple crops, is forgoing GM technology almost entirely and using conventional breeding instead, despite its built-in limitations. GM products just might end up on the shelf, says HarvestPlus Director Howarth Bouis.
Potrykus, now 75 years old, worries that he may not live to see his invention do any
good. “It’s difficult for me not to get upset about this situation,” he says. The idea for golden rice was born at an international agricultural meeting in the
Philippines in 1984, says Gary Toenniessen of the Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropy in New York City. It was the early days of genetic engineering, and over beers at a guesthouse one evening, Toenniessen asked a group of plant breeders how the technology of copying and pasting genes might benefit rice. “Yellow endosperm,” one of them said. That odd answer alluded to the fact that a
quarter-billion children have poor diets lacking in vitamin A. This deficiency can
damage the retina and cornea and increase susceptibility to measles and other infectious diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 children go blind every year as a result, and that half of those die within 12 months. Vegetables such as carrots and tomatoes, as well as meat, butter, and milk, can provide the vitamin or its precursors, but many families in poor countries don’t have access to them. A rice variety producing precursors to vitamin A in its endosperm, the main tissue in seeds, might provide a solution—and it would have yellow kernels.
Classical breeding cannot produce such a
rice, however, because although pro-vitamin
A is present in the green parts of the rice
plant, no known strain makes it in its seeds.
The only option is to tinker with rice’s DNA
to produce the desired effect. Throughout the
1980s, the Rockefeller Foundation funded
several exploratory studies, but the plan didn’t
gel until a brainstorming meeting in New
York City in 1992, at which scientists discussed the bold idea of reintroducing the biochemical pathway leading to beta carotene,
the most important pro-vitamin A, into rice
but putting it under control of a promoter
that’s specific to endosperm.
Potrykus, then a pioneer in rice transgenics
at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
(ETH) in Zürich, attended, as did Beyer, who
specialized in carotenoid biochemistry and
molecular biology. The two met on the plane to
New York and hit it off; their fields of expertise
were complementary, and the fact that Zürich
is less than 2 hours from Freiburg was helpful.
They soon had a proposal written up.
Beyer admits he barely believed in the
idea himself, and the Rockefeller’s scientific
advisory board was equally skeptical. Introducing an entire genetic pathway into rice
seemed like a stretch. Still, the foundation
rolled the dice and supported the project.
It took 7 years, but Potrykus and Beyer
eventually succeeded in making golden rice
by splicing two daffodil genes and a bacterial gene into the rice genome. The eureka
moment arrived late one night in Freiburg,
Beyer recalls.
He was analyzing the molecular content of seeds produced in Potrykus’s
lab, as he often did, using a technique called
high-performance liquid chromatography.
This time, peaks showed up on the screen
where they had never appeared before—the
signals of carotenoids. When Beyer went
back to look at the batch of seeds, he noticed
something he had missed: The grains had a
faint yellow hue. Golden rice had been born.
The battle begins
Potrykus says he always knew golden rice—a
Thai businessman suggested the catchy
name—would be controversial. As a professor
in Switzerland, one of the most fiercely antiGM countries in Europe, he had been confronted with angry students since the 1980s.
To protect his plants, ETH spent several million dollars on a grenade-proof greenhouse.
For Beyer, unofficial road signs declaring the
Upper Rhine Valley a “GM technology-free
region” are a twice-daily reminder that the climate in Germany isn’t much better.
But golden rice posed a special dilemma to
GM crop opponents, admits Benedikt Haerlin, who coordinated Greenpeace’s European campaign at the time and now works for the
Foundation on Future Farming. Unlike the
existing GM crops that primarily helped farmers and pesticide companies, it was the first crop designed to help poor consumers in
developing countries. It might save lives. The
decision whether to oppose it weighed heavily
on him, Haerlin says, which is why he consulted with WHO experts on vitamin A and
why he traveled to Zürich to spend a day at
Potrykus’s lab to talk. Potrykus, impressed by
Haerlin’s intelligence, hoped to convince his
fellow countryman.
He failed. Although Greenpeace pledged
not to sabotage field trials, it did launch an
aggressive campaign against golden rice.
It argued that the crop was an industry
PR ploy—seed company Syngenta was
involved in the project, the group pointed
out—designed to win over a skeptical public
and open the door to other GM crops.
Golden rice did not attack the underlying
problem of poverty, Greenpeace said;
besides, other, better solutions to vitamin A
deficiency existed.
Perhaps Greenpeace’s most effective
argument, however, was that golden rice simply wouldn’t work. The most successful
strain created in 2000 produced 1.6 micrograms of pro-vitamin A per gram of rice. At
that rate, an average 2-year-old would need
to eat 3 kilos of golden rice a day to reach the
recommended daily intake, Greenpeace said,
and a breastfeeding mother more than 6 kilos.
