Jeffrey M. Smith
See book keywords and concepts |
 Syngenta even claimed that one month of a delay in marketing golden rice would cause 50,000 children to go blind.30
A closer look reveals some interesting omissions in the industry's numbers. According to a Greenpeace report, golden rice provides so little vitamin A, "a two-year-old child would need to eat 7 pounds per day."31 Likewise, an adult would need to eat nearly 20 pounds to get the daily recommended dose. |
| Devinder Sharma "A majority of the acutely malnourished people that the proponents of "golden rice" claim they want to help cannot afford to buy rice from the market. If these poor people cannot buy ordinary rice, how will they pay for "golden" rice? The question has been conveniently overlooked. If these hungry millions could meet their daily rice requirement, there would be no malnutrition in the first place. The problem cannot be solved by providing nutritional supplements through GE rice. The answer lies in policy changes that force governments to ensure sufficient food for all. |
| But if they are going to spend the time to educate, they can teach people to eat a red rice from India or brown rices, which contain more vitamin A than golden rice but without the risks. Or, as Michael Pollan asks is his New York Times Magazine article, "The Great Yellow Hype," why not instead teach "people how to grow green vegetables [that are rich in vitamin A and other nutrients] on the margins of their rice fields, and maybe even give them the seeds to do so? Or what about handing out vitamin-A supplements to children so severely malnourished their bodies can't metabolize beta-carotene? |
| David Schubert points out that "a GM plant making vitamin A precursor, such as 'golden rice,' might also produce retinoic acid derivatives." He says these might result in "direct toxicity or abnormal embryonic development."34 In addition, one gene inserted into the rice comes from daffodils. It is possible that it will also transfer known allergens from the flower.35
Biotech proponents also admit that to persuade people to eat yellow rice may require an educational campaign. |
| According to a Greenpeace report, golden rice provides so little vitamin A, "a two-year-old child would need to eat 7 pounds per day."31 Likewise, an adult would need to eat nearly 20 pounds to get the daily recommended dose.32
"This whole project is actually based on what can only be characterized as intentional deception," writes Benedikt Haerlin, former international coordinator of Greenpeace's genetic engineering campaign. "We recalculated their figures again and again. We just could not believe serious scientists and companies would do this."33
There are other considerations. |
| Indeed, it remains to be seen whether golden rice will ever offer as much to malnourished children as it does to beleaguered biotech companies. Its real achievement may be to win an argument rather than solve a public-health problem. Which means we maybe witnessing the advent of the world's first purely rhetorical technology. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
See book keywords and concepts |
 Biotech Finds Its Poster Child
A national TV commercial showed a montage of smiling Asian children, caring doctors, rice paddies, and a narrator who says that golden rice can '"help prevent blindness and infection in millions of children' suffering from vitamin-A deficiency."27 Time magazine went so far as to claim on their cover, "This rice could save a million kids a year." The biotech company Syngenta claims one month of a delay in marketing golden rice, would cause 50,000 children to go blind. |
Peter Pringle
See book keywords and concepts |
 In other words, consumers would be no worse off eating golden rice (which also contained the 35S) than they would be eating cauliflower and cabbages from the market. The British researchers reprimanded Ho for not taking the science of biotechnology seriously. "The transgenic situation has to be compared with the natural situation, not with a Utopian one. |
| The report did little to quiet Ho and her colleagues, who continued to rail against the 35S. When golden rice was announced, they attacked the invention as a "useless application, a drain on public finance, and a threat to health and diversity." The new rice "possessed all the usual defects of first generation transgenic plants plus multiple copies of the cauliflower mosaic virus promoter, which we have strongly recommended withdrawing from use on the basis of scientific evidence indicating this promoter to be especially unsafe. |
| Syngenta's deal with Potrykus and Beyer over golden rice was an early example. Monsanto's transgenic sweet potato developed by Kenyan researchers was another. But Gary Toenniessen, the director of the Rockefeller Foundation's rice biotech program, who has watched the seed companies increase their control over lab research for thirty years, puts the new corporate image into perspective. Before making these rice genome data public, Monsanto and Syngenta selected what they wanted. "They've been mining the rice resource base as fast as they could," he says. |
| A second antibiotic-resistance gene also used in golden rice was covered by a patent owned by Eli Lilly. By then, however, the Europeans had already concluded that genetic engineering could and should proceed without such unpredictable processing aids. The possibility of creating new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria might be tiny, but why risk it when there were other marker genes available? |
| One example is golden rice, the most famous test-tube plant, which promised to ward off blindness in undernourished children. Although not the instant sure prevention its promoters originally trumpeted, this prototype may eventually lead to plants that can save lives in places that experience dire food shortages—again providing that no obstacles are placed in the way by governments, industry, or special interest groups.
