https://quillette.com/2019/12/01/gm-crops-like-golden-rice-will-save-the-lives-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-children/
Any day now, the government of Bangladesh may become the first country to approve the growing of a variety of yellow rice by farmers known as Golden Rice. If so, this would be a momentous victory in a long and exhausting battle fought by scientists and humanitarians to tackle a huge human health problem—a group that’s faced a great deal of opposition by misguided critics of genetically modified foods.
Golden yellow rice ear
Compare two plants. Golden Rice and Golden Promise barley are two varieties of crop. The barley was produced in the 1960s by bombarding seeds with gamma rays in a nuclear facility to scramble their genes at random with the aim of producing genetic mutations that might prove to be what geneticists used to call “hopeful monsters.” It is golden only in name, as a marketing gimmick, with sepia-tinged adverts helping to sell its appeal to organic growers and brewers. Despite the involvement of atomic radiation in its creation, it required no special regulatory approval or red tape before being released to be grown by farmers in Britain and elsewhere. It went almost straight from laboratory to field and proved popular and profitable.
Golden rice
Golden Rice, by contrast, was produced in the 1990s by carefully inserting just two naturally occurring genes known to be safe—from maize and from a common soil bacterium—into a rice plant, disturbing no other genes. It is quite literally golden: its yellow color indicates that it has beta carotene in it, the precursor of vitamin A. It was developed as a humanitarian, non-profit project in an attempt to prevent somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 people, many of them children, dying prematurely every year in poor countries because of vitamin A deficiency. (Vitamin A deficiency causes children to go blind and lose immune function.) Yet the rice has been ferociously opposed by opponents of GM foods and, partly as a result, has been tied up in red tape for 20 years, preventing it from being grown. One study in 2008 calculated that in India alone 1.38 million person-years of healthy life had been lost for every year the crop has been delayed.
Golden Rice was the brainchild of two scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, aimed at helping the 250 million children—predominantly in Asia—who subsist mainly on rice and suffer from vitamin A deficiency. Telling the parents of these children to grow vegetables (most don’t have land), or distributing vitamin capsules—the preferred alternative of some environmental activists—has not proved remotely practical.
Potrykus hit upon the idea of awakening the molecular machinery in the seed of a rice plant—it is active in the leaves—to make vitamin A while casting around for something he could do to help the world towards the end of his career. Within a few years, and with Beyer’s help, he had succeeded. With additional assistance from scientists at the agricultural company Syngenta, organized by Adrian Dubock, they eventually produced a version of Golden Rice that was sufficiently rich in beta carotene to supply all the vitamin A a person needs. (Dubock wrote about the development of Golden Rice here.) With some difficulty, they cleared the many intellectual property hurdles, getting firms to waive their patents so that the rice could be sold or given away. Potrykus and Beyer insisted that the technology be donated free to benefit children suffering from vitamin A deficiency and Syngenta gave up its right to commercialize the product even in rich countries.
Given the scale of human suffering Golden Rice could address, there may be no better example of a purely philanthropic project in the whole of human history. Yet some misguided environmental activists still oppose Golden Rice to this day.