To drive the point home, an activist in the
Philippines sat down behind a giant mound
of golden rice during a press conference.
“Fool’s gold,” Greenpeace called it.
A photo of the event, which quickly
found its way around the world, still makes
Haerlin chuckle—and it still makes
Potrykus angry. Greenpeace assumed that
children had to get all of their vitamin A
from rice, which was unrealistic; it also
ignored the fact, says Potrykus, that even
half the recommended intake may prevent
malnutrition. And Greenpeace assumed that
the uptake of beta carotene by the human gut
and its conversion into vitamin A were quite
inefficient, resulting in one vitamin molecule for every 12 molecules of beta carotene.
Nobody knew the true rate at the time, but a
recent, soon-to-be-published study among
healthy volunteers who ate cooked golden
rice, led by Robert Russell of Tufts University in Boston, suggests that it’s more like
one for every three or four. “That’s really
quite good,” says Russell, who
supports the golden rice
project. (A similar study is
planned among people with
marginal vitamin A def iciency in Asia.)
Haerlin says his calculations were based on the best
data at the time. But even if
they were correct, Potrykus
says, the first golden rice was
just a proof of principle.
Greenpeace might as well
have blamed the Wright brothers for not building a transatlantic airplane, he says.
The low beta-carotene yield
would eventually be tackled
by Syngenta—even though
Potrykus resented the way the
company got involved. Between 1996 and
1999, Beyer’s lab received funding through a
European Commission contract that also
included agrochemical giant Zeneca (called
AstraZeneca after a merger in 1999). Under
the program’s rules, any benefits had to be
shared by the signers. AstraZeneca had not
worked on golden rice per se, Potrykus says,
but the company claimed a share of
that intellectual property anyway; it was interested in
developing the technology commercially, for
instance in health
foods, says Potrykus,
who was initially
“furious” that a big
corporation now had
a say in his project.
David Lawrence
has a different take
on those events: At
the time, AstraZeneca
primarily wanted to support the humanitarian
development of golden
rice, says the cur rent
head of research at Syngenta; the company didn’t
have any commercial plans.
(AstraZeneca’s agribusiness division
merged with that of Novartis to form Syngenta in 2000.) But whoever’s right, the
move proved a blessing in disguise, Potrykus
now says. At Syngenta, he found a new partner in Adrian Dubock, a bubbly, fast-talking Brit with experience in patents, product
development, regulation, and marketing—
subjects Potrykus and Beyer admit they
were clueless about.
Dubock helped work out a deal in which
Syngenta could develop golden rice commercially, but farmers in developing countries who make less than $10,000 a year
could get it for free. He also helped solve
patent problems with several other companies. Dubock retired from Syngenta in 2007
but remains involved as a member of the
Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, a group
Potrykus chairs. “Without him, the project
would have ended already,” Potrykus says.
But perhaps most important, Syngenta
scientists replaced a daffodil gene with a
maize gene, thus creating a new version of
golden rice, dubbed GR2, that produces up to
23 times more beta carotene in its seeds.
Even with the one-in-12 conversion factor,
that meant 72 grams of dry rice per day
would suffice for a child, the company’s scientists said in 2005. A 2006 paper by Alexander Stein of the University of Hohenheim in
Stuttgart, Germany, estimated that the rice
could have a major public health impact at a
reasonable cost.
Those results didn’t convince the skeptics. Real-world studies are still lacking,
says WHO malnutrition expert Francesco
Branca, noting that it’s unclear
how many people will plant,
buy, and eat golden rice.
He says giving out
supplements, fortifying existing foods
with vitamin A, and
teaching people to
grow carrots or certain leafy vegetables are, for now,
more promising ways
to fight the problem.
A golden future?
Today, the debate about
golden rice has quieted
down, in part because its
inventors are keeping a low
profile. Syngenta stopped
its research on golden rice
and licensed the rights to
GR2 to the humanitarian board on World
Food Day in 2004; given consumers’distrust,
there was no money in it, says Lawrence.
Most golden rice work is now taking place at
six labs in the Philippines, India, and Vietnam, the countries chosen as the best candidates for the crop’s launch.
Although Potrykus has
retired, Peter Beyer is
still working on golden
rice at the University
of Freiburg.
There’s a long way to go. Both the original
golden rice, now called GR1, and GR2 were
created with Japonica cultivars that are scientists’ favorites but fare poorly in Asian fields.
