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Golden Rice
thue writes: "According to this story (reg. required) in the NY times "golden rice", ie genetically modified rice which contains beta carotene, could save a million children each year who would otherwise have died from malnutrition. The main reason golden rice is not yet in use is that the methods used in the creation was covered by patents, and getting a deal with the patent holders has delayed them one year (1,000,000 dead as a result!?). But the article also describes great resistance to everything GMO, even something as harmless and beneficial as this. Caution is understandable when dealing with powerful traits such as various kinds of resistance, but beta carotene...?" What I liked about it was that the developers hadn't crippled the strain's ability to reproduce. Genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled, forcing farmers to buy new seed from the company year after year.
people aren't starving or suffering from malnutrition because food isn't constructed properly, they're starving because not enough people care to do anything about it. Don't blame the food, blame society.
Like most complex social issues, you can't place the blame on just one thing.
Consider famine, for instance. The most popular view of famine is that it's caused by lack of food supply, and that the solution to it is supplying food to impoverished regions. But according to Nobel winner Amartya Sen , famines are not caused by lack of food supply, but due to economic and social factors - mainly purchasing ability and electoral feedback.
Famines never occur in democracies, because elected officials are responsive to feedback since they want to be elected again. During the 59-61 famine in China, between 14-40 million people died - a staggering number - yet nothing was done because a totalitarian system prevented the feedback loop between victims and govt. officials. In cases like this, genetic engineering or a better supply chain doesn't really help much.
The root cause of starvation is economic and social. Even China and India produce enough food to feed their entire populations - it's the way their system is structured that causes the problem. Of course, this doesn't mean that a more nutritious supplement doesn't help. IIRC, thiamine supplements in wheat/bread are required or encouraged by the FDA, in order to save American lives on a statistical scale. In large scale trials, thousands or millions of lives can be saved even with vitamin supplements, but that's not the main solution to nutritional problems.
The root cause is the underlying social and economic infrastructure, and that requires a bigger fix, and will save more lives in the long run.
However, because of the size of the problem, even a "minor fix" such as genetic engineering can save human lives on a massive scale. So it may well be a good solution in certain areas, providing the domino effect and technical details are resolved.
w/m
Adding beta carotene may indeed have all the temporary benefits stated, but one has to remember that nature is famous for adapting to changed circumstances.
Even 20 years ago, the thought that nature would come up with resistances to almost all our antibiotics was regarded as almost unthinkable, yet here we are with strains of TB, malaria and E.Coli with just one or even no antibiotics which are effective against them.
My caveats against Golden rice, are that whilst it will be almost certainly effective in the short term, it will add several million people to the hungry nations of the world and 10 years or so later we will have to come up with something new. Even more importantly, introducing a single crop which most of the world will be critically dependent on introduces a single point of failure into the crop system, so anything which adversely affect that crop would devastate the Third World.
The Real Solution IMO, is to educate and encourage diversity in the eating habits of the rest of the world. This is a solution which doesn't have a problem with patents, but is obviously unpopular as no one is willing to fund it, whereas the GM companies are probably salivating at getting this idea as the 'foot in the door' to get GM products acceptable to the rest of the world.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Now when we have weddings and throw rice on the bride it will be a golden shower!
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
this lets you read the article without signing up to the NYT
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Credit Cards If you make the minimum payment you pay twice as much for everything you buy. This puts the average middle class household below the poverty line all by itself. $50,000 provides only $25,000 in buying power when you use credit cards. Visa/Mastercard is a TRUST. Needless to say, like Microsoft, they are not looking out for your best interests.
Insurance When the government mandates that money must leave your pocket that is called a TAX. Since low income/bad neighborhood/poor driving records pay much high rates for a given value of car, Insurance is a tax inversely proportional to income. When was the last time you had representation in the insurance company?
Money Buys Government Corporations have won every election and ballot measure for the last 25 years. Is it any wonder we have corporate welfare and lesser of two evils choices for candidates. As long as corporations control the government, YOU DON'T
Dollars = Lives The US gross national product per capita is $31,746 SO, if you work from age 18 to 65 on average you will produce about 1.5 million dollars in a lifetime. Therefore the average US life is worth 1.5 million dollars. When someone accumulates vast wealth they are in fact harnessing the output of other people for their own gain. 100 billion dollars is 66,000 lives. The creation of 100 billion dollars requires 66,000 people to born, work their entire lives and die. Despite Bill being a nice guy and donating 3 billion to charity (there is that less than 3% again) He is personally responsible for 66,000 deaths. Take these figure out across the NYSE and NASDAQ and you will have Billions of people dying To benefit a select few.
You may not buy all my arguments but as you can see 1,000,000 people dying because of one patent is ludicrous. For those of you who are part of the system that destroys lives, saying "that's just the way it is" is not an excuse. "I was just following orders"
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
"this was all done with idea of helping poor countries, research was payed by tax-payers, and no-one will be asked to pay any royalities"
Very strange: i wonder if it is the same project? The one I'm talking about was developed in Europe (Switzerland if i remember it correctly). If only this story would not require registration."Too much vitamin A is bad for you. In high levels it is a known teratogen (can deform a foetus)"
Yes, it's why a polar bear's liver is inedible, and why several Vitamin-A derived Acne medications have warning labels.
