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Grains of hope

Golden rice and other genetically engineered crops could revolutionize farming and help solve world hunger. Protesters fear they could also destroy the environment.

February 12
Time Asia

At first, the grains of rice that Ingo Potrykus sifted through his fingers did not seem at all special. But once their dark, crinkly husks were stripped away and the interiors polished to a glossy sheen, Potrykus could behold the seeds' golden secret. At their core, these grains were not the pearly white of ordinary rice but a very pale yellow—courtesy of beta-carotene, the nutrient that serves as a building block for vitamin A.

Potrykus was elated. For more than a decade he had dreamed of creating a golden rice that would improve the lives of millions of the world's poorest people. At least 1 million children, weakened by vitamin-A deficiency, die every year and an additional 350,000 go blind. Potrykus saw his rice as the modest start of a new green revolution: bananas that wouldn't rot on the way to market; corn that could supply its own fertilizer; wheat that could thrive in drought-ridden soil.

But imagining a golden rice was one thing, Potrykus found, and bringing one into existence quite another. Year after year, he and his colleagues ran into unexpected obstacles, beginning with the finicky growing habits of the rice they had transplanted to a greenhouse near the foothills of the Swiss Alps. And when success finally came in early 1999, Potrykus, 65 and about to retire as a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, faced even more formidable challenges. The golden rice that he and his colleagues developed is a product of genetic engineering, what opponents call Frankenfood. As such, it was entangled in a web of hopes and fears and political baggage, not to mention a fistful of iron-clad patents.

For about a year now—ever since Potrykus and his chief collaborator, Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg in Germany, announced their achievement—their golden grain has illuminated an increasingly polarized public debate over genetically engineered crops. Last month Potrykus and Beyer arrived in the Philippines carrying golden rice seeds and genetic material bound for the International Research for Rice Institute, IRRI for short. The goal of IRRI scientists will be to develop a golden tropical rice, based on the techniques Potrykus has used for his temperate rice variety. And this is only the first step. Two private companies—Swiss-based Syngenta and Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City in the U.S.—revealed last week that they have mapped the entire rice genome, paving the way for other dramatic breakthroughs. Years of lab work on a viable genetically modified (GM) rice variety are still needed, but scientists in Asia will undoubtedly find their rice subjected to the same kind of hostile suspicion and scrutiny that has already led to curbs on the commercialization of these crops in Britain, Germany, Switzerland and Brazil.

The increasingly acrimonious debate over genetically engineered crops erupted the moment they made their commercial debut in the mid-1990s. European environmentalists and consumer-advocacy groups were the first to launch major protests that have since spread worldwide. Environmentalists in India have filed suit against Monsanto to prevent it from testing genetically modified cotton. In the Philippines, farmers have demonstrated against seed giants Monsanto and Dupont's field tests of Bt corn. And activists there point to Miracle Rice—a product of the Green Revolution in the '60s—as a cautionary lesson. Its wholesale adoption in Southeast Asia led to a rice monoculture, making crops more vulnerable to insect pests and disease, and more dependent on pesticides.

Public hostility is understandable. Most of the genetically engineered crops introduced so far represent minor variations on the same two themes: resistance to insect pests and to herbicides used to control the growth of weeds. And they are often marketed by large, multinational corporations that produce and sell the very agricultural chemicals farmers are spraying on their fields. So while many farmers have embraced such crops as Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans, with their genetically engineered resistance to Monsanto's Roundup-brand herbicide, that let them spray weed killer without harming crops, consumers have come to regard such things with mounting suspicion. Why resort to a strange new technology that might harm the biosphere, they ask, when the benefits of doing so seem small?

Indeed, the benefits have seemed small—until golden rice came along. Golden rice is the first compelling example of a genetically engineered crop that may benefit not just the farmers who grow it but also the consumers who eat it.

No wonder so many of those concerned about poverty and hunger are convinced that such crops have a critical role to play in feeding the world. China, one of the first countries to grow genetically engineered tobacco and cotton commercially, is investing heavily in the technology as a way to combat its chronic domestic food problems. C.S. Prakash, a scientist at the Center for Plant Biotechnology Research at Tuskegee University in Alabama, recently accused anti-GM activists of being "well-fed folk" who "jet around the world" to disrupt technology that will benefit the poor. According to Prakash: "Biotechnology is one of the best hopes for solving ... food needs when we have 6 billion people, and certainly in the next 30 to 50 years when there will be 9 billion on the globe."