In Africa a parasitic weed of the genus Striga, or witchweed, inserts a sort of underground hypodermic into the roots of corn and sorghum, sucking off water and nutrients. |
| Potrykus was taken aback by the storm his golden rice had created. After the previous three years of the biotech war, he had expected opposition, some "poisoning of the springs," as he put it in the German phrase Brunnenvergiftung, but he found the wave of abuse and criticism overwhelming. In an article in the journal Plant Physiology, he bemoaned "the propaganda war against our work with arguments that we are only pretending to work for mankind, or are only satisfying our own egos, or are merely working for the profits of industry. |
Jeremy P. Tarcher
See book keywords and concepts |
 It's dubbed "golden rice" because three new genes, two of them from daffodils, give the rice color. Ingo Potrykus, who experienced hunger himself as a child, is convinced he's found a solution to another scarcity problem. Vitamin A deficiency, he says, causes 3,500 children to die every day.3
Ingo sounds like one of the most dedicated and caring people you'd ever meet. But there's one thing wrong with this picture: There is no scarcity of Vitamin A in the world! |
Jeffrey M. Smith
See book keywords and concepts |
| According to a Greenpeace report, golden rice provides so littie vitamin A, "a two-year-old child would need to eat seven pounds per day."29 Likewise, an adult would need to eat nearly twenty pounds to get the daily recommended dose.28
"This whole project is actually based on what can only be characterized as intentional deception," writes Benedikt Haerlin, former international coordinator of Greenpeace's genetic engineering campaign. "We recalculated their figures again and again. We just could not believe serious scientists and companies would do this. |
Marion Nestle
See book keywords and concepts |
 The rice grains that contain beta-carotene are yellow (hence: golden rice). source: Ye X, et al. Science 2000;287:303-305. "Refer to figure 13, page 156. system to work in rice, for example, the scientists also must successfully grow rice cells in tissue culture (an artificial medium containing nutrients and growth factors), infect the rice cells, grow them back into rice plants, and have the rice breed true under greenhouse conditions. Each one of these steps presents its own set of technical difficulties. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
See book keywords and concepts |
| Given this reality, the promise of golden rice should be taken with a pinch of salt."31
Hiding the Food Safety Issue
Steve Druker had been aware that the U.S. media was avoiding the GMO controversy, but he had just the story to change that. He had discovered that the GM policy of the FDA was against the law.
Druker, a public interest attorney, had read the laws over and over again and he was sure that the FDA had broken several. His organization, Alliance for Biointegrity, along with the International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA) in Washington, D.C. |
| In his New Tork Times Magazine article, "The Great Yellow Hype," Michael Pollan says that golden rice impales Americans on the horns of a moral dilemma: "If we don't get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the third world will go blind."
"Yet the more one learns about biotechnology's Great Yellow Hope," Pollan continues, "the more uncertain seems its promise."27 A closer look reveals some interesting omissions in the industry's numbers. |
Marion Nestle
See book keywords and concepts |
| Research steps required to genetically engineer and to produce and use golden rice containing beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A
Basic Research (see table 16 in appendix for further details) Isolate the desired genes and regulatory DNA segments from daffodils, bacteria, peas, and viruses.
Transfer the genes and segments to rice embryos.
Grow the embryos; select the rare embryos that accept the desired genes and segments.
