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.

Comments

Multiple causes, multiple effects

[w00ly_mammoth]

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

alternative link

[ideut]

this lets you read the article without signing up to the NYT

It is not about the rice.

[Perdo]

1,000,000 people have not died because these people are jealously guarding their intellectual property. 1,000,000 people have died because they live in nations unfriendly to the US and politics prevents us from sending aid. 1,000,000 have died because Logistics both to the countries they are in and within the countries themselves is poor. 1,000,000 people have died because they are fighting with each other preventing aid from being delivered. 1,000,000 people have died because the bureaucracies of aid organizations suck up 90% of the donations they get for administrative costs. 1,000,000 people have died because charitable donations have dropped from an average of 10% of earned income to less than three percent because you can't give when two parents are working and still not paying the bills and putting food on their own table. Here are my thoughts why:

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"

Re:unknown

[Guppy]

"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.

Re:Ummm, I've got a radical idea...

[rve]

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...

OTOH

[guran]

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.

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.

Crippled for a reason

[Trevor Goodchild]

Genetic crippling is not done for the purpose of profits. It is done to ensure that some biological mutation doesn't get out of hand and destroy an ecosystem (like, say, kudzu).

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.

Re:GM food is not a good idea yet

[American AC in Paris]

The wholesale introduction of GM foods into our food chain is just too risky at the moment. It's a new technology and mistakes are part of the learning process, and will inevitably be made. If history has taught us anything, it's that no new advance comes without teething troubles. And given this, the last thing we should do is push for them to be used by the general public - a mistake now could cost millions of lives and contaminate other crops, making them tainted as well.

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

Re:Yeah, GREAT IDEA!

[Daniel Rutter]

> if this little number of a genetically modified
> rice kernel is extremely harmful (similar
> things have happened before with frankenfoods)

Or, to put it another way, no they haven't. Unless you know something everyone else doesn't. Citation, please.

> 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.

Actually, it's an unavoidable side effect for most of the world's sterile or functionally sterile crops, IIRC. Hybrid grain, as grown by just about everyone that grows grain commercially, isn't gene-spliced or franken-anythinged. It's just very highly engineered by essentially old-fashioned methods (super-repeated crossing of different strains of durum, rye, et cetera) to have gigantic yield. A side effect is that it can't reproduce - or, at least, it can't breed true.

This isn't to say that deliberately engineered sterility can't be a useful feature, commercially speaking, and safety-wise; if you make a transgenic plant with some bad-ass drug in its leaves, you want to make as sure as possible that it cannot cross-breed with other strains.

But all the misinformed hysteria about Terminator Technology ("it'll get out in the pollen, and EVERYTHING will become sterile!!!") seems to me to be at least a hundred years too late. Someone out there probably knows when triticale was first created; I don't remember my high school agriculture classes that well :-).

Of course it's possible that genetically engineered organisms pose a risk not posed by the old-fashioned kind of GE (where you mix genes by crossing different strains). "Real" GE lets you introduce genetic material that does not exist in anything you could cross with any possible normal biological ancestor of the resultant organism.

But that, in itself, does not create a risk sufficient to outweigh the demonstrable advantages of GE in reducing other risks - like the risk of starvation, or the risk of environmental damage from pesticide and fertiliser run-off and overspray, or the risk of mass extinctions caused by people practising slash and burn agriculture in ways unchanged for 25,000 years. GE offers solutions to these sorts of problems.

It's an analogous situation to the first nuclear fission experiments, in which the possibility of an uncontrollable chain reaction destroying the entire planet could not be ruled out. Indeed, logically, NO possibility can EVER be completely ruled out. Real scientists don't make absolute statements.

But the world-bomb downside seemed very, VERY unlikely, and the upside seemed very large. The same situation pertains today, but GE isn't being done in secret at Los Alamos. So, today, the uninformed mobs can storm in and smash scientists' greenhouses and rip up their fields.

> 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.

That'd explain why Dr. Potrykus, who invented golden rice, wants so desperately to GIVE IT AWAY, now wouldn't it?

Read the article before posting, please.

If you do that, and then form the opinion that it is a good idea to take up pitchforks and flaming torches and march on the castle on the hill, go right ahead. But if you join the lynch mob just because, as Dr. Potrykus says, "...the genetic engineer is in the public opinion the devil", then you are in my opinion a damn fool.

unknown

[rve]

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)