Indeed, by the year 2020, the demand for grain, both for human consumption and for animal feed, is projected to go up by nearly half. Add to that the need to conserve overstressed water resources and reduce the use of polluting chemicals, and the enormity of the challenge is apparent.

GOING FOR THE GOLD

In the late 1980s, after he  became a full professor of plant science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Ingo Potrykus started to think about using genetic engineering to improve the nutritional qualities of rice. Of some 3 billion people who depend on rice as their major staple, around 10% risk some degree of vitamin-A deficiency and the health problems that result. The problem interested Potrykus for a number of reasons. For starters, he was attracted by the scientific challenge of transferring not just a single gene, as many had already done, but a group of genes that represented a key part of a biochemical pathway. He was also motivated by empathy. As a child growing up in war-ravaged Germany, Potrykus and his brothers were often so desperately hungry that they ate what they could steal.

Around 1990, Potrykus hooked up with Gary Toenniessen, director of food security for the Rockefeller Foundation. Toenniessen had identified the lack of beta-carotene in polished rice grains as an appropriate target for gene scientists like Potrykus to tackle because it lay beyond the ability of traditional plant breeding to address. For while rice, like other green plants, contains light-trapping beta-carotene in its external tissues, it does not produce beta-carotene in its endosperm (the starchy interior part of the rice grain that most people eat).

At a Rockefeller-sponsored meeting, Potrykus met the University of Freiburg's Peter Beyer, an expert on the beta-carotene pathway in daffodils. They decided to combine their expertise. In 1993, with some $100,000 in seed money from the Rockefeller Foundation, Potrykus and Beyer launched what turned into a seven-year, $2.6 million project, backed by the Swiss government and the European Union. "I was in a privileged situation," reflects Potrykus, "because I was able to operate without industrial support. Only in that situation can you think of giving away your work for free."

The two scientists soon discovered, however, that giving away golden rice was not going to be easy. The genes they transferred and the bacteria they used to transfer those genes were encumbered by patents and proprietary rights. Only after extensive negotiations have the two scientists managed to strike a deal with Syngenta, Monsanto and the four other companies that held exclusive licenses to the technologies used by Potrykus and Beyer to create golden rice. In exchange for commercial marketing rights in the U.S. and other affluent markets, the companies recently agreed to donate the technology free to developing countries.

Still, critics of agricultural biotechnology erupted. "A rip-off of the public trust," grumbled the Rural Advancement Foundation International, an advocacy group based in Winnipeg, Canada. Potrykus was dismayed by such negative reaction. "It would be irresponsible," he exclaimed, "not to say immoral, not to use biotechnology to try to solve this problem!"

WEIGHING THE PERILS

Beneath the hyperbolic talk of Frankenfoods, even proponents of agricultural biotechnology agree, lie some real concerns. To begin with, all foods, including the transgenic foods created through genetic engineering, are potential sources of allergens. That's because the transferred genes contain instructions for making proteins and some proteins—those in peanuts, for example—cause allergic reactions. Then there is the problem of "genetic pollution," as opponents of biotechnology term it. Pollen grains from such wind-pollinated plants as corn, for instance, are carried far and wide. The continuing flap over Bt corn and cotton—the gene of a common soil bacteria (Bacillus thuringiensis), a natural insecticide, is transferred to the plants—has provided more fodder for the debate. Ecologists are concerned that widespread planting of these crops will spur Bt resistance among crop pests, and Bt is popular with organic farmers.

Even more worrisome are ecological concerns. In 1999 Cornell University entomologist John Losey performed a provocative, "seat-of-the-pants" laboratory experiment. He dusted Bt corn pollen on plants populated by monarch-butterfly caterpillars. Many of the caterpillars died. Losey himself is not yet convinced that Bt corn poses a grave danger to North America's monarch-butterfly population, but he does think the issue deserves attention. Others agree. "The problem with transgenics is the risks and hazards involved," says Ashish Kothari of Kalpavriskh, an Indian environmental group working to preserve the country's biodiversity. "We still don't know what this can do to other plants and organisms."