Researchers are now backcrossing seven GR1
and GR2 lines with the long-grained, nonsticky Indica varieties popular among Asia’s
farmers. In early April, researchers at the
International Rice Research Institute in the
Philippines finally started a field trial with a
GR1 backcrossed into a widely used Indica
variety called IR64—the first field trial ever
in Asia. (The only other outdoor studies
were two done in Louisiana in
2004 and 2005.) The new varieties must not only produce
enough beta carotene but also pass
muster in terms of yield, seed
quality, and appearance.
The project could have been
much further along, Potrykus says,
if there weren’t so many rules governing GM crops that make little
sense. Conventional breeders can
bombard plant cells with chemicals
and radiation to create useful
mutants without having to check
how it affects their DNA; a GM
insertion must be “clean”—that is,
the extra genes must sit neatly in a
row without disrupting other
genes—which adds months or even
years to the lab work. Because field
trials take long to get approved,
researchers have been confined to
greenhouses, in which they have
trouble growing the large numbers
required for breeding and feeding
studies. These requirements have
caused “year after year of delays,”
Potrykus complains.
Even if field trials are successful, there are no guarantees that
golden rice will eventually be
approved in the target countries.
Use of other GM crops, such as Bt cotton, has
exploded in Asia in recent years (see infographic, p. 466). But GM rice has languished.
In India and China, regulatory agencies have
shied away from approving insect-resistant GM
rice despite extensive testing. “The expectation
is that they will [be approved] eventually,” says
Toenniessen, “but it’s a major decision for any
Asian country.” Thailand, a major rice exporter,
has decided to steer clear of GM rice altogether.
Kavitha Kuruganti of the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, an anti-GM group in
Hyderabad, India, promises a major battle
should golden rice head to the market in India.
She thinks that the crop is unnecessary and
probably unsafe to eat and that a massive switch
would reduce diversity and threaten India’s
food security. “We will try to organize a broad
public debate,” she says.
Not worth funding?
Whether justified or not, the turmoil over
golden rice has shaped other efforts to improve
the nutritional value of crops. Take HarvestPlus. With a $14 million annual budget that targets 12 crops, it aims to boost levels of three
key nutrients: vitamin A, iron, and zinc. It
relies almost entirely on conventional breeding—which has Greenpeace’s blessing—
because it wants to have an impact fast, says
Bouis, the director. What little GM technology HarvestPlus supports is a “hedge,” in
case the political and regulatory climates shift.
But in plants that have little or no natural
ability to produce a nutrient, breeders
have nothing to work with. Thus, vitamin
A–enriched non-GM rice and sorghum are
essentially off the table, says Bouis, as is
boosting zinc and iron in sweet potatoes and
cassava. Iron in rice is a question mark.
The uncertainty about the future of GM
foods also tends to scare off the financial
donors on which programs like HarvestPlus
depend. Rockefeller, for instance, is frustrated
that a GM rice whose field trials it helped pay
for in China is stalled, says Toenniessen. “To
avoid making the decision to approve it, the
Chinese keep asking for more field trials,” he
says. “In the end, that becomes a foolish use
of our funds.”
The only charity still investing massively in
GM crops with enhanced nutritional value is
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Through its Grand Challenges in Global Health
initiative, it is spending more than
$36 million to support not only
golden rice but also GM cassava,
sorghum, and bananas. The foundation declined to comment for this
story. But the researchers it supports say that they are optimistic
that their products will make it
through the pipeline.
James Dale of Queensland
University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, who heads a project to add iron, vitamin A, and
vitamin E to bananas, says he has
learned several lessons from
golden rice, including the importance of local “ownership”—
which is why he has teamed up
with researchers in Kampala.
“This will be a Ugandan banana
made by Ugandans,” he says.
Not that this mollifies opponents. Greenpeace will fight to
keep GM bananas, cassava, and
sorghum from poor countries’
fields, just as it will keep opposing golden rice, says Janet Cotter
of Greenpeace’s Science Unit
in London.
Battle-scarred, Potrykus says he
hasn’t given up hope that the regulatory system can be overhauled so
that GM technology can benefit the poor. He
believes a massive, multimillion-dollar information campaign might help convert the public.
He has tried in vain to contact Bill Gates in hopes
of tapping his wealth for such a media blitz.
He also wrote the late Pope John Paul II to
ask for support for golden rice. “You know the
definition of an optimist?” he jokes: “Someone
who’s asking the church for money.” His Holiness declined, but Potrykus was invited to join the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, where he
hopes to convene a meeting on golden rice
next year—the 10th anniversary of his tarnished invention.
Anyway that was from Science magazine, a fairly informal primer from the other viewpoint.
Face to face
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