That's one of the reasons why the the Vitamin A in Golden Rice is in the form of Beta Carotene, which can be taken in doses 100's of times greater than the RDA (Vitamin A is considered to be toxic at around 20x RDA). BTW, Beta Carotene overdoses happen in real life every so often, usually with individuals who consume too much (up to several gallons) of carrot juice. There are no toxic effects, although in cases of severe overdose, your skin may turn orangish for several months.
Instead of shipping new GMOs to various poor countries, why doesn't the US government
stop paying farmers not to produce food, and ship the resulting excess to those self same
countries?
This wouldn't be as nice as it sounds. Doing that, you ruin the local economy there. Farmers in the 3rd world cant hope to compete with the dump prices and high quality of the goods we don't need, and are forced to give up their work, and move to the city to live off the garbage.
The problem this vitamin A enriched rice was meant to tackle wasn't a complete lack of food (in that case food aid like you suggest would be more in place), but a lack of vitamins caused by a diet of rice alone...
People who eat less, reproduce much, MUCH less, maybe even uncapable of reproducing, are smaller in size, so they require less external energy spendings and occupy less space etc.
BTW, is General Motors aware of any of what's going on here?
You can't handle the truth.
Here's a link to "Ingo Potrykus' Response To Golden Rice Critics", a page containing some comments from the head of the group that designed Golden Rice. I'm not going to quote the contents of the page here, but I recommend you read it if you're interested in what the professor himself has to say.
This means, if this little number of a genetically modified rice kernel is extremely harmful (similar things have happened before with frankenfoods) we may be unable to stop it from growing with disasterous consequences.
The whole 'grow once and never again' isn't just a good business model for the corporations that make this stuff, it's a safety precaution.
As jello biafra said, "We're incompetant as human beings, even worse at playing god"
I tend to agree.
Additionally, people aren't starving or suffering from malnutrition because food isn't constructed properly, they're starving because not enough people care to do anything about it. Don't blame the food, blame society.
If you think for a minute that the people making this crap aren't spinning the "Look how many people are dying because we can't distribute our product' angle out of pure greed, you're got another thing coming.
It's time you read such articles not only more critically, but also past the first couple of paragraphs. It might also do some good to think that even with all the great intentions that the good doctor had in developing the Golden Rice, it may not be the best thing in the world. Read the ENTIRE article and then look back at your own statements and see the foolishness.
or should we start worrying about the balence of nature and the rights of the smallpox virus (which is basically extinct except for a couple of vials under tight security in a couple of research labs)?
this really bothers me given the apparent lack of ethics of the seed companies, vs the wanna be a luddite attitude of some of the protesters.
there are valid points on both sides, and rash stupidity as well.
We should be able to include this sort of thing into a strain of seed, etc. if we do it right. This turbulent fear of "we'll always screw it up" is rather unproductive. since apparently we need a better way to catch the "bugs" in the process.
Open sourcing the process is probably not a good idea though.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
But *if* this modified strain of rice should have some nasty side effect, it would be a really bad thing if it reproduced.
Dunno. My feelings towards GMO crop is like my feelings towards an unknown binary.
It might do wonderful things, but I don't want to test it on a system that I need for a living, computer or biotope.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
This is an awful lot of effort simply to insure we have more mouths to feed. And if you think that the whole world can eat and live like the US you are mistaken. The US has about 7% of worlds pop and consumes almost 40% of its food. About 20% of the total energy consumption in the US is for the production and manufacturing of food.
OTOH 1 million children a year is 0.1% of the number of people who don't have clean potable water to drink. Also, while the birthrates for the bottom 5th of economies is high, the corresponding rate for slightly more advanced economies is only marginally lower. Combined with higher survival rates post age 5 you have a population pyramid that explodes at the bottom, pushes the media age down and provides an enormous base for another population explosion from the next generation. So while the poorest contries may have a birth rate over 4% and media life expectancy of 44, the next poorest countries may have a birthrate of 3.5% and a life expectancy of 59. The excepts most of sub Saharan Africa which because of AIDS is expected to have a net negative birthrate, a decrease in life expectancy to 40 and an absolute near elimination in the population between age 14-60 in the next 10 to 15 years.
So while we argue about engineered corn and rice, pest resistant fruit and enhanced protein water plants let's keep in mind that feeding someone is life long proposition. Developing economies do not have sustainable models - at least none that anyone has been able to apply yet. So the notion that all you have to do is feed the children is wishful thinking. With all of those now-fed children come a host of other problems like urban density, sewage treatment, public health and hygiene, education that no one who's screaming about the evils of genetic engineering is prepared to think about. The argument so far seems to be a debate about who is more fearful of being ignorant. We have the "it's an unknown we don't know what mutant we'll unleash on the world" argument. Or we have the "it's against Gods plan to mess with fertility" argument. On the other side of the aisle we have the "technology will save us" battle cry. Neither argument really takes into consideration what happens if you are successful because in both cases you have a world filled with miserable starving fecund people.