There are more potential pitfalls. Among other things, the possibility exists that as transgenes in pollen drift, they will fertilize wild plants, and weeds will emerge that are hardier and even more difficult to control. No one knows how common the exchange of genes between domestic plants and their wild relatives really is, but Margaret Mellon, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' agriculture and biotechnology program, is not alone in thinking that it's high time we find out. Says she: "People should be responding to these concerns with experiments, not assurances."

That is beginning to happen, although—contrary to expectations—the reports coming in are not that scary. For three years now, University of Arizona entomologist Bruce Tabashnik has been monitoring fields of Bt cotton that farmers have planted in his state. And in this instance at least, he says, "the environmental risks seem minimal, and the benefits seem great." First of all, cotton is self-pollinated rather than wind-pollinated, so that the spread of the Bt gene is of less concern. And because the Bt gene is so effective, he notes, Arizona farmers have reduced their use of chemical insecticides 75%. So far, the pink bollworm population has not rebounded, indicating that the feared resistance to Bt has not yet developed.

ASSESSING THE PROMISE

Are the critics of agricultural biotechnology right? Is biotech's promise nothing more than overblown corporate hype? The papaya growers in Hawaii's Puna district clamor to disagree. In 1992 an epidemic of papaya ringspot virus threatened to destroy the state's papaya industry; by 1994, nearly half the state's papaya acreage had been infected, their owners forced to seek outside employment. But then help arrived, in the form of a virus-resistant transgenic papaya developed by Cornell University plant pathologist Dennis Gonsalves.

In 1995 a team of scientists set up a field trial of two transgenic lines—UH SunUP and UH Rainbow—and by 1996, the verdict had been rendered. The nontransgenic plants in the field trial were a stunted mess, and the transgenic plants were healthy. In 1998, after negotiations with four patent holders, the papaya growers switched en masse to the transgenic seeds and reclaimed their orchards. "Consumer acceptance has been great," reports Rusty Perry, who runs a papaya farm near Puna. "We've found that customers are more concerned with how the fruits look and taste than with whether they are transgenic or not."

The widespread perception that agricultural biotechnology is intrinsically inimical to the environment perplexes Gordon Conway, the agricultural ecologist who heads the Rockefeller Foundation. He views genetic engineering as an important tool for achieving what he has termed a "doubly green revolution." If the technology can marshal a plant's natural defenses against weeds and viruses, if it can induce crops to flourish with minimal application of chemical fertilizers, if it can make dryland agriculture more productive without straining local water supplies, then what's wrong with it?

Of course, these breakthroughs have not happened yet. But as Potrykus sees it, there is no question that agricultural biotechnology can be harnessed for the good of humankind. The only question is whether there is the collective will to do so. The answer may well emerge as the people of Asia weigh the future of golden rice.

Greenpeace promises not to halt trials of GM vitamin rice

February 10
Independent (UK)

Greenpeace has promised not to sabotage a forthcoming trial on genetically modified (GM) rice, because of the strong moral arguments in favor of producing a staple crop that could alleviate childhood blindness.

It is believed to be the first time that the environmental activists, who have spearheaded attempts to sabotage and disrupt GM crop trials in Britain, have accepted the questionable morality of destroying something aimed at preventing children from going blind. Benedikt Haerlin, a senior figure in Greenpeace International, said that although he opposes the release of all GM crops into the environment, he believes that "golden rice" enriched with vitamin A, is an exception to the Greenpeace rule of search and destroy.

"The trials of GM 'golden rice' will not be the target of Greenpeace action, I'm quite sure about that," Mr Haerlin told the World Life Science Forum in Lyon.

"I feel that 'golden rice' is a moral challenge to our position. It is true there is a different moral context, whether you have an insecticidal or pesticide-resistant GM, or whether you have a GM product that serves a good purpose."

"Golden rice" is being developed at the Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, with charitable funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in the US. Laboratory research will be followed by the first field trials, according to Ingo Potrykus, the former head of the project. Rice is the staple crop for more than half the world's population, but it lacks vitamin A in high enough levels to prevent blindness in an estimated 50,000 children a month.

"Golden rice" has extra genes inserted, which artificially boost vitamin-A production in the plant. Scientists also hope to engineer the plant still further to boost levels of iron, another vital element largely missing from rice.

However, Greenpeace claimed yesterday that children would have to eat a 9kg bucketful of the rice each day, to satisfy all their daily dietary requirements. "It is a fool's gold", it claimed.

