At the end, he gave his enthusiastic support to the development and expansion of golden rice. Other Philippine farmers, however, gave contrasting reports. Some raised concerns about small farmers becoming indebted to larger corporations for seeds, exploitation of farmers, and human and environmental health. Their viewpoints are lost in the debate, prompting ethical concerns over who should get to decide what crops to plant in a particular country or region.
Stone GD and Glover D. Agric Hum Values. Murnaghan I. Ethical concerns and GM foods. Genetically Modified Foods. May 23, Stone GD and Flachs A. Tickell O. September 8, Tang G … Grusak MA. Golden Rice is an effective source of vitamin A. Am J Clini Nutr. Goodman RE and Wise J. Food Allergy Research and Resource Program.
May 2, Mayer JE. The Golden Rice controversy: Useless science or unfounded criticism? McLean MR. Potrykus I. Golden Rice and beyond. Plant Physiol. Skip to Main Content. Share: Twitter Facebook Email. Curriculum Integration Ideas This unit may be used in life sciences or social studies classes during topics including the following: environmental biology health economics and sociology global health nutrition Golden Rice Project Golden rice is a genetically modified, biofortified crop.
The Opposition to Golden Rice Golden rice may seem like a realistic solution for VAD, but those in opposition say the project is deeply flawed.
What Are the Ethical Issues Raised? Many developing nations are not so lucky. These populations often rely on cheap staple crops like rice and corn to survive — they do not have access to a wide variety of nutrient-rich foods, chiefly due to the high costs of growing or purchasing them.
Rice-based diets in particular are a major cause of micronutrient deficiency. The few micronutrients rice does contain are located in the outer layer of the grain, which is removed during the refining process [4]. Micronutrients play a large role in growth and development, so these deficiencies are especially detrimental to children. Vitamin A deficiency VAD , affecting one-third of children in the world under age 5, is the leading cause of childhood blindness.
Vitamin A is key to immune system function, and children with VAD are more likely to contract common illnesses like measles than children without a deficiency. They are also more likely to die from respiratory and diarrheal diseases [7]. Traditional fortification and supplementation programs are costly and logistically complicated, and the question now is whether we should try additional tactics to increase micronutrient consumption.
Another strategy to eliminate micronutrient deficiencies is biofortification. Biofortification increases the nutritional value of crops through either selective breeding or genetic modification Figure 1. Instead of adding nutrients to the food after harvesting, as in staple food fortification, the plants themselves are altered so that they produce these nutrients [9]. Selective breeding begins with a plant variety that already contains some amount of the vitamin or mineral of interest.
These plants are then bred to generate plants that have higher levels of the compound, and the process is repeated over many generations to develop a plant variety with desirable levels of the compound. For crops that are difficult to breed, genetic modification may be a better option than selective breeding [10]. Figure 1. There are multiple ways to obtain necessary micronutrients.
Micronutrients can be obtained through a varied diet rich in fruits and vegetables or through supplements. Staple food fortification adds micronutrients to commonly eaten foods. Biofortified crops are bred or engineered to produce micronutrients.
Scientists instead turned to genetic modification to reduce VAD. Foods like carrots and sweet potatoes have high levels of the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene; when humans eat these foods or beta-carotene capsules, a percentage of the ingested beta-carotene is converted to vitamin A.
Using our knowledge of biochemistry, would it be possible to create rice that has high beta-carotene levels? After seven years of work, and the insertion of three genes two from daffodil, one from bacteria , a multidisciplinary team of scientists succeeded in making GR1. The improved strain GR2, which replaced a daffodil gene with a corn gene, produces up to 23 times more beta-carotene.
Children were given a specified amount of Golden Rice to eat, and the amount of vitamin A they produced was measured with a small blood sample. This conversion rate of beta-carotene to vitamin A vitamin A equivalency was used to calculate the amount of Golden Rice needed to prevent vitamin A deficiency based on intake guidelines.