When I went to S11, one of the speakers at the Sunday protest was Dr Vandana Shiva who spoke about this "new" Golden Rice. (She an Indian Eco-Feminist.) The amount of Vitamin A is delivers to the body is much, much smaller then what other forms of food can provide.
In short, it was a con by the company who developed the product to use the WTO and health reasons to take over the market of locally grown rice for a profit.
You can read all about it here.
-- Huh, what?
Also, there are huge safety concerns with genetically modified food. Maybe we should make sure this stuff isn't going to kill millions before we unload tons of it on a third world country?
We need to slow way down with our adoption of these food products. There have been far too many disasters unleashed by our arrogance already.
While I certainly believe that a company/individual who develops something worth patenting (not patents from obvious stuff) like this deserve to be able to make money, there has to be a line drawn.
/. interview with the Pinkerton people who were doing commercial "geek profiling" for schools on the premise that people like US need to be identified because we may be the next Columbine murderers?).
But then, the corpratist mentality has no concept of morality (IE, remember the
There needs to be some kind of control on patents such as these that makes it manatory for the patentholders to be reasonable and expeditious with licensing. How this can be done, I don't know.
But then, if the patentholders had a brain among them, they might understand that releasing a product cheaply that may save a million lives is better marketing for your company than any slick sleazy annoying Madison Avenue firm can do for you, at ANY cost!
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
There has been a lot of uproar about Geneticaly modified foods, has anyone actualy seen any harm from this yet? Medicaly I mean?
Dirty Pirate Hooker
it just needs to better distribute what it
already produces and to transfer technology to
poor contries that suffer from salinisation, desertification, etc, simply because of poor
agricultural methods.
The solutions this planet needs are very simple, and they all start with education for third world farmers.
- zebra muscles in the Great Lakes, introduced to prey upon some 'bad guy' or other, and now taking over the niche of native clams and muscles
- kudzu introduced into the south to control roadside erosion, now famous for growing rampantly out of control.
- pompas grass, introduced into CA from S America to control erosion, now grows everywhere, out competing endangered native grasses.
The list goes on and on...Now, I know, nutritionally enhanced rice sounds innocuous at worst, and life-saving at best, but ... it is so difficult to predict the effects of tweaking any of the variables in the complex dynamic systems of our ecosphere. Too often the result is unexpected and irreversable damage.
Given that the problem of malnutrition is not the result of a lack of resources in the world, but of a flawed distrobution system for those resources, wouldn't we be wiser to spend our energies and money solving the distrobution problem, rather than inventing one more expensive, monopoly-controlled food source and peddling it to the world's poorest countries?
Just my $.02
Joe's -- No GMO's!
Well, if GM food isn't a good idea yet, somebody really should have let Gregor Mendel know that a while ago. Because you know what? He was genetically modifying food. Sure, he wasn't using fancy gene splicing techniques, but he was quite literally modifying the genetic structure of pea plants through rigorous cross-breeding, and he was doing so in a decidedly artifical manner.
Companies today like Pioneer have entire fields devoted to this same practice of aggressively cross-breeding various staples in efforts to yield more disease-resistant, larger, tastier foods. Why, oh why, do people not get just as worked up over aggressive cross-breeding as they do over laboratory-based genetic engineering? Is it our obsession with the whole natural = right, artificial = wrong? If so, just keep reminding yourself that glasses are extremely unnatural, whereas the Bubonic Plague is 100% pure Mother Earth.
We most certainly can afford a single mistake. We, as a species, have made more mistakes in our history than I can possibly count, and yet here we are. Somehow, nature forgave us for introducing things like horses to North America and tobacco to Europe, even though these things were -clearly- never intended to happen through any 'natural' means.
GM food is indeed quite ready now. We shouldn't let the FUD of a bunch of luddite crackpots, weepy Sally-Fieldsesque mothers and pseudo-scientists stop us.
$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
People who don't know much about genetics are always very sure that we don't know enough about genetics to know if it is safe. Very convinced that the people who do know enough about genetics to know what is safe and what is not, really don't know enough.
Of the many people who have tried to explain to me that genetic engineering is dangerous, none even seemed to know what a 'gene' is. Nor will they listen if you try to explain. They only know it is dangerous, not what it is. Apparently the knowledge itself is considered dangerous.
Too much vitamin A is bad for you. In high levels it is a known teratogen (can deform a foetus)
Arguments like this are so far off base and it's scary how easily they are believed. No one is starving because there is some scarcity of food. We've had the technology to feed the world for decades. The problem is one of distribution. Who is going to buy land, buy seeds, grow food, and then pay to have it shipped to those who can't afford it? Even when people are "benevolent" and would like to do this, it's just not financially possible because of the way the market works. Being able to grow food more efficiently is /not/ going to benefit the hungry. Who it /will/ benefit is agribusiness, which is why they're pushing so hard for it and arguing "how can you be against this when it will solve world hunger?"
What also usually ends up happening is that through the increased use of monocultures, pesticides, etc. it is a major blow to the environment. So let's tally that all up:
hungry people: lose.
the environment: loses.
(already)rich agribusiness CEO's: win!
this looks like it has about the same result as anything else large corporations are pushing for.