Grow the transgenic embryos into plants. Harvest seeds from the plants. Test the seeds for beta-carotene. |
| To create golden rice, scientists obtain genes (DNA) for the missing enzymes from other plants and bacteria and insert them into the DNA of rice (see tables 12 and 16, pages 158 and 280). and nutrients in the grain when it begins to grow into a plant (see figure 13). Rice makes small amounts of beta-carotene in its bran layers, but not in the endosperm. Most people just eat the endosperm, however, because millers remove the bran layers when they convert brown rice to white rice (which is why rice in the United States is enriched with several vitamins and iron). |
| When Ingo Potrykus complains about "those who would damage humanitarian projects" (discussed in chapter 5), he worries most that vandals will destroy test plantings of golden rice. In Great Britain, Greenpeace and other groups conducted "destruction actions" against test plots of transgenic crops, sometimes dressed in full-body anticontamination suits and goggles. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
See book keywords and concepts |
| Michael Khoo of Greenpeace says golden rice "isn't about solving childhood blindness, it's about solving biotech's public relations problem." If the industry were truly dedicated to the problems of malnutrition and starvation, a tiny fraction of their advertising budget could have been diverted to make an enormous difference already. Khoo says, "It is shameful that the biotech industry is using starving children to promote a dubious product. |
Marion Nestle
See book keywords and concepts |
| He warned Greenpeace, "If you plan to destroy test fields to prevent responsible testing and development of golden rice for the humanitarian purpose, you will be accused of contributing to a crime against humanity."33
In the next chapter, we will examine environmental and other potential risks of genetically modified foods as a basis for evaluating the industry's contention: if genetically modified foods are safe, no opposition to them is justified. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
See book keywords and concepts |
| And it is not clear whether the genes from the daffodil, which are used to create golden rice, will transfer known allergens from the flower.31
The biotech proponents also admit that to persuade people to eat yellow rice may require an educational campaign. But if they are going to spend the time to educate, Pollan asks, why not instead teach "people how to grow green vegetables [that are rich in vitamin A and other nutrients] on the margins of their rice fields, and maybe even give them the seeds to do so? |
Marion Nestle
See book keywords and concepts |
| We already know that questions about the ability of golden rice to help people overcome deficiencies of vitamin A will not be answerable for several years. While waiting for the results of future research, it is worth considering more immediate ways to solve problems of vitamin A deficiency. Taken together, the many nutritional, physiological, and cultural factors that affect vitamin A status suggest that the addition of a single nutrient to food will have limited effectiveness. |
John Robbins
See book keywords and concepts |
 Despite high-minded talk of golden rice and ending hunger, Monsanto seems to have a few other motives.
Is Roundup safe? By pesticide standards, it's relatively benign, and certainly does not belong in the same toxicity class as DDT, Alachlor, or Butachlor, which Monsanto also makes. But that doesn't mean it's harmless. In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has identified 74 plant species that are potentially endangered by excessive use of glyphosate, the primary active ingredient in Roundup. |
| In a tactic that has led to enormous public confusion, these biotech corporations have not hesitated to refer to crops like golden rice repeatedly in PR campaigns designed to increase public acceptance for genetic engineering, omitting the fact that the vast majority of their efforts focus in a very different direction.
^he Biotech Industry
The Monsanto Corporation, founded in 1901 by a chemist to manufacture saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, is by far the largest player in the world of genetic engineering today. |
| Shiva goes on to say that in many cases, people are suffering from vitamin A deficiency not because they don't have access to golden rice, but because their fields have been doused with too many chemicals. "At the moment," she says, "about 40,000 children in India'are going blind for lack of vitamin A, only because industrial farming has destroyed so many wild field plants, the sources of vitamin A that were available to the poorest people in the rural areas. With biotechnology they will increase this lunacy. |
| Foods like golden rice will be designed to contain higher levels of the things we want, like vitamins, and fewer of the things we don't, like cholesterol and saturated fat. Pigs will be bred to grow human organs for transplants. Scientists are even isolating DNA from species long extinct, such as mastodons and Neanderthal people, in the hope of restoring them to life.
It sounds as if the sky is no longer the limit. Genetic engineering and the biotech companies can seem to hold the key to the promised land.
Dr. |
| The research that is being done on "wonder crops" such as golden rice is conducted almost solely by a small number of institutions dependent on philanthropy or public funds. But such projects are far from the norm. The vast majority of genetic engineering is undertaken for private profit, funded by corporations such as Monsanto. |
Email this page to a friend
