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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
"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.
> 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.