Slashdot Mirror
Interview With Professor Potrykus, Inventor of Golden Rice
crabel writes "According to WHO, 127 millions of pre-school children worldwide suffer from vitamin A deficiency, causing some 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness every year. This deficiency is responsible for 600,000 deaths among children under the age of 5. Golden Rice might be a solution to this problem. The only problem? It's GMO. In an interview inventor Potrykus, now close to 80 years old, answers questions about the current state of approval, which might happen in the next couple of months."
Ignorance and fear are the problem.
GMO could be a problem depending on how it is done and how it is deployed. Ignorance and fear prevent any meaningful discussion of the matter. Calling for more research into the risks and then trampling experimental crop fields doesn't help either.
The seeds being owned by a company is a problem, though. It's like open vs closed source but applied to food.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
rice contains more fat (0.66 gr/100gr) than carrots, so the golden rice should be at least as effective as carrots then. And yes, meat would be good too, but very expensive.
It's not entirely the fault of the populace that they are ignorant. Have you tried finding out in what way GMO foods at your local supermarket have been modified?
Heck, if the agriculture companies had started using genetic engineering to make crops healthier, they would have been far more likely to be accepted. But they started by making crops more watery (and thus less nutritious), making it so farmers can blanket entire US states with herbicides without affecting the desired crops, and introducing pesticides that AFAIK are just assumed to be safe. So a broad brush was used, and because of the agriculture companies it was the bad brush instead of the good one.
Apparently you haven't read the study itself. Which was conducted on mice genetically predisposed to cancer and that during the process control groups were changed so that results would better fit the theory of cancer-inducing GMO. Articles are being removed, because the study was a conducted with so many violations it's result cannot be trusted and since independent attempts to reproduce the results of the study, conducted thoroughly have not come to the same conclusions. But, please, go ahead and don't let facts get in your way of fear-mongering.
No kidding. The anti-Luddites are just as bad as the Luddites when it comes to this stuff. There is a whole spectrum of food available without needing to rely on someone's patented experiment.
With sweet potato, it's not just vitamin A. they have about the highest concentration and spectrum of vitamins you will find in any common crop. And it's freaking easy to grow. The problem is not lack of technology, but lack of simple knowledge and willingness to apply it.
Another crop that is ridiculously easy to grow in temperate and tropical zones is the moringa tree, which produces copious edible leaves and seed pods, with a near-miraculous nutritional profile. Unfortunately, try to get poor Africans to grow it and eat it and they will often turn up their noses in disgust, calling it "poor people food". Sweet potato often receives the same low-brow snobbery in the USA, actually.
The problem of nutrition is always more cultural than anything else. Look at the USA itself, where abundant nutritious food is available, yet the average American gets most of his calories from high-fructose corn syrup (delivered to your gullet in many sneaky ways). And when you add up HFCS and highly-processed grains, that probably accounts for a good 85% of the calories eaten in this country.
So yes, "golden rice" might solve a problem, in the sense that it would fool culturally-bound people who are unwilling to forego rice as their staple food. But it's hardly the only way. And I do remain highly suspicious of the long-term risk/benefit scenario with GMOs.
It's a cool thing, but some of us aren't playing games when it comes to our health.
Why would GMO affect your health? Do you have any idea what percentage of 'natural' plants are nasty, poisonous, cancer-inducing, etc.?
eg. Potatoes. When they turn green in sunlight it's because they're making a deadly poison to protect themselves. It can cause illness, birth defects and even death. There's no way a potato would get FDA approval if it was introduced in our diets today.
Tomatoes have it, too. You know potatoes and tomatoes are members of the nightshade family, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine
I hope you're totally paranoid about potatoes and ask to inspect them before cooking if you're in a restaurant. Peeling away the green skin doesn't remove it (the green is only chlorophyll, not the Solanine) and it's not affected by heat. You do, ask, right?
Oh, wait...people have been eating them for more than 100 years so it doesn't count.
No sig today...
Yes, but we're talking about Golden Rice here, which is nothing to do with RoundUp.
Golden Rice has exactly three extra genes in it. The modification made was openly published. Many widely eaten foods already contain the exact same genes The only reason it was added to rice is because that's what these people grow/eat on a daily basis.
No sig today...
Another crop that is ridiculously easy to grow in temperate and tropical zones is the moringa tree, which produces copious edible leaves and seed pods, with a near-miraculous nutritional profile. Unfortunately, try to get poor Africans to grow it and eat it and they will often turn up their noses in disgust, calling it "poor people food". Sweet potato often receives the same low-brow snobbery in the USA, actually.
Hah. Golden rice could actually bump into the same problem. For some peculiar reasons, in many parts of the world, white rice - pretty much like white-anything (bread, flour, people...you name it) is subconsciously considered "purer" and anything else has a poverty stigma attached to it. Don't ask me why, it just happens. Trying to convince Asians to eat something ricey AND brown or yellow or orange may prove difficult. Don't know about Africans but you find this kind of food idiocy pretty much anywhere, so I guess there's a solid chance that golden rice will actually be a tough sale (*especially* since it's been *designed* as "food for poor people who couldn't afford better diet otherwise").
Ezekiel 23:20
We were only able to develop Golden Rice because the technology was patented. Thus it was publicly accessible for research. Without patents, the technology would have been secret.
They were granted free use of those patents because of the humanitarian usage. And I expect they'll do the same with the final patent on Golden Rice itself. This guy is looking to help the world, not make money. Read the interview, it's quite interesting.
which is totally what she said
The simplest solution seems to be to grow some carrots or other vitamin A rich food alongside rice. But, maybe you're right and they need every inch of their land to grow rice and can't spare any for other vegetables.
Have you actually set foot in a rice paddy here in Asia? I'm guessing not. Rice is extremely unique in its ability to grow under monsoonal conditions. I'm not aware that carrots are fond of 5cm of standing water throughout the growing season.
Beyond that, as the grandparent noted, these people use all the land to grow rice. It's not that there aren't good solutions (from a Western developed country standpoint), it's that this one FITS the problem at hand.
Actually no, they've licensed it for free. As long as your not growing it on a commercial scale you can use it for free. Basically they saw this as a PR opportunity so they helped develop and license it on their own dime.