"It is inconceivable that a single technological fix could solve this problem," Mr Haerlin said.

"If we made a concerted effort to use the anti-vitamin A deficiency measures we have at the moment, we could be in the position of finding that vitamin A deficiency is under control by the time this 'golden rice' is ready," he said.

Claims by the biotechnology industry that "golden rice" will save the sight of 50,000 children a month, and that attempts to oppose the GM rice are tantamount to condemning these children to a life of blindness is reprehensible, Mr Haerlin said.

"It is important not to poison an important debate about environmental impact, by using the misery of millions of people of this world. This is deplorable. It will not lead us to an educated and unbiased discussion about this rice," he said.

Dr Potrykus said that the efficiency of the GM technique could improve with further research. "What matters is that we have something extra to prevent vitamin deficiency," he said.

"My motivation is to help those 50,000 children blinded every month, and to help those mothers who die because of iron deficiency. That was the reason that I did the work."

Bioengineered plants fail in wild

February 9
HealthScout

If the genetically modified crops described in the latest issue of Nature were contestants on Survivor, they'd be the first voted off the island.

British biologists report a 10-year study of four types of genetically modified (GM) varieties of oilseed rape, sugar beet, maize and potato shows the pumped-up plants didn't thrive when grown in the wild.

The findings may ease public fears that GM plants will become "superweeds," pillaging the habitats of their unaltered cousins. And the study also provides some of the first long-term data about the safety of GM crops.

The research was done for the British government and a consortium of biotechnology industries, and cost about $2.2 million. Led by Michael Crawley, a professor of biology at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, researchers planted the crops in 12 different habitats around Britain, and checked the sites every year.

The rape and maize plants were made resistant to a herbicide called glufosinate, while the sugar beet was resistant to the herbicide glyphosate. The two types of potatoes planted were modified to produce Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), a pest-killing bacterium.

"Since we weren't applying the herbicides in these natural habitats, we didn't expect the GMs to gain any competitive edge," says Crawley.

Sure enough, they didn't.

The GM crops were soundly defeated by neighboring native plants. Within four years of planting, all of the GM oilseed rape, maize and sugar beet were extinct. By the end of the decade, potatoes persisted at only one site, but the survivors all lacked Bt.

Crawley wasn't surprised.

"Had there been big differences between the GM plants and the conventional plants, it would have been very surprising indeed, because genetic engineering for a trait like herbicide resistance isn't expected to have any positive effects on the way the plant would behave in the wild," he says. "If it had negative effects, they'd be expected to be small ones."

This should quell some of the public concern over the effect of GM crops on native plants, says Crawley.

"What our experiment shows quite clearly is that for these crops, escape from cultivation is an extremely remote possibility," he says. "These plants are so dependent on agriculture for their persistence -- they simply have no competitive ability in natural vegetation."

"It's very clear-cut that there's no risk for herbicide tolerance and Bt in these crops," he says. "But that's not the same as saying that GM crop plants could never be a problem."

Norman Ellstrand, a professor of genetics at University of California, Riverside's Center for Conservation Biology, says the findings dovetail with what experts have found so far.

"Most of the crops will be benign and will not become invasive, and there will only be a targeted fraction where you would imagine invasiveness might evolve," he says.

"In the past, with traditional crops, hybridization between crops and wild relatives growing nearby inserts crop genes, which gives the wild type an advantage," says Ellstrand. For example, a weed beet that provided new genes via pollen between sugar beet and a wild relative has cost millions in agricultural damage in Europe.

"If it's happened with traditional crops, it will happen with transgenes," says Ellstrand. "There will be situations where transgenes will move into wild populations and make those wild populations weedier, and we still have concerns about that. But it's not going to be every crop."

Still, there could be other problems, cautions Ellstrand. Hybridization could cause plants to produce allergy-causing proteins, he notes. And if a crop is introduced into a new area and encounters an endangered wild relative, it could force the native strain into extinction.

And there is even the risk that some varieties of maize being bred with pharmaceutical proteins could transfer these genes to maize meant for animal or human consumption -- a potential health threat, says Ellstrand.

Militant farmer may face jail time

February 9
AP

A prosecutor on Friday asked a court to hand down a three-month prison sentence for activist Jose Bove, on trial in France raiding a laboratory and destroying more than 1,000 genetically altered plants.