This type of experiment can be conducted for any food or supplement, and studies have also shown that Golden Rice and beta-carotene supplements have similar vitamin A equivalencies [12].
The most convincing arguments in favor of biofortification are cost and feasibility. UNICEF and other relief organizations have relied heavily on donations from governments and private foundations to fund fortification and supplementation programs in impoverished areas.
Funding is not guaranteed, especially in instances of economic crisis and political turmoil. Poorer countries also lack the necessary infrastructure and logistics needed to distribute supplements and fortified foods. Traditional supplementation programs require consistent monetary investment; USAID estimates costs for Ghana or a country of similar size to be million dollars annually [13]. In contrast, biofortification is markedly less expensive.
Once the farmers have these seeds, no further investment would be necessary, as they can continue planting the seeds year after year, and beta-carotene production is stable over multiple generations of Golden Rice plants.
Some groups, notably Greenpeace, argue that biofortification, especially through genetic modification, is not appropriate — instead of introducing GM crops into poor countries, we should be helping farmers learn to grow a variety of crops to improve their overall diet composition [5]. One example is the cultivation of beta-carotene rich sweet potatoes as a secondary crop in Africa; again, the disadvantages of these types of programs are high cost and logistical burdens.
GM advocates are careful to make the point that biofortification should be just one component of public health efforts in the developing world, and it will be most effective when used in conjunction with poverty-reduction programs [4].
Another major hurdle GM crops face is safety, as many consumers believe that inserting foreign DNA into a plant may make the plant unfit to consume. One important example is mutation breeding: seeds are exposed to chemicals and radiation that generate a pool of seeds with different mutations, some of which may be beneficial. As of , crop varieties had been derived using mutation breeding, but safety testing is not mandated for these crops as it is for GMOs like Golden Rice, and breeding efforts are much more loosely regulated [].
GM opponents worry that the new genes in GMOs may be toxic. Hence, dependence on rice as the predominant food source unavoidably leads to vitamin A deficiency, most severely affecting children and pregnant women. A major goal of the Golden Rice Project is to supply consumers in rice-based societies with the recommended daily intake of vitamin A. The tools necessary to achieve this goal are available since the development of an advanced version of Golden Rice known as GR2.
Golden Rice , which is the result of targeted genetic engineering, offers a partial solution to a global problem. This pathway is active in rice leaves but is turned off in the grain during development. The first step was to insert the genes into the rice embryo, through particle bombardment or bacterial transfer. Potrykus' lab used an Agrobacterium -mediated transformation, where engineered bacteria inserted its DNA into the targeted rice plant embryos.
This DNA contained all three genes—phytoene synthase psy , from daffodil , phytoene desaturase crtI from bacteria , and lycopene beta-cyclase lcy , from daffodil. Scientists also inserted other pieces of DNA that the genes needed to function in the cell, and they inserted marker genes to help them track the inserted DNA.
Then the scientists grew, selected, and tested the embryos for beta-carotene. When full-grown, the rice plants produced and stored beta-carotene in their starch.
Since the initial experiments with rice, scientists have engineered other crops, including maize and potato, to produce beta-carotene using different biochemical pathways. Rather than commercializing their invention, the inventors, especially Potrykus, worked to legally secure Golden Rice as a humanitarian project.
They licensed Golden Rice to Syngenta formerly Zeneca , a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. These national and international research organizations would adapt Golden Rice to local environmental and climate conditions.
Golden Rice Humanitarian Board oversees that these research institutes can acquire their licenses at low costs and in short periods to better promote the development of Golden Rice.
Both inventors credit Syngenta's Adrian Dubock with helping them navigate the complex intellectual property legal system around agricultural biotechnology. Potrykus and Beyer said they never anticipated the Intellectual and Technological Property Rights and material transfer agreements required for the production of Golden Rice.
These licenses protect inventors' rights to genetic material, scientific techniques, and exchange of seeds for research.
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