Calling the June 1999 burning of the rice plants ``intolerable,'' prosecutor Olivier Decout also sought a three-month sentence for a second defendant, Rene Riesel who, like Bove, has been previously convicted in a separate case.

The prosecutor asked for a three-month suspended sentence for the third defendant, Dominique Soullier, because he has no prior record. A verdict was expected later Friday.

Decout denounced the ``premeditated, deliberate'' operation, saying the use of hammers and crowbars and the destruction of doors and computers were ``unacceptable methods in a state of law.''

Bove, 47, a militant sheep farmer, gained fame after attacking a McDonald's restaurant as part of his battle against globalization.

He is being tried on charged he raided a greenhouse belonging to CIRAD, an international center for agronomy research in Montpellier.

CIRAD, a civil party in the case, is seeking $1.7 million in damages.

In the past, Bove received an eight-month suspended sentence for plowing up a field planted with genetically modified corn. In September, he was sentenced to three months in prison for vandalizing the McDonald's in Millau in southern France. An appeal of that verdict is to be heard next week.

Bove is under investigation for allegedly destroying genetically altered corn in two other regions in France.

Bove is a leader of the Farmers Confederation, a militant group of farmers fighting against what they see as the encroachment of multinationals producing standardized, unhealthy food.

Top scientists urge more caution over GM crops

February 9
Independent (UK)

A distinguished panel of scientists has warned that international standards for the testing of genetically modified food are "scientifically unjustifiable" and called for a far more cautious attitude to approving GM crops.

An extensive investigation by the Royal Society of Canada, the country's foremost scientific body, has concluded that "the mere absence of evidence" that genetic modification can damage human health or the environment does not justify allowing GM products to reach the food chain.

The report says there has been insufficient research into potential allergic effects or toxicity. GM foods could pose "serious risks to human health, of extensive, irremediable disruption for the natural ecosystems or of serious diminution of biodiversity".

Chief among the 53 recommendations is that a fundamental testing standard, also used in Britain to assess whether to license GM food, should be abandoned immediately because it offers inadequate protection to health.

The panel calls for a far more "conservative" approach to approving GM food and warns that approval of GM products "with these potentially serious risks" should not be given unless scientists are absolutely sure that they can rule out such "potentially catastrophic risks" through testing.

Its damning report is likely to put pressure on the Government urgently to reassess the British testing standards.

Professor Conrad Brunk, chairman of the panel of scientists, said: "When it comes to human and environmental safety there should be clear evidence of the absence of risks – the mere absence of evidence is not enough."

Ministers and British scientists have been closely observing developments in North America, where GM crops have been widely grown commercially for years.

Tim Yeo, the Conservative agriculture spokesman, said: "If they are coming to these conclusions about the risks of GM food it raises disturbing questions for Britain and Europe. This puts the whole GM debate in a new light."

The Royal Society report also raises serious concerns about the scientific community's close links to the biotechnology industry.

It expresses concerns about "the undermining of the scientific basis of risk regulation" because of the "increasing domination of the research agenda by private corporate interest".

Greenpeace calls biotech ads 'false'

February 9
CBC

TORONTO - Environmental campaign organization Greenpeace is filing a complaint with Advertising Standards Canada demanding what it calls misleading biotech industry ads to be pulled from the airwaves.

The ads in question, placed by the Council for Biotech Information, state that a new type of rice could help prevent blindness and infection in millions of children. But Greenpeace says recent scientific evidence shows this isn't the case.

A Greenpeace report, released Friday, shows the genetically engineered, GE, rice provides so little vitamin A, essential for healthy eyes, that an adult would have to eat 10 pounds of rice a day to meet recommended allowances. A two-year-old child would need to eat seven pounds per day.

Greenpeace's Michael Khoo accuses the biotech industry of using starving children to promote a dubious product. He says the ads are more about solving the biotech industry's public relations problems than they are about health.

According to Greenpeace, the scientist who developed golden rice, Dr. Ingo Potrykus admits there isn't a study published showing the human body can convert the beta-carotene in GE rice to vitamin A.

Pulled ads

In 1998, crop-developer Monsanto was forced to withdraw a similar European television ad after leaders of 23 African nations complained to the UN that the image of the poor and hungry in their countries was being used by giant multinational corporations to promote their products.